by Cori Lefkowith | Oct 15, 2015 | Blog, Diet, Mindset, Workouts
With the holiday season fast approaching, there is no time like the present to get your fitness routine in line.
You may be getting busier. There may be parties and temptations and excuses to slack on your healthy eating and workout routine.
You may even think to yourself, “I’ll just enjoy and get back to things in the New Year.”
But that only makes things harder. It only puts you behind once January hits.
It only provides you with excuses to not succeed in the future.
And it most definitely doesn’t help you create healthy habits that will last and get you through other rough, temptation-filled, busy times of year.
Instead of putting your health off to the New Year this year, why not start creating healthy habits and putting in place a program that will help you stay healthy and on-track through the holiday season?!
Below are 10 Tips To Help You Stay On-Track This Holiday Season and 2 Quick Bodyweight Workouts you can do anywhere when you are short on time or don’t feel like going to the gym.
by Cori Lefkowith | Oct 9, 2015 | Blog, Bodyweight, Exercises
The Jumping Jack is one of those basic bodyweight gym class moves that many of us forget about in search of the new best thing to help us burn fat and get our sweat on at home.
We skip the Jumping Jack in favor of soul crushing Burpees or Squat Jumps or some other move we feel like is more likely to make us feel gnarly and want to barf.
But Jumping Jacks can be a great move to include in our workout routines, even simply as active rest. Plus there are a ton of fun Jumping Jack Variations you can do if you are bored with the basic gym class variation!
Below are 15 Jumping Jack Variations as well as a regression for anyone who needs a lower impact move.
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by Cori Lefkowith | Sep 30, 2015 | Blog, Foam Rolling, Pain Relief
The first step in preventing and alleviating upper body aches and pains is to relax tight muscles to help start correcting imbalances and restore normal muscle length-tension relationships.
That means you must foam roll.
Foam rolling can help you relax tight muscles so that you can then stretch, activate and strength to get the correct muscles working. If you don’t first loosen tight muscles, you may not be engaging the correct muscles when you workout.
And if you aren’t engaging the correct muscles, you may only be perpetuating imbalances, compensations and injury.
Below are 11 Upper Body Foam Rolling Moves to help you correct imbalances and loosen tight muscles caused by sitting hunched over a computer all day so that you can prevent and alleviate injuries.
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by Cori Lefkowith | Sep 18, 2015 | Blog, Core, Exercises, Functional Fitness
Often we don’t realize how much our core actually works when we do our basic exercises. We instead think we need to do more crunches or sit ups to specifically target our cores instead of focusing on movements that work more muscle groups at once.
And while including exercises to really target our core is important, there are more moves out there to work our core from every angle than we realize.
Many of them we may even be doing without realizing how much they are already building and improving our core strength and stability.
These moves will target and work your entire core – everything from your shoulders to your knees – in a functional way to strengthen, not only other exercises, but also how well you move in everyday life.
These 15 Unconventional Core Exercises are functional movements because they target your core while making you move or engage muscles in a way you might during everyday life and during exercises that require you to use other muscles.
by Cori Lefkowith | Sep 11, 2015 | Blog, Core, Exercises, Functional Fitness
A good workout program should make you move in every direction – forward, backward, sideways and even rotationally.
We need to be strong in every plane of motion to help us prevent injury when moving in everyday life.
But sometimes strengthening ourselves so we can move better in everyday life and prevent injury means performing Anti-Rotational Exercises.
Anti-Rotational Exercises are exercises that build stability and strength to prevent rotation. “Preventing rotation” means that your body is able to resist forces acting upon it that may try to rotate or move it in a way and direction that it can’t move safely.
If you are shoved, trip, slide on ice or are simply carrying something that is an uneven weight and awkward, Anti-Rotational Exercise can make your body strong so that your core can handle the torque without leading to pain and injury.
Below are some great Anti-Rotational Moves to help you build your core strength and stability to prevent injury so you can move better in everyday life.
These Anti-Rotational Movements are either unilateral moves, moves unilaterally loaded or movements with an outside force trying to rotate and twist you while you resist.
Start light with these moves and make sure that you maintain proper form throughout as improper form could cause you to twist and compensate, leading to the exact thing you are trying to prevent!
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