Hello World!
Well, that’s what I feel like saying as I have been out of touch for the past couple of weeks. I went on vacation down south to see some family and celebrate my Nana’s 80th birthday. We had a wonderful time and I even got a chance to get in a few rounds of golf before heading back up north.
OK, enough with the recap and pseudo excuse for not writing any posts for the past two weeks!
7.06
Honestly, episode six of the Biggest Loser didn’t really show me anything worth writing about, with the possible exception of Bob giving Mike and Ron a wake up call about needing to eat in order to loose weight. I know, I know, it’s actually quite counter intuitive. Consume more to loose more?! What the…? Yeah, folks, as it turns out (and as I have mentioned before) it is necessary to maintain a healthy consumption rate and sometimes even increase your consumption depending on the amount of calories you burn. So that was what I took from episode six. Not much but it was something.
7.07
I wasn’t able to watch this episode in real time as we were driving from North Carolina down to Florida (16 hours in total). However, my father-in-law was kind enough to tape it for us to watch when we got back home. Good thing too! It was an interesting episode to say the least. It really hit on a great topic I am sure many of you face: what do we do for exercise when we don’t have access to a gym?
I know that there were many times that I either didn’t have access to equipment or just didn’t have the time to get my butt over to a gym. This had always provided me with an excuse to not do anything. “Oh well, such is life. I’ll just get back to it when I can.” BULLSH*T! That’s all that is – pure, simple and smelly. So I was really pleased to see both trainers go through different exercises that can be done without the use of “real” equipment. Mind you, Bob was able to use a neat looking device called a TRX that hung from a tree and allowed contestants to use their own body weight to provide resistance for exercises. Jillian, who hated the fact that she was locked out of the gym, was able to drive her team to a great workout using everything from body weight to firewood in order to get the job done. Great job, Jillian.
I would like to note that there were a number of contestants complaining that they were feeling pains in muscles that they hadn’t felt before. Shocking, right? After all, they have been working out like mad in the gym all this time – why would they feel new muscle pains doing simple exercises without machines? C’mon, folks, think about this. Real life movement! It’s not on a stationary bike or on a treadmill. Last I checked, not all ground was super smooth. Oh, and a real bike can’t be kept upright without constant balance. So the contestants using a number of stabilizer muscles that hadn’t been worked out fully. They were forced into different movements that weren’t/aren’t seen in the gym. AWESOME! This is something that we should all note: get outside at least once every couple of weeks and do an outside workout, be it a sport, rock climbing, or even a simple hike. You’ll find that the variation is not only rewarding to the body, but a welcome change to the routine of your workouts.
7.08-1
A two part episode, eh?
In typical BL fashion, there was a shake up this week – a challenge ended with all the contestants being divided into two separate teams. The majority of individuals (7 out of 12) are now with different trainers. So, as you can imagine, there was a lot of emotion from the ones that had to switch. Tears flowed. I can understand this because you tend to build a bond with a trainer and it can be emotional to leave. You may even feel like you are betraying them if you move on to another trainer. However, let me just say that this was the best thing that could happen for some of these folks. Albeit difficult, it was great. Heck, it’s a benefit that wasn’t even touched upon during the first hour of the show. Folks, it’s the same principle as the last episode: with change, the system will be shocked. When the system is shocked, it finds a new gear and you tend to start burning more calories.
A personal example: I love to use the exercise bike. I can get very comfortable and eventually just glide through an hour, hour-and-a-half ride. Over time, my calorie burn effectively goes down. It becomes easier for me and I don’t burn as many calories for what I consider the same output. Now when faced with this I have to add a “shock”. In my case, not a new trainer (I don’t have one to switch) but a new piece of equipment – a treadmill. I will burn a tonne of calories in comparison by switching to a new type of exercise. OK, so my example isn’t quite as extreme as what the contestants on the show went through but it could end with the same result. We’ll see with part two.
As I suspected, switching trainers worked out well for most of the contestants. They all seem to be reinvigorated and more determined to reach their goals. The second part of this episode was pretty much just the weigh in. They did, however, touch on a few tips from Prevention Magazine. The one that hit home for me was the fact that regular and diet pop both shorten your life span. The regular pop because of all the sugars and the diet pop …well, we all know it’s loaded with chemicals. Honestly folks, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it on here before, but there have been numerous trainers that have said they see a dramatic weight loss in those who cut out diet pop. Kind of hard to swallow seeing as there are no calories in diet pop, but let’s stop to think: there are a tonne of chemicals in them and we aren’t exactly sure how our body deals with those. Another factor is that when they cut diet pop from their diets, most people end up turning to water to quench their thirst. You can never underestimate the power of water; it is a great cleanser of the body’s systems and it is a vital element to your overall health goals. So in my book it’s a win-win.
Phew! That was a lot to recap in one post, sorry for that. The basic tips to pull from these episodes are: you gotta eat, drink water instead of diet pop, and …. switch it up! Three simple ideas that aren’t always easy to implement, but I can guarantee that you will benefit from following them.
Cheers,
Coach Joe
Step Into It 