Mar 04

Don’t Split Hairs when you Have a Forest to go through… Adhere to Physical Activity 3 times per week!

Some important aspects of a life time of happiness, strength and health are:

“Do I exercise at least 3 times per week?

“Am I properly hydrated?”

“Do I get enough sleep throughout the week.”

Sometimes when we see advertisements on different programs that are targeted to decrease weight loss in 30 days, improve your diet in a short amount of time, or entering a 28 day fitness challenge, we see this as an immediate solution to some of the issues that give us weight gain.  We get questions a lot from our Personal Training Clients here in Napa asking if we’ve heard of “The Perfect 30”, the newest 21 day cleanse, or a (insert # of days) (insert promo name) challenge!  I’ve seen the 21 day “Dad Bod Challenge!”

We see challenges like this happening all the time on TV, social media, and “limited time offers” from local organizations quite frequently! When we get done with that 30 day Quick Fix solution, what happens after that? More often than not, nothing.  We don’t continue to refine our wellness and fitness after the small month long challenge is done and a relapse of gaining weight and loss of physical activity is observed once more.  Joy.

These small promotions like  cleanses and “The Perfect 30” are the “splitting hair” activities I am referring to.  Why split hairs for a short amount of time when we have an entire forest in front of us to go through.  If you sit around and split hairs, you’re wasting your time when you could be moving forward and making some real progress toward maintaining a healthy life for the long run.

A better approach would be to focus on the big “forest” of life that is in front of us. This means focusing on the broader, more robust parts of life rather than all the “quick fix” advertisements and promotions.  Focusing on the simple fact of performing challenging physical activities on a weekly basis will give us positive influences to our Life Time Fitness goals.

Some of the things within this Forest of Life Time Fitness, include a weekly exercise routine. Instead of focusing on just 30 days of doing some sort of fitness challenge that requires you to check in 5 days a week at a boot camp class, it might be a better idea to just ensure to exercise 3 times a week on a regular bases for the rest of your life. This could include anything from taking a hike, gardening in the back yard, chopping wood, going to the gym and doing a few of the resistance training machines, or making sure that you walk at least 2 hours a week. Focusing on weekly exercise adherence will give you a life time of impact to your health and wellness. Ensuring that you do some sort of physical activity throughout the week AT LEAST 3 times, will cover a lot of the struggles in the “forest” of weight loss, injury prevention, and ensuring that we are emotionally and physically well.

Even though there may be various other distractions in our life that tell us we are unhealthy in one way or the other, focusing on a big broad topic and adhering to creating solutions for the “forest” will help us positively influence the issues right in front of us. Counteracting the detrimental effects of age, injuries, and weight loss is going to be a lifelong challenge. So, let’s embrace it as a lifelong challenge of going through the forest of Life Time Fitness, and focus on exercising a total of three times per week. Instead of stopping for a while trying split hairs and dabbling with a 30 day “Quick Fix” solution to solve a problem, why not adhere to traveling through the forest of life on a weekly basis and promote adherence to exercise as a serious part of your journey.  There really aren’t any Quick Fix Solutions when it comes to the threat of injuries, illnesses, and weight gain. However, we can absolutely ingrain Life Time Fitness to make sure that we don’t let these threats get the best of us by making sure that we adhere to a weekly exercise routine and perform some strenuous physical activity at least 3 times per week for the entirety of Our Lives.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about our approach to creating strong, happy and healthy lives through Personal Training and Life Time Fitness Coaching, feel free to reach out to us at napatenacious@gmail.com or give us a call at 707-287-2727.

Feb 25

4 Pillars of Life Time Fitness: Wellness, The Fitness Continuum, Nutrition… and PLAY!

Improvements in Life Time Fitness include focusing on some major categories that will significantly help benefit one’s health through a regular fitness program. Something that we promote with our Personal Training clients here in Napa, is to focus on something we call The 4 Pillars of Life Time Fitness. Within these pillars, we feature 4 critically important themes responsible for positively influencing our Health and Wellness Goals.

Wellness: Wellness can be defined as the ability to maintain oneself in an optimal level of feeling well physically, mentally, and emotionally. This could mean anything from being injury-free, free of illness, and being emotionally happy and healthy.

The Fitness Continuum: We utilize the continuum of fitness as a way to discover where a person is currently in their stage of fitness. This could mean that you are just starting out exercise and fresh into a new program, maintaining your Fitness and exercising about one to two times per week, improving your current fitness level 3 months into a program of exercising 2-3 times per week, or trying to become more athletic. It’s very important to figure out where you are in these four different stages of the Continuum of Fitness. By figuring out where you are in these stages of the fitness Continuum, you can now plan on where your journey of fitness will take you next.

Nutrition:  Another component that is very popular among finding solutions to weight loss, is nutrition. Focusing on your nutrition as a critical pillar to support the overall structure of Life Time Fitness is another useful angle to focus on to maintain a healthy weight and ensuring that your body is being fueled with the proper nutrients that will support its functions.

Hobbies and Play:  Lastly we focus on the category of Hobbies and Play! When we talk about the category of Play, we want to make sure that we are including some sort of Hobby in your plan to get healthier! While it’s important to make sure that we eat right and exercise regularly, it’s just as important to make sure that we are partaking in recreational activities that entail us to use our bodies in recreational ways.

When our clients come to us on how to improve their Life Time Fitness, we need to approach it from various angles.  If you are curious about how to more effectively focus on your Life Time Fitness goals and how to implement some of these tools listed, please feel free to reach out to Napa Tenacious Fitness at napatenacious@gmail.com or give us a ring at 707-287-2727.

Feb 19

Perform Resistance Training ONCE per Week= Fountain of Youth!

About every 3 months there is a new health trend in being promoted and spoken about.  I hear clients, friends, and family talk about the newest latest health theme.  Sometimes it’s intermittent fasting.  It can be The Whole 30 Diet.  Or doing the P90X or Insanity workout package.  These are all great!  However, what I see is there is a lot of drop off.  Why?  Simple answer, the 30th day hits in the Whole 30.  People get hungry during intermittent fasting, so they eat when they’re supposed to fast.  And, there are only 10 episodes to your exercise DVD, and then you have to repeat the same thing over again watch the same Trainer leading the exercises bounce around on the TV and tell you what to do.  I’ve even heard people say they can rehearse the same lines on the Exercise DVD.

What we need is a consistent schedule in which we can exercise.  I make sure I exercise at least ONCE a week.  That’s 52 times a year.  Unfortunately, that’s more than what half of the nation is doing currently.

A critically important component of maintaining Health and Wellness is adhering to a weekly exercise Routine.  This means participating at least once per week in a form of physical actively involving stressing the body through a mode of exercise.

We’ve heard repeatedly that exercise is the key to longevity in life.   The fountain of youth.  While it’s true that a body in motion stays in motion, what is the most important is ensuring that we perform some form of resistance training or strength training throughout the week. Strength training and resistance training can take many different forms. A lot of the times when I speak with clients, I hear that resistance training and strength training revolve strictly around going to the gym and utilizing either weight machines, dumbbells, or barbells. While this is true to some degree, resistance training and strength training come in various forms. Exercise modes such as Yoga, Pilates, Isometrics, Group Fitness Classes, Spinning Classes, running, and other recreational activities will fall within the category of resistance training and strength training.

Every day physical activities such as yard work, housework, or some other projects such as painting that leaves your muscles feeling sore is a form of physical activity.  At the same time, this is not a form of “training” to enhance the body.  Chores are work are “work”, not “training.” Focusing on a form of training that enhances the musculature of the body is what will elicit critically important benefits in helping the body stay stronger and healthier for a longer period of time. For instance, when going to a one-hour yoga class, you are putting the body in positions that you normally don’t find yourself in your everyday life. Holding a Downward Dog or Pigeon pose stresses the muscles of the triceps, shoulders, hips and core muscles.  Looking at another common exercise technique such as the Push-Up, we don’t find ourselves belly down on the ground posting up with straight arms and fully extended legs.  The position of the Push Up will put stress on the Triceps, Shoulder, Hips and core as well.  Sounds familiar to those Yoga exercises, right?   While these are not common positions we find ourselves in our everyday lives, these positions will train us to be stronger so we can perform chores without feeling beat up by the end our tasks because our muscles can endure more and our body is more durable!  It is the productive stress that we are putting on our muscles throughout exercise training that will cause an adaptation in strength to our bodies when we perform a form of Resistance Training.  Doing this once a week will make us stronger!

The important take-home message here is that it’s important to refine our physical well-being by challenging the muscles in a different form of resistance and strength training. A challenging the body in these different forms of resistance training, we will Alyssa and adaptation that will improve our strength, hormone concentration, and overall emotional well-being as well. They structured and standardized exercise routine will help to act not only as a Improvement for our overall well-being, but as a enhancer for our physical, emotional, and mental well-being!

If you have any questions about what an easy method of Resistance Training might be and how it could help you, please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask us at napatenacious@gmail.com or call us at 707-287-2727.

Feb 07

The Benefits of Exercise over Alcohol to Improve Confidence!

The benefits of exercise remain a critical component in improving our wellness in life. Progression in staying healthy and injury-free, improving ones overall fitness, and improving overall quality of life is a clear byproduct of putting in time and energy to a structured exercise routine. One technique for improving Life Time Fitness that we do with our Personal Training clients in Napa here is working on managing alcohol consumption throughout the week. Not only does alcohol elicit surplus calories to where they can be stored as fat on the body unnecessarily, but alcohol also affects other important functions in life.  In this article we’ll talk about how alcohol is commonly used as a extrinsic motivator that is aimed toward boosting someone’s confidence and how exercise can be an invaluable investment to supersede the usage of alcohol and increase one’s positive outlook on life.

Sometimes by consuming alcohol as a recreational activity, confidence can be increased. The ability to be unhindered by any sort of inhibitions to say some things and act a certain way that you may hold back in a sober state are increased. Hence,  having a drink before going out to a social event might be appealing.  Once again, as stated in the beginning of this topic, alcohol can lead to deleterious defects in our Life Time Fitness and weight loss goals.

A benefit of some of the weekly goal setting tactic that we establish with our Personal Training clients is to abstain from alcohol a certain amount of days. We call these alcohol-free days or AFD’s. In addition to having alcohol free days, we also promote exercise to be done at least two to three times per week. When we eliminate alcohol and increase exercise, some of the benefits promote increases in emotional status and our physical well-being. After an exercise routine has been completed, a feeling of accomplishment is achieved. When we accomplish something, we feel good about it and those positive thoughts resonate into other aspects of our life. When we accomplish something we could feel a little more confident. In addition to feeling better in our emotional status, another aspect of confidence is the actual physical appearance that your body will achieve from abstaining from a specific amount of alcohol and from exercising the muscles on your body on a regular basis! We can see that there is a positive correlation in feeling more confident from conscious decisions that we make to improve our Life Time Fitness by abstaining from alcohol a certain amount of days and increasing weekly exercise adherence.

Imagine walking into a room 10 lbs. lighter than you were a month ago because you practice weekly exercise adherence and practice having a certain amount of alcohol free days per week. Your body will look better, your emotional status will be in a more positive and happy state, and other people will probably notice this. When other people notice this, more often than not this will be a positive feedback loop to being perceived as a more confident person.

Who needs alcohol to feel confident!?!

So the take-home message here is to practice a form of Lifetime Fitness that will increase your confidence. Life Time Fitness does not require the supplementation and alcohol, all it requires is a few goals of weekly exercise adherence that can be easily established to improve your overall physical appearance and increase your confidence.

Jan 27

Putting Yourself First: Wellness as a Priority!

The category of Wellness has to do with staying strong, healthy, and happy emotionally, mentally, and physically.   A critical component to staying “Well” is putting yourself first by taking time aside to exercise, set goals, and partake in your hobbies. Everyone has families, but you won’t be able to take care of your family and friends unless you take care of yourself first as a priority!

It’s important to exercise at least once per week to ensure that your body is able to perform in your everyday physical functions and remain free of injury. Adhering to weekly exercise could be as simple as making sure to take a fitness class once a week, doing a quick exercise routine involving lower-body and upper-body resistance training techniques, or just taking a hike or brisk walk.

Another component of staying well is to embracing one of your hobbies and contributing to it at least once a week. This could be anything from writing in your journal, gardening, cooking a new recipe every week, or even watching your favorite TV show if you’re too busy to do so. Hobbies are very important to fine tuning your mental acuity by separating yourself from the stresses of everyday life. Going to work, taking care of bills, or maybe managing certain relationships in your friendships and/or family can become a recurring theme in which it’s hard to get out of those mundane ruts of stress. It’s important to purposely setting aside time once throughout the week to tend to your hobbies will give you the opportunity to separate yourself from these stressful

One of the most important things that we work on with our Personal Training clients in Napa is to not only set goals, but also revisit those goals and manage them every 4 weeks. It’s very important to look at where you are in Your Life Time Fitness journey and see if the goals you have established are still conducive to positively influence your Wellness. If you’re not sure, take some time to think about where you would like to be in 4 weeks. A very serious question that we asked our personal training clients here at Napa tenacious Fitness is “What does success look like to you after this next month?”

Putting yourself first before the other mandatory stresses in life is a critically important component to Lifetime Fitness. Perhaps it would be a good idea to take some time aside to ensure that you are positively influencing your Wellness by making sure that you exercise weekly, contribute to your hobbies weekly, and really take some time to dig deep and assess your goals and make sure they are right for you.

Jan 13

30:3 Sit-to-rest ratio! Stand up Every 30 minutes at Work to Improve your Fitness

Our Personal Training Clients that we manage at Napa Tenacious Fitness have careers such as busy executive, event coordinators or managers in which their day can include anything from doing administrative work, to being a writer, to sitting down and having meetings all day. The drawback of sitting all the time means that the potential to be sedentary is increased. We all know that sedentary positions can lead to detrimental effects in our Life Time Fitness such as the increase risk for cardiovascular disease, increased risk of diabetes, and increased risk of becoming overweight.  We can even look at sedentary movement being just as bad as having a really bad smoking habit!

Periods of being sedentary throughout the day can lead to a lack of physical activity which will lead to excess weight gain and decreased lean muscle growth. In addition when staying in a seated position for a long period of time, you can also get symptoms of atrophy in which muscles of the back, upper shoulder, and hip and knee joints get stiff… Leading to symptoms of pain and decreasing the desire to move.

An effective solution that we coach at Napa Tenacious Fitness for our Personal Training clients is to be mindful about how important it is to get up from a seated position and move on a consistent bases. There are a few things we can do to improve our physical activity throughout the day so that we can positively influence our weight loss goals, decrease the likelihood of injuries occurring, and improve activity overall throughout the day in order to keep the mind acute and constantly aware, encouraging a positive state of mind throughout the day.

A tactic that has proven to be very successful with our Personal Training Clients to improve their fitness and encourage weight loss in Napa have been to set reminders for every 30 minutes, perform 3 minutes of exercise.  For instance, after performing some work at the desk for 30-60 minutes, it will beneficial to get up move a little!

This mode of exercise could be a simple task, such as performing a squat, or doing some push-ups against the wall, or simply taking a walk around the building or the room.

This is an example how the day could look from 9 AM to Noon before lunch implementing the 30:3 “work time”-to-“get up and move time” method we teach our Personal Training Clients in Napa.

9:00 AM-9:30 AM- Arrive at work… say to hi people.  Sit down and get ready to start the day!

9:30 AM:  Start to do some administrative worm (could be phone calls and/or answering email)

10:00 AM:  Stand up and perform 4 neck stretches (you can see the Dynamic Stretching Routine for the neck that we teach our Personal Clients here:  https://youtu.be/68HFrKEOt_w)

10:03 AM- Sit back down… and do more “insert administrative task”

10:35 AM-  Stand Up!  Walk down the hall way.  Give someone a high five.

10:38-  Sit back down… type away!

11:11 AM –  Stand up, Perform 10 1/2 squats!

11:14 AM-  Sit back down and do what you do best at that desk or go to the meeting!

11:44 AM-12 PM-  Tie up any loose ends before you head out to lunch and get ready to go to lunch and do this all over again until your day is over!

Implementing the technique of getting up and doing something that takes no more than 3 minutes involving a form of physical activity will keep the body in a healthier state.  Even 3 minutes movement every 30 minutes will help positively influence weight loss progress and battle the detrimental effects that sedentary activity threatens to impose!  Our jobs these days require a lot of sitting (yours truly included… writing this BLOG article and posting it took a little time!).  Let’s work to ensure that we don’t let the detrimental effects of sitting too long hinder our Life Time Fitness Goals!

Dec 10

Weight Loss: When Should I eat My Carbs?

A very common question that we receive from our Personal Training clients in Napa has to do has to do with what are the best times to consume your carbohydrates?  In this article, we’ll explore some commonly asked questions about when and why to eat carbohydrates to create the best lean muscle building and fat burning scenarios.

Should I consume carbs in the morning or just not eat carbs at all in the morning?

After you wake up from sleeping, you essentially wake up from an 8-hour fast, when your body is deprived of nutrients for that period. This is a very convenient time for your body to absorb vitamins and nutrients and is also when the body needs to reset hormone and blood sugar concentration levels.  When your body is sleeping, different cells are being broken down to be used as energy to help reset different immune system cells and hormone concentration. Therefore, when consuming a carbohydrate in the morning, your cells will be taking in these carbohydrates and utilizing them as energy to help rebuild the different cells that have been broken down in the catabolic state that your body goes into while sleeping.

Why should I eat carbohydrates earlier on the day as opposed to later in the day?

Certain carbohydrates will elicit an insulin response. We’ve spoken time and time again about how insulin can be a useful tool  which will either cause a cell to absorb sugar throughout the bloodstream and utilize it as a fuel source to rebuild certain connective tissue cells.  But we have also spoken about how insulin can be used when your body is in a “rest and digest” phase to tell fat cells to absorb sugar throughout the bloodstream and then be used as fat storage underneath the skin.  Shifting your carbohydrate consumption to the morning after you wake up will help counter act the effect of producing insulin at a rest and digest phase. Your body is an insulin sensitive state when you wake up. Due to the lack of calorie consumption and interaction of your muscles using excess sugar in the bloodstream to rebuild connective tissue cells, your body is ready to utilize insulin as a catalyst to help connective tissue rebuild in the fasted state you’re in after you wake up from a long night’s rest.

I am decreasing my overall calorie consumption, but I’m having a hard time losing weight?  (Are you eating your carbs at night time)?

Avoiding carbohydrates at night time will decrease the amount of insulin that you produced before you go to bed. Before you go to bed, your body goes into a rest and digest state. This means that your body is not going to be in the absorptive state that it usually is first thing in the morning or right after you perform strenuous physical activity (like exercising!). When your body is in an absorptive state, your body will use free-floating sugar throughout the blood to produce energy. Later on in the day, your body is going to be in an insulin resistant state. That means that any increase in insulin will create absorption of sugar into fat cells, which lead to ugly fat that is stored in the love handle area(or many other areas where you don’ t like your fat to be stored!).  In addition, your energy levels are decreased as well. This means that calories will not be utilized at this time of the day. If the calories are not utilized when there’s lower activity levels, carbohydrates will go straight to storage (fat!).

Increasing mindfulness on when you are consuming a specific type of food is a critical component to weight loss and maintaining your Life Time Fitness goals.  If you have questions, please feel free to reach out to us at napatenacious@gmail.com and we would be delighted to give you a few pointer on losing weight and achieving your Life Time Fitness goals here in Napa!

Oct 14

Healthy Salads! Simple Staple Ingredients for Awesome, Delicious Salads!

A great staple to anyone’s diet is to include salads into their weekly snack, lunch or dinner food choices. Why?  Well, by choosing a healthier salad option, you can positively promote positive life style choices in a path to maintaining a healthy weight, gaining healthy vitamins and minerals through raw whole foods, and getting nutrients through a clean and organic food source. This doesn’t mean go to Taco Bell and get the Taco Salad with some sort of gross cream sauce.  When working with our Personal Training Clients in the Napa Valley, salads are very quick and easy compliment to anyone’s diet.

 

There are many benefits to making your own salad from scratch including knowing exactly what is in your food.  This is an empowering ability to make your own food and be responsible for what types of healthy items are being put into your food plate in front of you.  Not only are you responsible for what goes in your plate in front of you, but you can choose foods that you like and thinks taste good too!

 

Here is a list of some of the staples in salads that we promote to our Personal Training clients at Napa Tenacious Fitness.

 

  1. Arugula, spinach or baby butter lettuce. These leafy green vegetables are loaded with vitamins and minerals that are critical for the well being of the human body.  Pick which ones you like the most and throw two handfuls in your salad bowl!   Eat as much as you want to help you not feel as hungry and promote healthier choices throughout the week.

 

  1. Nuts of some sort- shaved or blanched, cubed almonds are great. Raw walnuts are another great option because of the meatiness they add to a salad.  Pistachio and cashews are also great additions to any salad.  Nut are awesome for various reasons but we are mentioning them right now due to the simplicity of adding them to a salad.  They’re relatively inexpensive too.  You buy them in their raw state and then  simply grab a handful and put them in your salad!

 

  1. Crunchy fruits like apples, pears or grapes. These are great to add into any salad to give a little extra flavor to avoid the boringness of a cruciferous, bitter green salad.  In addition, you get some fresh fruit that has great antioxidant and anti inflammatory benefits!

 

  1. Home Made Vinaigrette. Critical for any salad.  A great basic vinaigrette is rice wine vinegar, olive oil, mustard, lime juice, salt and pepper and a little bit of honey.  If you want to enjoy your salad, make sure to have a tasty dressing you actually enjoy.  A great healthy choice for dressing is one that does not have cream and ton of artificial fillers in it.  You can establish that by just mixing oil, vinegar, citrus and honey.

Putting a raw salad in your dietary habits is a great way to positively influence losing weight, maintaining a healthy weight and keeping the body feeling good and absent of disease.  So go create

Oct 06

Alcohol Free Days, AKA “AFD’s”

Everyone wants to go out for a drink with their friends every now and then. It’s always nice to celebrate the end of a long work week with a tasty alcoholic beverage such as the one of the finest glasses of wine from the Napa Valley, a delicious craft IPA, or an awesome cocktail from one of the Napa’s fanciest restaurants.  Let’s face it, alcoholic beverages taste good. And they sure as hell make you feel good too. However, there are some important things to know about alcohol and how it effects the physiology and chemistry of the human body. If you’re looking to achieve important goals through your Lifetime Fitness routine, educating yourself on what alcohol does to the human body is critically important toward your progress.

 

Losing weight can arguably be one of largest goals mentioned that we deal with over at Napa Tenacious Fitness with our Personal Training clients here in the Napa Valley. Something that’s usually brought up is eating habits. It is argued that abs are made in the kitchen. This is actually very true. What you put in your mouth and what metabolizes in the human body is very important toward the distribution of fat in the human body. However, what some of our clients don’t touch on is the amount of alcohol that they consume throughout the week.  Time and time again, we will see clients who are looking to lose an extra 5 to 10 lb. after their diet is very meticulously designed and organized. Clients will report that they are eating salads, decreasing carbohydrate consumption at night time, and not eating as many breads. And then they state that they are still hanging on to a few extra pounds from their goals that are important to them. An important question to ask would be “how many times a week are alcoholic beverages consumed?”

 

This is a critical component toward weight loss. Not only does alcohol give excess calories and spike insulin, which will lead to unused calories being stored as body fat and telling subcutaneous fat cells to grab onto excess calories that are not utilized for resynthesis of lean muscle, but alcohol is a huge diuretic.  A diuretic response is very similar to the body detecting a poison. Once the body detects something that is not synthesized and broken down correctly to aid the functions of the human body, the body detects it as a poison and then goes through a process called fermentation. When fermentation occurs, the body will excrete the alcohol and will also flush out proteins that are responsible for rebuilding cells in the human body in the urine.  Essentially, the body is being stripped of vital nutrients that are critically important for losing weight, building lean muscle, and increasing the immune system. Therefore, when alcohol is consumed, not only are you urinating more, but within the urine there are substances that are vital for helping you obtain your Lifetime Fitness Goals, such as losing weight, building lean muscle, and creating revolutionary decisions in  living a happy, strong, and healthy lifestyle.

 

In addition, diuretics will truly dehydrate body. When the body is dehydrated past the point of standard hydration, it takes a ful three days of over-hydration to ensure that the body is properly hydrated. The human body will not recover hydration in just one day. Therefore, it’s important to know that when alcohol is consumed, these detrimental things will be occurring in your body.  Rehydration takes a full three days of over-hydration. The body detects alcohol as a poison, and is treated as a diuretic by eliminating positive building proteins and other minerals throughout urine.

 

We’re not saying don’t drink at all. Life is short, and alcoholic beverages put a lot of joy in certain people’s lives. However, what we are saying is that it would be helpful to your Lifetime Fitness Goals to monitor the amount of alcohol that you drink for a week. For instance, a good solution for individuals who are not tracking the amount of alcohol they are drinking per week, would be to make sure that there is a three-to-one “alcohol-free day” to “alcohol indulgence day” ratio.  “Alcohol-Free-Days” are also known as AFDs!  And we can call “alcohol indulgence days” AIDs… This means that for every day in which alcoholic beverages are consumed, try to abstain from alcohol for 3 days after that. This will ensure balance that your body is not only recovering from the diuretic and poisoning effects of alcohol, but this will also curb the excess calories from going into your body.

 

So as a 3:1 “AFD” to “AID” Ratio, think:  3 AFDs/1 AID.

 

So go enjoy life, have a few drinks if that’s within your morals and ethics. However, it’s important to be educated on what alcohol actually does to the human body and how it can actually have her some of your lifetime fitness goals.

 

Oct 04

Weekly Progressions in Strength and Motivation: Progressive Overload Schemes

Ensuring that your performance is increasing in an exercise program is a critical component to committing to a fitness routine and putting it all the hard work. This means that adhering to a program that shows success in your exercise performance is a very useful tool. In our case over here at Napa Tenacious Fitness, we utilize what we call a “three-week progressive overload scheme” with our personal training participants. In these exercise overload schemes, we progressively challenge our clients to increase the frequency of the amount of repetitions that they perform in a certain exercise, increase the resistance in strength training routines, decreasing an angle to create more torque on a certain exercise movement, or increasing the challenge of a certain exercise such as implementing a exercise technique that will challenge balance, coordination, or thought.

 

An example might be performing an exercise each week such as a bodyweight squat. The first week we would do three sets of 10 repetitions, followed by the second week doing three sets of 12 reps editions, and finally finishing with three sets of 15 repetitions on the third week.  By tracking the amount of repetitions you are doing each week, you are challenging your body too go past its limit. When the body is challenged to go past its limit, there are a few things that come into play. Mind set On approaching and exercise is challenged, and in this case your overall effort will be put to the test to complete a greater amount of repetitions. In addition, physiologically the muscle fibers of the body will adapt to an over stressed environment.

 

When a greater amount of stress is put on the body from doing increased repetitions, muscle fibers will want to regrow and get stronger over time to match the demands of increased repetitions. The same mode of thought applies to overall drive and motivation to work to achieve more reps week after week. Therefore, the increased will power and increased physiological adaptation of strength will improve the overall performance human body.

 

While three week progressive overload schemes are very important to increasing motivation and increasing strength in the human body, it’s very important to have what we call an “unloading week” on the fourth week. When we work with our Personal Training clients, we implement the unloading week on the 4th week which has a lower intensity scheme and includes decreased repetitions, resistance and overall difficulty of the exercise. This week allows the body to de-stress and then come back for another first week where new exercises are introduced. By going in this cycle, we’ve seen a lot of success in our Personal Training clients here in the Napa Valley. Ensuring that a new exercise technique is introduced every 4 weeks is a great way to keep things fresh and keep the mind and  body percolating.