Online Fitness Programs Growing In Popularity

The benefits of a personal trainer and the convenience of the Internet have come together in the latest fitness trend: online personal training. This concept emerged about ten years ago, but in the past five years, online training programs have amplified in popularity, said an expert yesterday at the American College of Sports Medicine‘s 15th-annual Health & Fitness Summit & Exposition.

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Kids Should Not Consume Energy Drinks, and Rarely Need Sports Drinks, says AAP

Sports and energy drinks are heavily marketed to children and adolescents, but in most cases kids don’t need them – and some of these products contain substances that could be harmful to children.

In a new clinical report, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) outlines how these products are being misused, discusses their ingredients, and provides guidance to decrease or eliminate consumption by children and adolescents.

Fitness Testing

Fitness testing is a way of gaining information about the health, fitness level related and skill related components of an athletes fitness. Testing can take place in a number of environments, with laboratory testing being the most accurate; however there is still a large range of tests that can be carried out, away from a lab, which provide a lot of useful information. Fitness testing is not only for athletes, applies to any person that wants to get in a better physical fitness.

How FitnessPTO works

Training clients since 1993 has enabled me create a training system that is efficient, motivating, and which will help you achieve the best results you can!  Effective training is similar to going on a trip.  You need a starting point.  From there, you chose your destination.  Once you know where you want to go, you map out the route to get to there as efficiently as possible. It is also important that you plan for your meals along the way.  All of this makes for a successful and rewarding trip!

Top Five Fruits and Vegetables

Image via Wikipedia

The following lists can help add nutritional quality to your diet. I looked at variety and quantity of key vitamins and minerals, the amount of fiber, plus beta-carotene and phytochemicals — those non-nutritive components that have disease-fighting benefits. The description of nutritional benefits highlight their strengths, but this list is not all-inclusive.

Fighting the cold and flu season

It is very important to consume foods high in Iron and vitamin C.

Iron
Most of the iron you consume goes to form hemoglobin, the substance that helps your red blood cells transport oxygen from your lungs to the rest of your body. The rest is stored in the bone marrow, liver, spleen and other organs.
Because iron also plays a key role in helping to prepare your immune system‘s infection fighters for battle, a deficiency may lead to colds.

Guidelines for a healthy diet

– Avoid sugar (sugar, honey or brown sugar) and starch (white flower products, white rice, potatoes, corn) intake.
– Avoid products with excess fat.
– Avoid alcohol. Alcohol lowers the sugar in the blood and will increase your appetite. Also have a high number of calories.

Burning Calories

The main thing we have to know is that our muscle tissue burns 90% of the calories we consume, so it seems logical that if we have more muscle, we burn more calories. Also, taking in a higher amount of calories than the calories we burn, will result in weight gain in the form of fat by converting these excess calories into fat.

Cost of obesity? Over $4,000 if you’re a woman

At FitnessPTO, we’ve always known that an investment in health and fitness is rewarded financially and we’re happy to see a yearly dollar amount figure to represent this. Our total yearly membership cost is less than 2% of the total yearly cost of being obese. Here’s a great article based on a study by George Washington University.

Obesity puts a drag on the wallet as well as health, especially for women.

Doctors have long known that medical bills are higher for the obese, but that is only a portion of the real-life costs.

George Washington University researchers added in things like employee sick days, lost productivity, even the need for extra gasoline — and found the annual cost of being obese is $4,879 for a woman and $2,646 for a man.

That is far more than the cost of being merely overweight — $524 for women and $432 for men, concluded the report being released Tuesday, which analyzed previously published studies to come up with a total.

Why the difference between the sexes? Studies suggest larger women earn less than skinnier women, while wages don’t differ when men pack on the pounds. That was a big surprise, said study co-author and health policy professor Christine Ferguson.

Then consider that obesity is linked to earlier death. While that is not something people usually consider a pocketbook issue, the report did average in the economic value of lost life. That brought women’s annual obesity costs up to $8,365, and men’s to $6,518.

The report was financed by one of the manufacturers of gastric banding, a type of obesity surgery.

Two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, and childhood obesity has tripled in the past three decades. Nearly 18 percent of adolescents now are obese, facing a future of diabetes, heart disease and other ailments.

Looking at the price tag may help policymakers weigh the value of spending to prevent and fight obesity, said Schulman, pointing to factors like dietary changes over the past 30 years and physical environments that discourage physical activity.

“We’re paying a very high price as a society for obesity, and why don’t we think about it as a problem of enormous magnitude to our economy?” he asks. “We’re creating obesity and we need to do a man-on-the-moon effort to solve this before those poor kids in elementary school become diabetic middle-aged people.”

A major study published last year found medical spending averages $1,400 more a year for the obese than normal-weight people. Tuesday’s report added mostly work-related costs — things like sick days and disability claims — related to those health problems.

It also included a quirky finding, a study that calculated nearly 1 billion additional gallons of gasoline (3.8 billion liters) are used every year because of increases in car passengers’ weight since 1960

By LAURAN NEERGAARD (Associated Press)

Insulin, major factor for weight gain

What is insulin? Insulin is a hormone secreted by the pancreas. Insulin balances the blood sugar.

But how does insulin effect weight gain in the form of fat? As we learned before, carbohydrates are the primary source of fuel. When you eat carbohydrates, they break down into glucose, causing your blood sugar to rise.