Take Your Vitamins
For all those Women (and Men) who take care of the housekeeping chores!
I don’t think an advertisement like this would have much of a chance getting published today! 
Motivation Tips – Stay Fit As You Grow Older
Staying motivated to exercise shouldn’t be hard! Common sense tells us that staying fit will make for a happier healthier life right?
The problem is that as you get older, things start happening that make it harder and harder to maintain the same level of fitness that you used to take for granted. Maybe it’s something as innocuous as a 2 week vacation where you overindulge. Maybe it’s an injury that 10 years ago would have taken a week to heal but now takes a month! I used to think that staying fit would always be easy. I was wrong!
A natural progression is that as you exercise less, you tend to start gaining weight. At first it’s easy to jump back into the exercise mode and burn those extra pounds off. As you age it becomes much easier to gain the weight than to take it back off.
Motivation. How do you stay motivated to stay fit? Here are a few tips that help me:
1. Take stock of your workout clothes and shoes. As much as I hate to go shopping, I will admit that sometimes you need new workout clothes and shoes. In the case of shoes it’s not just for looks but for the health of your feet, legs, back, etc. Sometimes a new training outfit is just enough motivation to get you back on track.
2. Have a Plan. Keep a log of the exercises you plan to do on a specific day. For most people, having a schedule written down makes sticking with a workout regimen much easier. I find that planning a week ahead will help me out immensely.
3. Set believable goals! Nothing can hurt your motivation faster than setting goals that are impossible to achieve. An example would be setting a weight loss amount of 8 pounds in a week. Sounds good but in reality trying for an amount like that would be downright dangerous as well as a motivation killer when you realize that it’s not going to happen.
4. Don’t be boring! Vary your workouts as much as you can. Doing only one type of exercise for an extended period of time can quickly lead to burnout. To stay motivated, try various exercises like biking, jogging, tennis or hiking.
Whatever techniques that you use to stay motivated, remember to always keep an open mind. Don’t beat up on yourself if you miss a few days. Staying fit is tough and it’s just going to get harder as your body ages. Have fun with it!
Burn Off Those Holiday Calories
It’s a new year already! How the heck did that happen?
Between forced couch time with gout and all those marvelous holiday baked foods, I need to lose some weight. I figured this might be a good time to post some exercise and healthy eating tips.
Most of this stuff has been covered at length in earlier posts, but a quick review should be helpful.
Exercise every day. Walk, run, swim, train with weights, walk the dog. Do something physical each day and you will just naturally feel better and should help to shed those unwanted pounds.
Drink lots of water! Start the day by drinking a couple of large glasses of water. This will help to replace the water that your body needed during the night. Continue to drink more throughout the day. 1 to 2 glasses of water before meals will help you to feel full without eating so much.
Eat those green leafy veggies. In fact eat at least 4 servings of some kind of vegetable every day. This will help to control your hunger is one of the better ways to regulate blood sugars.
Fruits are good! One of the reasons a lot of people shy away from fruit is the high sugar content. Don’t do this! The skin of some fruits is/are a really good source of fiber and fruits also provide different vitamins and minerals the benefit the body.
Nuts aren’t just for squirrels. Unless you have a nut allergy, eating 1 or 2 ounces of raw nuts per day will provide a good amount of fiber and protein, which helps your metabolism.
Eat Breakfast. No I don’t mean that you should have a huge stack of blueberry pancakes covered with rich Vermont maple syrup, fried eggs, sourdough toast spread with butter and delicious pork sausages every morning. Eat a sensible low calorie breakfast. Fruit and yogurt are a couple of items that I like in the morning.
Eat less more often. Instead of the standard three big meals a day, try to eat small amounts of food throughout the day. Eating less more often tends to speed up your metabolism and will help to burn more calories.
I would stay and write more on the subject but all of a sudden I have a craving for sausage and eggs.
Living with Gout and Gout Flare Ups
I think my overindulgence on Thanksgiving came back to haunt me. 
It seems like ages since I wrote the last blog post…. Good grief it has been about 3 weeks!
For years I’ve had a tendency to suffer from Gout in my big toes and ankles. Once I learned the early warning signs and what to do when a flare up was about to occur, living with gout became a lot easier.
Gout is caused when the uric acid in the body becomes too high. This acid then attacks the joints, causing swelling and immense amounts of pain.
My brother in law, a pharmacist, explained the cause of the pain in this manner. “Think of the acid as pieces of glass with razor sharp tips. As the white blood cells come to the affected joint, they are impaled onto the glass.” A gruesome thought but it sure illustrates what gout pain in a joint feels like!
So what does Thanksgiving have to do with not writing blog posts?
Overeating! And overeating on the wrong kinds of foods!
Although high uric acid amounts can be genetic in origin, another cause of too much uric acid is eating foods that are high in purine content. This includes consuming meat, seafood, alcohol and even fructose sweetened drinks. Unfortunately I did too much of the above!
The result was a gout flare up in my left ankle. It had been so long since I’ve had problems that I missed the early warning signs. When my ankle started to hurt on the day after thanksgiving, I figured I must have twisted it a little or something and I ignored it. Big mistake! By the next day I knew I was in trouble. The signs of a gout flare up were unmistakable by then.
The interesting thing about my gout is that if I catch it early, a 75 mg Indomethicin tablet will nearly always stop it in its tracks. However if the acid has time to get settled into the joint and starts to feel at home, it’s darn hard to pry it out again!
In this case it was really hard to evict. I ended up getting a doctor’s appointment. The doctor gave me a prescription for colchicine which I’ve taken before and wasn’t looking forward to taking again. It always has worked to stop the gout flare ups, but a side effect of taking the drug is that you often develop bad diarrhea. Makes it hard to leave the house for a few days.
Anyway, the gout is gone, Christmas has come and gone, and the year 2010 is nearly gone!
It’s time to get back to writing and living life.
Turbulence Training – Exercise Hard to Burn Fat
In college terminology it’s often called “The Freshman 40!” In senior citizen terms it’s called “Damn I wish I 
had enough energy to burn off all the calories from last night’s dessert!”
I’ve written about the importance of combining diet with cardiovascular training in the past. As one gets older it becomes harder to maintain a healthy weight. As your metabolism slows down, it takes much more exercise to achieve the same level of fitness.
If you do find yourself needing to lose a bunch of weight, dieting and normal exercises alone may not be enough to provide quick weight loss.
What you really need is an intense workout that has enough variation so that it doesn’t become boring. Combine this with a good diet and you should soon see some good weight loss results.
There is a combination of interval training (cardiovascular) added to resistance training (weight lifting) that seems to fit the criteria we are looking for. It’s called turbulence training.
I’m not here to hype the program for the guy that started the program and I haven’t participated in his training. A quick Google search would give you all the information you need to make up your own mind about the program. I merely wanted to write about the subject as a possible way to combat weight gain.
What is the idea behind turbulence training?
Turbulence training features variety, which would help with the problem of ‘plateaus’ that naturally develop when the same exercises are done over and over again for an extended period of time.
Intensity is another factor involved in turbulence training. In order to burn fat, high intensity workouts will provide much faster results. *** Of course the health of each individual must be taken into account before starting any difficult training regimen.
What does turbulence training involve?
As in any workout regimen you must stick to a certain routine. This routine will be changed up monthly so as not to get ‘stale.’
The routine calls for working out 3 days a week, with each session beginning with resistance training followed by interval training.
Resistance training: Usually involves some form of weight training and includes 2 to 4 repetitions made up of 6 to 8 reps per set. This is followed by a ‘super set’ which is 2 non competing exercises done in pairs. An example of this would be squats followed by bicep curls with no rest in between the two.
Interval training: This part of the workout will be the high intensity portion and can be any cardiovascular exercise such as running, cycling, rowing etc. This should last for at least 20 minutes and you need to push yourself until you feel really fatigued. At this point back off a little and then begin the push again.
A combination of the two different exercises should yield excellent results and will certainly help to turn your body into a fat burning engine.
