Organic Schmorganic

This new trend of everything being "Organic" is getting really annoying.
If I learned anything from all the Chemistry classes I had in college it's that ANYTHING containing carbon is organic. And all foods are made mostly of organic (carbon-containing) compounds. Companies have taken advantage of how ignorant people are and they simply put the word organic on any of their existing products and they sell way more at triple the price. People think just because it has the word organic on the package that it is good for you.
Originally foods were called organic because they were grown without pesticides or fertilizers but companies have taken this word to the extreme. Don't always believe the words on a label. A perfect example of this would be wheat thins. Whoever thought of that name was very smart because it fools everyone into thinking they might be good for you because they contain 2 words that we associate with being healthy. But they aren't any better for you than any other cracker on the shelf with lots of fat/saturated fat.

Weight Loss: Cardio versus Diet

Is cardio the best thing to do for weight loss?
No it is not! Cardio is very good for your heart and does burn calories while you are doing it. If you are going to do cardio on a treadmill make sure the treadmill mat is ideal. But just think of how long and hard you run versus the amount of calories that you burn. It really isn't worth it in my book because I don't enjoy running. If you love running, then run all you want. If you are more like me then you will want to slim down using more affective methods. For each 3500 calories you eat in excess to what you need you will gain 1 pound of fat. People that are overweight/obese are usually at that stage because of 2 reasons: Lack of exercise and excess calorie consumption. Think about how easy it would be to gain 1 pound of fat in a week. You would only have to eat 500 extra calories a day. Let's think about that, 500 calories extra would be as little as 2 teaspoons of brown sugar. Now lets think of how much cardio you would have to do to burn those 500 extra calories. Anyone that has ever used a treadmill knows that it takes some effort to burn 500 calories. A 150 lb. person running a 6.7 minute mile for 30 minutes would burn 500 calories, and that's a fast pace! So it should be very obvious by now that it would be much easier to lose weight by simply eating less instead of doing crazy amounts of cardio. I'm not saying to not do cardio! Cardio is very healthy and beneficial for your heart and a great workout for your legs. But, if you are running for the sole purpose of losing weight you are not using knowledge to your advantage. When it comes to your weight, a little discipline in the kitchen is better than a lot of discipline in the gym.

The perfect weight loss program would involve a combination of both cardio and weights. As I said earlier, you burn calories while you are running. But when you step off the treadmill you are done burning your calories. That's why it is smart to lift weights! You don't burn many calories while lifting weights, but the advantage is that you are building muscle. And the more muscle you have the more calories you will burn throughout the day. If you ever want to find the most overweight people in a gym simply look in the cardio section. You will see the same overweight person running on the same treadmill for years! Just doing cardio isn't going to get the results that most people want. On the other hand if you want to find the fittest people you will notice that they will be in the weights section of the gym. That's because they understand what is necessary to improve their bodies. If cardio worked as well as people thought, then that person that goes to the gym does the treadmill and then goes home to eat whatever they want would be skinny. But sadly it doesn't and we have to learn to control what we eat and more importantly stop eating before we feel stuffed. We also have to do cardio in MODERATION, (No use in killing yourself and hating the gym) do a little cardio but not so much that you dread going to the gym. Look for the truth behind the word Organic in the next post

Plyometrics- Exercises that enable a muscle to reach maximum strength in as short a time as possible

Have you ever wondered how your leg reacts so fast when the doctor taps the tendon below your knee with a rubber mallet?
The tendon that is being tapped is called your patellar tendon and the muscles that react are the quadriceps. With most movements in the human body our mind has to process the information and send impulses to cause the chemical reactions that result in muscle contraction. When the patellar tendon is tapped the sensory receptors in the muscles send this information only to our spinal cord which in turn sends back impulses to contract. The reaction is so fast that the muscle contracts without our brain even knowing about it. And this is the secret behind plyometrics and jumping hihger. This reaction is called a stretch reflex. The tendon that was tapped was stretched and the body reacted by contracting. The same holds true when you lower your body rapidly to jump. Muscles in your legs are stretched rapidly and they respond by contracting which will result in jumping. Plyometrics has 2 main objectives. The first is to strengthen the contraction that results from the stretch and the second is to train all the fibers to contract at the exact same time. Because jumping is such a fast motion it makes sense to train the muscles involved in a very fast way. Weight training with the legs is necessary to have the strength required to go through the movement, but weight training alone really wont help you jump higher. That's why you don't see bodybuilders dunking basketballs. They have tons of leg strength but their legs have developed a lot of slow twitch muscles that don't react as well to fast movement.

Some foods to stay away from

I was just reading on Yahoo's home page and there was a link for some of the worst foods you can buy. I thought it was interesting so im going to put some of them here.

Worst Candy Bar = Twix!
There are 11 grams of SATURATED fat!!!! That's horrible! I wouldn't recommend eating 11 grams of saturated fat all day. That's as much saturated fat as 11 strips of bacon. So don't use Twix as a stocking stuffer.

Worst Cereal = Quaker 100% Natural Granola, Oats, Honey & Raisins
This cereal has 420 calories and 30 grams of sugar.... not good for you.

Yoga

Shoulders

Lateral Side Raises
Stand with weights at your side, arms straight. Raise your arms until they are parallel to the floor and then slowly lower them back down to your side. You are going to have to use a light weight for these so that you can do 12 reps.

Rear Delt Raises
Same as Lateral side raises but you will be bent at the waist the whole time so that your body is parallel to the ground.

Front Raises
Stand with weights at your side and lift them in front of you with straight arms until they are to eye level then slowly return to starting position.

Shoulder Presses
Do these with the better biceps workout

Calves

Today you are simply going to do 500 calf raises. For the first 100 stand with feet shoulder width apart and toes pointing straight ahead. Go all the way up on the ball of your feet as high as possible, hold for one second and then all the way back down. It's best to do them on the edge of a step or somewhere where you will be able to have your heel go lower than the ball of your foot. The next hundred do them with toes point out at 45 degrees. The next 100 do them with toes pointing in towards each other. Make sure you do at least 50 reps in each set. You have all day to do them so space them out however you would like. Strength through doing exercise will improve your fitness.

Push-up workout

This is the 7 Minute push-up workout..... even though it will take you longer than 7 minutes to complete at first, but that is the goal.

This workout is very simple and you should see great improvement in as little as a week of doing it.

The idea is that you do 30 push-ups each minute for 7 minutes, totalling 210 push-ups in all.

You have the whole minute to do the 30 push-ups so if you finish the first 30 in 25 seconds you get a whole 35 seconds of rest before starting the next set of 30. Ideally you want to be able to do 30 each minute but once you cant get 30 in a minute you will be trying to finish the remaining push-ups in the fastest time possible. It may take you 12 minutes to do the first time but don't worry you will improve the 2nd time and the 3rd and so on until you can get them in 7 minutes.
Post your times on here so everyone can see the improvements people are making.

You will want to give yourself at least 2 days of recovery, but probably more after the first time of doing it... you will feel it for sure.
Girls you just do all of the push-ups from your knees... you need to do push-ups too.