5 Strategies To Eating Healthy On The Road, Or In The Air

Another cross-country flight and yet another day spent eating meals in an airport.

You know that planning your meals is an important part of staying lean and healthy. But, how do you plan when you have lay overs, flight delays, and need to be extra early just to waste time waiting in long lines to be searched by a grumpy TSA Agent.

Here are five strategies to make the most of eating healthy when your days in spent traveling through airports.

#1. Carry and emergency stash. Stock up on a bag of nuts, beef jerky, and a piece of fruit. Pack one of each in your carry-on and then restock in the airport when one or all are gone.

#2. Meat and veggies. In those rare times when you actually get the chance to sit down in an airport restaurant for a meal, skip the burger and fries and order a piece of grilled fish, steak, or chicken with extra veggies.

#3. Be calorie conscious. Most fast-food convenience stores and coffee houses now list their choices on the menus. Look for the lower calorie options and make your choices based around those.

#4. Go easy on the pre-flight, in-flight, and layover booze. Sure a drink may seem like just what is needed after a day of connecting flights, meetings, and yet one more flight home. But, all these extra drinks will wreck havoc on your fitness goals. If you know that your business meeting with customers will most likely result in drinks at some point, then skip the airport booze all together. If they don’t then a drink or two between a connection with your meal isn’t the worst thing.

#5. Drink lots of water. Flying will dehydrate your body and a busy schedule can make it easy to forget to drink some water throughout the day. If you always keep a bottle of water with you there is better chance that you will drink more water.

Keep the above strategies in mind on your next business trip and you won’t have to worry about losing the progress that you’ve worked so hard to gain.

If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:

https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/

Regular Exercise Is Simpler Than You Think

You do not have to spend hours in the gym everyday, or even go to gym at all to stay fit. The following are four simple ways to incorporate exercise into your life.

#1. Walk twenty minutes to thirty minutes most days. Done consistently walking will improve your cardiovascular fitness and help you shed a few pounds. Take it up a notch by carrying a 20-40 pound backpack.

#2. 50 minutes, twice a week. Hitting the gym twice a week for a good total-body workout will reward you will numerous benefits when done consistently ovetime. In a years time this is enough to see a completely different person staring back at you in the mirror.

#3. A daily bodyweight routine. Ten to twenty minutes of the following circuit will keep you fit to be able to tackle all of your daily activities.

  • Push Ups x 25
  • Squats x 25
  • Pull Ups x 5
  • Reverse Lunge x 15 each
  • Front Plank x 60s
  • Jumping Jacks – 25
  • Repeat for as many rounds as possible in 10-20 minutes. Rest as needed.

#4. Reps on the Minute. Some days you only have time for a quick 10-minute workout. That is where the “Reps on the Minute” strategy works great. Pick and exercise, start a timer, and perform a set number of reps. Then rest the remainder of the minute. Continue for 10 rounds.

Here are a few examples:

Kettlebell Swings x 25 reps

Squat and Press x 15 reps

KB Snatch x 10 each arm

Battling Ropes x 40 slams

Regular exercise doesn’t have to take a lot of time, it just has to be consistent

If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:

https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/

One Awesome Workout You Can Do Anywhere

Get your week started with this awesome bodyweight workout. No equipment necessary.

  1. Bodyweight Speed Squat
  2. Push-Up
  3. Reverse Lunge

*Reps = 10-1 (10 reps round one, nine reps round two, eight reps round three, and so on down                    to one.)

4. 15 Jumping Jacks after each round

 

Have a great week!

 

If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:

https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/

Athletes Have Off-Seasons, Do You?

Athletes have off-seasons, do you?

The off-season allows the body time to recover. No athlete would ever try to compete and perform at a high level year-round, because this would wear done their body.

While athletes’ have off-seasons, the regular exerciser never does. Instead he or she goes to the gym 3-4 times per week, pushes hard, and expects to see results without ever slowing doing. They then wonder why joints get achy, strength decreases, and body fat occasionally increases.

The body is tired. It has been pushed hard for months on end. Not to mention that this pace has continued through a stressful life event or two, and more weekend hangovers than proud to admit.

Occasionally taking a week or two off from exercise is good for the body. It allows the muscles to get fully rested and recovered and come back stronger. This is especially true when strength plateaus are hit or weight loss stalls. Give the body some time to rest and those plateaus can be then be broken through.

If you have been working out consistently for six months or more you could probably benefit from a week off. Then continue to take a recovery week once every 16-20 weeks. During this week still eat well, maybe get a message, take a few walks, but skip your regular workouts.

Recovery is part of training, but it is the most often neglected part.

If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:

https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/

A Member’s Story…Angie D.

 

If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:

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Move It, Or Lose It

Move to keep moving.

The only reason people lose the ability to move and do things like getting up and down from the floor is because at some point that movement stopped happening in life.

When a movement is no longer performed, deconditioning and poor ability to move in that pattern happens.

This then leads to pain in the movement, which further leads to a fear of moving because movement hurts, or once on the floor there may not be the strength to get back up.

And finally the fear of movement leads to a lack of any movement and overall decreased health.

We get our clients up and down from the floor, teach them to regain and restore their ability to squat, to hinge and swing a kettlebell, to crawl, to carry a heavy sandbag, and get moving well again.

Movement is life and life is movement.

If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:

https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/

Say “No” To Franken-Foods

Fat free, sugar free, low sodium, reduced calorie, gluten free, low carb; Are these really better?

Taste comes from three places: sweet (sugar), salt, or fat. Remove our reduce one an another has to be added or increased to make up for taste. Or worse, something fake gets added.

Eat real food and stay away from all the Franken-Foods and their deceiving labeling that makes them sound like better options.

If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:

https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/

What 80/20 Really Looks Like

You may not be eating as well as you think.

Sure Monday through Friday you may do well. But, then Friday night hits. You go out for dinner and order the grilled salmon with steamed veggies and skip the bread. But, you have dessert and a bottle of wine.

Or maybe on Saturday you feel that it would be nice to make your kids a big breakfast of pancakes and bacon. You tell yourself it’s okay because “it’s for the kids” and you’ll only have a little.

Then there is that stressful day that just needs unwound with a few drinks or a bowl of ice cream.

These are the small things that by themselves are perfectly fine, but added up can wreck your progress. To get results in the gym it takes eating clean 80% of the time. For most, it ends up only being 60-70% clean.

So what does 80% look like? Or better yet, what does the 20% look like?

To stay at 80% or above means you can have roughly 3-4 cheats per week. Every alcoholic drink that is a cheat. Every dessert that’s a cheat. Every piece of chocolate or candy another cheat. Fried and processed foods, a cheat again. Chips and salsa, you get the point.

Eating clean is the missing link to getting results. And many times what we think is clean eating isn’t clean enough.

If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:

https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/

Start Your Morning With A Bang

Alarm. Coffee. A few minutes scrolling your news feed. Shower. Breakfast. Kids out the door. And finally yourself out the door. It has already been a busy day and you have not even started work yet.

Give yourself 10-minutes every morning dedicated to exercise. Best of all you don’t even have to add this to your routine. Just replace “scrolling the news feed” with a simple bodyweight routine.

Here is one that will only take 10-minutes:

  • Front Plank 30 seconds
  • Mountain Climbers – 5 each
  • Bodyweight Squat – 10 reps
  • Push Ups – 10 reps
  • Reverse Lunge – 5 reps each
    • Repeat 3x

Done every morning you will find that over time you begin to feel better and have more energy. And eventually may even want to add more.

To make exercise consistent, exercise needs to become a part of your routine.

If you’d like more information about fitness coaching click here:

https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/

Movement Is Life

Denver Neck and Shoulder Pain Treatment

The body was made to thrive on movement.

Daily movement is essential for life, yet the modern lifestyle promotes being sedentary. A typical day results in an hour commute to work, eight to ten hours at a desk in front of a computer, an evening filled with running kids to activities, and then crashing down on the couch or in bed at ten in the evening to unwind with a book or TV before going to bed. Outside of walking the dog the entire day is spent sitting.

But, the body was meant to move. It is this lack of movement that causes aches and pains, poor posture, and a host health of issues. It’s also why weekend warriors get hurt skiing, playing pick up basketball, or doing yard work. The body has been sedentary all week and then it’s pushed to be physical, but isn’t prepared to handle the physicality of those activities, so it gets injured.

Finding ways to move more each day can prevent this. Go to the gym two or three days a week and do some strength training, get up from the desk every hour and do a short two minute body-weight routine, take a ten minute walk a few times through out the day, join a gym that is near the kids places of activity and go there in evening rather than sitting in the car or watching them practice, find as many ways as possible to be more active.

Movement is life.

If you want more information about fitness coaching click here:
https://pittsburghnorthfitness.leadpages.co/21-day-shape-up-challenge/