What is Tabata Training?

(From Active.com)

 

There are various workout styles that you may have heard about; all styles are meant to help you reach your fitness goal. You may want to increase strength, lose weight, improve flexibility or build muscle. All in all, most exercise programs can help you reach whatever your goal is as long as you stick to a plan. Well, here's another type of workout you can add to your list—Tabata training.

Tabata training is a High Intensity Interval Training (H.I.I.T) workout that lasts four minutes. 

The History of Tabata

Tabata training was discovered by Japanese scientist Dr. Izumi Tabata and a team of researchers from the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo.

Tabata and his team conducted research on two groups of athletes: one group trained at a moderate intensity level while the other group trained at a high intensity level. The moderate intensity group worked out five days a week for a total of six weeks; each workout lasted one hour. The high intensity group worked out four days a week for six weeks; each workout lasted four minutes and 20 seconds (with 10 seconds of rest in between each set).

The results; group one had increased their aerobic system (cardiovascular), but showed little or no results for their anaerobic system (muscle). Group two showed much more increase in their aerobic system than group one, and increased their anaerobic system by 28 percent. 

In conclusion, high intensity interval training has more impact on both the aerobic and anaerobic systems. 

The Tabata Program

The Tabata workout lasts only four minutes, but is one of the longest four minutes you'll encounter. The structure of the program is: 

Workout hard for 20 seconds

Rest for 10 seconds

Complete eight rounds

You push yourself as hard as you can for 20 seconds and rest for 10 seconds until you complete eight sets. You can do pretty much any exercise you wish. You can do squats, pushups, rows, etc... Any exercise that works your large muscle groups is strongly recommended. Kettlebells work great too.

Tabata is great to get a quick workout in if you're short on time, need to switch up your routine, or need to improve endurance speed. Incorporate this type of workout into your fitness routine and produce results.

Trapped by stress, guilt or lack of motivation?

The other day I was sitting at a stop light and my mind was wandering a little, maybe thinking about the song on the radio.  Next think I know, I was rolling backwards!  I slammed on the brakes and… then realized that I never moved. The car in the turning lane next to me decided to pull forward and my brain thought I was the one moving.  Aside from nearly giving myself a heart attack, no harm was done.

When work is getting really busy, I start experiencing professional vertigo that is the mental equivalent to what happened to me at the stop light.  I start to feel like everything in life has stayed the same, but I am moving backwards and can’t catch up. Ever had that feeling?  The truth is, that MY light is going to be red until after work slows down and it’s just not my turn to go forward yet. I have to remind myself that I’m not really going backwards – it only feels that way. 

It can be difficult to exercise when it feels like life responsibilities are a boa constrictor around your neck.  But it's not just public accountants that feel this way.  Many moms have described feeling that there is so much to do that when they take time for themselves, guilt shows up.  Maybe this is related to the fact that tons of people are giving crappy advice on being the perfect mother, but for fathers everyone is just happy if you don’t spend 20 hours per week watching sports. Ironically, knowing that you should be taking care of yourself becomes just another thing that you SHOULD be doing and are failing at.  Sigh. 

Whether you are a public accountant, a parent, or just super busy, research shows that pent up stress can cause depression, anxiety, crankiness, mood swings, headaches, insomnia and chronic guilt.  

Whether you are caring for a family, a client or just caring for yourself, you need to start taking your mental health seriously.   It’s not okay to be permanently stressed and overwhelmed.

Here are some things you can try out to ease your mind:

If you are overwhelmed and stressed STOP ADDING THINGS TO YOUR LIFE! Stop saying yes.  Stop it. Say no.  Say it right now.  Practice it.  If the PTA or neighborhood watch needs volunteers, say no.  If your kid wants to take up soccer or shark wrestling say NO.  If someone with cancer in your neighborhood wants you to bake 1,000 cookies for a bake sale, SAY NO!  Try out this sentence:  “No, I can’t watch your (insert curseword) kid for the afternoon”.  Say NO to everything you can. You can take on some more stuff once you stop feeling like your Titanic is taking on water.  If you can’t say NO, I am offering my services.  For $1 per incident I will call whomever you want and tell them NO for you. 

You are a person too.  If something comes up where you really NEED to help someone -  like say… a sick friend who needs you – for Pete’s sake get some help for yourself first! You have a bunch of people who would love nothing more than to help you, but you are always trying to do stuff on your own, aren't you?  If a friend called me and said they had a toilet that needed scrubbing; I would laugh but I would be there in 30 minutes.  If you aren’t a friend, I will tell you NO.  Clearly you skipped the previous paragraph. Forbes Woman research showed that for working women, it’s not simply a matter of not being ABLE to ask for help.  They actually don’t WANT to because it may endanger their sense of being a good wife, mother, or employee.  If that sounds like you – then you need to talk that out with someone and find a healthier alternative.

Relax better, EVERYDAY. Take time every day to do something you find relaxing. Maybe it’s only 5 minutes on some days.  So what?  Take 5 minutes then.  Do something you enjoy.  If you feel guilty just remind yourself that you can’t help other people when you are a wreck.  Imagine that you are on an airplane.  You are strapping on your oxygen mask so you can help others later.  If someone is telling you that you SHOULD feel guilty for taking time for yourself, you need to have an upfront conversation with them about…  shutting up.  Ok I’m kidding.  Sort of.  Be nicer than that. Or not.  Your important relationships deserve your full attention – recognize that you are included in that list.  You deserve your full attention also.  If you have consistent guilt problems, check out this article or talk to someone who can lead you out of your guilt cycle.

Exercise is good for the mind. When it comes to mental health, one of the cheapest and most effective things you can do is exercise.  In many demographics, research has shown that exercise is more effective at improving mood than anti-depressants.  Just do it for 10 minutes a day.  Exercise will also increase your energy and help combat insomnia.  Exercise is more about consistency than intensity, so don’t worry if you are not running marathons.  Just start doing SOMETHING.  Most people find exercise is easier to do if you do it in the morning before life gets crazy.

Vitamin D. If it is winter, and you are feeling perpetually stressed or overwhelmed, get your vitamin D levels checked. If you’ve never had this done give it a shot.  If you are low, a little Vitamin D supplement can help quite a bit.

Stop eating junk. When your blood sugar is all over the place, it can mess up your moods and wear you down.  Eat better foods and try to get a lean protein every 3-4 hours.  This will help level out the swings in blood sugar and make it easier for you to handle stress.

Set lower goals. Yeah, I said it.  All the self-help gurus and people who make money by bossing other people around can shut their traps.  Stop reviewing everything that needs to be done each day.  Set a minimum and when you meet that line, you have succeeded even if you get nothing else done.  Here’s a good minimum – Go to work, complete 1 load of laundry and 15 minutes of exercise.  Or…  Cook Dinner, do 1 load of dishes and 15 minutes of cycling.   Doing a couple of things consistently every day will make a much bigger difference than burning yourself out trying to do everything.  What good will a perfectly clean house be if you don’t get to enjoy it because you are wearing a straitjacket in a padded room?

Be more Zen.  Stop half doing things.  Have you ever pushed through 6 loads of laundry only to run out of energy before putting away the Mount Everest of clean clothes?  Do 1 load of laundry and don’t start another until that load is put away.  If you are cooking, don’t think about anything but cooking.  Notice everything you can about the experience of chopping those vegetables. When you are doing a chore you hate (matching socks!) use it to practice accepting things you can’t change.  Practice being okay with it.  It all sounds a little silly, but you are trying to teach your mind to take a break from its incessant whining and worrying.  It is just as important to rest your mind as it is to rest your body.

Conclusion:  There are lots of ways to deal with stress.  The worst way is to drown yourself in distractions, bad habits or worrying.  Choose two of the above things and do it for two weeks.  If it doesn't make a difference, I have a money back guarantee.

A Unicorn, a Police Officer and Wallaby go into a bar

This weeks reading is brought to you by the WSJ.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all&_r=4&

Read it or else.

How many calories - Redux

Some poeple are too thin. Some are too fat.  Some are just right.  Medical stuff and hormones and all kinds of things play into our weight.  But having a family history of being overweight doesn't make us fat.  It's all the time we spend in line for chinese food that does that.

Believe it or not, being healthy is not actually about weight.  You don't REALLY care what the numbers are.  You just want to feel good and look good.  Eating the right amount of calories is the KEY to both losing weight and gaining weight (if that's your thing).  More importantly, the quality of those calories will determine how you FEEL.  No matter how thin you get, you will feel like garbage if you keep eating garbage.  Write this down:  "My stomach is NOT a trash compactor"


If you’ve been storing away fat like a bear getting ready for winter, it means you’ve been eating more than your body needs.  That part is obvious. The part we forget is that getting unhealthy happens slowly.  Barring some kind of alien abduction scenario, you probably won't wake up one morning 200 pounds heavier than the previous day.  Fat grows silently over time.  Like a flower, or love or a tumor.   You became unhealthy slowly and you're going to improve it slowly.

How Many Calories do I Need?
BMR stands for Basal Metabolic Rate.  Let’s say you were trapped on a mysterious island after a plane crash.  Your Basal Metabolic rate is the minimum amount of coconuts you need to eat so that you don’t DIE.  Our bodies need calories to keep our organs running, to power our massive energy sucking brains, and to keep our cells and muscles functioning.

Click the link below to open a BMR calculator.  Enter your current information to figure out your current Basal Metabolic Rate. Or, if you have my excel metabolic calculator you can just use that.

http://www.bmrcalculator.org/ 

Put in the following stats for a fake person.  Let's call them...  Professor Guggenheim.  Age 25, Female, 150 pounds, 5 foot 9 height.

The calculator says Professor Guggenheim has a BMR of around 1491 calories per day.  That’s the amount of calories that would keep her from looking like Skeletor and dying of a starvation heart attack. The problem with that BMR number is that we want to do MORE than just be minimally alive.  We want to do awesome stuff like swimming with dolphins, fire dancing or reading People magazine.  So Professor Guggenheim needs to bump that calories number up a bit. 

The Harris Benedict Equation
Since we want to do more than just not die, we need to add calories to our BMR to get the amount of calories our body needs for our level of activity. There are calculators that use body fat % to determine your calories and these are much more accurate.

1. If you sit on your rear all day and do basically nothing active, multiply your BMR by 1.2

2. If you do light exercise 1 to 3 days per week, multiple your BMR by 1.375

3. If you do moderate exercise 3 to 5 days per week, multiple your BMR by 1.55

4. If you do heavy exercise 6 to 7 days per week, multiple your BMR by 1.725

Let's say Professor Guggenheim exercises 3 times per week; we would multiply her BMR by 1.55 to get 2,311 calories per day.  This is the amount she needs to maintain his current body.  You should NEVER EVER eat below 1.2 times your BMR.  Anything less than eating at the sedentary level is a starvation diet and will only HARM you in the long run.  You will lose weight, but it will not be permanent because your body will eventually realize you are starving and it will fight the weight loss by slowing your metabolism and digesting your muscles.  And the more muscle you lose, the harder it will be to not look like you are made of marshmallow. So never eat below 1.2 times your BMR. 


Start by deciding you want to feel better.  Calculate the number of calories you should be eating and just eat that.  We'll worry about eating better foods later.  For now, just get your eating portions in control.

Eating Strategies

Author: Darci  2/11/2013

As we all take a critical look at ourselves and our health, there are many questions that
naturally come up. Questions such as: What type of exercise is best? How often should we
exercise? How do I make time for exercise? How to I monitor or track my progress? What are
my goals? These are all questions that may enter our minds when considering ways to improve
our health. However, the answer to all of those questions is secondary compared to the answer
to this question: What should my diet be like? In this memo I’d like to share some trending
eating strategies that I’ve read about recently. All of them have been effective for various
reasons and for various types of people. I’d like to share these strategies to get you thinking
more critically about what you eat and how you plan your meals for the day.

Strategy #1 – Intermittent Fasting:
A relatively new strategy that has surfaced that promotes weight loss is called Intermittent
Fasting (IF). As the name suggests, the main point behind the strategy is to frequently take part
in fasting periods followed by a period of calorie consumption. For example, one sample of this
strategy suggested fasting every day from 8PM until noon the next day. That’s an overnight fast
that totals 16 hours of basically no calorie intake. Beginning at noon you would eat your first
meal of the day. The second meal would come between the hours of 3?5PM with the final meal
being consumed a little prior to 8PM. Exercise should be planned into your schedule sometime
before or after the second meal of the day. The beauty of this diet strategy is that you aren’t
restricted to certain foods when you do decide to eat. That doesn’t mean you should go nuts at
McDonald’s or Burger King, but it’s also not forbidden from time to time. During the fasting
hours from 8PM until noon the next day, it is highly recommended that you drink plenty of
water to stay hydrated. A very low calorie drink is allowed in the morning such as black coffee
but the main idea is to keep calories restricted until after 12PM. It should be noted that the
preferred type of exercise that should accompany this diet strategy is resistance training.

Strategy #2 – Carb Back-loading
Carb back-loading (CBL) refers to the time of day when most of your carbohydrates should be
consumed. It is recommended that you eat little to no carbohydrates in the morning and
afternoon hours. It is then suggested that resistance training be done sometime in the hours
between lunch and dinner. Once your workout is complete for the day, you are more than
welcome to go nuts on carbs for the rest of the evening hours. This even means desserts and
other high-carb options are perfectly acceptable when following this strategy. As with
Intermittent Fasting, the preferred type of exercise is resistance training. While walking,
jogging, cycling, and other forms of exercise aren’t frowned upon, both of these eating
strategies suggest that you’d get the most bang for your buck by taking part in resistance
training. And more specifically, the heavier weights you can lift, the better! This doesn’t mean
you need to be a World’s Strongest Man, but it does mean you should challenge yourself with
the heaviest weights you can handle for sets of 3-8 repetitions.

Strategy #3 – Carb Cycling:
Carb Cycling (CC) takes a slightly different approach to calorie restriction than IF or CBL. CC is a
weekly plan rather than a daily concept. With CC, it is suggested that you have some cycle of
days where you have no/low carbs one day, low/moderate carbs another, and moderate/high
carbs on another. Rather than trying to explain this concept further, take a look at two samples
of CC that could be used as a weekly cycling structure:

*  Monday = No Carb
*  Tuesday = Low Carb
*  Wednesday = High Carb
*  Thursday = No Carb
*  Friday = Low carb
*  Saturday = High Carb
*  Sunday = Low Carb

OR

*  Monday = Low Carb
*  Tuesday = No Carb
*  Wednesday = Low Carb
*  Thursday = High Carb
*  Friday = No carb
*  Saturday = High Carb
*  Sunday = Low Carb

As with any approach to your diet, eating should be done with intention and attention. The
bottom line is that weight management is not just about what you eat, but also how you eat.
What may work for one person might not be the best option for another. As a Wellness
Committee Member, I am not claiming to be a dietician or fitness expert. Accordingly, these
approaches may not be the best for YOU. I suggest doing your research before beginning any
fitness routine or making drastic changes in your diet.

Healthy Breakfasts

Author: Darci - Feb. 4, 2013

You wouldn’t make it far from your driveway on an empty tank of gas, so why would you leave the house without filling up your tank first? Eating a healthy breakfast is no different for our bodies. A good breakfast fuels you up and gets you ready for the day. Breakfast is important because it is what your metabolism is based on for the day. If you give your body fuel to burn early on, it will burn more calories throughout the entire day.

So, you are probably wondering what a nutrient-dense breakfast consists of. The main focus is eating a breakfast that is filling and has the proper nutrients to satisfy you until your next meal. If there is any meal where you want to load up on protein and complex carbohydrates, it is breakfast, not only because proteins and complex carbs are filling, but because you have the entire rest of the day to burn the provided calories. Eating a complete breakfast sets the pace for the day since you won’t be as inclined to over-eat at other meals.

Often, breakfast foods are high in sugar and other simple carbohydrates which do not provide the necessary nutrients to get you through the day. So here are some tips and helpful hints on what a nutrient-dense breakfast should look like:

• Include whole grain products instead of refined products
• Choose low-fat dairy products (skim milk, low?fat yogurt and low?fat cheeses, such as cottage cheese and natural cheeses).
• Limit intake of fried foods, grease, and extra gravies/sauces
• Aim to include fresh fruit at breakfast rather than fruit juice, which can be high in added sugars.
• Make sure your breakfast includes:

1. Complex carbohydrates (such as whole grain cereal, whole grain bread, wheat bread or fruit)
2. Protein (such as eggs/egg whites, peanut butter, lean meat, poultry or fish or nuts)
3. Healthy fat (such as peanut butter, nuts, light cream cheese)

     

Menu ideas for healthy, dense breakfasts:

300 Calorie Breakfasts at Home or On-the-Go
1 pack Nature Valley granola bars, handful of nuts, 8 oz skim milk
1 mini whole wheat bagel w/ 1 Tbsp light cream cheese, 1 small banana, 4 oz skim milk
1 wheat English muffin toasted w/2 slices lean ham, 1 slice of 2% cheese, ½ cup sliced fruit, 4 oz skim milk
Carnation Instant Breakfast/Protein Shake, 1 pack Nature Valley granola bars

400 Calorie Breakfasts at Home or On-the-Go
1 cup cereal w/ ½ cup skim milk, ½ cup sliced fruit, handful of nuts, 1 string cheese
1 slice wheat toast, 1 Tbsp peanut butter, 1 fruit, 8 oz skim milk
Yogurt cup w/ handful of nuts, ½ cup sliced fruit, 1 wheat English muffin w/2 slices of lean ham
Carnation Instant Breakfast /Protein Shake, 1 pack Nature Valley granola bars, 1 banana, 1 yogurt

500 Calorie Breakfasts at Home or On-the-Go
1 whole wheat bagel w/ 2 Tbsp light cream cheese, 1 small fruit, 8 oz 2% milk
2 whole wheat waffles w/ 2 Tbsp butter, drizzled with syrup, 1 string cheese, 8 oz skim milk
1 wheat English muffin w/ 2 cooked egg whites, 2?3 slices lean ham, 1 slice 2% cheese, 1 small fruit, 8 oz 2% milk
1 pack Nature Valley granola bars, 1 small fruit, 2 string cheese, 8 oz 2% milk

The Myth of Target Heart Rate

The myth

It started decades ago, and some people still believe it:  If you want to lose fat you need your heart rate in the ‘fat-burning zone’ and for cardio health you need to be in the higher ‘cardio zone’.   Like all crap science, it sounds good but is wrong.

 I don’t know about you, but I don’t even really sweat when I am working out in the ‘fat burning’ zone. 

The science

There are no target heart rate zones.  Treadmills have those stickers on them because people want to see them.  They are nonsense and you can ignore them, with one caveat.  There are medical reasons to not exceed certain heart rates.  Ask your doc if this might apply to you.

 The thinking with this myth is that low intensity exercise burns fat calories and high intensity exercise burns carbohydrate calories.  Like many lies, it’s sort of true.  If your exercise is more intense, you will PROPORTIONATELY burn more carbs than fat.  However, the total number of calories is you burn is WAY higher if you are working out harder (higher heart rate).

Conclusion

Low intensity doesn't mean you only burn fat and high intensity doesn't mean you are burning all carbs.   You will burn fat and carbs in varying proportions, but the overall calorie burn will be higher when you work out harder.  Duh.  Working out harder will have a greater affect on fat loss than staying in some magical fat burning zone.   Your best measure on if you are working out hard enough is how you feel, not some arbitrary target heart rate sticker.