Walking As Fun Exercise!

Walking is some of the best exercise you can get, but it can become a bit monotonous. Whether you need a nudge out the door, training inspiration, or a reason to keep going, here are some enthusiasm boosters.

Make it a game. Walk as long as it takes to spot, say, three red cars. Then set a new game objective, and keep on walking.

Follow a new leader.Let your dog set the pace.

Entertain a party.Plan a progressive dinner where each course is a walk away from the next. Start with healthy appetizers at one house, the main course at the next stop a couple of miles away, and dessert at the third.

Travel an unmapped course. Don't plan your route. Instead, make decisions at every turn based on what looks interesting. Follow a curious-looking winding street to its end, or a hill to its top view.

Dust 'em.Pick a walker on your path who seems a bit more fit and faster than you. Then try to pass her.

Enjoy a mini-getaway.Plan an itinerary that takes you and a friend on a brisk, hour-long walk ending at a coffee shop. Or have breakfast before heading off for your favorite antique store, then browse awhile before starting for home.

Feed the birds.Bring along bread crumbs or maybe the Sunday paper to read on a stop in the park.

Play it by ear.For an interval workout, bring your MP3 player. Speed up whenever you hear a fast song.

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Say Goodbye To Your Love Handles!

It is an unfortunate fact of life that as we age, fat seems to make itself at home in our bodies. One of its favorite places to reside is in the area of the waist just above our hips, called the love handle region. But what is to love, exactly? Those additional rolls of fat are the guilty culprits in making many articles of clothing fit a little snugger, and in keeping many of us from showing up on the beach in bathing suits. There are no if’s, and’s or but’s about it; love handles have got to go! The good news is that with the proper combination of diet, cardiovascular exercise and muscle toning, you can say goodbye to those unsightly love handles.

Targeting Fat
Here’s the bad news: there is no way to target specific areas of fat on our bodies for effective reduction. Instead, we must focus on reducing fat in the body overall, and the best way to do this is through diet and cardiovascular exercise. A general rule of thumb is that once a woman hits a body composition that is around 20% body fat, the love handles will begin to disappear. It is doubtful that anyone needs to be preached at about the proper way to eat these days, with so much information available on diet and nutrition. Keep in mind that no matter how much you exercise, you will continue to gain weight if your calories consumed are higher than the calories burned each day. This is why it is so important to cut out fats and sugar from the diet as much as possible while you are exercising daily, to increase your odds of dropping the pounds and inches on a consistent basis.

Cardiovascular exercise should be done four to six times each week, and can be as simple as taking the dog for a walk around the block, to sweating it out on the treadmill at the gym. Any type of cardio exercise will effectively burn the calories – and the additional fat – but the harder you workout, the quicker you will see results. Before you begin any type of exercise program, make sure that you talk to your doctor about the safest choices for you. Once you have a cardio workout established into your daily routine, you can begin adding specific exercises that will tone the muscles on either side of your abdomen, called the obliques. The best types of movements that will work this area include twisting and bending motions that will stretch and tone those muscles. The toning will succeed in reducing the inches around your waistline, and give you the definition and firmness that your image is craving.

While additional fat storage in the body may be a fact of life as we age, there are things that we can do to keep those storage areas under control. Once you get a handle on those love handles, you will be able to sport that bikini with confidence. Bye bye, love handles!

Exercises: Get a Handle on Your Love Handles
Basic crunch: Works the rectus abdominis, the wide flat muscle that runs from your breastbone to the top of your pelvis.

Lie on the floor with your feet hip-width apart. Cradle your head in your hands without lacing your fingers together and with your elbows rounded slightly inward. Tilt your chin a small way towards your chest and pull your abdominal muscles in.
Exhale through your mouth as you curl your head, neck, and shoulders up off the floor. Hold at the top of the movement for a moment, then inhale as you slowly lower down.

Twist crunch: This exercise works your rectus abdominis as well as your internal and external obliques, two muscle groups that wrap around your waist.

Exhale through your mouth and curl your head, neck, and shoulders up and towards the left. Hold at the top of the movement, then lower to the start. Twist to the right on the next rep, and continue alternating until you complete the set. Note: Don't just twist your elbows from side to side. Really concentrate on twisting from your middle.

Anchoring: This exercise uses all of your abdominal muscles, including the deep, underlying transverse abdominis. Your lower back also gets a workout.

Lie on your back with your left foot on the floor. Lift up your right leg and bend your knee so that your thigh is perpendicular to the floor and directly in line with your hip; flex your heel. Raise your arms up over your chest and clasp your fingers together.
Slowly lower your heel and your arms towards the floor. As you do so, concentrate on keeping your abs pulled inward, and don't allow your lower back to pop up off the floor. This becomes harder the closer your heel and hands move towards the floor. When your heel has almost touched the floor, slowly return your arms and leg to the start. Repeat this exercise four times with your right leg, then four times with your left.

Celebrity Fitness: Katherine Heigl

Before filming her new movie, Knocked Up, Katherine Heigl hated working out. But since meeting Hollywood trainer Harley Pasternak, the actress raves, "I'm in the best shape I've ever been in."

Still, Heigl, one of PEOPLE's 100 Most Beautiful in 2007, didn't get there without putting up a fight. "I hate dieting. I hate the whole thing!" she tells PEOPLE in its new issue. A revealing love scene in Knocked Up gave her the motivation to hit the gym with L.A. trainer Pasternak, who is known for his intense, time-efficient workouts. "Katherine had a beautiful body, but it had never been toned," says Pasternak, who has worked with Halle Berry, Jessica Simpson and Sheryl Crow.

Heigl, 28, met with him for cardio and circuit-training sessions of 25 to 50 minutes, up to five times a week for six weeks prior to shooting. On-set, she'd jump rope or lift dumbbells outside her trailer. All the while, she ate Pasternak's 5-Factor Diet, which delivered five high-protein, high-fiber meals a day. Even with a scheduled weekly "cheat day," says Pasternak, Heigl soon looked "tighter and more toned."

Typical Workout for Heigl:
• 5 minutes of jump-roping, jogging, or stair-climbing for a cardio warm-up.

A circuit of 4 sets each of the following:
• 25 dumbbell flies
• 25 lunges
• 25 low-body crunches

Followed by:
• 5-25 minutes of cardio running, elliptical training, stair-climbing or biking, with the last five minutes working as a cool-down period.

Sample Day's Meals:
Breakfast: French toast with ricotta pillows
Mid-morning snack: A mixed-berry shake
Lunch: TexMex salad with chicken and black beans
Afternoon snack: Hummus crudite
Dinner: Sea Bass with brown rice and edamame

Why You Should Exercise...Even Though You Don't Want To

The benefits of exercise may sound too good to be true, but decades of solid science confirm that exercise improves health and can extend your life. Adding as little as half an hour of moderately intense physical activity to your day can help you avoid a host of serious ailments, including heart disease, diabetes, depression, and several types of cancer, in particular breast and colon cancers.

In addition to the disease-fighting properties of exercise, regular activity can improve the quality of your life and your general well-being in many other ways, such as helping you sleep better, reduce stress, control your weight, brighten your mood, sharpen your mental functioning, and improve your sex life.

Exercise at a Glance

In a nutshell, exercise can:
-Reduce your chances of getting heart disease.

-Lower your risk of developing hypertension and diabetes.
-Reduce your risk for colon cancer and some other forms of cancer.
-Improve your mood and mental functioning.
-Keep your bones strong and joints healthy.
-Help you maintain a healthy weight.
-Help you maintain your independence well into your later years.

Six Pack ABS

If you admire all those 6 pack abs, just remember that nothing is fair or equal. Men and boys have it much easier when it comes to six packs. Females have an extra fat layer that males don’t, so men and boys don’t have to work as hard as women and girls to develop packed ab muscles . Yale University researchers found that teen girls smile more than teen boys, according to ‘Prevention Magazine.’ With all the extra ab and face muscle work, girls should be the grumpier ones. Grrrrrrr.

Russian Twists:• Start in seated position with knees bent and feet on the ground.• Lean back at a 45 degree angle• Rotate your upper body as far as you can from side to side, keeping your hips and legs stationary.• Keep you hands – or a medicine ball if you’re more advanced – at shoulder height and arms length as you rotate them• Do 4 sets of 20 twists with a 30 second rest between each set.

Ab Work

When you’re doing ab work, inhale through your nose, bringing oxygen in to prepare for the push; breathe out in puffs through your mouth when you exert, as you pull in your abs. That’s Inhale when you’re going Into it; Exhale when you Exert the most effort and are Exiting from the power move. You’ll feel the exercise much more dramatically!!!

Performance counts

When you’re doing aerobics, it’s important to monitor your breathing as it speeds up. An easy way to check is to listen to yourself sing. If you can get out a melody while working out, you’re doing just fine. If your voice is tooooo breathy, then slow down a bit.

Cheek to cheek

Efficient running means using your arms properly. Arms should be bent at a 45 degree angle at the elbows, with fingers extended AT ALL TIMES. Keep your arms firm and your elbows held close to your body – not flapping around or flying up or out. Push up one bent arm as you pull down the other, alternating them like a robot.Create an arc so your hands go cheek to cheek. That is, first swing your elbow forward and up, with your arm bent, so your extended fingers are near the cheek on you face, then pull your elbow down and back, in an arc, keeping your arm firm and bent, so that your elbow ends up raised behind you, and your extended fingers are near your butt cheek. Doing this is critical to lung efficiently, so you’ll have more air and endurance; and a faster pace, with less effort.

Relaxed running

When you’re running, either on a track or on a treadmill, and you’ve had it, simple corrections will help your speed and breathing, so you’ll find energy to keep going.: 1) Make sure you’re hands are moving cheek to cheek with fingers extended and elbows in close to your body. (see "cheek to cheek" 2) relax your shoulders, and then any other muscles you’re tensing. 3) Make sure those hands are unclenched, fingers are extended.

Form vs content

If you’re a woman just starting to exercise, you need to do it away from the mirror. An Ontario study, reported in ‘Elle,’ showed that the impact of mirror reflections was different, depending on the exerciser’s level. “While active women focus on their form, sedentary women pick themselves apart.”

First things first

If you feel pokey when you’re walking or running, and you want to speed- up, use your arms !!!! First make sure your arms are positioned correctly – see "cheek to cheek" – and get used to how that feels. Skilled walkers and runners pump their arms faster when they want to speed up, because they know their legs will follow!!!!

Against the trend

When you diet, your metabolism slows down. An efficient way “to reverse that trend is to perform strength and resistance moves,” according to studies in Good Housekeeping. So get out the weights, all you dieters, here we go!!! Strength training - anerobics - working out with weights, - builds stronger muscles. Stronger muscles burn more calories than weaker ones. Sooooo, lifting those weights is all about boosting your metabolism, FYI!!!!!

Whatever works

Everybody’s access is different, so you have to be a designer, and build your own fitness mix.

You need to slowly work up to more than 20 minutes of aerobic exercise; and/or more than 10 minutes of weight training 4 – 5 days a week; with an ab add –on component when you’re ready.

Seem overwhelming and impossible? You start burning fat after 20 minutes of aerobics, so get going slowly, and gradually work up to what’s realistic, and makes you feel fit and good. Mix it up so it isn’t boring, and it’s easier on your body.

Props for trying

No matter how much exercise you do, give yourself props. Don’t go off on what you didn’t’ do. If you do 5 minutes one day, it’s 5 minutes more than nothing, so hoorays are all for you!!!!!!.

Chemical Reaction

When you’re stressing big time, your body releases adrenaline to give you energy to get through it. By exercising, you’re switching stress’ adrenaline overload , to inner peace from endorphins. Can you think of a more positive power switch, even if it’s things floating in your blood?

Ten ways a serious work out can help you

1) Energize you
2) Strengthen your muscles and bones
3) Strengthen your heart and lungs
4) Reduce stress
5) Improve your skin
6) Reshape your body
7) Keep your eyes healthier
8) Pump your metabolism
9) Burn calories
10) Give you attitude!!!!!

What else gives you so much bang for your buck?

Butcher block

After twenty minutes of breathing aerobically, you have oxygen galore. The oxygen hunts for stored fat and burns it up. We know the only good stores for fat are delis or butcher shops, so let’s do aerobics for more than 20 minutes, use oxygen to clear out our fat storage lockers, and shop only at stores that are fun!!!!!!!!!.

Exercise Mix

If you find yourself full of exer-sighs, not knowing what’s best for you, here’s something to think about while you’re scratching your head. According to The World Book Encyclopedia, including your smiling face muscles, you have 600 major muscles inside your body. Since they’re all connected, you’ve gotta get these muscles moving from bottom to top. For a job this size you need a weekly mix of aerobics, anerobics and ab work. Now - what does that mean exactly?

Aerobic exercise is continuous motion that makes you breathe harder and speeds your heart beat.
Anerobic exercise involves intervals of intense exertion and rest.
Ab work strengthens the core muscles surrounding you’re torso, giving you a center of power.

So you need to mix it all up. If you’re only about Pilates or yoga, switch it up and sweat at least once a week. If you’re a biker or runner or hiker, get out the weights and give your upper body a push. .... and, yes, we all need core strength. A strong core will power boost both your upper and lower body and help avoid injury... soooooo you need to start twisting and working those middle muscles for added strength everywhere, no matter what else you’re doing!!!!!!!.

Give your 600 majors a moving mix and you’ll be proudly flexing big time into your nineties!!!!!!!!!!