HyperStrike

Popular Workout Programs for Active Seniors

No matter your age, you can still enjoy working out. There are plenty of safe ways to still feel healthy and in shape.

First of all, you want to make sure you are prepared and have a safe workout. Here are few things to think about before and while you workout:

• You might want to get a medical clearance from your doctor
• Stop if you feel pain
• You should always warm up and cool down
• Don’t workout if you are sick, have a temperature or are injured
• Don’t exercise outside if the weather is too cold or wet
• Drink plenty of water before, during and after working out
• Don’t hold your breath during your workout
• Use good posture while exercising
• Make sure your shoes are in good condition and provide a lot of support
• Be sure not to overwork yourself
• Avoid eating heavy meals around 2 hours before exercising
• And stop exercising and see your doctor if you experience chest pain or tightness in the chest, neck or throat; Difficulty breathing; Abnormal heart beat; Nausea and/or dizziness; or Light headedness.

A simple way for you to get into the swing of exercising is walking. Start off slow and walk short distances. You can start off with a mile leisurely walk and then increase it by two to five minutes each time after.

If it is cold or raining out and you can’t walk in the park, the mall is a wonderful place to walk instead. You can get your workout in while window shopping.

You can focus on different types of exercises such as cardio and endurance workouts, strength and resistance, and stretching and flexibility exercises.

Cardio/Endurance
Your goal should be doing 30 minutes of cardio exercises each day. This includes walking, cycling and swimming. You can split each exercise up if you wish to do 10 minutes of each. Throughout your workout, be sure to check your heart rate. In the beginning you want your heart rate to increase 50% over your resting hear rate. Gradually you want to work up to where your heart rate is 85 % over your normal rate, but don’t push yourself too hard. It will take a little time to get there.

Strength/Resistance
Strength and resistance workouts can be done by using weights, resistance bands, nautilus machines, or by using everyday things such as walls, the floor and furniture. After strength and resistance training, your body needs at least one day to recover. These workouts could range from 30 to 60 minutes long. Try to do one or two sets of 10-12 repetitions at just a moderate intensity.

Stretching/Flexibility
Your warm ups and cool downs should always include stretching. This will help prevent injuries, stiffness and soreness. Yoga and pilates are some exercises you might want to look into because they focus on your core area and they are beneficial for both your body and mind.

Fitness centers also provide a lot of options between its equipment and classes offered. There are many exercise machines that do not put stress or strain on your joints. Some workout facilities might have classes such as water aerobics. Water aerobics causes less strain on your joints as well. The water supports your weight instead of your legs having to support it. It is a great resistance exercise for your entire body. Water aerobics can be exhilarating and fun too.

There are many options for you stay in shape. The most important thing to remember is to be safe and listen to your body. It knows when you should stop.

Work Smarter Not Harder -

  Most of us approach cardio exercise in one of two ways. We are either moving so slowly that we don’t elevate our heart rate much at all or we go at all out intensity and work too hard, moving our heart rate out of the maximum fat burning range. There are 3 types of fuel that we can burn when exercising; carbohydrates, fat or lean mass. Most of us prefer to burn fat. After all, one of the main reasons that most people work out is to lose weight and/or reduce body fat.

       By working smarter, not harder, you can increase the amount of calories from fat that you burn during a workout. The more intense the exercise the more overall calories you are going to burn. You will also burn more calories in a shorter amount of time. But the kicker is that the higher the intensity, the less number of calories that are coming from fat. The trick is to find a happy medium where you are working hard enough to elevate your heart rate and burn fat while keeping the intensity low enough that you continue to burn fat and not begin to use your lean mass as fuel.

       You also want to make sure that you are working hard enough to build a cardiovascular base and increase your fitness level.

       One way to make sure you are working in the proper zone is by obtaining a measurement of your VO2 max. This is the amount of oxygen that you are able to consume per minute per kilogram of body weight. The more oxygen you can consume the heavier workload you are able to perform. This test will provide you with the proper training heart rate zones for your age, weight, height and sex.

       Another good idea is to wear a heart rate monitor during cardio exercise. This lets you see precisely what your heart rate is during exercise. If you have a VO2 max test, then you will know what your appropriate heart rate zone is for achieving maximum fat burn while still working to increase your overall fitness level. Many heart rate monitors allow you to program your training zones so that you are easily able to stay in your zones while working out.

       Many people are surprised at the low intensity that is required for maximum fat burning. If you are only interested in overall calorie burn then higher intensity exercise is great. It is also good, no matter what your goal, to crank up the intensity at least once a week to maintain your fitness level and possibly even improve it.

       Cardio exercise is a key component to a well rounded fitness program and it will only enhance the results that you will see from consistent weight training. If you can get all pieces of the program firing at once, you will reach your goals in what seems like no time at all and you’ll do it by working smarter, not harder! That is music to my ears!

Improve Post Workout Recovery

Many people warn about the dangers of overtraining. I believe that there is no such thing as overtraining, just under-recovering. Everyone knows that you have to put in hard effort at the gym, but the recovery phase is where your body actually gets stronger. Here are some suggestions to help you recover so you can keep working hard.

Get plenty of sleep. You usually hear that people need 8 hours of sleep a night. That may or may not be enough for you. A better way to judge is to sleep until you wake up on your own, without an alarm. Unfortunately that isn’t realistic for most people.

Take a nap. Try to find a quiet place to nap for at about 20 minutes. This shouldn’t be used as a replacement for not sleeping at night. Naps have been shown to increase alertness and performance. Try to find a dark, warm place where you won’t be disturbed. If you need to, get a blanket and an eye mask.

Meditate. Meditation has many benefits similar to napping. It helps alleviate stress and cam the mind. Some studies have also shown that meditation also lowers lactate production after exercise.

Take a shower. Actually take a hot shower (or bath) for 3 to 4 minutes and then a cold shower (or bath) for a minute. The hot water encourages blood vessels to expand and the cold makes them contract. Three to five sets of this speeds up your blood flow.

Fuel your recovery. Make sure that you are eating enough and that you are eating healthy food. If your body isn’t getting the nutrients it needs then it cannot recover. Ideally you will eat right after your workout.

Get a massage. A good sports massage on a regular basis is important. You should do it as often as possible. For a high level athlete, everyday. Realistically, most of us should try to go every month. In between massage sessions you should massage yourself with a foam roller.

Recovery is just as important as exercise. These are simple things that will really improve your performance and health, and keep you training.

Burn More Fat with Circuit Training

Circuit training is an excellent way to improve your strength while simultaneously improving your cardiovascular endurance. It can be done in a short period of time, it training helps you burn fat. On top of all of this, circuit training is challenging and fun.

The fat burning effect of circuit training is through a mechanism called EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption). Circuit training allows you to work at a high level of intensity, and your body doesn’t immediately return to its resting rate. After circuit training, your body continues to burn energy as if you were exercising, even though energy demands are back to a resting rate. This means that you are still burning fat even after you have stopped.

You may have figured out that circuit training is more intense than traditional weight lifting. You cannot exercise at a high intensity for very long , but good news is that you don’t have to. Circuit training eliminates the rest periods and moving quickly through exercises, you cut down on the amount of time you have to spend in the gym. I don’t know about you, but I am always looking for ways to save time.

Go ahead and try it for yourself. Take a few exercises from your Online Training Center workout today and perform them as a circuit.

To turn any Online Training Center workout in a circuit, alternate exercises for the prescribed number of sets with no break.

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Are Sports Drinks Necessary for Workouts?

Sport drink commercials would like us to believe that we will perform better - or as good as the pros - if we drink their products. Is this true? Are sport drink products better than water alone?

Research suggests that if our activity lasts more than an hour, with vigorous activity (such as competitive endurance events, summer conditioning, or in hot environments), a sports drink is better than drinking water alone. The carbohydrates and electrolytes in the sports drink do help replenish those that are lost during your activity.

However, that also means they are not necessary for most weight training programs. Your program should not last for more than an hour and many programs have rest periods that last longer than you are actually active. Your carbohydrate stores are not exhausted enough for you to require any need for a sports drink. There still are exceptions: the environmental conditions, exercise intensity, acclimatization, aerobic fitness level, hydration status, age and gender can all have an effect on you will perform during your workout.

If you routinely train intensely for more than an hour, you will have to deal with dehydration. During endurance exercise, the research suggests 150 to 350 mL (6 to 12 oz) of fluid should be consumed every 15 to 20 minutes. There has not been any recommendations established for resistance training and fluid losses alone, however, this same recommendation can also apply. Your rate of fluid loss while exercising will depend on the same conditions listed above (i.e. environmental conditions, intensity of play, etc.).

In order to replenish lost glycogen during your training, bring a water bottle containing a solution of six to seven percent carbohydrate and electrolytes, such as Cytomax, Heed, G Push or Hammer Gel. Try to avoid Gatorade, Powerade or any of the common sport drinks seen on commercials because they contain a considerable amount of table sugar, which may lead to nausea, diarrhea and/or poor replacement of muscle glycogen.

Alcohol and Weight Loss

Summary

In short, you can drink in moderation and still enjoy a healthy lifestyle. But continuous over-consumption will hurt your goals of improving your fitness level, body fat and recovery from exercise or an injury.

Alcohol & Fitness

A moderate intake of alcohol can be part of a healthy lifestyle. Wine, in particular, has antioxidants which can benefit the cardiovascular system. It’s easy to think that if a little is good more would be better. But you may have your fitness and weight loss goals sabotaged by binge drinking and eating, especially on the weekends. For those of us that are truly focused on a goal of fat loss, improved health and/or fitness, let’s look at the implications of alcohol.

Empty Calories

While dieting or improving your fitness, it is best to avoid foods that contain “empty” calories. These are foods that lack nutrients and only contain calories such as candy, soda, chips, ice cream, crackers, and, yes, alcoholic beverages. At 7.1 calories/gram, alcohol has almost double the calories of carbohydrates and protein (4 calories/gram).

There is no nutritional value of alcohol as these calories are not metabolized the same way as carbohydrates, proteins and fats. In fact, alcohol can actually interfere with how your body uses other carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals. One-half ounce of pure ethanol (the primary type of alcoholic beverages) is equal of one drink, which equals 12 ounces of beer (150 calories), 4 ounces of wine (100 calories) and 1.25 ounces of liquor (100 calories).

The liver can metabolize only a certain amount of alcohol per hour, regardless of the amount that has been consumed. The metabolic rate depends, in part, on the amount of metabolizing enzymes in the liver, which is determined by an individual’s genes and varies accordingly.

In general, after the consumption of one standard drink, the amount of alcohol in the drinker's blood (blood alcohol concentration) peaks within 30 to 45 minutes. One drink may take up to 2 hours to be metabolized while 4 drinks may take up to 7 hours for the liver to metabolize it. In general, women metabolize alcohol slower than men.

Therefore, if you do drink, take your time and let your body get rid of it accordingly. Let’s look at what happens when you drink.

Metabolizing Alcohol

Alcohol is one of the few substances that has some absorbed directly through your stomach, approximately 20%. The rest of alcohol is rapidly absorbed in the upper portion of the small intestine.

From there, the alcohol-laden blood then travels to the liver which affects nearly every liver cell. The liver cells are the only cells that produce enough of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) to break down alcohol at a significant rate. But the liver still metabolizes alcohol much slower than it is absorbed.

The above reaction produces hydrogen ions (not shown). This results in a decrease in a very important molecule called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD). NAD binds to the hydrogen ions, which creates NADH. NAD becomes unavailable for many other vital body processes for which it is needed, including carbohydrate and fat metabolism that are needed to produce energy that would be used during a sport or training. Without NAD, the energy pathway is blocked, and alternative routes are taken, with serious physical consequences:

1. The body becomes more acidic
2. An accumulation of fat in the liver

As a result, carbohydrates, proteins and fats eaten during the same meal that would be normally metabolized for energy have a greater tendency to be stored as fat in the presence of alcohol. Much of our culture has a bunch of these moments: beer and wings, beer and pizza, wine and meat with potatoes, etc.

As such, alcohol by-products are converted into fatty acids which are stored in your liver and sent to your bloodstream. This will certainly affect you having that lean, attractive athletic physique you may be exercising and dieting to gain!

There have been repeated studies indicating how alcohol consumption is correlated with an increase in waist-to-hip ratio. This may be a result of fat deposits accumulating within the liver itself but not an increase in body fat.

Isn’t Alcohol Healthy?

There has been much positive press of alcohol’s protective effects against heart disease. Certainly, moderate amounts of alcohol do raise the “good” cholesterol, high-density lipoproteins (HDL). However, too much alcohol can actually raise your risk of heart disease.
What’s too much? The answer to this is dependent on your genes. Check your family history in order to possibly get an idea of whether or not your alcohol consumption may be more of a hazard to your health rather than a benefit.

In larger amounts, alcohol can raise your blood pressure and increase the amount of harmful fats called triglycerides, which, when combined with a low amount of HDL cholesterol, results in a blood profile correlated with an increased risk in heart disease. Excessive consumption over time may result in chronic elevated blood pressure, stroke, digestive cancers and liver damage. If a little is good, more is certainly not better.

Alcohol and Post-Exercise Recovery If you play a sport and go out to party right after coming from the gym or game, alcohol intake can interfere with the game and post-exercise recovery. Even if you drank plenty of water to rehydrate, because alcohol is a diuretic, it can cause your body to lose more fluid than you ingest. This requires replacing losses even after drinking moderate amounts of alcohol.

Alcohol delays and interferes with carbohydrate replenishment post-exercise. This may interfere with your next game’s performance. If you have a big game coming up within the next 24 hours, it is better to avoid alcohol entirely.

Many times, we may get injured while exercising or while playing a sport. Some may think that we should drink more alcohol to ease the pain. Unfortunately, this is not true. Athletes with soft tissue injuries or bruises should avoid any alcohol 24 hours post-exercise. Alcohol is a vasodilator, and it may actually increase swelling, bleeding and delay recovery. Usually soft tissue injuries are those that require ice. Thus, by drinking alcohol, you are giving the opposite “treatment” of what it truly needs.

If the temptation of drinking is too strong and unavoidable, get a post-exercise meal and fluids in first before drinking any alcohol and take your time drinking it. The food will cause less alcohol to be absorbed into the bloodstream and pass into the small intestine with the rest of your food.

Summary

In short, you can drink in moderation and still enjoy a healthy lifestyle. However, it is continuous over-consumption that will hurt your goals of improving your fitness level and body fat.

Avoid drinking post-exercise, or wait another 2-3 hours post-exercise before drinking in order for carbohydrate stores to be refilled within your muscles. Also, avoid drinking while injured because this will delay your recovery.

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Hydration - Exercising In The Heat

When exercising in a hot environment (30 degrees Celsius or 86 degrees Fahrenheit), even a little loss of fluid will impair performance and increases the possibility of suffering a heat injury. Proper hydration impacts health on an assortment of levels and is necessary for proper digestion of food and cellular metabolic processes

We can’t totally avoid dehydration if exercising for longer than an hour in the heat and the effects of heat stress should not be underestimated. The following recommendations can help to offset large fluid losses:

• Avoid excessive thirst as it is the body's natural dehydration indicator. If you are thirsty, you are already dehydrated.
• Drink adequate amounts of water daily. The general guideline is one liter (about one quart) for every 1000 calories you consume. If you are sweating profusely, drink more to replace fluid loss.
• Drink two cups of water for every pound lost. Weight yourself before and after profusely sweating or at the end of your day to determine weight loss.
• Dark urine can be a sign of significant dehydration.
• Sports drinks or water are the best choices during long, hot exercise, especially where fluid demands are high, such as running, cycling, basketball, etc.

Fluids, Sodium & Sports Drinks
Drinking fluids with a CHO concentration of less than 8 grams (like soft drinks, energy drinks and fruit juice) during exercise delays gastric emptying and slows fluid delivery.

Drinking fluids containing sodium may decrease urine output and drinks with a low amount of sodium improves taste and stimulates thirst. During long, hot exercise, sports drinks with standard sodium concentration may be ideal because studies have shown less fluid is consumed as taste decreases. Sports drinks with added electrolytes (like Cytomax and Hammer Gel) may be the best choice for significant dehydration. The ideal sports drink depends on your sensitivity to the type of sugar source, your fitness level, the duration of exercise and the temperature and humidity of the environment.

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The Mind and The Body

1963 Nobel Prize winner and renowned brain researcher Sir John Carew Eccles proposed a theory of philosophical dualism. That is, the mind is a non-physical substance, an invisible entity, separate from the physical world but without violating the principles of energy conservation.

Eccles calls the fundamental neural units of the brain "dendrons", and proposes that the 40 million dendrons in the cerebral cortex region are linked with special mental units, or "psychons", collectively representing the conscious experience. In willed actions, psychons act on dendrons and, for a moment, increase the probability of the firing of selected neurons. This, as suggested by Eccles, is how you consciously make your body move.

The woman who lifted a car with her own hands displayed the willed action of a mother desperate to save her child. Whether this story is fact or urban legend, super-human feats have been documented elsewhere for years, often in circumstances where the mind facilitates physical acts deemed otherwise impossible.

Neurons on their own don’t always fire to activate muscle fibers; something must activate these neurons, and, according to Eccles, it is the dendrons that trigger them, but they themselves must first be triggered by the mental units, the psychons, or the conscious mind.

The invisible mind, then, controls the physical brain. And since the brain generally orchestrates movement of the body, it is then reasonable to say that your mind can be a very powerful determinant of what you can achieve physically.

You might follow the substantial view, which argues that the mind has its base in the brain but is separate and independent of it, or you might subscribe to the functional view, which holds that the mind is entirely dependent on the functions of the brain and can have no existence beyond the brain - nor can it survive the death of the brain.

Or you might have your own belief and can debate any detail of the mind as it refers to the human intellect and consciousness, but you can’t deny the fact that the mind is tightly intertwined with the body.

According to recent literature, the mind can help make the body healthy or pass it into the hands of disease – the mind can indeed modulate the functions of the immune system. Psychoneuroimmunology and psychoneuroendocrinology are areas of research examining the relationship between the mind, the immune system, the nervous system, and the endocrine system, whereby the brain and body communicate with each other closely in a multidirectional flow of information that consists of hormones and neurotransmitters.

Your mental attitude, then, can determine who you are, how you are, what you do, and how you do it. It can make you great or it can break you.

Attitude, a direct manifest of the mind, can also determine whether you reach your fitness goals or fall short of them. In exercising the general attitude is that the mind is not intimately involved when indeed it should be.

We’re talking about the illusive mind that transpires into the will power to push for an extra repetition, an extra 10 seconds of intense work, or fighting to save an otherwise missed lift in Olympic weightlifting. Your mind gives birth to the mental drive that pushes your body harder in order to achieve positive changes. Your attitude toward these things is kin to the mind.

And then there is the mind as it relates to training intelligence, such understanding as much as you can about exercising, recognizing appropriate rest periods, and being familiar with various methods of recovery and restoration (nutrition, food-intake timing, sleep, hot baths, massage, meditation, etc.).

To attain fitness success, you must study, understand and effectively utilize the literature, advices, hints, and tricks as often as possible. The journey to optimal fitness isn’t that of a passive process but of an active one, and perhaps it’s even ok to pave this path with a bit of mania. Just as lovers of art, enthusiasts of cars and fans of Star Wars are maniacs, hobbyists, and geeks, so too should fans of fitness be buffs, addicts or fanatics.

Among the mind’s many attributes that make us human, perhaps the most amazing of all is its ability to visualize. “You must visualize to actualize,” the saying goes. Visualization is perhaps one of the most underestimated features of the mind when it comes to fitness-related endeavor.

Sadly, many people adopt a fitness routine only to follow it aimlessly, wandering into the gym and going through the motion, cheating themselves out of the results they otherwise might enjoy had they engaged in visualization.

Visualize your performance. Visualize your ability to work harder. Visualize your body’s transformation. The ability to visualize is perhaps the greatest gift to the human species.

It has been the impetus to some of the greatest inventions of mankind, those things which improve life and advance the human conditions. This ability to visualize great things for the world is the same mechanism by which you will actualize your fitness success. Without it, you’ll continue to shadow-box a faceless goal.

A healthy body is dependent on a healthy mind. Likewise, a hard-working body is dependent on a hard-working mind. So when you come to the gym, don’t forget to bring your workout shoes, but more importantly is remembering to bring a mind that is charged up for a tough workout.

3 Must Do Daily Stretches

You don’t have to spend a ton of time stretching, but you should spend some time everyday. Most of the exercises in a HyperStrike workout move you through a full range of motion and improve your flexibility, however, some stretching is good to complement this. Stretching is also useful to promote recovery.

If I had to pick only three stretches to do regularly, they would be:
1. Spinal Rotation Stretch
2. Towel Stretch
3. Cat-Dog Stretch

These three stretches cover the major parts of your body: the spine, hips and shoulders. Keeping these three areas limber will help keep you feeling good and moving well.

The Spinal Rotation Stretch relaxes the hips and the rotator muscles of the lower and mid-back and stretches the ligaments that support the disks.

The Towel Stretch increases mobility in the shoulder girdle. This exercise helps preserve range of motion in the shoulders.

The Cat-Dog Stretch helps improve flexibility of your spine which is essential for any type of movement or activity. This is a must for people who sit a lot.

To achieve the best results, you should make some time to stretch everyday. Try to incorporate as many stretches as you have time for. If a certain area of your body is tight, you may want to devote extra time to stretching that part.

Remember, that it is best to stretch when your body is warm. And over time, you should notice improved range of motion.

For more stretching exercises, visit the HyperStrike Exercise Lab.

Home Sweet Home Gym

This photo is of our friend Ben White working out at home.....

Many people mistakenly believe that they have to go to the gym to get in shape. They believe you need special machines to work the different parts of their body. Really, you just have to put in hard work and be creative in using the equipment you have.

Body Weight
The first piece of equipment that everyone should use is your body weight. When it comes down to it, life requires you to move your body around. So practice. If you need some ideas of body weight exercises HyperStrike has many to inspire you. Or maybe you think that you are to strong for bodyweight exercises. Try doing handstand push ups and one leg squats (pistols).

Dumbbells
If you have a couple dollars to spare you can get a set of dumbbells, maybe two. Now you have the equipment to do all of the dumbbell exercises and the bodyweight exercises from the Hyperstrike library. There are dumbbell variations of almost every popular barbell exercise (squat, dead lift, military press, etc.), plus some that you can’t do with a barbell.

Kettlebell
Although more expensive, a kettlebell is a very versatile piece of equipment. There are many advantages a kettlebell has over a dumbbell. There are also different ways to hold the kettle bell that can add challenge if necessary.

Alternative Equipment
Some of you may be thinking that there is no way to get superman strong with a couple dumbbells, a kettlebell and your body weight. There are many pieces of equipment that you will not find in a gym that you can get very cheap. Used tires, for example, are usually free. And I am sure you have all seen some really strong men throwing them around. Kegs are also very cheap and it is very easy to change the weight by adding or dumping water. How about a big rock?

All of this equipment is easy to obtain. It doesn’t take up too much space (except maybe the tire). And it is portable, so you can workout just about anywhere and any time.

No More Excuses!
Hopefully you see now that there is no excuse not to work out. With a few simple implements (many of them inexpensive) you can get a great workout. You can do it any time and any place and you don’t have to deal with that guy who sweats all over everything at the gym.