Exercise’s That Ages You Faster

   Exercise that was once considered the most effective way to look younger, get leaner and more fit…now linked to accelerated aging, inflammation and chronic age-related diseases. (Plus, what you can do instead to slow the aging process down to a crawl — so you can burn off age-related weight..and look and feel YEARS younger!)
      According to science, there’s a difference between chronological age and biological age, which means you can be 50 years old and literally have a body of a 40 year old. I’m sure you’ve met someone that not only looks 10 years younger, but has boundless energy and stamina. That being said, I’m sure you’ve seen the exact opposite as well, someone that looks and acts much too OLD for their actual age.
      So what’s the deal?  Is it genetics?  I know it sounds like the most reasonable answer.  But genetics have very little to do with how fast or slow you age.  Believe it or not, YOU have way more control over the aging process than you think. 
    Seriously, it’s not science fiction… you CAN slow your aging process, BUT only if you know what to do.
...And I’m not talking about having to take anti-aging pills or hormone supplements.  Nope.  This is much safer and more effective.  It’s something you can do on your own.
    There are countless men and women who have cracked the code on aging and have literally slowed down their biological clock to a crawl.  And I’ll show you all the effective anti-aging tips and tricks in just a minute, but first let’s look at what happens as you age…

 1.Your metabolism slows down to a snail’s pace as you age.  This makes burning fat and losing weight next to impossible.

 2.The hormones responsible for all of your youth-like qualities such as healthy skin tone, strong lean muscle, robust energy and insatiable sex drive, start declining more and more each year that goes by.  And if you’re not proactive, your youth enhancing hormone levels may drop so low that there is no turning back.

 3.Aging makes your bones weaker and more brittle by robbing your body of vital minerals that are essential for strong bones.  This is why so many elderly people suffer from hip fractures that can lead to even more serious medical complications.

 4.It’s not just your physical qualities that get negatively affected by aging…your brain suffers as well.  Your memory, your ability to solve problems, and your decision making skills all start to decline and worsen each year.

 5.And here’s the real kicker:  After 40, your biological age starts to speed up and age faster than your chronological age!  In fact, for every year that passes you can age up to 6 months extra.  That means when you turn 42, your body is essentially turning 43…if you keep this up, at 48 your body could be as old as 52!!

    These are the harsh facts, but it’s the truth.  However, it doesn’t need to be this way.  YOU have the power to slow aging and prolong your youth.  When you apply my anti-aging strategies, you’ll be able to REVERSE the aging process by greatly slowing down your biological aging well below your chronological aging.

 Here’s what you can expect when you use some of my anti-aging strategies:

   1.You’ll re-ignite your metabolism, reprogramming your body so you can readily start burning fat right away.

   2.You’ll reboot your endocrine system, creating a resurgence of youth enhancing hormones so can get infinitely more energy—and replace flab with lean, strong muscle while boosting your sex drive
  3.You’ll fortify your body by regaining bone density and building a solid foundation.
  4.Boost your brain power, enhancing memory and improving your cognitive function making you as sharp as a tack
  5.You’ll dramatically decelerate your body’s aging process.  So, your biological age will age slower than your chronological age—making you look and feel younger each year that passes.

   Now I need to warn you… what you’re going to read next is probably going to go against everything you’ve ever heard before.  BUT that’s because very few people actually know how to slow their aging process. 
  Think about the so-called “experts” giving you anti-aging tips… what do they look like? 
   Look, I’m not one to judge by looks alone, but as far as anti-aging is concerned I’m taking advice from the people in the scientific community and not someone on Youtube or a website selling anti-ageing products

      Now, here are the 3 WORST mistakes you must AVOID if you want to slow the aging process and increase your metabolism to burn fat, boost your youth enhancing hormones to get more energy & stamina, and build a lean, strong, healthy body:

  1. Cardio:Too much cardio can make you age FASTER
    Too many people think that cardio is the answer to everything related to weight-loss and fat-loss.  And although cardio can be helpful (if done properly), it does nothing to slow the aging process.  In fact, it does the exact opposite!.  Doing long frequent cardio sessions will break down your muscles and increase the production of free radicals.  These free radicals are nasty little things that damage the cells in your body and accelerate aging.
    Don’t worry if you’re concerned about your heart health.  There is a much more effective way to improve your cardiovascular health, which I’ll cover in just a minute.  And here’s the best part: it takes only 1/3 the time of a conventional cardio workout AND it also triggers your youth enhancing hormones instead of those nasty free radicals that age you faster!

 2.  A Low-Fat Diet:NOT eating fat makes you age faster

     It’s hard to believe that “low-fat” is still a dietary recommendation because science has proven that fat is not the cause of weight gain or heart disease.  In fact, since the introduction of the fat-free diet, the world has gotten more fat and sick than it has ever been before. 
     Fat is not the enemy.  Fat does NOT make you fat.  In fact, fat is an absolute must if you want your body to look and feel younger!  Why?  Because healthy fats are an essential source of good cholesterol, which is KEY to producing the hormones that enhance your youthful qualities.  (Not all cholesterol is bad, by the way — good cholesterol is a crucial component of healthy skin tissue, making your skin more supple, glowing, and youthful).  If you’re following a low-fat diet, you’re depriving your body of the nutrients it needs to slow aging and keep your youth.
 3. Yoga:Yoga is great for relaxation, but is NOT best for fat-loss
      Yoga has been around for thousands of years and it’s still around after all this time because it’s very effective for things like improving your inner consciousness, mind-body connection and spiritual health.  However, it should NOT be considered an effective form of exercise.  Sure, some movements are difficult and physically challenging.  BUT strictly physiologically speaking, yoga lacks the necessary components to stimulate your body to build lean muscle, burn fat and most importantly… trigger your youth-enhancing hormones to help slow aging.  Yoga can improve your flexibility and calm your mind, but it will NOT stimulate your “youth” hormones

 

 

 

 

Top 10 Mistakes Personal Trainers Make

      Throughout my career I have been fortunate enough to work with and be taught by many different strength coaches and experts in my field and have been able to get a look at what works and what doesn't work in regards to program design. Recently I talked with many of the industry’s leading professionals about the common mistakes they have seen over the years. Originally I only planned to use notes that I took down to better myself as a
Professional Personal Trainer but soon realized that the information that they were giving me could benefit many others out there and so I put this together to identify the biggest program design mistakes in the hope that you will be able to avoid making these in your own programs.

Mistake # 1: Not assessing Clients.
Assessing clients is a huge part of program design but it is all too
often left out. There are many ways to test a client and obviously,
you can’t  spend hours on functional tests but this doesn't mean that you cannot assessyour client. Before workouts even begin you can talk to the client
to get a feel on how they are doing, during warm-ups you can assess,
during the workouts you can look for things that need to be fixed ifathletes don't respond to cues.

Mistake # 2: Creating Programs based on one training methodology.
All too often strength and conditioning coaches and personal trainers build training programsaround their own individual bias. Maybe they used to be a Bodybuilder,an Olympic lifter, a powerlifter, or a strongman and so when they sit down to write their training programs often they are will look like they are designed for that sport. For instance if you come from a powerlifting background you may decide to bench, then do board presses, then rack lockouts followed by another tricep movement. Buthow effective is this going to be a developing the client for anythingother than the bench? There’s so many different methods out there toimprove a clients performance that you need to keep an open mindtake pieces from all of these training methods and figure out what ismost applicable to your athletes and put them all together in yourprogram.

 Mistake # 3: Teaching variations as progressions.

It seems there is a current trend that in order to teach a squat you
must first teach a bodyweight squat, then a dumbbell squat, then a
front squat, and then a back squat. This is not a progression but a
series of variations. A progression should follow a specific plan of
teaching a motor skill or a skill through that plane until it becomes a
complete skill. And then you start adding a load or other external
variables to that skill.Let's look at the squat. First you would teach athletes how to do abodyweight squat, next you would want to teach them how to squat
with a piece of dowel or PVC pipe, next you would add the bar andlastly you would add weight.

 Mistake # 4 : Not being able to justify what is in your program.

There is so much information available on the Internet now and so
many personal trainers are coming out with innovative exercises that it is very
easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest and forget about what
it is we really need to achieve with each training session. I am not
saying that you should not include other exercises but make sure you
are including them for a reason and not because you read somewhere
that you should. If you can’t justify why everything in your program is
in there, then it shouldn’t be in your program.

 Mistake # 5: Lack of Attention

Often the personal trainers lack attention to details and will allow the client to getaway with not doing things properly. You must spend time teaching
your athletes the fundamental basics and techniques to executing the
lifts before you begin to load up the weight. We cannot expect a
client to know that they are performing a lift incorrectly if they have
never been taught how to perform that lift correctly. Once you know
they can perform the lift it makes it easy to give feedback in regards
to whether they are squatting low enough or not, whether they are in
the correct position or improper positions etc.

Mistake # 6: Number Inflation
For some reason some personal trainers decide to throw the
rule book out the window and allow clients to perform lifts incorrectly
in order to lift heavier weights. Unfortunately, although this
may look good on paper in the long run it does nothing but hurt the
client. This is a lose, lose situation.

 Mistake # 7: Pushing too hard

Personal trainers often push their athletes too hard in the weight room.I see it everyday. It isimportant to take into account everything that goes on in a clients
life and know when it is time to push and when it is time to back off.
When designing your program remember that there are a lot of things
outside of the weight room that have a huge affect on clients (diet,
sleep patterns, school, relationship, etc) that need to be taken into
account as well as the demands of training itself. Often personal trainers will
mistakenly think that there clients are giving them a low level of
effort when in reality the client is giving it their all but they just have
not recovered from a long ,hard week.

 Mistake # 8: Too Much Volume

By the time you factor mobility work, dynamic work, agility work,
lateral speed work, linear speed work, plyometric work, strength work,
power work, and conditioning you end up with a huge list of possible
exercises and often people get carried away and try to include it all in
one workout. A lot of times people just – you try to spread that out
and it's really easy just to get carried away and just use way too much
volume. What is interesting to me is I have yet to work with an
athlete who didn't respond to a workout that focused more on quality
than quantity.

 Mistake # 9: No long-term plan

Believe it or not there are many personal trainers out there who do not have an
organized plan and have no idea what their end goal is for their
clients. When you sit down to write a program you should always
ask yourself where do we want to end up? Where do we want them be
in six months,12 months. When it finishes?  Where do you want the clients fitness levels to be at ? Etc. Then once you have figured out where you want to end up you work backwards and design a program that will help you achieve those goals. The biggest mistake you can make is not having your goal written down and just trying to do things week by week. If you don't have that end goal then you are not going to know where to start or what you need to do each week.

Mistake # 10: Copying someone else's program
Many personal trainers  believe that if they copy the top guy on the internet or Youtube training program then they will become successful. However, using a program with the mentality that one size fits can become very counterproductive to both the athlete at the end goal. Because, generally the programs that are copied are designed for really advanced athletes and this means that beginning athlete might get overwhelmed by the demands of the workouts. Of course you can always learn from other programs but it is important to find out for ourselves what our clients need and be able to create a program that meets those needs.

 

Pain & brain

How is it that some athletes seem able to overcome a painful injury with ease, while others really suffer? And how can the same injury produce different pain experiences in different athletes? In the past, the scientific and medical world has seen the mind and body as two separate entities and the sensation of pain as the result of purely physical and chemical processes as a result of damage to tissues. 

Modern medicine however is beginning to show the limitations of this approach. Most magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have shown that there's little link between the degree of tissue damage revealed in a scan and the amount of pain experienced, while nearly 40% of people with abnormal and damaged spines have no pain whatsoever! 

Tissue damage alone it seems is insufficient to explain the degree of pain experienced. 

       The "gate control theory" proposes that the central nervous system (CNS - brain and spinal chord) plays a central role in modulating the what kind of pain you experience i.e. the type and degree of tissue damage only partly explains what you subsequently experience; it's the CNS processing of those initial tissue damage signals that determine how debilitating and sever that pain is and how rapidly it diminishes. 

While the gate control theory has been continually modified and expanded, it has stood the test of time and is backed up by over forty years of scientific research.
Because the brain is involved in interpreting and processing pain signals, the thoughts, emotions, beliefs and attitudes of the athlete can and do play a role in the pain that is experienced after injury.

 In other words, pain effectively emerges from the combined action of the pain system, which comprises of three components:

 .           Peripheral modulation - where pain receptors are stimulated by an initial injury or trauma and then by the release of pain stimulating chemicals.

•           Spinal modulation - where the signal travelling from tissue to brain can be either amplified or decreased by nervous interactions as it enters the spinal chord.

•           Supraspinal modulation - processing in the brain involving attention, beliefs, attitudes and previous pain experiences.

         The interaction between these components is complex but helps to answer some of the questions raised earlier. For example, scans of brain activity show that different people respond differently to the same pain stimulus, while studies involving twins have shown that learned behaviours are also important.

Even in the same athlete, the pain experienced can vary significantly depending on the circumstances becoming significantly less during competition when supraspinal and spinal modulation act to inhibit the transmission and limiting awareness of the pain signal.
        Sometimes, chronic pain produces changes in the functioning of the pain system so that it becomes over-sensitised. When this happens, even everyday movements and pressures that would normally cause no irritation or pain in tissues continue to cause pain, long after the originally injured tissue has healed.
      This can be compounded by an athlete's fear and anxiety about their ongoing pain and by focusing too much attention on the pain. When this "maladaptive pain" becomes entrenched, a gradual and graded approach to activity designed to desensitise the pain system is require.

 Should you ignore pain and try to shrug off an injury?

The initial phase of sensitisation is designed to encourage you to stop using injured tissues to avoid making things worse. You therefore need to ask yourself three questions:

•           Can I cope with the pain?

•           Can I continue to contribute a meaningful performance?

•           What are the consequences of continuing?

 The answers to these may well depend on the situation you find yourself in, and require a judgement call. If that's the case, you need to qualify the questions above by asking:

•           Am I prepared to cope?

•           How important is contributing a worthwhile performance to me?

•           Am I prepared to suffer the consequences?

     Using a potentially risky pain killing injection the day before an Olympic final, would seem quite reasonable thing to do if it was the only way an athlete could compete, but the same course of action would not seem reasonable for a novice runner before a fun run!

You may be able to overcome acute pain and continue to compete, but it doesn't necessarily make it a wise decision, which is why professional advice at the earliest possible opportunity is invaluable!
     Inevitably, the most successful athletes are those who best understand the relationship between pain and performance; they're prepared to overcome pain, but make wise and informed decisions about when it is worthwhile trying to do.

 

 

 

 

How simply moving benefits your mental health

While it is obvious that your feelings can influence your movement, it is not as obvious that your movement can impact your feelings too. For example, when you feel tired and sad, you may move more slowly. When you feel anxious, you may either rush around or become completely paralyzed. But recent studies show that the connection between your brain and your body is a “two-way street” and that means movement can change your brain, too! 

How exercise can improve mood disorders

Regular aerobic exercise can reduce anxiety by making your brain’s “fight or flight” system less reactive. When anxious people are exposed to physiological changes they fear, such as a rapid heartbeat, through regular aerobic exercise, they can develop a tolerance for such symptoms. 

Regular exercise such as cycling or gym-based aerobic, resistance, flexibility, and balance exercises can also reduce depressive symptoms. Exercise can be as effective as medication and psychotherapies. Regular exercise may boost mood by increasing a brain protein called BDNF that helps nerve fibers grow. 

For people with attention-deficit disorder (ADHD), another study showed that a single 20-minute bout of moderate-intensity cycling briefly improved their symptoms. It enhanced the participants’ motivation for tasks requiring focused thought, increased their energy, and reduced their feelings of confusion, fatigue, and depression. However, in this study, exercise had no effect on attention or hyperactivity per se. 

Meditative movement has been shown to alleviate depressive symptoms. This is a type of movement in which you pay close attention to your bodily sensations, position in space, and gut feelings (such as subtle changes in heart rate or breathing) as you move. Qigong, tai chi, and some forms of yoga are all helpful for this. For example, frequent yoga practice can reduce the severity of symptoms in post-traumatic stress disorder to the point that some people no longer meet the criteria for this diagnosis. Changing your posture, breathing, and rhythm can all change your brain, thereby reducing stress, depression, and anxiety, and leading to a feeling of well-being. 

The surprising benefits of synchronizing your movements

Both physical exercise and meditative movement are activities that you can do by yourself. On their own, they can improve the way you feel. But a recent study found that when you try to move in synchrony with someone else, it also improves your self-esteem. 

In 2014, psychologist Joanne Lumsden and her colleagues conducted a study that required participants to interact with another person via a video link. The person performed a standard exercise — arm curls — while the participants watched, and then performed the same movement. 

The “video link” was in fact a pre-recorded video of a 25-year-old female in a similar room, also performing arm curls. As part of the experiment, participants had to either coordinate their movement or deliberately not coordinate their movement with the other person’s arm curls. They filled out a mood report before and after each phase of synchronizing or falling out of synchrony. They also reported on how close they felt to the other person. 

The results were interesting. When subjects intentionally synchronized their movement with the recording, they had higher self-esteem than when they did not. Prior studies had shown that synchronizing your movement with others makes you like them more. You also cooperate more with them and feel more charitable toward them. In fact, movement synchrony can make it easier to remember what people say and to recall what they look like. This was the first study to show that it makes you feel better about yourself, too. That’s probably why dance movement therapy can help depressed patients feel better. 

Putting it all together

Your mind and body are intimately connected. And while your brain is the master control system for your body’s movement, the way you move can also affect the way you think and feel. 

Movement therapies are often used as adjunctive treatments for depression and anxiety when mental effort, psychotherapy, or medication is not enough. When you are too exhausted to use thought control strategies such as focusing on the positive, or looking at the situation from another angle, movement can come to the rescue. By working out, going on a meditative walk by yourself, or going for a synchronized walk with someone, you may gain access to a “back door” to the mental changes that you desire without having to “psych yourself” into feeling better.