journey gym nutrition blog

I fight it all the time: the urge to curl up on the couch with a delectable snack...mmmmm...But wait!  Won’t I feel better, look better, be happier, and be better able to rationalize curling up on the couch if I just do my workout?  Begrudgingly, yes I would.

No matter how it is hard for you (or me) to get moving, the benefits are outstanding and well worth it.  So before you push your workout off to tomorrow, read and remember these five ways to stay motivated:

Determine an attainable goal and plan to reach that goal.  The first thing to ask yourself is what your goals are and why do you want to reach them.  Do you want to lose weight, sleep better, increase your energy, gain strength, add flexibility, or just feel a heightened since of well being?  Once you know your goal, create a realistic workout schedule (like exercising twice on weekdays and once on weekends) that will set you up for success.

Change into your workout clothes.

With help from the American Council on Exercise (ACE), here are the top moves to whittle your middle.

Do these moves for 2 sets of 12-20 repetitions twice a week and you'll be well on your way to a stronger stomach.  But, as we all know, there is a six pack under there and ab moves is only part of the challenge.  While building muscle tone in your abs and throughout your body will boost your metabolism and help burn fat, you also may need to improve your eating habits.  Review our "Nutrition Basics" and "Eat Real Food. Period" articles for more information.

Crunch - The standard crunch is a mainstay for abdominal exercises.  Use the journey gym to add resistance by holding the resistance handle as you lift yourself from the bench.

It is never too late to start exercising but most of us, unless actively involved in sport, don’t really bother until we see or feel the signs that our bodies are deteriorating.  Research shows that men and women lose more than five pounds of muscle every decade of life due to disuse (Evans and Rosenberg 1992).  So, if you gain an average of 10 pounds a decade while losing 5 pounds in muscle mass, you are gaining 15 pounds of fat every decade.

All that fat has great negative impacts on your heart health, your metabolism, your endurance, and your ability to turn it around.

So it is simply not good enough to think that a weekend round of golf, an hour of tennis, or a brisk walk to the office each morning will keep a trim body.  Everyone needs to retain muscle mass through strength training.  No matter how you feel about resistance bands, dumbbells, or weight machines, building muscle provides overall tone, increased metabolism, maintained or improved bone density, more energy, and overall better health.

How do some people seem to stay young and fit while others seemingly age faster than their years?

Genes does play a role, but a large part of staying young is the determination not to let age get the best of them.  If you haven’t started a good exercise regime by your early thirties, it is going to be increasingly difficult to retain good body health and vitality.

But it is never too late to sta

We love this article and the blog it is from.  Please visit Zen Habits if you enjoy this article as their blog is chock-full of articles about productivity and self-improvement.  Recently my friend and fellow blogger Scott Young did a great post entitled, “New to exercise? Make workouts daily“ as it was an excellent post, and perfectly timed as it mirrors my own recent efforts at making exercise a daily habit.

The problem with trying to make exercise a habit, and it’s something that we’ve all faced, is that you usually try to exercise 3 or 4 times a week…and that makes creating a new exercise habit difficult.  The reason is that the more consistent an action is, the more likely it is to be a habit.

Therefore, as Scott points out, and it’s something I fully agree with, exercising every day is more likely to result in a habit — something that becomes almost automatic, and much easier, instead of a constant struggle.

I’ve been implementing this idea in my daily life recently, alternating every day between different exercises: running, swimming, biking and strength workouts, as a way of reaching my goal of completing an Olympic-distance triathlon this year.  I’m going to continue this habit change into the month of May.  I made daily running a habit last year, when I was training for my first marathon, but this year I stopped when I got sick, so I’m re-starting the habit.