Few Ways to Help you Get Fit and Stay Fit in 2018

Posted: January 01, 2018

My name is Sunny, I am one of the Masters at Master Park's Belt America and like most adults and parents out there it's a task to squeeze in a workout and eat healthy erveryday but there are a lot of simple and easy ways to organize and help you Get Fit and Sty Fit in 2018!

If youve ever been to one of our Dojos my adult members take their martial arts training, cross training, nurtrition and weight management very seriously but its also extremely FUN when you do it with the right people.

Here's a few ways my team stays FIT all year long:

1. Do something everyday, workouts dont need to be long they can but they dont have to be. Jiu Jitsu 90 minutes, Tae Kwon Do 60 minutes, Sprints 10 minutes, Tabata 4 minutes.

2. Use Apps to keep you on track, my go to Apps are: myfitnesspal, fitbit and mapmyrun by underarmour. Tracks everything, don't overlook your carb, protein and fat ratios. 50/30/20 is ideal but then again Jennifer Aniston says 33.33 across the baord so play around with it. Everyone's body is different, NO 2 BODIES ARE THE SAME so stop obsessing.

3. Drink Green Tea, speeds up your metbaolism. Its the liquid versio of the afterburn effect for people who train.

4. Fast once a month for 12 to 72 hours depending on the person and experince. I once fasted for 9 days, I got so hungry I ate my arm off. Im kidding my arm is still there. LOL!

5. Meditation is like doing bicep curls for the mind, its awesome. If you're not meditating I would highly recommend starting.

***Heres a few articles Ive compiled together for a short but good read on the topics that I ocvered up top. Enjoy it and please let us know if you have any questions. See you on the MAT!***

Is A Short But Intense Workout Best?

When it comes to preventing heart disease, diabetes and obesity, the intensity of your exercise beats the duration…hands down.

It’s a no-brainer that physical exercise is good for you. And if you want to buff up, you know you have to put in the hours at the gym.

But to reduce your risk of heart disease, diabetes and obesity? Great news: A new study, published in BMJ Open, says you can get away with a shorter but intense workout.

The secret, researchers found while looking at data from over 10,000 people in Denmark, is sweat. No, your perspiration doesn’t have magic properties, but if you break a sweat during your workout, your body will thank you. Here's what it takes.

The study showed that even an intense workout like fast walking or jogging could reduce the risk of metabolic syndrome (a cluster of risk factors for diabetes and heart disease that includes things like belly fat and high blood pressure)) by up to 50 percent. Casual walking for more than an hour, though, didn’t have much of an effect.

Unsurprisingly, people who were physically inactive were more likely to have metabolic syndrome, and while other studies are mixed on whether quantity or quality of physical exercise matters more, this one clearly comes down on the side of kicking it up for a notch—even if for just half an hour a day.That’s no excuse to ditch your regular workout to sit on the couch. (That kind of physical inactivity can kill, too.) But when it comes to heart disease, diabetes and obesity, the best advice is…if in doubt, sweat it out.

Running Versus Weight Training

When your goal is to lose weight, you want to take steps towards burning as many calories as you can. This is because when you burn a greater number of calories than you take in from what you drink and eat, you force your body into breaking down and using the extra fat you’re carrying. While running will cause you to burn a greater number of calories, weight training also has the capability of supporting your weight loss efforts.

Key to Losing Weight

The number of calories you burn everyday depends on the number of calories you burn with physical activity, as well as the calories your body uses to fuel the function and maintenance of an array of body processes, which is referred to as your metabolic rate. The creation of a 3,500 caloric deficit equals a pound of fat loss. Therefore, to support your weight loss goals, ideally you make adjustments to increase both the calories burned through exercise and your metabolic rate.

Running’s Impact

Running allows you to burn a significantly high number of calories very quickly. How many calories it will burn depends on your body weight as well as the pace as which you run. According to Health Status, a person weighing 180-pounds will burn about 691 calories in 60-minutes when running at 5 mph, about 821 when running at 6 mph and about 940 calories when running at 7 mph. Therefore, with running alone, as long as a healthy eating plan is followed, a 180-pound person can create a 3,500 caloric deficit and thus lose a pound of fat every four to five 60-minute running workouts.

Benefits of Weight Training

Lifting weights doesn’t burn as many calories as running while you’re participating in the workout. According to Health Status, the person weighing 180-pounds will burn about 281 calories during a general 60-minute weight lifting workout, to about 497 calories during a vigorous 60-minute lifting session. However, weight training is the most effective way for putting on lean muscle. According to the American Council on Exercise, the presence of lean muscle causes you to burn a greater number of calories throughout the day, because it takes more calories to maintain muscle tissue. As a result, you increase your metabolic rate and burn a greater number of calories throughout the day.

Winning Combination

Both running and weight training support a weight loss program, with each offering different benefits, but both resulting in an increase in daily calories burned. If you were to combine both exercise activities into your regimen, you would be simultaneously burning a high number of calories with running, while speeding up your metabolic rate with weight training. If you only participate in one exercise type, because running will help you burn a greater number of calories, it’s the more efficient of the two for losing weight.

Apps that make staying Fit, Fun and Easy

My Fitness Pal is a straightforward, simple diet and fitness tracking website and app perfect for the person who wants basic features without a lot of bells and whistles. The mobile app is available for Apple iOS, Android, and Microsoft devices.

This free fitness tool offers a food diary, an exercise log, a few simple tools, and a community forum for asking questions and getting advice. For exercisers who want the basics without much detailed analysis of diet and fitness goals, My Fitness Pal is a good choice.

MyFitnessPal Features

My favorite feature is the 'Quick Tools' option which allows you to quickly enter calories, previous meals, or recent exercises and workouts. But this fitness tool has other features:

A food diary and searchable nutrition database that includes thousands of common foods
A diet analysis that shows a breakdown of calories, carbs, fat, and protein
A recipe builder that allows you to create your own recipes and even submit them to the My Fitness Pal database
An exercise log with a searchable activity database and the ability to add your own exercises
Quick Tools that allow you to easily enter calories or copy meals and workouts from previous days
Downloadable reports showing your nutrition and fitness progress
A variety of helpful tools including BMR, heart rate, and recipe nutrition facts calculator
A community forum to share experiences and get advice from other exercisers

Food Tracking

The Food section includes your diary for the day, listing your meals for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks.

Entering foods is as easy as clicking on a link and searching the database, which includes a wide variety of foods. The calories are immediately added to your chart, along with a breakdown of calories, carbs, protein, and fat.

The standout feature here is the Quick Tools option. In this menu, you can opt to add calories to your diary without having to enter other information, which is a godsend if you wait until the end of the day to track meals without your labels handy.

Its ability to remember meals or copy all your meals from the day before also makes logging your meals easier.

Logging Exercise

The exercise section is a bit spare, showing your cardio and strength training workouts for the day. Adding exercises works the same way as in the food section. You click on the link, search the exercise database, enter the minutes you exercised and the activity is added to your list along with estimated calories burned.

The set up here makes it easy to add strength exercises, which can get tedious if you have long workouts. Once you enter a strength exercise, it pops up on the screen the next time around, so you can easily add the moves you do frequently.

MyFitnessPal Extras

The tools section is also a bit spare, offering fitness calculators (BMI, BMR, heart rate and nutrition) and other things like weight loss tickers and badges for your website. It will also graph your progress to your weight goal if losing weight (or gaining it) is your desired end result.

In addition, My Fitness Pal offers several forums where you can post questions, tips, and answers about gaining, losing, or maintaining weight, your success stories, find motivation and more.

The Bottom Line

Overall My Fitness Pal is one of the easiest diet and fitness tracking websites out there.

It only took minutes to sign up, add a few meals and exercises, and get a quick breakdown of my calories in vs. calories out for the day. For people who don't want to spend a lot of time entering details or looking at reports, My Fitness Pal is a great choice.

Benfits of Green Tea

Boost your immunity—and lose weight—with this popular source of antioxidants

Where it comes from: Green tea is tea made with only the leaves of a special plant native to Asia, the Camellia sinensis. Black tea is made from the same plant but the two teas are different because of the way they are processed. Green teas are the least processed and the method preserves more of the nutrients compared to the methods of other teas.

Green tea has been used for thousands of years; it originated in China and took over most cultures in Asia. In the recent decades, it’s also gotten extremely popular in the West because of its major health benefits.

What it’ll do for you: “Green tea is considered to be an antioxidant and has been suggested to play an important role in cardiovascular disease, cancer and other diseases,” explains Sarah Currie, RD and personal trainer for New York City-based Physical Equilibrium LLC. Here, a look at two key benefits that you may care most about:

Burns fat and helps you lose weight
Some studies have found green tea extract, which is rich in polyphenols and catechins, to be useful for obesity management since it induces thermogenesis and stimulates fat oxidation. A type of catechin prevalent in green tea, epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), is said to increase resting metabolism and stimulate fat-burning. Dutch researchers helped 76 people lose weight and, over the next three months, gave the patients either a 270-milligram capsule of green tea or a placebo every day. The group who took the green tea continued to lose weight but the group taking the placebo soon regained their lost weight. Another study agreed that EGCG has the potential to increase fat oxidation in men and may contribute to the anti-obesity effects of green tea.

Also worth noting: “If you normally drink coffee loaded with cream and sugar or a 500-calorie mocha every morning, then swapping either out for calorie-free green tea will certainly contribute toward weight loss because you are cutting your daily caloric intake,” Currie points out. “If you regularly eat excess calories and are not active, popping a green tea pill is not going to do much (or anything!) to counteract that.”

There are many countries where green tea consumption is high, and obesity and cancer rates are low (compared to the U.S.) but those benefits can’t be solely attributed to green tea.

Fights influenza
A 2007 performed by a professor at Appalachian State University found that green tea may give an immunity boost to individuals under stress. He put 40 subjects under extreme physical stress during a five-week period.

40 test subjects who were subjected to extreme physical stress situations during a five-week period. Every day, some students were given 1,000 milligrams of quercetin (which green tea happens to be a rich source of) and the others were given a placebo. Only five percent of the subjects reported upper respiratory illness during a two-week follow-up while 45 percent of the placebo-takers reported illness.

Suggested intake: As with most herbs and supplements there are no exact recommended dosages. One cup of tea contains about 50 milligrams of caffeine and 80 to 100 milligrams of polyphenol content, depending on the strength of the tea and the size of cup. In capsules, green tea extract can range from 10 to 750 milligrams. So, pills vs brew? Most studies that have shown promising results on green tea’s antioxidant activity have been done in beverage form. “Drinking tea is the best way to go since it also a offers hydration,” Currie says. “Not to mention the soothing, calming and relaxing aspects of drinking a cup of warm tea.”

Associated risks/scrutiny: “As with all herbs and supplements, one should exercise caution,” Currie says. Green tea is caffeinated and too much caffeine has been shown to affect sleep, raise heart rate and increase anxiety in some people. Too much caffeine can also cause gastrointestinal distress.

Concentrated green tea extracts have been reported to cause liver problems. It's important to talk to your doctor before you start taking supplements—especially if you’re already on regular medication, as there could be contraindications.

Beneifts of Meditation

We hear it all the time: Meditation can improve our creative thinking, our energy, stress levels and even our success. Prominent artists, businessmen and politicians cop to the practice. Would it work for you?

“It did to my mind what going to the gym did to my body — it made it both stronger and more flexible,” said Dr. Hedy Kober, a neuroscientist who who studies the effects of mindfulness meditation, which she has practiced for 10 years, at her lab at Yale University. She admitted during a TED Talk that she started meditating to deal with a break up, but found that it helped her handle stress and unpleasant feelings in all areas of her life.

Studies show that meditation is associated with improvement in a variety of psychological areas, including stress, anxiety, addiction, depression, eating disorders and cognitive function, among others. There’s also research to suggest that meditation can reduce blood pressure, pain response, stress hormone levels and even cellular health. But what does it actually do to the body?

For one thing, it changes our brain. The cells and neurons in the brain are constantly making new connections and disrupting old ones based on response to stimuli, a quality that researchers call experience-based neuroplasticity. This affects the neural circuits of the brain, which in turn affects how we respond to situations. It also affects the actual structure of our brains — thickening some areas and making others less dense.

“Think of the end of a neuron as a hand, with thousands of ‘fingers,’” said Dr. Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital who studies mindfulness meditation. “The number of fingers relates to the number of interconnections between neurons and that number can change — one reason it can change is due to stress.”