Americas Fittest Cities

These result's where on yahoo this morning. I thought it was pretty interesting and I noticed the fact that these cities tend to have more activities to do outdoors. I feel that our culture likes to bunker down inside and become inactive. We all need to get out, get some fresh air and engage in some physical activity each day. Remember being active helps with so many things in life from happiness to better sleep at night and of coarse good health and physical shape! Anyways heres the link if you want to view the full article.

http://health.yahoo.com/featured/111/america-s-fittest-cities-2010

No. 5: Portland, Ore.
Score: 70.4
Obesity Rate: 23.9%
Exercise Rate: 82.3%

Portland is dotted with dog parks, doctors offices and "no smoking" signs--which add up to impressive health stats.

No. 4: Seattle, Wash.
Score: 70.5
Obesity Rate: 22.8%
Exercise Rate: 81.9%

The Pacific Northwest either produces or attracts health citizens. Seattle scores high by providing physical education classes for kids and tennis courts for adults.

No. 3: Minneapolis, Minn.
Score: 71.7
Obesity Rate: 23.9%
Exercise Rate: 84.3%

A penchant for exercise offsets slightly above-average obesity rates in the Twin Cities.

No. 2: Boston, Mass.
Score: 72.6
Obesity Rate: 19.9%
Exercise Rate: 78.6%

Boston's relatively affluent population avoids cigarettes and stays trim. The state also mandates that all its residents have health insurance.

No. 1: Washington, D.C.
Score: 73.5
Obesity Rate: 22.6%
Exercise Rate: 80.1%

Caffeine

Caffeine, you know the stuff our parents used to always try to limit for us. Some people think it's bad for you and think they should cut it out completely but then there are those who don't really care. In between is a group that thinks its fine but shouldn't make up the majority of your consumption. So which is right? The truth is that caffeine is not bad for you but, consuming to much can be bad and the effects it may have on you are what you need to worry about. Everybody reacts to it differently so you just have to be smart about how much you consume.

The good things about caffeine are that it stimulates the central nervous system, it increases your basal metabolic rate meaning you can burn fat easier, it temporarily increases your mental clarity, and increases your muscular coordination for physical activities. Caffeine can open your air passageways to increase breathing quality. So as you can see, caffeine can be a very good thing to consume regularly.

Too much of a good thing can become a bad thing. The only real bad thing that can come from caffeine is addiction. What happens is people start craving it so they consume more and more which can lead to a jittery feeling from all of the sugar in most caffeinated drinks. So other than the fact that you shouldn't drink too much soda or coffee, caffeine is actually something that can be very positively effective for your fitness goals.

Replacing Bad Habbits With Good Ones

We all have a bad habit or two and they come and go throughout our life but we can't just stay in that habit. It would be counterproductive actually! Say you have a bad habit of staying up too late and sleeping in until noon or later every day! This all starts because you allow yourself to get off track by staying up late one night! That's right just one night. What happens is in that one night you stay up until 2 in the morning rather than going to bed at 11 or midnight and instead of waking up at 7 or 8 you start waking up at 10 or 11.

Then you get onto this slippery slope and each night you stay up a little later and later until you eventually turn into an insomniac! In order to fix this problem you have to replace your nighttime activities with more relaxing things and begin to wind down in the evening so that you can get to bed at a decent time. You are simply replacing a bad habit with a good habit and it works with everything from sleep habits to eating habits, to drinking or smoking habits. If you want to kick a habit replace it with a good one.

The Effects of Junk Food

We all know their bad for us but we still seem to keep eating them. It's funny because we as people all seem to want the good things now! We would rather have something that feels good at the current moment than discipline ourselves to have better effects in the long run. We see this in every aspect of life in today's world and it's sad. Everybody want's the good things in life but few are willing to pay the price to get them. If you want to live healthy you need to learn to stay away from junk food. If your going to the gym and working really hard to get in good shape but your eating junk food every day your pretty much defeating the purpose.

Eating too much junk food will lead to less energy and you will realize that you get exhausted really easy when doing physical activity. Junk food also causes you to crave more food and leads to over eating. Like I have said in recent posts you should feed yourself with meals throughout the day rather than snacking a lot throughout the day and eating 2 or 3 meals because when you eat more meals your metabolism stays at a steady state resulting in using that food for energy rather than storing it as fat.

Junk foods also have high amounts of cholesterol which leads to an unhealthy heart. The heart is the main organ needed to pump blood throughout the body so obviously it's important to keep your heart in healthy condition. Junk food leads to a build up of plaque in the arteries. As a simple guideline you should stay away from foods that taste to salty or to sweet. It's okay to have something sweet here and there but when you eat sweets on a regular basis you endanger yourself. So learn to eat healthy for your own benefit!

High Intensity Interval Training

High-Intensity Interval Training is an exercise strategy that is intended to improve performance with short training sessions consisting of 15-30 minutes. High intensity interval training is aimed at building strong endurance. A training session would consist of a warm up followed by 6-10 repetitions of a high intensity exercise done near maximum intensity. High intensity training is meant to push you to do as much as you can in a short period of time. The rest periods between sets are really short, about 10-15 seconds.

Studies have shown that 2.5 hours of high intensity interval training produce similar amounts of biochemical muscle change. High intensity interval training increases the resting metabolic rate for the following 24 hours due to excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, and can improve maximal oxygen consumption (VO2 max) more effectively than your typical long aerobic exercise.

Long aerobic exercises have been promoted as the best method to reduce fat but high intensity interval training has been proven to burn more fat.High intensity interval training is also known to increase athletic performance. With experienced athletes it can become harder to gain strength, high intensity interval training is a great method of overcoming these obstacles. Improvements in endurance can be achieved through high intensity interval training.

Comfort Kills

One of the biggest reasons people plateau at some point with the results they are getting out of their fitness program is because they get too comfortable. They get into this repetitive mode of doing the same workouts throughout the week, never switching it up, never raising the bar, and never living up to their full potential. Say you keep going to the gym Monday threw Friday doing different muscle groups each day of the week with the same routine just raising the weight here and there. Yeah you might see results for a while but you will eventually flat line.

In order to gain strength, build stronger muscles, and to keep moving forward you need to confuse your muscles with new exercises as well as push yourself out of your comfort zone! Don't limit yourself with what your can do, it's mind over body and if you push yourself you can do anything you want to do. The only limit is that you can't do too much too fast or you will end up injuring yourself. For example say your benching, your doing a set of 6 with 160 a set of 6 with 170 and two sets of 4 with 175 but when your done you know you could have done a little more. This doesn't mean that you have to go raising the weight just yet but doing more repetitions, and then progressively raise the weight.

This is why goal setting with deadlines is so important! When you set a goal with a deadline your telling yourself okay, I need to be able to put up this much weight by this date and in order to do this I am going to push myself a little further with each workout. It's all about progress! You need to keep making progress and constantly look to better yourself through creating more challenges weather it's a tougher workout, being more disciplined, or even adding a new activity to your daily life like running every morning. Look for ways to constantly challenge yourself in ways that will make you stronger in everything you do. If you allow yourself to slip into a cycle of comfort and continual repetition you will surely hit the wall so keep the challenges coming!

Keeping A Regular Work Out Schedule

Have you ever realized how people seem to go through phases of living healthy and slacking off? It's like going through a popular trend or something to some people but then they stop for a while losing all the hard work they put in. It's as if people think they can just go to the gym and work out for a couple weeks and see some results then their good to go. They end up gaining the weight back in half the time they spent working so hard to get it off!

The bad thing is that some people actually repeat this type of cycle over and over again always ending with the same results! The bottom line is this. "Being physically fit requires living a physical lifestyle", there's no shortcuts or magic tricks to get the results you want. I don't care what the add on TV says, sure they might help you shed some weight or whatever they advertise but they don't keep you moving forward constantly increasing your health! In order to live a healthy fit lifestyle there are 10 things you need to take into account.

A balanced diet, getting the needed vitamins and minerals, quitting any bad habits like smoking or drinking consistently, "Exercising regularly", having regular annual doctor check ups, balance your life to reduce stress, be yourself, find some healthy hobbies you enjoy, and most importantly have fun! If you stick to these ten principals you will not only feel better but you will start to enjoy your day to day life as well as your work outs! Don't think of working out as stressful either! Make sure to keep it fun with new exercises and always be sure to push yourself to be the best you can be!