It’s happening again. Halloween, followed by Thanksgiving, “the Holidays,” Uncle Ed’s birthday, the in-law’s anniversary, New Year’s Eve, then New Year’s Day! Are you short on time too? This is a very busy time of year for everyone, and you have to keep up, or you’ll find yourself even more overwhelmed. Though it is hard to find time for yourself during the busy holiday season, making time for fitness doesn’t have to equate to an hour-long workout at the gym. My motto: Do what you can, when you can, because ALL activity adds up!

Here are 10 fun ways you can burn 10 calories, FAST!

1. Run up and down the stairs for 45-60 seconds.
2. Vacuum two large rooms (okay, maybe not fun – let’s call this “multi-tasking”).
3. Put on some great music and dance like no one is watching.
4. Play tag with your kids.
5. Go get the mail, and take three fast laps around your house while you’re out there.
6. Park in the furthest space from the door at the grocery store. Pushing a full cart of groceries clear across the parking lot burns calories and provides resistance for a two-for-one mini-workout.
7. Better yet, park at the end of the driveway and unload the groceries. The extra walking with heaving bags in your hands will be great exercise. You get bonus points if you have a steep or very long driveway.
8. When you’re unloading the groceries, before you put that gallon of milk in the fridge, use it to do 6-10 bicep curls per arm, then hold it in front of you while you do a set of 8-12 squats or lunges.
9. Set the timer on the microwave and see how many jumping jacks you can complete in one minute.
10. Rake leaves! This is a great upper body workout.

Kind of reads like a magazine cover, doesn’t it? In all seriousness though, there really are some simple steps that will help you achieve a weight loss goal…but you can’t do just one and kinda do the other two, or only kinda do all three. Do all three, keep you eye on the ball, and you’ll hit a home run.

Ready? Here we go…

Your Plan

1. Record your food intake daily. Include in your diet a variety of fruits and vegetables at 6-9 servings daily; 2-3 servings of lean protein; 3 servings of dairy; and quality oils.
Why? Keeping track of what you eat for a few weeks (I’m not talking forever people), can tell you several things:
* how many calories you are really eating
* what nutrients you are getting enough of and which ones are lacking
* why you may be sluggish at certain times of the day
* why you feel lightheaded and shaking an hour or so after a meal of snack (i.e, the meal may have too much sugar in it)
Food tracking sounds very tedious. At first, it is. But most of us eat the same types of things over and over, so once recorded, the hard part is done. Also, there are some spectacular apps now that help with food tracking. On the short list: MyFitnessPal.com(Free), MyNetDiary – Food and Exercise Diary for iPad ($9.99), and Calorie Counterby FatSecret for iPad (Free).

2. Find opportunities throughout the day to move (walk, climb stairs, do squats while waiting for bread to toast, etc.).
Why? All movement counts, so why not move whenever you can? How many times do you stand in front of the microwave and watch it reheat your morning coffee? You could knock out a set of push-ups in that amount of time, or some jumping jacks. Once you are in the habit of thinking about movement, you don’t have to think about it anymore and you’ll automatically take the stairs at work, or park farther away from the front door of just about everywhere.
There is an app for this too! Check out RunKeeper (RunKeeper.com) and find an app for just about every activity you can think of. If you like to walk, jog, or cycle, then MapMyRun will track your mileage for you.

3. Make goal-setting a habit. In a notebook, list 5, health-fitness-related goals for 2008 and record them DAILY. Review them 1-2 times per day. For example, “I weigh ____lbs by _____(date)” and “I eat ___ servings of fruit/veggies per day by _____(date)”
Why? When you write it down, the goal takes on a new life. As long as the goal remains in your head, it is just an idea you are tossing around. Write it down, and you can’t ignore it. Take this one step further: add the goal as a reminder on your smart phone, plaster it on your calendar, update your Facebook status with it, Tweet it…you get the picture. Involving others in your goal helps to hold you accountable, so the next time you bump into Aunt Edna at a family gathering and she asks, “I saw on Facebook you are training for some running race. How is your training going?” You’ll either sheepishly admit you bagged that plan, or proudly say, “it is going great!” Don’t be afraid to tell others your plan. You’ll find you have way more supporters than naysayers.
Helpful Apps: Life Goals ($3.99, iTunes), and Unstuck, winner of the 2012 Appy Award for Best Lifestyle App, (for iPad, free).

This is actually one of the better questions I’ve received recently. Instinctively, my first thought is NO. More on this in a minute.

If, however, you are new to fitness and just starting to exercise regularly, then by all means do whatever type of exercise you like, even if it means doing the same thing every day. You will eventually reach a point when the results taper off, you lose motivation, get bored, or all of the above. That is when you’ll want to mix it up.

Even if you are a fitness guru, there will come a time when your “normal” workout routine isn’t working, or you suffer from burnout (this is common). To keep your muscles challenged and continue to see results, you need include the following components in your routine:

1. Variety

2. Cardiovascular exercise

3. Muscle strengthening exercise

4. Progression (which is just a fancy word for, “gradually making it harder” so that muscles and/or cardiovascular fitness continue to improve)

5. Stretching

Variety is the spice of life, and also the key to a successful workout routine. By continually surprising your muscles with new challenges, they will in turn adapt and become stronger, more efficient.

To mix up your routine, you  might try martial arts, swimming, weight training, yoga or Pilates, Zumba, BodyPump…you get the picture. This is also called “cross training.”

Cardiovascular exercise is the calorie-burning equivalent of driving your car on the highway. Aim for 30-60 mins on most days of the week.

Strength training is beneficial in many ways. It builds lean muscle, which increases resting metabolic rate. It also helps prevent injury by strengthening the muscles around the joints.

Progression will get you from A to B. You can progress both your cardiovascular and strength training routines, and there are many ways to do it. Read more about how to progress your routine.

Stretching We sit all day, move forward  most of the time, and, as the title of this post would indicate, tend to do the same workouts over and over. As a result, muscles get T-I-G-H-T. Stretching at least a few times a week for 15-20 minutes (2-3 minutes for each major muscle if you do 8 stretches and hold each one 15-30 seconds, and repeat), will go a long way toward improving elasticity, and help prevent injury. I’m a fan of yoga, as well as Pilates, but really, any stretching is good in my book.

You might also like: Is your workout working?and, Strength Training 101

Do you have a favorite “mix it up” routine? What do you do to add spice to your workouts?

Training for your first road race and feeling the pain in places other than your muscles? One of the most common complaints among new runners is ankle and knee pain, and while many factors contribute to pain in the joints (biomechanics, weak quadriceps, previous injuries, worn-out shoes or improper fit, weak tendons…), the most common causes can be nipped with a few tweaks of your form.

1. Take a chill pill. Okay, not literally, but try to relax. Running is a great way to reduce stress, but don’t run stressed. Every few minutes during your run, try to notice where you feel tight or are carrying tension. Are your shoulders creeping up toward your ears as the miles pass? Release the tension and roll your shoulders back and down, as though you’re tucking your shoulder blades into your back pockets. I often carry tension in this area, and focusing on spreading the distance between my shoulders does wonders to alleviate tightness in this area.

2. Don’t strike the ground with your heel first. Rather, aim for mid-foot, which will help reduce the amount of stress to the ankles and knees by keeping your feet underneath you as you land, rather than in front of you.

3. Lean forward from the ground up. When I tell runners to lean into their run, the first thing they do is hinge at the hip. A better cue would be, “fall into your run.” By hinging at the ankle joint, you give gravity a chance to assist you. Let it. By leaning forward into your run, your legs will naturally land underneath your hips, right where they belong.

4. Zip it up. Imagine zipping up your pants. Notice how your lower pelvis is drawn in toward your spine? Good. Now try to maintain that level of contraction in your lower abdominals while you run. Right off the bat you’ll notice a slightly faster pace. You can thank your core for that extra boost of power!

5. Keep your chest open and your eyes forward. I was always told to keep my eyes on the ground about 6ft in front of my feet. Not only was this an extremely boring way to run – after all, it isn’ t much fun to look at the pavement – it also forces you to run with slumped shoulders, creating misalignment of the skeleton and over time, a whole slew of mechanical problems. By opening up the chest and running tall, the impact of each foot strike is absorbed by your skeleton, rather than the individual joints, beginning with the ankles. Imagine increasing the distance between your chest and pelvis as you run, literally lengthening your core.

Finally, give it time. Changing running technique will take focused practice. Try dedicating 5-10 minutes of every run to improving your form, then gradually increase this “form focused” time by 5-10 minutes every week until one run every week is dedicated to maintaining ideal form. Those aches and pains you experienced early on when you were a novice runner should gradually disappear. With practice, you can avoid injury and run pain free for many miles (and years) to come!

From this week’s inbox…

A great question from Kali in Cincinnati, OH: “Do you think it is better to strength/weight train everyday along with some cardio, but work different muscle groups each day…..or is it better to strength train 3-5 days a week and do cardio with no strength training on the other days?  I have been reading a lot about how more ST is better for fat loss than cardio.”

I think the difficulty many of us fall into is using the time available to us. We want the most bang for the buck, right? I know I do. If time were no obstacle, the ideal scenario would like something like this:

• Steady-state cardio in your target heart rate zone for 30-40 mins, twice  per week
• Interval work (either cardio intervals, strength-cardio intervals, or Tabata intervals) once or twice per week
• Strength training (this includes boot camp classes and/or any body-weight exercises that may also elevate the heart rate, such as jump squats, jump lunges…really anything that involves repetitive jumping until the muscle(s) being worked are ready to grow a hand to slap you with) – twice per week

Any more strength training than this, and you may be overworking your muscles and not leaving enough time for rest. Body builders and fitness competitors are the exception, but I’m talking about regular Janes like you and I.

These workouts would be on separate days per week, so SIX separate workouts and a day of rest, yoga, or stretching. Most of us don’t have that kind of time, SO, to answer Kali’s question, I would say it is okay to combine strength workouts with cardio like this:

• Sustained, steady-state cardio for 30-40 mins, followed by core training and also upper body strength training. Most cardio activities involve the lower body, therefore strength training AFTER cardio often means your legs are too cooked to strength train if you’ll be lifting heavy weights or doing intense plyometric work. BUT, there is an exception: simple lunges and body weight squats or squats with light weights are okay if the point of the exercise is to build endurance – i.e, low weight, high reps.
• Slipping cardio into the strength training workout. For example, two to three sets of three different exercises (upper body, then lower body, then upper body), followed by 5-7 minutes of more intense cardio, followed by another grouping of three different exercises (lower body, then upper body, then lower body, for example), followed by another 5-7 mins of more intense cardio, etc. I do this with most of my clients and you get the best of both: cardio intervals, higher intensity, strength training, variety…and it burns calories like lighter fluid.
• Last, but not least (I could keep going, but don’t want to bore you to death), if you are doing strength training the way you should – that is, not chit-chatting with everyone who passes through the gym while you are between sets, but rather, doing 8-10 different exercises, in succession, for two to three sets, and fatiguing each muscle group as you go, you will accelerate your heart rate. Do 20 walking lunges with a set of 12-15 lb wts and tell me I’m lying . Getting down to business in the gym, staying focused, and minimizing “stand around” time, you’ll inevitably get some cardio benefit too.

Thanks for the question, Kali. Keep them rolling…please send questions to: draymond@blueskygym.com

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