LATEST IN FITNESS AND HEALTH —
Our FIT journal.
5 Fitness Habits to Establish In Your 20’s
During your 20’s, you are in the golden zone for establishing fitness habits that will last you a lifetime. This is the decade that you should be beginning to take your health a bit more seriously. You most likely don’t yet have the responsibilities that come with children and a mortgage. That makes it the ideal time to cement in those good habits so that, when greater life’s pressures come, they are already ingrained. Here are 5 fitness habits to build into your life during your 20s.
THE Best Fat Burning Moves to Make
Burning fat is hard work. Most of us have spent a lifetime accumulating excess body fat so we shouldn’t expect to be able to get rid of it overnight. Successful fat loss is a combination of caloric restriction, cleaning up the diet by cutting out simple carbohydrates and smart exercise. In this article, we will focus on the exercise side of the equation.
There are literally hundreds of exercises you could do to lose body fat. What you need to do is identify the handful that will give you the best bang for your buck in terms of caloric burn and the degree to which the exercise boosts your metabolism after your workout. The four exercises to follow have been proven to be the most effective moves to accomplish both of those objectives.
Tone Up - Our Treadmill Workout
In their quest to boost their fitness, millions of people jump onto the treadmill, and then proceed to mindlessly pound away and tune out. The truth is that most of them are getting nowhere, literally. Not only are they physically staying in the same place, but their fitness isn’t progressing. The reason is simple – they aren’t working hard enough.There is a better way. You’ve probably heard of high-intensity interval training. It’s been around for over a decade, but it has become hugely popular in the last few years. HIIT started out as a method of running on the track, but is now being applied to all sorts of types of training, including bodyweight and resistance exercises. In this article, we will focus on how you can apply HIIT training to your treadmill workout.
How to Prep for an Endurance Race
You’ve put in the long months of training and now your endurance event is almost upon you. In this article, we provide half a dozen tips to help you conquer your nerves and take care of those little things before your event that can make all the difference.
5 Common Fitness Myths & Why They Aren’t True
The fitness industry is rife with half truths, false beliefs and outright myths. This has led countless people down the wrong path, with the result that they waste a lot of energy for very little result. Here are 5 persistent fitness myths and why they aren’t true.
How To Have A More Holistic Workout Routine
Too many people fixate on a particular type of workout to the exclusion of all else. Yet, that is not the way to develop total fitness or to maximally prepare your body for the challenges of everyday life. Whether it’s weight training, running or doing HIIT, just doing one type of workout will prevent you from reaching your true fitness potential. In this article, we present a workable routine that provides a more well-rounded holistic workout routine.
6 Tips for Training Intensely for Over 50’s
When you make it past 50, your body begins to have limitations. When you’re working out, that means that you have got to make some adjustments in your training. That doesn’t mean that you have to reduce your intensity and train like a geriatric. It does mean that you need to forget about the gym bro-science that younger guys can get away with and start training smart. In this article, we reveal six ways to do precisely that.
3 Yoga Props & How To Use Them
Have you been dipping your feet into the wonderful world of yoga? If so, you are, no doubt, discovering the wonderful physical and mental benefits of this ancient practice. Maybe, you have seen people making use of yoga props to enhance their practice but you’re not sure how to use them yourself. In this article, we take a look at three of the most popular yoga props and show you how to use them.
How to Run a 10KM in 8 Weeks
The 10km is the most popular competitive running distance of them all. If you’ve accepted the challenge and conquered your first 5km, then the 10km is a natural and achievable progression. Doubling your distance, however, is a real challenge that will require that you take your training to the next level. Let’s find out how to prepare for and successfully complete your first 10km.
Benefits of Reformer Pilates
The Pilates Reformer is an extremely effective versatile and safe way to exercise. In this article we find out exactly what a Pilates Reformer is and why it deserves to be a part of your workout routine.
Studio Classes For When You Are Short On Time
Getting in your scheduled workout, week in and week out, can be a real challenge. There are times when, no matter how organized and motivated you are, life gets in the way and you simply cannot dedicate the hour plus to your training session that you normally invest. But that doesn’t mean that you have to miss out on training completely. At FIT we make it easy for you to get in an awesome workout when you happen to be time poor with our condensed time frame classes that will have you in and out of the gym in 35 minutes flat. We’ve got four types of studio classes that are designed for people in a hurry. Check them out.
Breathing Techniques For Meditation & Mindfulness
Breathing is something we’ve all been doing since the moment we entered this world. So, you’d think that we’d have learned to do it right. The reality is that, while we are all able to breathe in order to preserve our lives, there are a number of ways to improve our breathing, especially when it comes to making our meditation and mindfulness practice more impactful. Let’s take a look at a half dozen breathing techniques that will help you to focus your mind and your body.
3 Exercises for a Stronger Back
When you’re thinking about what workout to do for the day, how often do you think about focusing on the muscles in your back? Perhaps your workout goes a little something like, biceps, triceps, abs, glutes, quads and if we take a second to think about it, all of these parts of the body connect to our back. Back exercises can improve your posture, enhance your physique and help protect your back from pain and injury and I’m pretty sure we have all experienced back pain to some degree or another, whether it’s been upper pain, lower pain, chronic or mild it’s not a fun thing to have and can last a very long time. So why not put these exercises to the forefront of your mind and make it a back day!
Pump It Up
Group classes can seem a bit daunting, you probably feel that they're full of people already knowing what they’re doing. There’s no beginners or advanced groups to most of these classes, but with easy routines to follow anyone can simply join.
Know Your Upper Traps
If you have been experiencing knots to the back of your neck or to your mid back, chances are the pain is coming from your upper traps. The upper traps are attached from the base of the skull and inserts to the thoracic spine. This triangular muscle extends to the width of the shoulder and is responsible for moving and rotating your shoulder blade, stabilising your arm and extending your neck.
A Beginners Guide to Barbell Deadlifts
Deadlifts are a form of weight training that will help develop strength to your overall body. Focusing on your hamstrings, glutes, lower back and upper back when standing in position but also relying on your core strength to stabilise your body through the lift, meaning your abdominal muscles, upper torso and arms are also getting a workout.
Tone Your Inner Thighs
Heading into summer, I’m sure most of us would like to say goodbye to our friend who sometimes makes an unwanted appearance especially when the weather is hot called Mr or Misses Chafing. I have definitely met them one too many times. Sound familiar?Most of the workouts we do incorporate some sort of leg muscle activation, whether it’s in our calves, hamstrings or the glutes but do you ever focus on your inner thighs? This often-underworked part of our legs is just as important as every other muscle in our legs and body because strengthening them is important for stabilising our hips, knees, lower back and core.
Circuit Training 101
Short on time but want to achieve maximum results? This is where you need to relook at your current workouts, to see how you can get the most out of your time in the club with your routines and the great thing is, no personal trainer is needed. Say hello to Circuit Training.Circuit training is high intensity, fast paced workouts based on a series of exercises, where you move between workout stations back to back with a short period of rest to no rest in between exercises.
Cycle into A Spin Class
Spin bikes, you either love them or hate them. If you’re not an avid cyclist, then the thought of getting onto a bike at the gym probably won’t interest you at first. But the difference between the two, is one is used by cycling out on the road with probably a lot of traffic around them and the other is used by getting onto a stationary bike at the gym. Keyword here being stationary.
MEDITATION FOR YOUR MIND
Did you know the oldest documented evidence of the practise of mediation are wall arts in the Indian subcontinent from approximately 5,000 to 3,500 BCE, showing people in meditative postures with half-closed eyes? If people have been doing it, all those years ago and people are still doing it now, then surely there has to be some truth to the benefits of mediation, right?