All posts filed under: Exercise

High Intensity for Everyone

If you are like me, when people talk about the High Intensity Interval Training workout, HIIT, you assume it is something designed for the people who have been working out for a while and are looking for a way to “up their game,” so to speak. Which is easy to understand considering the typical HIIT workouts you find online are pretty intimidating. They are filled with exercises with scary names like “thrusters,” “Russian twists” and “planks.” Then there is the complicated rules like: do 12 thrusters, run 2 minutes, walk 3 minutes, do Russian twists for 10 seconds, repeat 7.5 times, walk at half speed for 10 seconds…too much! I have recently become aware that it does not have to be this way. In fact, almost everyone can reap the benefits from the HIIT workout. Not just those who are already running 5K’s. The science behind this workout, according to http://www.dailyburn.com, is about heart rate. It turns out that when you raise your heart rate for a period followed by lowering it for a period it …

Why do I have to skip a day between body toning sessions?

For those of us just starting out and getting into a routine it seems so contrary that we have to follow a hurry-up and wait regimen for body toning. Nonetheless, this is exactly what we are instructed to do. So, we try to schedule upper body on Monday, Wednesday, Friday; lower body Tuesday and Thursday; and if we miss a day it tends to put a wrench in the whole process. The question of why we put ourselves through this scheduling maze all boils down to science-kinesiology to be exact. Kinesiology is often defined as the study of human movement, but has evolved to be more than just that. According to the American Kinesiology Association, kinesiology is, “The academic discipline which involves the study of physical activity and its impact on health, society, and quality of life”, http://www.AmericanKinesiology.org. These are the people who’ve determined that we need to skip a day between working out. Here’s what they’ve discovered: Lifting weights creates a stress on your body. The act of repeatedly working your muscles, aka contracting them, …

Getting Firm – Lessons from my Workout Video Collection

Getting SpiteHot is going to require some movement – movement of not only attitudes and perceptions, but downright physical movement. The big headlines over the past few days have been about the newest study that has found, yet again, that those of us with sit down desk jobs are not doing so well. I sit at a desk 8 hours a day. Check out these numbers from http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org that I found at http://www.diygenius.com: Basically, the verdict is that movement is necessary to be healthy and sitting can be downright deadly. It is time to MOVE! Being on a budget I decided to take inventory of my current supply of workout videos and DVD’s. A little less extensive than my book collection, I have a couple of video sets and about 5 random workout DVD’s. This doesn’t surprise me because it’s easier to read a book than jump up and down. Thinking SpiteHot SpiteHot means to get healthy and use my past experiences to catapult me forward, so I took a trip down memory lane and …