Nutritional Vitamin Supplements
By · CommentsNutritional vitamin supplements and vitamin nutritional supplements are among the most important things you can do for the overall health of your mind and body. Taking quality broad-spectrum nutritional vitamin supplements on a regular basis can ensure that your body has enough of the nutrients needed to perform and function the way it’s supposed to.
Since we are now living longer, we want the years to be active ones filled with energy and vitality and free from disease. Ideally, the source of vitamins, minerals and nutrients should be from your diet. However, poor food choices, processed foods, sodas and excess sweets have become the norm for millions. Besides, even with a well-balanced diet, studies find that food nutrient values have been declining for decades because of soil depletion.
Choosing one of the high-quality nutritional vitamin supplements helps fill the ‘gaps’ in nutrition that everyone has. The ingredients used in vitamin nutritional supplements can be one of two types, either natural or synthetic. Numerous studies have shown that the natural nutritional vitamin supplements have a higher potency than the synthetic ingredients. However, since the synthetic ingredients are cheaper, most manufacturers use synthetic ingredients. It’s no wonder that studies done based on the cheap one-a-day vitamins show that little if any benefits will be obtained using these products.
The essential nutrients that the body requires are extensive and are much more than just vitamins and minerals. High quality daily nutritional vitamin supplements should include amino acids like L-Carnosine, alpha lipoic acid and acetyl L-Carnitine that provide proven benefits. Other anti-aging nutrients backed by studies that the body needs and will use are antioxidants such as quercetin, bioflavanoids, certain herbal extracts, enzymes to improve the vitamin nutritional supplements absorbability and so on. And these nutrients must be in the correct proportions to each other.
There ARE manufacturers that design and make supplements available online that provide the broad-spectrum nutritional vitamin supplements at reasonable prices. Instead of looking for the cheapest, look for the best value. There is one manufacturer in particular that uses pharmaceutical grade ingredients, many supported by clinical studies and at very reasonable prices. Ingredients are even linked to relevant clinical studies on their website. The ‘delivery’ system used is called ‘enteric coating’ which allows absorption to take place in the small intestines instead of the stomach since stomach acids destroy most of the nutrients.
Taking quality vitamin nutritional supplements should be about better health and energy, freedom from illness, improved sexual vigor and slowing the aging process. Learn as much as you can about ways you can help protect yourself from premature aging and the role that nutritional vitamin supplements will have in your health every day. Eat as healthy as you can, stay active, get sufficient quality sleep and keep taking the best nutritional supplements you can find.
A Natural Source Of Melatonin
By · CommentsMelatonin is produced by the pineal gland. It is believed to play a role in anti aging, as well as helping with jet lag and insomnia. But caution is well advised with using melatonin as a supplement, given how powerful its effects are.
One of the problems with melatonin is that most of the studies were done on animals, like rats, and not humans. Animal studies are used by the scientific community to indicate whether a substance has promise, and can yield valuable results even though they are ethically reprehensible and other alternatives exist. One such study was done at the University of Texas Health Science Center.
Whilst it was funded by a grant from the California Walnut Industry, these scientists were able to establish not only that walnuts contained melatonin, but that it was able to be absorbed – at least by rats. But they believe humans would also be able to absorb melatonin from walnuts. Unfortunately, they don’t know how many walnuts you’d have to eat to get the benefits they established as a potential in this study. It might be a lot! But using food as a source of melatonin is a good option given that it is much safer, particularly if suffering from serious illnesses.
University of Texas scientists also found that melatonin had an antioxidant effect. Antioxidants protect our cells from damage by oxidation. Antioxidants slow down the aging process, and interestingly, melatonin levels often decrease with age.
The antioxidant effect of melatonin has been presented before. Dr Reiter, also of the University of Texas Health Science Center, believes it can protect the central nervous system as well as the body generally from free radicals. He also thinks melatonin can increase the body’s own production of another antioxidant, glutathione peroxidase.
People who should not take melatonin supplements are:
* children
* pregnant women
* breastfeeding mothers
* couples trying to conceive
* people with serious allergies
* HIV and cancer patients
Whilst it is not recommended that people with cancer take melatonin, this is primarily for the reasons that not enough research has been done on humans, at least according to Dr Kenneth Cooper. But some of the research that has been done with people suggests that melatonin may be very helpful – if it is taken with the supervision of a doctor. And herein lies the crux of the problem – melatonin is a very powerful substance. Only small doses are needed to create improvements. For example, Dr Cooper cites the example of dosages as small as 2 to 3 mg only, for some people suffering insomnia.
Overall, melatonin is very promising, and may well help people with serious illnesses like cancer and multiple sclerosis. In the meantime, increasing our dietary intake of foods like walnuts that potentially supply us with this wonderful nutrient, may have a host of protective health benefits as well as slowing down the aging process.
Cross Training for Fitness and Fatloss
By · CommentsThe numbers on your scale do not indicate whether you are fit or fat. Far more significant than your total body weight is the composition of your body tissue. If a man’s fatty tissue is bigger than 14% up to 15% of his body mass, or if a woman’s is more than 20% to 22%, he or she is overweight, or more precisely, overfat.
A small amount of fat is needed for padding the internal organs and as insulation under the skin. Excess fat leads to such diseases as diabetes, gout, high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, and gallbladder problems. There are very few, very fat persons. The reason is that the fittest, not the fattest survive.
The problem now is focused on how to resolve the problem. The problem with most people who want to lose weight is that they have the propensity to concentrate more on getting those numbers lower than what they are seeing now. What happens next is that they strive harder to achieve a lower weight, according to the “ever reliable” result of the weighing scale.
It would be more important to think of the human body as a heat-exchange engine that works on the basic principles of energy physics. The caloric balance equals the total calorie intake minus the total calorie expenditure.
Some of the calories people ingest are used for basal metabolism. As people get old, their bodies require fewer calories for this basic upkeep. Some calories are excreted as waste products. Some go into “work metabolism,” the energy expenditure required for any physical activity.
Hence, if people take in more calories than are used by these functions, there is a definite caloric excess. By the laws of physics, energy is transformed rather than destroyed. In this case, each excess of 3,500 calories is changed into a pound of fat. If people want to reverse this process, they have to burn up 3,500 calories to lose a single pound.
Winning the War Against Fat
When you think of fighting fat with exercise, you probably think of hours of hard, sweaty exertion. If this is the case, then, you will not get any farther. This is because people who are so much into losing more by exerting more effort tend to get bored easily.
Why? Because experts contend that when people exert more effort than what they are capable of doing creates a tendency to develop weariness and ennui. Hence, they give up, stop doing their routine exercises, and end up sulking in the corner with a bag of chips that seems to have all the bad calories in this world.
Now, you might ask, “What should be done instead?” The answer: cross training.
After some intensive studies and experimentations, health experts were able to come up with the concept of incorporating cross training in order to overcome or break the monotony or dullness in an exercise program.
Cross training refers to the integration of diverse movements or activities into a person’s conventional exercise routine. The main purpose of incorporating cross training into an exercise program is to avoid overdoing excess muscle damages and to put a stop to an imminent boredom.
Three of the most commonly used activities whenever a person decides to engage into cross training are swimming, running, and cycling.
In cross training, distance is one way to extend your activity as your condition improves. For this reason, you need to traverse a measured distance.
If possible, swim the course and measure the distance. If you will be using a running track, such courses usually are a quarter-mile per lap for a complete circuit.
Cross training offers a variety of benefits for fitness and fatloss. It builds up the strength and endurance of the heart, lungs, and blood vessels. It has also some tranquilizing effect on the nerves, and it burns up calories as much as it makes your “losing weight” more bearable.
Cross training has three basic components:
1. Endurance exercises to condition the heart, lungs, and blood vessels and to induce relaxation. These begin with a careful planned walking and jogging regimen, depending on fitness level.
2. Exercises to strengthen the muscles, particularly those important to good posture. These include some activities that are selected to encourage some people who are already burnt out with a particular routine.
3. Exercises to improve joint mobility and prevent or relieve aches and pains. These consist of a series of static stretching positions that are safe and effective for most of the people who wish to try to lose some fat.
Indeed, cross training is a great way to modify the concept of exercising and losing fat without having to endure monotonous activities. In fact, the idea of exercising is to like what you are doing, hence, if you engage into cross training, you will be aware of it that you have already achieve your desired weight.
Boiled down, cross training is, certainly, one way of having fun.
Benefits of Cardio Interval Training
By · CommentsIn a long-term study of the health of the people of in the United States, the U.S. Public Health Service documented the chances of developing heart disease among various groups in the population. Long before the any symptoms appeared, epidemiological research could identify high-risk groups.
Among the highest risk factors are male sex, age over 35, cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, high levels of certain blood fats, and a family history of cardiovascular disorders.
Other researchers have added to this list another risk factor: the compulsive, hard-driving, highly anxious personality. The greater the number of severity, the greater the person’s overall risk.
These threats to the heart can be divided into two main categories: those beyond individual control, such as age, sex, and heredity, and those that can be controlled, avoided, or even eliminated. Among those in the second category are what cardiologists call “the triple threat.” These are the high blood pressure, cigarette smoking, and high cholesterol levels in the blood.
If you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, your risk of having a heart attack is twice that of a nonsmoker. If you smoke, have hypertension, and eat a diet high in fats without any exercise at all, your risk is five times greater than normal.
The Healthy Heart
If these risk factors endanger the heart’s health, what enhances its well-being and improves its odds of working long and well?
Obviously, quitting cigarettes and eating a low-fat diet will help. The next best thing you can do for your heart’s sake is to give it what it needs: regular exercise or a complete cardio interval training.
The heart is a muscle, or, more accurately, a group or “package” of muscles, similar in many ways to the muscles of the arms and legs. And just as exercise strengthens and improves limb muscles, it enhances the health of the heart muscles as well.
Since World War II, several large-scale statistical studies have evaluated the relationship between physical activity and cardiovascular disease. One well-known survey compared 31,000 drivers and conductors of some bus companies. The more sedentary drivers had a significantly higher rate of heart disease than the conductors, who walked around the buses and climbed stairs to the upper level.
The why and how behind these statistics were bet explained by classic experiments with dogs whose coronary arteries were surgically narrowed to resemble those of humans with arteriosclerosis. Dogs who were exercised were had much better blood flow than those kept inactive.
The exercise seemed to stimulate the development of new connections between the impaired and the nearly normal blood vessels, so exercised dogs had a better blood supply to all the muscle tissue of the heart. The human heart reacts in the same way to provide blood to the portion that was damaged by the heart attack.
To enable the damaged heart muscle to heal, the heart relies on new small blood vessels for what is called collateral circulation. These new branches on the arterial tress can develop long before a heart attack – and can prevent a heart attack if the new network takes on enough of the function of the narrowed vessels.
With all these facts, it is now boiled down to a single question: What should be done in order to prevent such dilemmas?
Some studies showed that moderate exercise several times a week is more effective in building up these auxiliary pathways than extremely vigorous exercise done twice often.
The general rule is that exercise helps reduce the risk of harm to the heart. Some researches further attested the link between exercise and healthy heart based from the findings that the non-exercisers had a 49% greater risk of heart attack than the other people included in the study. The study attributed a third of that risk to sedentary lifestyle alone.
Hence, with employing the cardio interval training, you can absolutely expect positive results not only on areas that concerns your cardiovascular system but on the overall status of your health as well.
This particular activity that is definitely good for the heart is a cycle of “repeated segments” that is of intense nature. In this process, there is an interchange periods of recuperation. It can both be comprehensive activity and moderate motion.
Consequently, the benefits of merely engaging into this kind of activity can bring you more results that you have ever expected. These are:
1. The threats of heart attack are lessened, if not eliminated
2. Enhanced heart task
3. Increase metabolism, increase the chance of burning calories, therefore, assist you in losing weight
4. Improves lung capacity
5. Helps lessen or eliminate the cases of stress
Indeed, cardio interval training is the modern way of creating a healthy, happy heart and body.
Finding a Weight Loss Program
By · CommentsGetting involved in Weight Loss Program can be intimidating for a beginner. It can also be hard to know where to start. There are several questions that you can ask yourself, which will guide you towards the right weight loss program.
- What am I trying to achieve by joining a weight loss program? (Goals)
- What type of program will work with my schedule?
- Is their a certain type of program that will work best for my body type?
- What have other people tried and had success with?
- Do I have any friends that are interested in doing this with me?
- How much am I willing to spend on a program?
- How much am I willing to Risk?
- Am I interested in a Diet program? A exercise program? Both?
- What is my timeline?
- How fast am I wanting to reach my goal weight?
These questions are meant to bring out ideas and really get you thinking about what type of weight loss program will be right for you. Once you have taken time to reflect on these questions for yourself I recommend talking to a professional to further help guide you into the right program. You might be able to do this simply through a family doctor, or even your local gym club.
Feel free to reprint this article as long as you keep the following caption and author biography in tact with all hyperlinks.
WHY CAN’T YOU GAIN WEIGHT?
Though there may be many reasons why you may be thin, the most apparent reason is because of your genetics. If your parents are naturally thin or have a small body frame, then you will most likely have the same small body type.
To some degree, your size can also be controlled by your metabolism. If you have a difficult time gaining weight of any kind (fat or muscle) then you most likely have a fast metabolism. That simply means that your body burns calories at a faster than normal rate. You must take this into account whenever you are considering a particular diet or training program. Is it geared towards someone with your metabolism and goal?
Now as you know, there are many ways to train. Hundreds, thousands even. Some work and some do not, but for the specific goal of gaining weight, there are a few UNIVERSAL things that all skinny guys must do.
Though much of the information I cover here is not as “magical” as you may like, I consider these rules to be the basics with regard to weight gain. These are not all of the answers, but they are definite elements that MUST be addressed in any successful weight gain program.
You should be able to easily integrate these rules into your current program to make it more suitable for your particular body and goals.
GENERAL RULES
1.Get the proper information that pertains to your SPECIFIC condition and goals.
The first big problem I find in most people is the lack of correct information. Yes you are motivated and doing things, but your effort is wasted on incorrect dieting and training information. Basically, skinny guys are taking advice from people who have never had a weight gain problem. Want to know how to gain weight? Then find someone who has walked your shoes. Someone who has been where you are.
2.Set a specific goal and create a plan of attack.
If you were to drive cross country to another city, would you just start driving randomly, or would you plan a route that would get you quickly and efficiently?
Think of your plan as a road map and your goal as your destination. Without a plan and a specific goal you will be without focus and can easily get lost or side tracked. This happens more often than you know. I see many people in the gym just doing whatever, or just eating whatever — no plan or specific goal. They wonder why they don’t make progress. They have no focus.
Having a specific program to follow allows you to take action each day. This action is focused on specifically getting you to your destination quickly. There is no thinking, debating or guessing. You just do it. A specific plan provides necessary daily structure that not only keeps you on the road moving forward, it also helps to develop good eating and training habits that will benefit you long after you have reached your destination.
3.Have confidence in yourself and belief in what you are doing.
Let’s face it; we live in a cruel world. Hate and jealously is everywhere. For most people who begin a fitness program to improve themselves, getting started will be half the battle. The other half will be staying motivated throughout the constant onslaught of negativity from others. A few negative words can do serious damage if you allow it.
The most insulting things you hear may be from friends, co-workers and acquaintances at the gym. People hate change. It makes them insecure, because they suddenly discover there’s more to you than they were probably willing to admit. They fear that you may actually achieve your goal. It makes them look less “superior”.
Once you have begun your plan, you must have faith and believe in what you are doing. Stay focused and avoid overly critical or negative people. If you have to, keep your business to yourself. When I first began my program, I stopped talking about what I was doing because I got tired of hearing things like “you can’t do that”, “that’s impossible”, “you’re wasting your time and money”. Funny thing is, now those people are constantly bugging me for advice.
It’s your life. It’s your body. It’s your dream. Don’t allow your success or failure to rest in the hands of others.
In Part 2 of this article, I will cover your workout rules and guidelines to MAKE SURE you gain muscle.
Does Turbulence Training Work
By · CommentsTurbulence Training Does Work
If you haven’t heard of TT you should go check out my workout program section and see my full detailed review.
Wedding Diet and Exercise Plan
By · CommentsA wedding diet should consist of complex carbohydrates, high quality protein and essential fatty acids. All of these three macro nutrients work together to make a wedding diet work.
Complex carbohydrates
- Oatmeal
- Whole wheat (bread, pasta, bagel etc)
- Sweet potato (yams)
- Brown rice
- Quinoa
- Green leafy vegetables
High Quality Proteins
- Whey protein shakes
- Chicken
- Turkey
- Fish (tilapia, snapper, tuna etc.)
- Lean Red Meat
- Eggs
Essential Fatty Acids (good fats)
- Avocado
- Salmon
- Egg Yolk
- Fish Oil
- Olive Oil
There are a couple of thing you should avoid for a wedding diet. Try to avoid simple sugars or simple carbohydrates. Some examples are fruit juices, energy drinks, candy, cakes, cookies etc.
I will emphasize that you should stay away from energy drinks and sport drinks. Most of them are filled with sugar and or artificial sweeteners. Some studies have proven that artificial sweeteners like aspartame can not be digested by body properly. Stick with plain regular water.
Strip the fat is a program that comes with a diet generator that will make a diet plan for your wedding to the exact food that you want to eat. It is a very helpful program that I use and that i recommend to all my clients. Your nutrition is far more important than the exercise plan. With a wedding diet and a exercise plan in order you will see results much much quicker and faster.
A exercise plan should be intense and short. Maximum of 45 minutes. Most exercise should be compound and elicit maximum calorie expendeture.
Compound Exercises
- Squats
- Presses (bench, overhead)
- Dead lift
- Lunges
- Push ups
- Sprinting
- Running
- Bur pees
I made a workout plan page so you can watch a video demonstrations on the following exercises.


