Fitness & Wellness

There’s a lot of talk about the benefits of fasting for health benefits, both longer term and intermittent fasting. When you fast, you are often lower in energy, especially if you’re doing a fast that’s a day or longer. That’s not necessarily true of intermittent fasting, which can be as simple as eating all your food in an eight-hour time frame and fasting the other sixteen hours. Should you skip your workout on those days when you’re fasting? There are reasons to believe that it isn’t necessary to give up all activity, as long as you follow some rules.

When you’re working out, your body uses the stored carbohydrates in the form of glycogen.

If you haven’t eaten in a while, you might have depleted those glycogen reserves. There’s a good and bad side to that. The body needs to find another energy source, which could be fat. Some studies show that the body burns more fat if you eat after working out, rather than before you do. However, there’s another source of energy the body might use and that’s protein, which means you’d lose more muscle tissue. The less muscle tissue you have, the slower your metabolism works and the less effective your workout will be.

If you’re intermittent fasting, schedule your workout to mesh with your fast.

Rather than risk a slower resting metabolic rate, it’s smarter to plan your workout to mesh with your fast. If you’re simply eating in an eight-hour window, workout after you’ve eaten, that’s especially true if you’re doing high intensity training. You’ll have the glycogen available that you need and keep your fire burning strong, while also reducing the risk that you’ll end up with low blood sugar levels.

If your fast is longer, stick with lower intensity workout while you’re doing it.

What’s a low intensity workout. For cardio, it’s one that you can talk while you’re working out. A walk, light jog or some easier exercises at the gym will keep your body moving without drawing too much energy. Your body will tell you if the exercise is too much. You’ll feel dizzy or light-headed during your workout. Remember, your body is already struggling from deprivation, you don’t want to add to the burden.

• A full meal right before a workout isn’t good either. If you’re headed for a workout, break your fast for the first meal of the day with a high protein style snack or light meal at least a half hour before you workout.
• Snack on protein throughout the day during your window when you eat. It helps build the muscles. Don’t forget a protein snack after a strength training workout. That’s when your muscles desperately need it for repair and growth. Don’t forget to hydrate frequently, either.
• You’ll probably find that eating snacks frequently during the window when you eat will help you feel better and have more energy. Make them a combination of protein and carbohydrates, like peanut butter and apples.
• Save a full meal for after a tough workout. It should be within a half hour of the workout. Make sure it includes at least 20 grams of protein to help boost your muscle maintenance.

For more information, contact us today at The Worx

While sugar and products made with sugar, have a sweet taste, it doesn’t mean they’re sweet for your health or body. In fact, they may be ruining your health. Man has always had a taste for sweetness. It’s obvious when you feed a baby and find they love applesauce or pudding far more than green beans. One anthropologist hypothesized that man was created to love sweetness, since sweetness in fruits and vegetables meant they were safe to eat. While that may be true, manufacturers of food have taken that love to a whole new level and put sugar in almost all food we eat.

Just because it’s natural, doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

You hear a lot about healthy sugars, like honey, can sugar or corn syrup. While honey does have some health benefits, like its antioxidants, heart healthy benefits and aid with healing wounds, consuming too much is extremely unhealthy. Remember those commercials for high fructose corn syrup—HFCS—it’s natural so it must be healthy. No matter what type of sugar you’re discussing, too much increases your risk of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and impairs your immune system and accelerates aging. Not all natural things are healthy. Tobacco is natural and so are many poisons.

You might be surprised that fat isn’t the enemy.

While it’s not healthy to eat too much fat, especially trans fat, it’s not the enemy that it’s been made to seem. In the 1950s a mega study by Harvard scientists were conducted. Mega studies take all the available studies and compare the results for an overall conclusion. They found that fat caused heart disease. What wasn’t explained is that the sugar industry paid for the study and provided extra money to the scientists for that conclusion. They only used those studies that leaned toward fat and ignored the problems of sugar. While trans fat does contribute to heart disease, most fat, which includes the fat in avocado, coconut oil and the fat in nuts actually add to good health.

Science has taken it a step further with HFCS.

Check the label of those processed food and you’re bound to see a lot of sugar added. Some of the sugar comes from high fructose corn syrup—in fact, a lot does. It may be called natural, but it’s not. It’s removed from corn stalks by using a chemical and that product is even worse than normal beet or cane sugar. It’s a combination of glucose and fructose. The body doesn’t process fructose well. It doesn’t suppress your appetite, plus has all the negatives caused by sugar, insulin spikes, metabolic problems, increased risk for heart disease, dementia, fatty liver disease, obesity and damage to the stomach lining.

They’re different chemically and how they react in your body. Fructose causes all the same problems as regular sugar, but also adds more. It goes into the blood stream rapidly, can cause fatty liver, spikes insulin and creates metabolic problems. It boosts your appetite, increasing the risk of weight gain. It increases the risk of heart disease, dementia and can even cause damage to the stomach lining.

• HFC is cheaper to make, so it’s in many processed foods. That means you’re eating it even when you aren’t aware of the sweetness, making it easier to eat more than you thought and overwhelming your body with it.
• Sugar is addictive. It affects the same receptors as cocaine. It also alters the sense of taste to make naturally sweet fruit taste less sweet.
• While doctors may focus on salt as an offender in high blood pressure, sugar plays a big role in making the numbers rise, too.
• If you’re reading labels to see how much sugar is in a product, you might be surprised to find that manufacturers use several types of sugar in a product and when listed individually, are lower on the list. However, when added together creates a product high in sugar.

For more information, contact us today at The Worx by Maia

To often people come into my gym and they’re depressed, frustrated and at their wits end. Either they couldn’t take weight off or they did and within weeks it returned….and often brought friends. There’s a logical reason that dieting doesn’t work and it’s all about those pounds finding their way back home after the diet ends. When you diet, it always ends. That’s when you go back to your normal eating habits that put on weight in the first place. Of course, you’ll gain that weight back again. Keeping the pounds off requires more than just lowering your caloric intake for a few weeks or months, it means changing your eating habits for a lifetime. When you add a program of exercise, you keep your metabolism burning hot!

What’s the difference between eating healthy and dieting.

When you diet, you often feel deprived or hungry. You have are limited to the food listed on your diet. Some diets, like fad diets, limit that selection severely by focusing on a “magic soup” or “weight loss elixir to drink three times a day.” Eating healthy just means making smarter choices when it comes to food. For instance, just switching from white rice to brown rice can save a few calories, while also boosting the nutritional content of the meal.

You might have a diet to follow initially, but that’s only until you learn the best changes to make.

It takes time to change old habits. Those eating habits may have come from your childhood, so many are rooted in the comfort food area. These are go-to foods when anything significant affects your life. Changing that doesn’t happen overnight. Learning what’s healthy and lower in calories isn’t always easy. In fact, food manufacturers often do everything they can to confuse the average consumer. The easiest thing to remember is that eating healthy means eating food that’s closest to its natural state and less processed.

Eating healthy also means eating food without added sugar.

You won’t eliminate eating food with added sugar by skipping the bakery area or pushing the cart quickly past the candy area. Sugar is in everything. To make matters worse, the amount of sugar something contains is often hidden by using several different types of sugar and listing each separately. If there were just 8 ingredients in a food and four of them were different types of sugar, from dextrose to sucrose or HFCS, if they were listed separately, sugar might not be the top ingredient. The last four ingredients might be the sugars, even though combined, they equaled over 50 percent of the contents.

• You’ll be surprised at how good food tastes once you get your taste buds back to normal. Today’s eating habits overload them with sugar. Once you give it up for a while, you’ll get more of the true taste of food.
• Don’t despair if you think you’ll never get to have your favorite foods again. It’s just not so. When you eat healthy, you can eat almost anything, just not on an everyday basis and with portion control in mind.
• Smarter eating is also combined with regular exercise. When you workout regularly, you’ll build muscle tissue and that boosts your metabolism to help keep pounds off 24/7.
• Regular exercise also builds your energy level, so you’ll be more active. The more active you are, the more apt you’ll be to keep pounds off permanently.

For more information, contact us today at The Worx by Maia

We have a lot of variety at The Worx in Alexandria, VA, that should help keep your interest and we take a great deal of pride in the motivation we provide. If you’re just starting a workout and healthy eating program, it can be overwhelming and you may need more to stay motivated as a beginner. Don’t worry, there are a number of things you can do until fitness and healthy eating become a habit and something you’ll look forward to doing.

It’s all about mindset.

How you think of working out makes a difference. If you consider it with dread, you’ll find it’s harder to get yourself to go to the workout. Focus on the positive and identify the things you look forward to when you workout at the gym. Maybe that is the great feeling you get when you’re finishing up or how good you feel knowing you conquered another workout. Start looking forward to it and you’ll be more motivated.

Make sure you have goals you can measure that are short term.

If you want to feel more energized and motivated, you’ll do better if you have goals to accomplish and can accomplish them. Even if your overall goal was to lose 50 pounds and fit into a much smaller clothing size, that won’t help you stay motivated the first few weeks or months, since it’s a long term goal. Break your goal down to smaller goals and have a few that have nothing to do with results, such as weight or inch loss. Track your healthy eating and workout schedule, making it a goal to stick with it for a week without vary. You can measure that and celebrate in just one week when you’ve accomplished that goal.

Workout with a friend.

If you have a workout buddy, that’s even better. You can keep each other motivated. Not only does a workout buddy make you accountable for working out that day by meeting you at the gym, they actually make it a lot more fun. You have someone to share your successes with and someone to complain to when the going gets rough. A buddy reinforces the accountability that a trainer provides.

• Make your workout part of your schedule. If you don’t put your workout into your schedule, chances are, you’ll start skipping it and end up quitting. If it’s in your schedule you make it as important as any other appointment.
• Create a routine and stick with it. No matter when you choose to workout, create a routine to help you stick with the program. Get your clothes out, fill your water bottle and get dressed for starters. If you follow the same procedure each day, it all becomes automatic.
• Post messages to yourself that remind you why you started the program in the first place. Maybe you started so you could lose weight and look better or maybe it was for health. Put it on a post-it or put a picture or phrase that represents the goal you hope to attain.
• Come into The Worx if you want motivation. We’ll help you stay rev’d up and provide a program that gets fast results. If you want the biggest potential motivation, it’s getting results.

For more information, contact us today at The Worx

If you want to get your fittest, there are some exercises or yoga poses you should do everyday. Keeping yourself limber and strong no matter how old you are is important. Many of the poses in yoga are similar or exactly like a Western alternative, but often done more slowly. In Alexandria, VA, I create many of the workouts that include these yoga like exercises to stretch the body, increase flexibility and strength.

Start with a pose that is a combination of two poses.

Start your day encouraging great circulation by doing the combination of the cat/cow pose. They’re a perfect combination since the poses massage and stretch the muscles in all directions. For the cat pose, you’re on your knees with your palms flat on the floor and elbows straight. Arch your back like a cat as you lower your head and exhale. Now it’s time to move back to starting position and then into the cow pose. In the cow pose, you move your head to look straight ahead as you drop your back toward the floor, leaving it with a dip mid back.

Do you want to work all major muscle groups? Do a warrior two pose.

Start by inhaling with your hands over your head. Take a large step to your right side as you exhale. Turn your right foot to the front of the mat as you lunge down with your thigh parallel to the floor and your knees over your ankle. Press down the back foot and lower the front knee toward the outer side of the right foot. Extend your arms so your right is pointing front, left toward the back. This pose stretches the body.

The forearm plank is also called the phalakasana forearm movement.

This pose starts kneeling on all fours. Bringing your elbows to the floor directly under the shoulders, clasp your hands together. Move one foot back and straighten the leg, followed by bringing the other foot back. Push your heels backward and lift up your kneecaps. Hold the position with your body straight for 30 to 60 seconds then slowly lower your body back as you reverse each step.

• You can create a variation of the forearm plank by straightening your arms, rather than resting on the forearms.
• Stretch your body to the side with the Vrksasana or tree pose. Lift one leg and place it on your inner thigh and you press your palms together in front of you. This pose, once learned is a relaxing way to stand.
• The locus pose or salabhasana builds muscle strength. Lay on your abdomen with hands straight in front, then lift your arms and head as you lift your feet and legs. Hold.
• There’s a lot of yoga exercises that are similar to Western workouts. At The Worx we ensure you get a great workout that includes all types of exercises. Come in for a free small group training session and see for yourself.

For more information, contact us today at The Worx by Maia