Workout Exercises

We’ve all heard some of the common myths about workouts – things like “no pain no gain” and if you don’t do 100 sit ups every day you will never get washboard abs. Sometimes we use these myths to put off exercising altogether. After all is it realistic for most people who have to work for a living to aspire to 100 sit ups every day? Do people who are not full time trainers really have time do that? There are other kinds of myths out there too, things like if you lift weights you will only build bulk, and if you want a leaner look you should do something else, like Pilates for example.

The Washboard Abs Myth

While it’s true that you need a comprehensive strategy for tightening abs if you want to see a six-pack, it’s also true that no amount of exercise will make your abs visible if you have a lot of fat covering your mid-section.  Toning is important but so is reducing body fat. To do that you must eat right – fewer of the bad carbs that are found in processed foods like white rice and white flour and more whole grains. You also need to ensure you are eating adequate amounts of lean protein to build muscle reduce fat.

Bulking Up Versus Toning

Weight training builds muscle, helps to reduce fat and is also important for maintaining bone strength and bone density – important for men but also essential for women who are prone to osteoporosis. Weight training is essential if you are on a weight reducing diet because increased muscle helps to maintain the metabolism at a higher fat burning rate and it also helps to reduce that saggy skin look that results if you are losing a lot of weight. If you ever catch yourself looking too bulky, which is unlikely unless you are a professional body builder deliberately trying, you can always cut back on the weight training. Until then, just believe that you are doing your body good because you are.

Working out until it Hurts

Your motivation is high, you get that adrenaline rush going and you work out longer and harder than  you intended, hoping it will get you in shape quickly. The next day you can hardly get out of bed. Did you help or hurt your long term goal of getting fit? When you work out hard enough to make your muscles sore, small tears in the muscle are causing the soreness. As the muscles recover, and the tears heal, muscles grow stronger. It is normal to experience a small amount of soreness for a day following a good workout – but muscle recovery is important. Experts often recommend working each muscle group every other day, allowing a full day for recovery. If your muscles are still sore on the second day following a workout, you probably over did things and need to slow down the pace.  A good way to prevent muscle soreness (and injury to the muscles) is to do a few warm up exercises, and then follow up your workout with a few cool down exercises.

Working out with exercise bands provides strength training and gives you full control over the intensity of exercises. Learn more about strength training with exercise bands at: [insert link to site]

Working out is a habit and habits need momentum. When you break the momentum for any reason it can be hard to resume. Not only that but you might find that when you resume you have to start your workouts at a slower pace with fewer reps than you had become used to. That’s okay. Don’t let it bother you.

Find Home gym workout routine and Then Move out Slowly

Remember the hardest part of getting back into your exercise program is picking up those bands. Remind yourself of all the reasons why you got started in the first place – you want to feel stronger, look trimmer, compete with the young college grad who just started in the office, or whatever your reason. Then start out slowly. Choose several home Gym workout routines that work the primary muscle groups and add in a few new exercises every week until you are back into your old routine.  Even if you only start with five minutes a day it’s important to re-establish the habit of picking up the bands and working through a few reps for the major muscle groups. Once you do, chances are you will do more than you planned. But don’t overdo it or it will be harder to go back to the next time.  Exercise bands are perfect for adapting your exercise level. You can work harder or less hard just by adjusting your grip on the bands and standing closer or further away from the door. Once you are back in the groove it will be easier to set new goals for yourself.

Taking a Break on Purpose

Consistency is key when working out for cardiovascular health and building muscle, but most experts agree that taking a break once in a while aids recovery. After a rest period, the body is ready to resume training and many people find that they actually perform better after a short rest period. How often should you break? Between 8 and 10 weeks of constant working a 5-7 break will do your body good. Some people prefer to train at half the usual workload rather than break altogether. If you are one of those people that have trouble getting back into your workout, this could be the key for you. In the myhotelworkout exercise book every exercise has an easy and a hard exercise. If you have worked your way up to the harder exercises, you can try the easy exercises every 8 weeks or so.  You can find out more about working with exercise bands here

More and more of us are traveling with our jobs. Time zone changes, jet lag, eating out all the time and lack of energy while traveling can really interfere with a healthy lifestyle.

If you spend much time in hotel rooms, what you need is a road warrior workout. You take your laptop and smart phone with you so you can have an office away from home. Using today’s technology you can do your email, write reports, go online, and send photos to your family all from the comfort of your hotel room. So that takes care of business, now what about your body?

Traveling means a lot of time sitting around; waiting for planes, sitting on planes, sitting in meetings, sitting in restaurants. And let’s face it, eating out is nice once in a while but when you do it every day for breakfast lunch and dinner, what do you eat? Restaurant food is invariably rich in the bad kinds of fat with high proportions of the wrong kinds of carbohydrates and low in protein. In fact finding high quality protein in an airport is near impossible. But you’re hungry so you have to eat something don’t you? If you are like many people, you also probably spend more time in the bar than you would at home.  So you combine a sedentary lifestyle with too much of the wrong kinds of food in large quantities and it’s no wonder you get depressed when you get back home and survey the damage to your body.

A road warrior workout has some great benefits. First, let’s face it, traveling by plane does not exactly equate to traveling in comfort. Your back takes the strain from lugging around your suitcase with a laptop pulling on your shoulder, and you can’t get up to stretch whenever you feel like so you arrive feeling like you’ve just been prised out of a sardine can.  A few minutes spent stretching out will do wonders to restore your sense of balance and loosen up those tight muscles in your back, shoulders and neck. Follow that up with a high quality workout the morning after you arrive and you will feel terrific all day long.

Working out on the road will help to burn up some of those carbs that might be all you can find to eat at the airport. Also, it will give you some much needed energy to focus in the meetings that you have to attend. If that isn’t enough reason, think about the many hours of hard work you have put into getting your body in shape. You don’t want to waste all that! When you look at all the advantages of working out on the road, a road warrior workout is an absolute must.

Road warriors can get in shape, and stay in shape – even while continuing with grueling travel schedules. It takes a bit of dedication, determination and a few tips and tricks, but it is possible and many people are able to make it work.

I want to hear from you! Do you have any tips to share with your fellow road warriors about how you make your workout routine work on the road? If so post a comment. You will be helping hundreds of people like yourself who travel frequently and wrestle the same problems you do.

Resistance bands are favoured by athletic trainers and fitness experts when it comes to conditioning small muscle groups. Smaller muscle groups are harder to train with traditional weights and exercise equipment, but resistance bands are flexible and manoeuvrable and therefore ideal for working on smaller muscle groups. Because they are flexible and work small muscles, resistance bands are often recommended by physical therapists to recover from surgery due to injury.

Don’t underestimate these seemingly lightweight pieces of rubber tubing. They can pack a punch. In fact resistance bands can give you an all over body workout that is every bit equal to a full gym workout if you know how to use them and the exercises in our book are designed to do exactly that. But be warned, this workout is no easy way out. If you do the whole programme, you will tone and strengthen every muscle group in your body.

Athletic coaches choose resistance bands for conditioning when they need athletes to replicate specific movements that they repeat over and over again in their sport. These repetitious movements involve the same muscles in the arms or legs, with varying degrees of intensity. As the intensity and direction in your throw, kick or punch changes subtlely, the smaller muscles are called into action, refining the effects of the larger muscles. Reproducing these movements with a resistance band can help to strengthen even the smallest muscles in the muscle group in a way that hand weights can’t accomplish. That’s why you might be given an exercise band say, to workout the small muscles in the hand or wrist following a broken arm, or the small muscles in the leg following knee surgery or another repair.

Training at home with resistance bands has other benefits. It complements a weights regime because it gives you a great cardiovascular workout, it can help you develop lean muscle and reduce fat, and it can help you improve coordination by refining the strength in even the smallest muscles in the body, resulting in better athletic ability overall, including improved balance and increased strength.

The minute you try a resistance band workout in the privacy of your own home you will know what we’re talking about. When you lift a dumbbell up and down you can feel yourself using the larger muscles right away. You can see the biceps bulge and feel the triceps working. When you pull on a resistance band,  it’s a very different feeling. Sure, it works the biceps and the triceps, but that wriggling little cord takes balance and coordination. You can literally feel the body calling into action the smaller muscles in your arm to help control the movement.  When you work out at home with resistance bands instead of weights, you will feel every bit as good as when you leave the gym. You will know you got a great workout because of the way it leaves you feeling. Tired for one thing – in a good way.  And every muscle will feel stretched, worked and toned.

Take your resistance bands with you when you leave home or when you can’t get to the gym, and rest assured that the workout you get is every bit as good as the one you left at the gym. These things work, and one session will be enough to prove that to you.