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Lean Muscle Workouts

Lean Muscle Workouts

No matter where you live, if you’re working out, you probably want to burn fat and build muscle tissue. Clients in Irvine, CA, who want to lose weight, often use a personal trainer to learn lean muscle workouts that help them do both. While doing any type of workout will help you lose weight, not all workouts will help you build muscles at the same time. Building muscle tissue is important. The more muscle tissue you have, the easier it is to keep weight from returning in the future. Muscle tissue requires more calories for maintenance than muscle tissue does.

It all starts with a good strength building program.

Cardio workouts do burn calories, but those calories come from both fat and muscle tissue. It actually can reduce the amount of muscle tissue you have and lower your metabolism. Strength building exercises, like lifting weights also burns calories, but it builds muscle tissue at the same time. The effects of workout increase your metabolism for hours after the workout, too. What are the best lean muscle tissue building exercises? The best ones are the ones you do consistently. Do weight training two to three times a week. Don’t do strength training every day. Give yourself a day or two rest in between strength training sessions.

Strength training can include pumping iron, resistance bands, HIIT workouts, bodyweight exercises or even power yoga.

While pumping iron is often what people initially identify as strength training, lifting weights is just one way to build lean muscle mass. HIIT workouts can give you an aerobic workout, while you’re building muscle tissue, too. You can even vary it to include flexibility training. Bodyweight exercises are excellent for muscle building, particularly for those who can’t make it to the gym. Resistance bands are also an inexpensive, easy to store addition to anyone’s at home workout. They’re great if you travel frequently.

Strength training should include both isometric and isotonic exercises.

Isometric exercises include the plank or a glute bridge. Isotonic workouts are squats, crunches and pushups. In isotonic exercises the muscles change length, while in isometric exercises, they don’t change length as they work against a force, think plank where you hold the position. Alternate your workout based on how you feel. If your joints are feeling stiff and sore, choose the isometric workouts where you get into position and hold.

  • Don’t worry about increasing weights, increasing reps works just as well. You can get results from either increasing weight and doing the same number of reps or increasing reps. Both methods provide the same results.
  • When you do compound workouts, you’re burning more calories, while building lean muscle tissue for several muscle groups. Think squats, pushups and deadlift.
  • If you can’t do the exercise yet, modify it until you’re stronger. If you haven’t worked out in a long time, some of the best workouts for lean muscle mass might be too difficult. Work your way up to them. Do modified, bent-knee pushups until you can do regular ones or step ups before box jumps.
  • Improve your diet. Eating a healthy diet is important to build lean muscle mass. You need extra protein, but also all the nutrients necessary for building muscle tissue. That means plenty of vegetables and fruits.

Get Rid Of Inner Thigh Fat

Get Rid Of Inner Thigh Fat

There’s no way to do a spot exercise and expect fat to come off just that spot. It’s true whether you’re talking about belly fat, inner thigh fat or fat on your booty. When you lose weight, it comes off your entire body, no matter how many spot exercises you do. However, exercise can tone the muscle under the fat to give some of the results you’ve hoped to achieve. It won’t make you lose weight just on your inner thighs, but will help improve the appearance.

Start with a healthy diet.

A healthy diet isn’t dieting. Dieting means sticking with a strict regimen of food. You often feel hungry or deprived when you diet. However, when you eat healthy, you’re simply making smarter choices when it comes to food. Instead of using sour cream on your baked potato, you use Greek yogurt. It means eating more fresh fruits and vegetables and eliminating processed food. Processed food often means empty calories and additives that increase the calorie count, like high fructose corn syrup, which seems to be in almost all processed food. Foods you might consider healthy, like applesauce, salad dressing, canned fruit, protein bars and cocktail nuts even have it, so switch to whole foods to make life simpler and get rid of fat quicker.

Get more cardio throughout the week.

Set your sights to increasing your exercise. While you need strength training, which helps build muscle tissue as you burn calories, increasing your overall activity will help you slim, not only your thighs, but your whole body, too. Find ways to walk more. Park further from the grocery. Walk to lunch rather than drive. Take the steps and not the elevator. It will work your legs, while burning more calories to get rid of body fat.

Use specific exercises to strengthen the muscles of the inner thighs.

Ballet is a good way to strengthen the muscles of the inner thighs. Think a plie squat with a wide-legged position. Lunges, step-ups, squats and even squeezing an rubber ball between the knees can tone and tighten those inner thigh muscles. If you don’t have an exercise ball, you can do that exercise without one. Sitting on a chair with your knees apart, put the palm of your hands against the inside of each knee. Use your hands as an opposing force as you try to bring your knees together.

  • Remember, you may be able to become the best you, but that doesn’t mean you’ll change your basic body shape. You can tone your body and make your entire body slimmer.
  • Find ways to make simple exercises give better results. If you’re doing squats, make it tougher. Use a child’s rubber ball to help. Put it between your legs, right above the knee and keep it in place as you squat.
  • Roll up a thick beach towel or use a rubber ball. Lay on your back with your feet flat on the floor. Put the towel or ball between your knees and squeeze. Hold for thirty seconds, relax, repeat four times.
  • Raise up on your toes and lower yourself to squatting position without letting your heels touch the ground. It’s hard. Use a table or chair for balance if you need to do it.

Smart Ways To Food Prep

Smart Ways To Food Prep

If you’re trying to lose weight or just get out of the junk food habit, menu planning and food prep should be top priority. Too often plans for healthy eating go down the drain the first time you have to stop at the store on the way home from work or can’t figure out what to make for supper. Instead of getting groceries, getting take-out sounds a lot better! That’s easy to understand in today’s busy world. Here are some ways to avoid that hassle and make eating healthy a breeze.

Take an hour to save money and time.

Choose one day a week to go through the weekly ads, find out what’s on sale and plan meals accordingly. Use in-season fruits and vegetables to save money and even foods on sale or coupons. Plan your menu to use ingredients from previous meals and plan to make double meals. By making twice as much as you need, you’ll have food left over to put in trays and freeze for another meal. That saves time in weeks to come.

Pick one day to shop and make that trip after you’ve eaten.

Create your shopping list and stick with it. It’s easier if you already ate. Make sure you have all the ingredients you need for the meals, so you don’t have to go back later to the store. If you want to get the kids involved, let them choose some of the food. For instance, if you’re having berries in yogurt for a snack, let them choose from blueberries, strawberries or peaches for the fruit. You give them a choice, but from a specific group of food.

Make the meals over the weekend.

It isn’t easy at first, but after a few weeks, cooking for the week will be a breeze. When you cook, double the recipe so you have enough for two meals. Freeze one meal, or even part of the meal, to use for a later meal. After a few weeks, you’ll have enough in your freezer to provide a few days of meals and you’ll have to cook far less each week.

  • You can get meal freezer containers for a reasonable price that makes storage and use far easier. They have separate compartments and a freezer tight lid so all you have to do is warm the meal in the microwave.
  • Make sure you have plenty of healthy snacks available. One key is to wash and prepare fresh fruits and vegetables and have them ready to eat. You can use some of these for meal prep and some for snacks.
  • Don’t forget soup. If you can’t use all the fruits and vegetables you chopped, don’t worry! You can also create soup and throw them into it. Leftover bones also make a great bone broth.
  • Learn to make substitutions. Some simple ones are using wild rice or brown rice instead of white rice to lower calories and increase nutrition or using Greek yogurt instead of sour cream.

How To Find The Right Diet

How To Find The Right Diet

Most of our clients in Irvine, CA, use their trainer and our expertise to find the right diet, if you’re working on your own, it’s not nearly as easy. Before you begin, you need to know what a healthy diet consists of and what your personal goals are. We consider food sensitivities, so should you. No matter how great a specific food is, if it doesn’t agree with you, it shouldn’t be part of your diet. There are some basics for any healthy diet.

Ditch the processed and embrace whole foods.

Processed foods have most of the nutrients removed while processing. They also contain chemicals to add to the shelf life of the food. The first change to make is to eliminate processed foods and focus more on whole food. It takes more creativity because you have to prepare the food, but you’ll find there are easy to find recipes online. Make your selection a rainbow of colors. Fruits and vegetables have different nutrients and benefits based on their color, so varying it each meal can help you get them all.

Identify the number of calories you need.

Each person’s calorie needs will be different, based on their present body weight, age, activity levels and goals. If you’re trying to lose weight, eating 3500 calories fewer will shed one pound. The easiest way to calculate your calorie needs is to eat for the weight you want to achieve. For building muscle tissue, make sure you include one gram of protein for every pound of body weight, a half gram of fat and the balance of your calories in carbs. People on a ketogenic diet to lose weight will need to keep carbs under 50 grams a day.

Don’t make your diet so strict or starve yourself.

One of the biggest reasons diets fail is that they’re too strict and have rules that make it impossible to follow. That’s why we focus more on eating healthy, than dieting. Actual dieting doesn’t work. The term, dieting, indicates a short term process and eating “special” food. Eating healthy is how we prefer to help our clients with their dietary needs. Healthy eating doesn’t require a lot of fuss. Choosing to fill your plate with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and cutting out sugar and processed food is a huge start to controlling calorie intake. You never fall off the diet wagon when you eat healthy, because you’re allowed some “otherwise forbidden” foods occasionally.

  • When you want to get the healthiest fresh fruit and vegetables, free from chemicals and pesticides, use the Clean Fifteen list to purchase those grown traditionally and the Dirty Dozen list for those that should be organic.
  • While calorie counting isn’t necessary if you’re eating healthy, portion control is. You’re allowed some cake once in a while, but that means a small piece of cake, not the whole cake.
  • If your protein source is meat, the way you make it is important. You should grill, broil, bake or boil it, never fry or deep fry it.
  • While exercise is very important, you can’t out-exercise a poor diet. Not only will you feel better, it helps you maintain your proper weight and boosts muscle building effort.

Questions You Should Ask Your Personal Trainer

Questions You Should Ask Your Personal Trainer

It’s important to have the best trainer to achieve your goals, especially since you’re putting in time and money to get results. There are questions you should ask your personal trainer to make certain that the effort you put in will get the results you want. Not all trainers are the same. Some have the top credentials and get results quickly, while others don’t. The first question you need to ask is about the trainer’s qualifications. What type of credentials does the trainer have and what certifications? Make sure those qualifications are respected in the field and that the trainer also keeps abreast of the latest research.

Find out if the trainer asks about your health and physical condition.

If you go to a trainer that doesn’t ask you any questions, but immediately has a workout program ready for you to start, run—don’t walk—away. Trainers need to know about your medical conditions, your present level of fitness, your goals and any special needs. All this information helps them create a program that’s difficult enough for you to see benefits, but is still within your physical capabilities. It won’t aggravate or tax any present physical problems and deals with limitations. It’s a program designed to address your specific goal, not a one-size-fits-all program.

See if the trainer provides more than just an exercise program.

Not all issues can be addressed with just exercise alone. In fact, diet is a key component to weight loss. Some issues, such as recovery from an injury, may require exercise to aid in building muscles to reduce the pain, but there are also complementary therapies, such as massage, that can speed the recovery. Find out if the trainer is certified to provide aid in other areas, besides exercise or works with other specialists that do.

Ask the trainer how often you’ll workout with him/her and whether there are options besides private sessions.

To get the full benefit of a workout program, you need to exercise at least three times a week with four times being ideal. While the trainer should be working directly with you as you learn each new exercise, once you learn a program, you don’t have to work with the trainer each time. A trainer that provides flexibility to help with your budget and even may provide small group training shows a willingness to meet both your physical and financial needs.

  • Find out how long before you’ll see results. The answer should be realistic, with some physical results evident after four to six weeks. The trainer may mention you’ll notice more energy after two to four weeks.
  • Ask the trainer how much he/she charges. This and any cancellation fees, payments up front and length of the agreement should be all laid out before you start working with the trainer.
  • Find out if the trainer has references, clients he’s worked with previously or is presently training. If the trainer needs to get the okay from clients first, all the better. It means he treats his relationship with them with confidentiality.
  • Ask about the type of program the trainer uses and type of exercises. Make sure it addresses all types of fitness, flexibility, endurance, strength and balance.

Telomeres? How They Affect Your Health And Aging

Client in our facility in Irvine, CA come here to make changes in their life that boost their health, slow the aging process and build their strength, endurance and flexibility. The pattern of healthy eating and exercising regularly positively impacts many different systems. One of those is the DNA and has to do with lengthening telomeres. If you don’t know what telomeres are, they act like aglets on shoelaces—those little plastic tips that prevent the shoelaces from unraveling. Only in the case of telomeres, they’re preventing the gene damage.

The chromosomes shorten every replication.

If there were no telomeres, cells would only be able to replicate a few times before there was DNA damage or the cells would die. However, instead of the chromosomes shortening, damaging the DNA, the telomeres shortens, so the rest of the chromosome remains intact. Luckily, the telomeres are the disposable part whose whole job is to protect the rest of the chromosome, allowing it to continually replicate without damage to maintain youth and good health.

Telomeres don’t just get shorter and then disappear.

If you want to live a long life, you definitely want long telomeres. However, the body is changing every day with new cells. We’re actually regenerating. While there’s a lot of estimates about getting a whole new body in a certain number of years, many scientists believe that some cells, like the heart cells, don’t replicate quickly, only about one percent per year. Aside from those slowly regenerating cells, there’s an estimate that it takes between 11 and 15 years to regenerate all the cells in the body. If you have longer telomeres, that regeneration takes place and you remain young and healthy. If they’re shorter, you either have damage at the cellular level and get disease or show signs of aging. You can do something to keep them longer.

You can lengthen your telomeres or prevent them from shortening.

If you had a car and the manufacturer said that all you had to do was put a certain type of oil in it and drive it over fifty miles an hour at least three times a week and it would last five, ten or twenty years longer, you’d do it wouldn’t you. That’s the same for your body and telomeres. Studies show you can do several things to lengthen the telomeres you have or slow the shortening process. Chronic stress, for instance, shortens telomeres, so eliminating the effects of stress helps keep them longer. Working out is the real stress buster as many of you know. Making sure you have exercise on a regular basis can help in other ways, too. In fact, studies show that people workout have longer telomeres and the more time spent exercising, the longer the telomeres were.

Scientists identify telomere growth by the amount of telomerase, an enzyme that lengthens telomeres. However, it lengthens the telomeres in both cancerous and healthy cells, so increasing it by chemical means could play havoc. Only by boosting all the systems, including the immune system, through lifestyle changes, can you have the best and healthiest outcome.

Learning meditation, yoga or some other relaxation technique can boost your telomere growth.

Eating healthy is also a way to encourage healthy telomere growth. One study showed a vegan diet and other lifestyle changes actually helped reverse the shortening of telomeres.

Foods that are high in nutrition and antioxidants are important. While you might take a supplement, it won’t provide all the phytonutrients that whole foods provide.


The Importance Of Angiogenesis

The Importance Of Angiogenesis

If you’re wondering what angiogenesis, all you have to do is break the word apart and identify the meaning of each part. Angio relates to the blood vessels and genesis is a suffix that means the beginning or development of something. Put them together and they mean the study of how blood vessels develop. Throughout your life, capillaries grow and diminish, based on the need at the time. If you have a wound, more capillaries grow to help it heal. That’s caused by a release of chemicals that induce the growth or splitting of blood vessels to create more.

When you don’t have enough blood vessels, you have a potential for heart disease.

Angiogenesis is neither bad nor good. If you have cancer, you have too many blood vessels being created, however, if you have heart disease, it may be because there’s not enough blood vessels being developed. The process needs to be balanced and when it gets out of whack, you have disease. That perfect balance makes it more difficult to treat. There are cancer treatments that block the development of blood vessels that feed the cancer, but stifling the growth of blood vessels too much can lead to other problems like valvular heart disease.

The dilemma continues, but what can you do.

I wouldn’t be a personal trainer if I didn’t believe in the positive and healing effects of a healthy diet and regular exercise. It’s not that I don’t believe in modern medicine and choose alternatives instead, but rather I believe the two can work together to boost the body’s health and maintain a more youthful body. One of the biggest problems with modern medicine is that everyone is different and has different needs. Dosage, specific medications and body chemicals are all different, too. It means there is no ONE magic bullet that works for every disease, even if it’s the same disease in a different person.

Until science finds a way to customize each and every treatment, you can help by making healthy lifestyle choices.

Ironically, increased angiogenesis not only can feed cancer, it can also cause obesity. When your body can’t cut out excess blood vessels or grow enough, it causes illness or negative changes in the body. Cancer cells require a blood source to survive, just as fat cells do. The more blood vessels you have, the more cancer cells can grow and the more fat you have. Eating the right foods can help get your body back to the perfect balance of producing enough to avoid stroke, heart disease and neuropathy, but not so many you have cancer, obesity, endometriosis and blindness.

  • Foods that help regulate angiogenesis by slowing the process include red grapes, green tea, kale, nutmeg, turmeric, parsley, berries of all kinds. garlic and artichokes.
  • Studies show that strawberries and red grapes can help inhibit abnormal angiogenesis. It’s the resveratrol in the grapes and ellagic acid in the strawberries that can inhibit abnormal growth by 60 percent or more.
  • The phytonutrients in food work in synergy to boost the effect of individual nutrients found in the each food.
  • The same foods that help prevent excessive angiogenesis, also promotes the appropriate development of blood vessels, making them good whether you have heart disease, cancer or any number of diseases caused by angiogenesis that’s out of balance.

How Exercise Improves Your Health

How Exercise Improves Your Health

Some people exercise to shed pounds and look better, while others may just love the boost of energy they get and feeling good. No matter what the reason you workout, you get the same results, exercise improves your health. It builds your energy and makes changes to your body that can add years to your life. Your body has five systems that when functioning properly, keep you healthy. They’re microbiome, angiogenesis, stem cells, immune system and DNA protection. Exercise helps all those areas.

What’s your microbiome system?

The simple answer is gut bacteria. Your body has more microbes than cells. In fact, there is an estimate that they outnumber human cells by ten to one, but they’re far smaller than human cells, so they are only five pounds or less of our body weight. The microbiome live in the gut with most of them in the large intestine. They aid in digestion, boosting immunity, keeping bad bacteria at bay and producing nutrients, such as B and K vitamins. Diseases as different as inflammatory bowel syndrome, diabetes and mental health issues come from an imbalance. Exercise can boost the health of gut bacteria and that after just six weeks of working out, the composition of microbes changed to a healthier grouping.

Your body continues to make stem cells after you’ve reached adult age.

Exercise boosts how stem cells behave. Exercise encourages stem cells to produce muscle tissue rather than revert to fat. That means even age related muscle loss can be reversed. Orthopedic specialists often encourage patients to exercise to increase the number of stem cells in the body. The more active you are, the more stem cells are produced. Stem cells can become any type of cell in the body, so there’s a potential for reversing aging. More research is necessary to see the extent of change.

Exercise increases DNA protection.

DNA protection comes from the telomeres on the chromosomes. Telomeres act like the tips of shoelaces, preventing the chromosomes from unraveling and destroying the DNA. When your cells replicate, some of the chromosome is lost. The telomere is the dispensable part of that’s shortened, to protect the DNA. When you workout, you lengthen the telomeres so cells can continue to replicate without damage or cell death

  • Angiogenesis is the process of maintaining just the right amount of blood vessels. An excess or insufficiency is bad and can cause cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other maladies. Exercise promotes normalization of the process.
  • Exercise also boosts your immune system. It helps boost antibodies and normalizes white blood cells, improve gut bacteria, burns off the hormones of stress and increases the production of antioxidants.
  • While exercise is important, you can’t ignore the importance of the role food plays in your health. There’s a whole new area in the medical field studying the potential for food to be medicine to fight disease and keep people healthier.
  • You’ll have improved circulation, a stronger fitter body and more energy when you workout, but you’ll also boost your feeling of well being. When you feel happier, studies show you live longer.

Exercise Can Help You Tune In To Your Body

Exercise Can Help You Tune In To Your Body

If you’re experiencing a gnawing sensation that something is wrong, but ignore it or can’t quite figure out why you’re having that feeling, you aren’t tuned into your body. There’s a lot of reasons to get in touch with the messages your body sends you. It could be it needs something to remain healthy or get healthy. It could be a warning to investigate issues before they become too advanced to handle or help in losing weight. Those are just a few situations that learning more about your body can help and exercise can help you tune in to your body. I’ve heard it many times from clients in Irvine, CA. Once they begin the program of exercise, they are more aware of what and when they eat and when to take action if they start to feel ill.

You may not recognize you’re out of shape if you’ve never been in shape.

Seriously, most of my clients are amazed at how good they feel after they work out for a while. They never knew how good they could feel, because they’ve never been in shape or it’s been so long, they’ve accepted feeling bad as part of their normal. One of the biggest way exercise helps you get in touch is to help you find what your real “normal” should be. It shouldn’t be dragging out of bed and always tired. It should be feeling energetic and since exercise improves your mood, feeling great about the day.

Exercise helps you get in touch with your body and with your appetite.

As you workout, you’ll start recognizing specific muscles in the body that either hurt or don’t hurt anymore. You’ll notice that you aren’t as hungry as you were before you started a program of working out after a few months. That’s because you’ve come to identify that sometimes you weren’t really hungry, just filled with stress and eating was a way of stuffing that stress back down inside so you wouldn’t be bothered by it. Exercise helps burn off the stress and the stress hunger or stress eating disappears.

The more in touch with your body you are, the more you’ll learn what the body needs.

Eating should be a pleasure, but for most people, it’s simply an act of putting food—any type of food available—into their mouth, chewing a few times and swallowing. There’s no pleasure in it. It’s a habit and often doesn’t entail eating healthy foods, but quick junk food that’s readily available. When you’re in touch with your body, you’ll be more mindful when you eat and find you not only eat less and healthier, you’ll enjoy savoring the flavors of whole natural foods.

  • Exercise helps you sleep better at night. The more in touch with your body you are, the more you’ll recognize its need for adequate sleep. That helps you be more productive and eat less.
  • Exercise helps eliminate the effects of stress in your life that can cloud your thinking. You’ll be more aware of what’s actually causing problems and whether the effect was caused by emotional pain or real physical pain.
  • The body is constantly informing the brain of everything that’s taking place and sending valuable information on your state of health. When you clear out all the trash and stress from the outside world, you’ll be able to hear what it’s telling you.
  • Knowing when to act on the messages the body is sending is important. When you exercise and become fit, you’ll have a benchmark to help you do it.

Improve Oxygen Supply To Cells

Improve Oxygen Supply To Cells

There’s a reason to improve oxygen supply to cells. It helps boost your energy level, improves your cognitive functioning and also helps you look and feel better. Improved oxygen levels can improve your breathing, help prevent headaches and that dizzy feeling. However, there’s more than it can do than just that. It improves your overall energy level, too. Today, there’s even skin boutiques that offer oxygen inhalation therapy to improve the condition of the skin and prevent premature skin aging.

Make some dietary changes to improve your oxygen levels.

Diet does play a role in oxygen levels. In fact, without iron in your diet, your blood can’t absorb the oxygen to transport throughout the body. Foods rich in iron include green leafy vegetables, fish, red meat, poultry and legumes. If you have iron deficiency, work with your primary care provider to overcome the problems. Make sure you have foods like broccoli and kale and a well balanced diet, as daily. Skip the junk food!

Get plenty of exercise.

When you exercise, you work your lungs and your heart. Both are necessary to provide more oxygen into the cells. The lungs actually bring it in, while the heart sends it throughout the body. The harder you work your muscles, the more oxygen is used and the more carbon dioxide released. It increases your breathing dramatically and causes the heart to pump faster to bring more oxygen to the cells. You’ll be improving the muscle use of the oxygen, lung capacity and oxygen delivery system with exercise.

Get plenty of fresh air and have plants in the house.

There’s nothing more refreshing than fresh air. It also can boost your oxygen intake. Luckily, it’s relatively nice year around and you can open windows and air out the house frequently. If you live in a colder climate, you’d have a narrow window between turning on the furnace and keeping the windows shut and turning on the A/C, also keeping the windows shut. If you can’t air out the house as often as you’d like, keep plants in your home. They improve the levels of oxygen by using the CO2 in the air and releasing oxygen.

  • The more you increase your body’s oxygen levels, the more you improve your concentration. Low levels of oxygen are responsible for headaches, mental confusion and poor memory.
  • The American Lung Association, COPD Foundation and federal health agencies all recommend exercise to boost oxygen levels for people suffering from lung disease.
  • Improved oxygen levels not only help detox the body and cleanse the blood, it also helps with recovery after an injury.
  • Learn breathing techniques to improve your oxygen levels. Studies show that breathing techniques, like diaphragmatic breathing, boost oxygen levels.