Month: February 2015

Keeping fit is something that many people overlook until they are out of shape and therefore must work harder to reach their physical goals. However, the work put into keeping your body healthy is worth it in both immediate results and long-term benefits. Here are some tips on fitness that can help keep you happy and healthy for years to come.

In order to truly commit to a fitness program, you need to change your attitudes and beliefs about fitness. You need to be willing to work hard, even when you’re feeling tired or lazy. Only if you are willing to make solid, lasting changes will you able to make fitness a part of your life.

In order to get the most out of your fitness routine when swimming, be sure to work on your ankle flexibility. This will help not only in preventing injury, but also will increase your performance in the water. This can be done simply by suspending your legs and pointing your toes away from you, then upward for a full minute.

One way to maximize your fitness routine is to keep track of your workouts and how well you did. This will result in positive thinking and will push you to compete against yourself. There are many online logs that you can keep, as well as devices that you can use to automatically track your workouts. This way you can see your progression and formulate your own challenges.

A great way to help you get fit is to start doing compound lifts. Compound lifts are lifts such as the bench press, squat, pull-up, and deadlift. These lifts are better than isolation lifts because they use more than once muscle group. Isolation lifts tend to only use one muscle group.

A good, and easy exercise to try when getting into better physical shape is walking. Walking at a fast pace for fifteen to twenty minutes a day can quickly impact your fitness goals. If you stroll for thirty minutes, you can have a similar impact to your body, it will just be more gradual.

The trapezius muscles are easily one of the most neglected body parts when it comes to exercise. To exercise them, simply hold a dumb bell in each hand, and lift your shoulders. Then lower them slowly. The trapezius muscles are an important part of upper body and back strength.

Are you looking to speed up your run? To increase the speed of your running time, make your actual running strides quicker instead of making your strides bigger. This will shave time off of your run. Push off with the toes of your trailing leg to get you going.

As stated earlier in the article, keeping fit can be hard work, but the rewards reaped from your efforts will be well worth the work. Maintaining proper fitness can help you lead a longer life, and help you enjoy the life you have now more fully. Follow the advice you learned from this article to get started on the road to better fitness.

If you get a McDonalds calorie counter, you won’t have to give up the taste and convenience of eating at America’s favorite fast food restaurant, even if you’re trying to lose weight. McDonalds and other fast food ventures get a bad rap, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

One of the biggest hits McDonalds has taken in the eyes of dieters was the movie Supersize Me, a documentary about eating nothing but McDonalds for thirty days. The movie’s director and nominal star ate nothing but McDonalds for the duration, without the benefit of a McDonalds calorie counter.

Eating McDonalds for three meals a day, he managed to gain better than twenty five pounds and pretty severely impacted his health. Needless to say, this didn’t do wonders for McDonald’s business, and it scared away even more dieter from eating at the fast food giant and led to the widespread availability of the McDonalds calorie counter.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In the wake of Supersize Me, several people took up the challenge of eating nothing but McDonalds food for a month and not gain weight or even lose weight. Which, according to popular thinking, should be impossible.

But, as it turns out, it’s entirely possible to eat nothing but McDonalds or any other fast food and lose weight. What you need to know is what you’re eating and what you can eat, which is where the McDonalds calorie counter comes into play.

McDonalds, like most fast food restaurants, has made the McDonalds calorie counter freely available online and at most of their restaurants. Since the food is all standardized, you can pick one of them up and now that what you get is going to very close to what the guides say.

Since you can do that, you can use the McDonalds calorie counter to figure what foods you can eat, and in what amount. You can eat there and still lose weight; all it takes is proper planning and the right choice of foods.

This doesn’t just mean eating salads and diet soda. You can have chicken McNuggets and hamburgers and fries and even milkshakes. What you can’t do is have them all at once or all the time, or at least not as much as you want all the time.

With the help of a McDonalds calorie counter, you need to select foods that fit into your diet scheme. Which is basically saying that you need to make sure your daily calories fit within a range that is going to let you lose weight. As long as you’re inside that range, you can eat whatever you like.

This does mean that, unfortunately, if you eat at McDonalds three times a day, you can have two double quarter pounders with extra large fries and a milkshake at every meal. You can go all out as an occasional treat, if you really need to, but you need to keep your calories within a reasonable range. But usually, you just need to consult your McDonalds calorie counter and find foods that you can enjoy and lose weight with.

Though one of the most popular tools used today to determine whether someone is at a healthy weight or not is the BMI, body fat and lean muscle tissue don’t figure into the equation. This has led many experts to discount BMI as an archaic measurement that isn’t accurate for many people. What is BMI, and why is it a good measure for some, maybe, and completely wrong for others?

BMI, or body mass index, was created in the early 1800s by Adolphe Quetelet. Because of that, it’s sometimes called the Quetelet index. It’s nothing more than a way of comparing a person’s weight to his or her height, and determining if his or her weight falls into a healthy and normal range. The BMI is still used today pretty much as it was when Quetelet invented it.

The formula for figuring BMI (body fat, bone and frame size, muscle and body type aren’t included in that) is this: Take your height in meters squared (your height times itself) and divide your weight in kilograms by that number. For example, if I’m 5 feet tall, that’s about 1.5 meters. To square that number, take 1.5 times 1.5. The result of that is 2.5. So if I weigh 120 pounds, that’s about 54.5 kilograms. Divide 54.5 by 2.5 and I get 21.8 as my BMI. The normal weight range is from 18.5 to 24.9, so 21.8 is classified as a normal weight. Underweight is considered 18.5 and below, while overweight people will calculate a BMI of 25 to 29.9. A BMI of 30 or greater indicates obesity.

BMI, body fat and general health can all be used as signs of how fit a person is. But where general health is pretty self-explanatory and the percentage of body fat clearly shows whether a person gets enough exercise or not, BMI is a bit trickier.

People with a lot of muscle don’t show accurate BMI readings. Because muscle weighs so much heaver than fat but takes up less space, a relatively small statured person can carry a lot of muscle weight without looking huge. BMI doesn’t take that into account. Football players, professional wrestlers, bodybuilders, and virtually any athlete who has a lot of muscle is going to measure as overweight and even obese according to the BMI. So it’s not accurate for them. Is it accurate for everyone else?

The answer to that is yes, and no. It depends on you. The BMI typically doesn’t show an accurate result for children. And extremely tall or large-framed people will show overweight or obese classifications more easily because of the extra weight from their bones and muscles. So for very short, tall or muscular people, the BMI appears to not be a good tool.

There’s also no distinguishing between men and women in the BMI. Body fat is more natural for women who are supposed to have more than men, so some sort of distinction in the measurement of the sexes would help the BMI’s accuracy