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Water! Water! Water!

Weigh yourself, divide your weight in half then divide 8 into that
number. That is how many 8 ounce cups of water your individual body
requires on a daily basis. Example: If one weighs 120 lbs. - 120
divided in half = 60. 8 divided into 60= 7-8, so one who weighs
120lbs. requires between 7 and 8 - 8 oz. glasses of water daily, or
about (4) 16 oz. bottles. Spread your water consumption out through
the day, drinking it slowly and steadily. Drinking too much water in
too short of time too quickly can actually be proven deadly. Your
consumption and elimination of water should stay pretty even in terms
of rate and amount. Flooding your system can cause shock to your cells
and as a result your insides can drown. Remember, the key to health is
balance. It is important to drink the amount of water your body needs
daily so as to keep your system nourished and clean. Also water helps
to flush out fluid and fat.

 Next to oxygen, water is the second most important consumption vital
to living entities and one of the prime elements responsible for life
on earth. Water makes up over 2/3rds of the planet and your body
consists of approximately 70% water. It circulates through the land
just as it does through the human body, transporting, dissolving, and
replenishing nutrients and organic matter, while carrying away waste
material. Water is the primary ingredient in all bodily fluids,
including your blood supply, lymph, saliva, glandular secretions, and
cerebrospinal fluid. It constitutes 92% of your blood, 92% of your
cerebrospinal fluid, and nearly 98% of your intestinal, gastric,
saliva, and pancreatic juices. The average 150 lb. person contains
about 5 quarts of blood in comparison to containing around 80 quarts
of water. Just to give you a small sampling of the diverse functions
of this precious element: it helps with digestion of food, helps to
maintain proper body temperature, gives lungs moisture to breathe,
helps prevent pain in your body, helps keep blood pressure normal,
helps lower cholesterol, and helps with depression, loss of libido,
and chronic fatigue.

 Your body loses about 2-3 liters of water a day via elimination,
urination, perspiration, and respiration and this amount may increase
during illness, high performance, exercise, pregnancy, and nursing. It
can't be stressed enough how essential this liquid of life is to your
well-being and how crucial it is that you replace the water you lose
on a daily basis to maintain your health. Water provides for the form
of your 100 trillion cells and is involved in all bodily and cellular
functions; therefore, it is of utmost importance to keep your body
hydrated by sufficient daily water replacement in order for it to
function efficiently. Dehydration results in deficient cell activity,
which leads to illness and disease. Just because a beverage is liquid,
does not mean that it is hydrating. Coffee, tea, alcohol, soft, and
sugary drinks are not only diuretics, but they also draw water from
the body's reserves, which classifies them as dehydrators. Every 6
ozs, of these type beverages that you consume, requires you to drink
an additional 10-12 ozs. (double the amount) of water to make up for
the loss they induce. Signs of dehydration include constipation,
headaches, indigestion, weight gain, fluid retention, and colored and
pungent urine. Illnesses associated with dehydration include colitis,
kidney stones, bladder and urinary tract infections, just to name a
few.

 Do not wait until your mouth is dry or you are thirsty to drink water.
You need to acquire the habit of drinking it even when you don't feel
like it and eventually your body will become accustomed to drinking it
on a daily, regular basis. Since water is the second most essential
element for life to exist on this earth and it is critical for the
structure and function of your body inside and out, it is imperative
to make sure the water you drink is pure, distilled, or treated with
reversed osmosis. Water constitutes, regulates, flows through,
cleanses, and helps nourish and heal every single part of your body,
but drinking water that contains poisons, toxins, chemicals, inorganic
minerals, and other contaminants can pollute, clog up and turn to
stone in every part of your body; therefore, by consuming the wrong
types of water you could end up doing more harm than good to your
system, in the long run. Stone can clog and block arteries just like
fat; hence, drinking water with inorganic minerals that your body
cannot utilize, can cause heart disease. A way to test your water is
to pour it into a pan and either let it sit in the sun and evaporate
or boil it until it evaporates. After all the water vanishes, if there
is a film, residue, or deposits left in the pan, your water is not
pure. If there are no changes to the pan, after the water vanishes,
then your water is fine.

Filed under  //   food   health  
Posted September 21, 2009
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Swallow This: Forget the ICE and Ibuprofen...

June 1, 2008
Phys Ed
Swallow This
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

From the perspective of an athlete, few things top the virtuous satisfaction that comes from a hard workout. That 10-mile run, that 1,500-meter pool sprint, that hour with the free weights. Makes you feel great, right? You’ll do it again tomorrow, for sure. But then it hits — the aftermath.

Within a few hours, your muscles begin sending vicious little reminders about your impressive efforts. Delayed-onset muscle soreness, as it’s called, settles in roughly 12 to 24 hours after an intense bout of training, especially if it involved unfamiliar or extreme movements. The affected muscles become so tender and strained that the process of rising from bed the next morning becomes a challenge.

Even if you haven’t arrived at this sorry state, repeated hard workouts can tax the body in insidious ways. Muscles, over the course of an hour or so of serious work, use up most of their stored energy. Without remediation, those muscles won’t respond as well during your next workout. They’ll be more prone to injury. You’ll be slower. The 70-year-old from down the street will pass you on the running path.

Completing a hard workout, then, is just the first step. You also have to undo all the damage you’ve just done.

Start with your postworkout meal. The regeneration of your muscles begins, improbably as it may seem, with that. “Back in the early ’90s, most athletes, especially runners and cyclists, were preoccupied with carbohydrates,” says John Ivy, the chairman of the department of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas in Austin and one of the pioneers of research into exercise recovery. This was in the heyday of carbo-loading, when athletes were convinced that the more pasta and bread they ate before a hard workout, the more stored energy they’d have.

But carbo-loading in advance of exercise is not the most efficient way to stock muscles with fuel, physiologists now know, thanks in large part to research conducted by Ivy. When reviewing studies of diabetics, he became intrigued by similarities with his own tests on cyclists: for both groups, insulin in the blood was more effective at carrying energy into the muscles if those muscles had recently been active. “Exercise makes your muscles more responsive to insulin, and this insulin, in turn, increases glycogen muscle uptake,” he says. In other words, exercise prompts your muscles to absorb more fuel — glucose, which is stored as glycogen — from the bloodstream. (Carbo-loading can’t take advantage of this insulin response because it precedes, rather than follows, a workout.) Your body is actually primed by the exercise to help itself replenish lost fuel.

This improved insulin response, however, lasts only for a brief time after a workout. “You have a window of about 30 to 45 minutes,” Ivy says. After that, muscles become resistant to insulin and much less able to absorb glucose. Drinking or eating carbohydrates immediately after a strenuous workout, at a level of at least one gram per kilogram of body weight, is therefore essential to restoring the glycogen you’ve burned. Wait even a few hours and your ability to replenish that fuel drops by half.

It’s also crucial that you take in some protein. Though it poses challenges to strict vegetarians, the latest research shows quite definitively that protein spurs even more of an insulin response than do exercise and carbohydrates alone. “Protein co-ingestion can accelerate muscle glycogen repletion by stimulating endogenous insulin release,” says Luc van Loon, an associate professor of human movement sciences at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and the author of several important studies about recovery. Translation: coupling protein with carbohydrates prompts your muscles to store even more glycogen for use during your next workout.

“I’d advise people to have their recovery drink ready and waiting for them before they leave on a run or long bike ride,” Ivy says. Ivy himself often drinks low-fat chocolate milk, but any food or drink that includes both carbohydrates and protein — a recovery drink, a smoothie, yogurt — will work.

Then have a real meal within two h ours. “You can maintain increased insulin levels and accelerated rates of recovery for about four to six hours if you continue eating,” Ivy says. Of course, you can also get by without such diet timing. “But you won’t recover as well,” Ivy continues. “You probably won’t be able to work out as hard on a daily basis.” The old guy who chugs his milk and Hershey’s syrup will not only pass you — he’ll lap you.

Meanwhile, there’s the physical damage inside your muscles to consider. Skeletal muscle is a unique kind of tissue, made up of long, thin fibers composed of several different proteins. These proteins interlock like Legos inside fibrous compartments called sarcomeres. Sarcomeres can stretch, but only so far.

During certain kinds of movements, some sarcomeres are pulled past their tolerance. The proteins inside separate, resulting in micro-tears throughout your muscle tissue. After a few hours, this leads to inflammation, swelling, stiffness and pain. (Eccentric muscle contractions, which lengthen muscles, are the main culprit in delayed-onset muscle soreness. Concentric contractions, in which muscles shorten — the upward motion of a biceps curl, for instance — cause less damage. That’s why running downhill makes you more sore the next day than running on flat ground.)

“This soreness is actually a good thing,” says Thomas Swensen, a professor of exercise and sports science at Ithaca College in Ithaca, N.Y., and a leading researcher into exercise recovery. “You want to stress the muscles. They will adapt positively.” The muscles will rebuild themselves, becoming stronger and more pliable. “That’s the whole point of hard training,” he says. “But it’s only effective if you recover fully.”

Which is another reason it’s important to up your protein intake after a workout; that same protein will also help speed muscle repair. “Exercise stimulates muscle protein synthesis and protein breakdown,” van Loon says. “However, without protein or amino acid ingestion, the net balance between protein synthesis and breakdown will remain negative” — i.e., your workouts, in the long run, may do your muscles more harm than good. But eat enough protein immediately after exercising and your muscles will repair themselves fully and become stronger.

Other postworkout recovery strategies, including many that athletes swear by, have far less scientific backing. Take massage. A 2000 study of British boxers showed that postworkout massage made the athletes only feel as if they were recovering quickly; they did not perform any better than those not massaged. Swensen’s own 2003 study of massage and recovery produced similar results as the British research.

These studies, however, like many others that have examined massage and exercise, were small and short-term. “It’s possible that if you followed athletes over the course of several months,” Swensen says, “you might see some benefits from massage. Those studies haven’t been done.”

Similar ambiguity clouds the use of ibuprofen after exercise. Although advertised as an anti-inflammatory, ibuprofen doesn’t always work as expected. A 2006 study of the drug’s use among ultra-marathoners found that it did not lessen muscle damage or soreness or reduce inflammation. And although most users do not experience side effects, ibuprofen has been associated with kidney damage and gastrointestinal bleeding.

Finally, there are ice and heat. Many elite athletes swear by a limb-numbing ice bath, and others prefer a soak in a hot tub — although little scientific evidence supports either remedy. Ice will effectively block the swelling associated with a serious injury, such as a sprain, but has not been proven to speed the healing of muscle tissue stressed by a workout. In a study published last year in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, people treated with ice after strenuous exercise later reported more pain upon standing than people immersed in tepid water. The study’s authors bluntly concluded that their research “challenges the wide use of [icing] as a recovery strategy by athletes.” Similarly, a study published in March in the European Journal of Applied Physiology found that, when it came to muscle recovery, a hot bath was little better than merely sitting quietly for a while.

So where does that leave you, the athlete who has just worked out so diligently? Mixing a smoothie or glass of chocolate milk, the one recovery strategy that satisfies both your inner physiologist and inner child.

Filed under  //   fitness   health   workout  
Posted September 21, 2009
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Why Join? - CKO Bayonne

At CKO, you will be burning fat and toning up by punching and kicking a real hanging heavy bag. The resistance from hitting a hanging heavy bag burns more calories and tones your muscles up faster than if you were just punching and kicking the air. You can burn up to 800 calories in a single class!

Each class is an hour long and includes strength, cardio and kickboxing on the individual heavy bags. Since the class is for both beginners and advanced members, you go at your own pace and get stronger and stronger each class.

Unlike the fitness kickboxing classes offered at other gyms where all you hit is air, CKO uses REAL BAGS to give you REAL RESULTS. Hitting the heavy bag improves your muscle tone and your cardio endurance and burns 800 calories, all in one hour – nothing else comes close.

via ckobayonne.com

This workout WORKS! If you are searching for a new fitness routine that delivers results, look no furhter. Schedule yourself for a FREE trial class and GET ADDICTED to the results that you will see immediately.

Filed under  //   fitness   gym   health   kickboxing  
Posted September 20, 2009
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