Fitness & Wellness

Stress can cause a lot of problems, from tension headaches to high blood pressure. Unfortunately, when people are under stress, particularly if it comes from a deadline, they often fail to take the time to deal with it. It only takes a minute or two to do stretches, but it’s well worth the time. Stretching can help relieve stress and boost your energy so you’ll actually work faster. Whether you’re trying to get rid of a tension headache or just want some relief from the pressure of the day, there are stretches that relieve stress that you can do to bring you the relief you need to keep on going.

Many people experience tension in their shoulders and neck first.

It’s the nature of most people’s work that causes the tension in the neck and shoulders. Either they’re bent over at an angle that’s uncomfortable (like a kitchen or work counter that’s a little too low) or sit at a desk all day and store up that tension in their shoulders. It can cause headaches, TMJ or just a painful neck. While seated, put your hands behind your head and interlock your fingers at the base of your neck. Slowly tilt your head forward as you squeeze your shoulder blades together and hold for 15 seconds. Release and repeat three more times. You’ll feel refreshed quickly.

Finish off the neck stretches with a few more stretches.

Wrap your left arm around your head, with fingers touching the right ear. Tug on your head gently to bring the left ear toward the left shoulder, breathing deeply as you do. Hold for six breathes and then do the other side. Finish it off by dropping your head toward your chest for a count of six breaths and then dropping it backward for the same length of time.

Your thighs, groin, chest and shoulders will relax with low lunges.

An overall stretch that can help boost your energy, while also relaxing your body is a low lunge. Don’t push yourself on this one, it’s meant for relaxation. Begin in low lunge position with the left leg bent and foot right under the knee. The right leg should be behind you with the knee on the floor. Place your hands beside your body behind your shoulders and breathe deeply, holding the position. Switch legs, putting the left leg behind then add another step in the same position, but raising your hands toward the ceiling as high as you can. Don’t stretch beyond the point where it feels good.

• Kneel in front of a couch or chair with space in front to extend your body so your forearms just touch when you lean forward. Lengthen your spine as you lean forward and hinge at the hips. Hold the position with head down, then return to upright position.
• Roll a towel and grab one end in each hand. Lay on your back and loop the towel around one foot. With the other knee bent, foot flat on the floor, raise the leg looped in the air, pulling it toward you with the towel.
• Push you bottom against the wall and raise your legs, resting them on the wall at a right angle to the body. Try to straighten them as you do. Hold the position and allow muscles to relax.
• Rocking from side to side, whether sitting on the floor with legs crossed or laying on the floor with knees up in a V position, can help roll out the kinks and stretch the back, bringing relief.

For more information, contact us today at Iron Fit San Antonio

If you want to be successful at weight loss, it takes a healthy diet. It’s important to eat fewer calories than you burn and get adequate nutrition. For every pound you gained, you had to eat 3500 more calories than you burned. It might be that 440 calorie Snickers bar you bought at the gas station or put in your basket while you were waiting to check out at the grocery. How many hours of exercise would it take to work off those excess calories? If you weighed 150 pounds, you’d have to jump rope at a moderate pace for about 35 minutes.

If one candy bar made that much difference, imagine what your daily calorie intake does.

If you’re consuming high calorie foods that have little nutritional value, you could spend all day in the gym and still gain weight. You also need nutritional food to build a healthy body and give you the energy to workout. You need protein for muscle building, healthy fat for many functions, including burning fat. It’s the high carb, highly processed diet that will cause you to fail to lose weight every time.

The benefits of both exercise and a healthy diet has been known as beneficial for a long time.

While there have been diversions in some categories, eating healthy food and exercising regularly has always been considered important for good health. When you workout, you need nutrients to help repair the micro tears in the muscle tissue. Exercise also boosts the production of telomeres, which protect the chromosomes in the cells, but you need the building blocks to create both cells and telomeres.

Some foods speed weight loss, while others impede it.

Sugar affects metabolism and is so destructive for every cell in the body that eating foods with added sugar should be banned from everyone’s diet. There’s often no real food in many of the food items offered on the grocery shelves. To eat healthy, make it simple. Eat foods that are closest to whole foods. If they’re packaged, eat food that has fewer ingredients. They can be frozen fruit and vegetables or canned, just read the label and buy ones that contain just one ingredient. You’ll find it far easier to lose weight.

For weight loss, you need both a healthy diet and regular exercise. Jack Lalanne, the first televised promoter of a healthy lifestyle, said the need for both best, “Exercise is king, nutrition is queen.”

You’ll be surprised at how easy eating healthy can be. Many of the recipes are remarkably simple, yet delicious, healthy and lower in calories.

Eating healthy isn’t dieting. In fact, it’s the opposite of dieting. Diets always end and leave you feeling deprived and hungry. Healthy eating leaves you full, satisfied and is a lifelong journey.

Eating healthy actually improves the quality of your workout. Sugary foods will slow you down, but a quick snack of protein and a healthy carb before and after your workout will help you build muscles, improve your workout and eventually help you boost your metabolism as muscles grow.

Client come to Iron Fit in San Antonio, TX, for a lot of reasons. Some come to improve their health, while others want to look better. What does that mean? Sometimes, it means losing weight and toning their bodies. However, some people notice their clothes feeling tight, and they haven’t gained a pound. They simply had their weight shift or changed their body ratio of fat to muscle by losing muscle and increasing fat. There are some steps you can take to help lose weight or just tone your body to feel comfortable in your old clothes or even buy new ones.

Replace body fat with muscle and lose a size or two.

Even people who are of average weight that hasn’t changed for years, can find their clothes fitting tighter. It happens when the composition of their body changes with muscle mass decreasing and fat increasing. Fat weighs less per cubic inch, so a container that holds exactly one pound of fat is larger than a container that holds one pound of muscle. It’s like comparing the size of a container that holds a pound of feathers to one holding a pound of iron. You can lose inches, make your clothes fit better and get other benefits from a program of regular exercise.

Maybe you do need to lose weight.

Exercise helps here, but a healthy diet is also important. When weight loss is a top priority, it all starts in the kitchen. You simply can’t out-exercise a bad diet, since it’s far easier to eat too many calories than it is to exercise those calories away. Eating a healthy diet doesn’t mean dieting. It means making smarter choices when it comes to choose what you eat. That may take some training, which of starts with planned menus to help you learn.

Your posture affects how your clothes fit.

Fitted clothing, unlike sweats, aren’t designed for people with bad posture, so they often don’t fit as well as they should when you first buy them. If you don’t exercise, you lose core muscle strength and that can cause your posture to erode further. It also can cause clothing to feel tight and uncomfortable. Just focusing on standing up straight with shoulders back can help your clothing fit better and building the muscles to maintain that throughout the day makes it even better.

• Could you be heading down a road to insulin resistance. If you’re eating a lot of simple carbs and refined foods, you might be. Insulin resistance can cause abdominal fat to accumulate, causing tightness around the waist and hips.
• You’ll be more successful at getting back to your best you when you are consistent. It’s all about making lifestyle changes where exercise and eating healthy becomes a habit.
• One way some have found helpful for weight loss is intermittent fasting—IF. IF can be eating light one day and regularly the next or only eating within an 8-10 hour window, such as 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• At Iron Fit, we can provide a program designed to get you comfortably back into your clothing with a program of exercise and nutrition designed especially for you and your needs.

For more information, contact us today at Iron Fit San Antonio

Whether you’re drinking coconut water or its processed counterpart, coconut milk, eating the rich meat of the coconut or using its oil, there are a great many benefits of coconut that you’ll derive. Coconut is nutrient dense and was one of the primary foods of many indigenous people of the West Pacific, where coconut palms grow freely. It’s vitamin rich, with plenty of minerals. You’ll get vitamin B, C, e, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus and iron from simply drinking coconut milk.

Coconut water offers benefit, particularly for people with diabetes.

Not only does the calcium in coconut water help build bones and strong teeth, boost your energy and help flush out kidney stones, it also can be a huge benefit for diabetics. Several studies show that it may have benefits for controlling blood sugar levels. Several studies show it helps lower blood sugar levels and maintain levels properly. Diabetics aren’t the only ones that benefit. Studies show it may provide benefits for lowering blood pressure. It also reduces the markers for oxidative stress.

Coconut oil boosts the immune system and lowers the risk of heart disease.

The lauric acid in coconut oil is anti-microbial, antifungal, anti-viral and anti-inflammatory. Recent studies show it may be a benefit for weight loss. Not only does it make you feel fuller faster, you feel fuller longer. It’s also been shown to help reduce abdominal fat. The medium-chained fatty acids in coconut oil convert to keytones, providing a source of energy for the brain that’s proven beneficial for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.

Add some grated coconut to your dessert or snacks for even more benefits.

You’ll get all the benefits derived from coconut oil and coconut milk when you eat the meat of the coconut. Technically, it’s the seed. It offers antioxidants that protect your cells from free radicals. Eat coconut with pecans, cranberries or raisins to boost the protection. Some studies indicate that coconut may reduce the potential for a stroke, since it increases the good HDL cholesterol and reduces reducing LDL levels.

• While all coconut products are high in fats, they’re healthy fats. Coconut milk is also less likely to clog your arteries than cow’s milk. The meat of the coconut has monoglycerides that are used for energy and not stored as fat.
• Coconut oil is also good for controlling acne outbreaks. It lowers the amount of bacteria that can cause it. As a beauty aid, just apply it to the hair to help prevent damage and makes hair silky smooth.
• A yeast overgrowth that causes candidiasis can be helped by using coconut oil. Its antifungal properties can aid in returning the microbiome to normal. Eliminating sugar at the same time also boosts progress.
• While you always should use a doctor’s advice for any condition, including thyroid problems, eating coconut can help increase the functioning of the thyroid.

For more information, contact us today at Iron Fit San Antonio

If you’re craving sweets, it can happen at any hour, but some people find it normally occurs in the wee hours of the morning, about 1 or 2 AM. It may wake you up or prevent you from ever falling asleep. For some, anything sweet, even if it’s sugar on toast, will do. Once you that perfect sweetness makes it to your mouth, you can go back to bed and rest easy. What causes that craving? Is it an addiction to sugar and you’re having withdrawals or something else?

There’s no doubt about it, sugar is addictive.

Think about the pleasure you get when you taste that first bite of a candy bar that you like. It melts in your mouth and not long afterward, you get a rush of energy. That satisfied feeling comes from changes in the brain that occur, which are similar to those that occur with cocaine. It is part of the brain’s reward system, which releases dopamine, the hormone that makes you feel good. One short animal study gave animals unrestricted access to sugar water for an hour a day and at the same time gave normal food. They focused on only the sugar water, just as cocaine addicts tend to focus only on cocaine, forgetting other needs. Just like all addictions, when that rush wears off, you’ll crave sugar again.

How does that affect your sleep?

Everyone is unique, but for the majority of people, that rush of sugar boosts the energy level. A sudden withdrawal can cause sleeplessness and keep you awake, craving the next “hit” of sugar. If you’re trying to withdraw from sugar, it can cause insomnia and craving. If that sugar low occurs during the day, you’ll also crave it, but it won’t be as noticeable as it is late at night. It can become a vicious cycle, where the more you eat, the more you’ll crave it and the more you’ll eat.

Maybe your body is lacking other types of nutrients.

Sugar comes in many packages. Some contain other nutrients your body needs. Is it a specific type of sugar, like chocolate? You may have a micronutrient deficiency, such as magnesium. Chocolate is a good source of magnesium, which may be what your body really needs. If you think that may be the problem, either opt for dark chocolate with the highest cacao content or foods that contain magnesium, like nuts, seeds and dark leafy greens.

• Is your gut microbiome balanced? Too much sugar can cause an overgrowth of yeast. Yeast love sugar. To help reduce your cravings, cut out sugar and eat probiotic foods like sauerkraut, yogurt or kimchi to replenish the beneficial bacteria and get back in balance.
• You may be craving sugar because you’re not getting enough calories during the day and too few carbs. The body requires carbohydrates to make serotonin that helps you sleep. It kept caveman awake to hunt for food in lean times.
• Look at your emotions. Sometimes people eat their way through problems and sugary treats are certainly comforting. If the problem is more psychological than biological, try unsweetened applesauce instead.
• You can deal with sugar craving by diverting your attention. Go for a walk, exercise or drink a glass of water. If you’re eating candy and sweets out of habit, keep them out of your home and form a new habit, like eating a piece of fruit.

For more information, contact us today at Iron Fit San Antonio