Health and Fitness

Train Muscular Strength (ME), Muscular Power and Muscular Endurance for Functional Strength Performance… Not Muscular Size for “Appearance”.

Training for muscular strength, power and endurance will bring about more functional improvements than training for muscular size or appearance.

There is a big difference between training for muscle mass and training for ME, power and endurance.

Each type of ME must be trained for optimum performance under any circumstance.

Fitness is a compromise between the physical abilities of cardiorespiratory endurance, strength, power, speed, flexibility, balance, coordination, agility, accuracy and toughness… and ME Maximum Strength

Maximum strength is how much force can be generated by the muscles and skeletal system for one, all-out effort.

You One-Rep Max is an indicator of this type of muscular strength.

Power

Power is strength per unit of time… I like to call this Explosive Power.

This type of ME is measured by the ability to move a weight from one point to another with speed……

You can see it in the mirror, in the numbers creeping up on the scale and in the tight waistband on your pants. You don’t like the way you look and you don’t feel great about yourself either. It is time to do something about it but just the thought of another diet brings to mind feelings of hunger, failure, cravings for forbidden foods and a fridge full of wilted lettuce and celery sticks.

You dream of a better way to lose this excess weight, trim down, look good, and feel great. Well you don’t have to dream any longer. This can become a reality by developing a new style of living that focuses on lifelong healthy habits rather than a short term ‘diets’ that won’t work short term and definitely not long term either.

Choosing a lifestyle solution for long term weight management involves making proper physical exercise a regular habit.…

Strength training was once a practice reserved for male competitive athletes and bodybuilders. Fortunately, those outdated ideas are where they belong, in the past. Strength training has been proven to benefit all populations and it is absolutely essential if we wish to change the look of our bodies.

Women especially reap huge benefits both physically and mentally from weight bearing exercise. Strength training creates strong ligaments and tendons, which serve to support the joints and decrease the likelihood of injury from other activities. It is the best thing a woman can do to reduce her risk of osteoporosis because working with weights increases bone density. Strength training also increases your metabolism as well because by creating muscle tissue, you are creating tissue that is active and uses energy (calories) even when at rest. And maybe one of the sweetest surprise benefits of strength training for women is the confidence and sense…

For many people, a weight-loss plan begins and ends with deprivation dieting. To them this is what you do every time you get sick of the excess fat hanging off your body. But this inevitably backfires because:

1) Such diets are virtually impossible to maintain
2) They lower your metabolic rate (the rate you burn fuel)
3) They work against the very health and fitness improvements that are needed to keep the fat from returning.

If you really want to get into better shape you really need to focus your efforts on getting healthy first. Lets repeat that idea – you need to get healthy to lose body fat not lose body fat in the hope you will get healthy.

In a nutshell you need to eat in a healthy balanced manner to support an active strength and fitness oriented lifestyle. The better you feel and your body feels the easier it is to…

As we get older we may silently wonder to ourselves how will we fare in the last stages of our life. Are we going to be lucky and not get some dreaded disease and remain fit and well right up to the time we go to meet our maker? Or the flip side of the coin is the possibility that we are going to become frail, incapacitated and incapable of taking care of ourselves, therefore dependent on our family, community and society for our care. And more importantly do we have any influence or control in this matter?

We used to accept with a shrug the inevitable decline in a persons physical and mental abilities as they grew older. Maybe we can remember our grandparents, thin, frail and weak. Maybe they could not take care of themselves and were forced to go into a nursing home.

The process of humans losing their…

It’s not that we age but how we age that matters and the how is what we have a lot of control over and will govern how this process affects us in the years to come. Aging is not simply about decay; it is an accumulation of choices about exercise and food that are made every day and consequences of these choices. This will determine if our later years are lived with comfort, independence and high physical activity or those years are lived with infirmity and disease.

A lot of attention is being placed these days on the subject of hormones and how, as we age our body gradually decreases the amount it makes for us. Around age 30, or even earlier the body produces less and less of the hormones that were keeping us young, healthy, fit and kept our body in good shape.

Once we hit 40, 50 or more…