As adult athletes we often get to feeling real good about ourselves. That is a good thing, actually a great thing. But we need to keep it in perspective to. Yes regular exercise makes us a better person in a lot of ways, but it doesn't make us better than others, just healthier. To often we begin to look down on others as we feel better about ourselves. Yes we have a good idea and we need to spread that knowledge to others. But all to often we come across as arrogant rather than as helpful.
It's better to be an example of what can be than a preacher of "the way", we are not Prophets we are just people on to a good thing that makes us healthier and hopefully happier than we were before we started. The benefits of walking, running, biking, swimming ect.... are amazing, it really can seem like a miracle but it's just us taking charge of our own lives. Yes everyone can benefit from regular exercise and as examples we can show those wonderful results.
Anytime we try to force someone to change, they are going to resist, it's human nature to resist change. We all have a comfort level that we want to protect at all cost. But fellow adult athletes we should spread our ideas of how to be healthier, we just need to do it in the right way.
By being a positive example you can make a difference in those close to you. You can be a source of knowledge on how to get started, you can help someone else stay motivated once they do get started. We can be strong in supporting what we believe in. I personally no longer give my business to restaurants that allow smoking. As far as I'm concerned having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in the pool.
Thanks for reading.
Rambling Panda
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Saturday, April 3, 2010
New Walkers
It's beginning to become spring weather in America, finally, and with the weather change a lot of people start thinking about getting in better shape. Being a beginner is the hardest and most rewarding time for an adult athlete. When your starting out you actually start feeling better and improving every day. When your an old seasoned war horse like me improvement comes only through hard regular training.
It takes your body about 15 to 30 minutes to warm up. Your gauge that your body is warmed up is when you begin to sweat. This is important to remember for a lot of reasons. First of all what happens when you warm up is that blood is channeled away from places like your digestive system to your muscles that are doing work. That is the time when you actually begin to train your body. These programs that tell you to walk 3 times a week for 20 min are missing the boat. You need to walk easy for 15 to 30 min until you begin to sweat and then walk for 20 to 30 min with your body warm and efficient.
Having said that any walking is better than staying on the couch and if you're in very bad shape then perhaps you can only walk to warm up yet. So let that be your first goal, walk to warm up 3 times a week. Work up to walking for an hour 4 to 5 times a week. Just like lifting weights when you can walk easy for 10 min, then the next time try to walk for 11 min and so on. Like weight lifting you have to regularly increase the weight, (distance) or (speed) to get improvement.
Walking is a complete sport, it differs from running in lots of ways; To start with when you run you do it by lifting your knees and landing on your feet. Your basically pounding your feet into the ground to get your forward motion. I was a runner for 30 years so I'm not anti running, just pointing out a fact. Preparing for a long event like a marathon is much easier for a walker than it is for a runner because your body recovers from training much quicker. Walking uses more muscle groups than running. When you walk the stride should start from your hips and butt and continue down your legs. Your arms and shoulders are worked with your arm swing which should be mostly to the back. Along with gentle stretching after you exercise, walking will work all your muscle groups.
In my next blog I'll talk about finding the right shoes and attire for walking. YES it makes a huge difference. Your shoes and sock combination will make or break your walking future.
Thanks for reading.
Rambling Panda
It takes your body about 15 to 30 minutes to warm up. Your gauge that your body is warmed up is when you begin to sweat. This is important to remember for a lot of reasons. First of all what happens when you warm up is that blood is channeled away from places like your digestive system to your muscles that are doing work. That is the time when you actually begin to train your body. These programs that tell you to walk 3 times a week for 20 min are missing the boat. You need to walk easy for 15 to 30 min until you begin to sweat and then walk for 20 to 30 min with your body warm and efficient.
Having said that any walking is better than staying on the couch and if you're in very bad shape then perhaps you can only walk to warm up yet. So let that be your first goal, walk to warm up 3 times a week. Work up to walking for an hour 4 to 5 times a week. Just like lifting weights when you can walk easy for 10 min, then the next time try to walk for 11 min and so on. Like weight lifting you have to regularly increase the weight, (distance) or (speed) to get improvement.
Walking is a complete sport, it differs from running in lots of ways; To start with when you run you do it by lifting your knees and landing on your feet. Your basically pounding your feet into the ground to get your forward motion. I was a runner for 30 years so I'm not anti running, just pointing out a fact. Preparing for a long event like a marathon is much easier for a walker than it is for a runner because your body recovers from training much quicker. Walking uses more muscle groups than running. When you walk the stride should start from your hips and butt and continue down your legs. Your arms and shoulders are worked with your arm swing which should be mostly to the back. Along with gentle stretching after you exercise, walking will work all your muscle groups.
In my next blog I'll talk about finding the right shoes and attire for walking. YES it makes a huge difference. Your shoes and sock combination will make or break your walking future.
Thanks for reading.
Rambling Panda
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Rest as Cross Training
I decided to write on this subject when I fell asleep last night doing a blog entry. No matter what sport you train for, even if your sport is just living a healthy life style, the best cross training you do is getting enough rest. Without adequate rest your just continuing to tear your body down not build it up.
When we do a hard workout we tear up our muscles, the muscle fibers actually get microscopic tears. They get lactic acid, the waste from doing the motion, pooled around between the fibers and you feel soreness. When you don't get enough rest all these things continue to happen without your body having a chance to repair the damage and remove the waste.
When you do get enough rest, especially sleep, your body will repair the damage and build the muscle tissue back stronger that it was before. That's what Training is all about, getting stronger and being able to exercise longer.
Your muscles are like car engines, they get fuel and oxygen delivered to them by the blood stream, they do their motion, and expel the lactic acid (exhaust) back into the blood stream. When you do this over a long period your body can't keep us so you have more lactic acid built up than the blood can remove. But during rest your body can get rid of the lactic acid that was left behind. When it continues to build up you feel it as soreness. The soreness becomes deeper and more uncomfortable the longer you go without rest.
Some people wrongly think that more and more exercise is required to get stronger. You just compound the damage when you workout even harder with out getting enough rest. So make rest a part of your training routine and you will not only make better gains but feel wonderful while your doing it.
Rambling Panda
When we do a hard workout we tear up our muscles, the muscle fibers actually get microscopic tears. They get lactic acid, the waste from doing the motion, pooled around between the fibers and you feel soreness. When you don't get enough rest all these things continue to happen without your body having a chance to repair the damage and remove the waste.
When you do get enough rest, especially sleep, your body will repair the damage and build the muscle tissue back stronger that it was before. That's what Training is all about, getting stronger and being able to exercise longer.
Your muscles are like car engines, they get fuel and oxygen delivered to them by the blood stream, they do their motion, and expel the lactic acid (exhaust) back into the blood stream. When you do this over a long period your body can't keep us so you have more lactic acid built up than the blood can remove. But during rest your body can get rid of the lactic acid that was left behind. When it continues to build up you feel it as soreness. The soreness becomes deeper and more uncomfortable the longer you go without rest.
Some people wrongly think that more and more exercise is required to get stronger. You just compound the damage when you workout even harder with out getting enough rest. So make rest a part of your training routine and you will not only make better gains but feel wonderful while your doing it.
Rambling Panda
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Training to Walk Faster
This last couple of months has been a experiment in the art of walking fast while keeping legal race walking form. The faster you walk the harder it is to keep all your parts performing like you want.
There is so much to think about, I try to imagine I'm going down steep stairs no matter if I'm on flat road or going up a hill. That keeps me walking with my feet in a straight line and helps get the hip drop right. That hip drop is good for a few extra inches of stride.
Being old and stiff I will never have that smooth rolling gait that you see on the worldclass walkers. But there are things even I can do. Keeping a good, mostly to the rear arm swing is good for keeping my stride flowing and keeping me from feeling like I'm walking on stilts or like a robot. The other is making sure I'm landing heel first instead of getting up higher on my foot. I'm walking with another walker who breaks into a shuffling run when he starts landing more toward the middle of his foot.
The stride has to start from your glutes and hips and not just your legs. When you start trying to go faster this gets harder, you have to start the stride by moving your hip forward with power. I've noticed that when I do a hard race my upper glutes are pumped like when a bodybuilder works on one muscle group. Hip forward and knees raises , not like a runner raising and lowering his knees for speed hip forward and knee is raised as your leg pushes forward not up like a runner.
I've been getting in some good 200m and 400m times but I need to have someone video me to make sure that my technique is as I think it is.
Thanks for reading.
Rambling Panda
There is so much to think about, I try to imagine I'm going down steep stairs no matter if I'm on flat road or going up a hill. That keeps me walking with my feet in a straight line and helps get the hip drop right. That hip drop is good for a few extra inches of stride.
Being old and stiff I will never have that smooth rolling gait that you see on the worldclass walkers. But there are things even I can do. Keeping a good, mostly to the rear arm swing is good for keeping my stride flowing and keeping me from feeling like I'm walking on stilts or like a robot. The other is making sure I'm landing heel first instead of getting up higher on my foot. I'm walking with another walker who breaks into a shuffling run when he starts landing more toward the middle of his foot.
The stride has to start from your glutes and hips and not just your legs. When you start trying to go faster this gets harder, you have to start the stride by moving your hip forward with power. I've noticed that when I do a hard race my upper glutes are pumped like when a bodybuilder works on one muscle group. Hip forward and knees raises , not like a runner raising and lowering his knees for speed hip forward and knee is raised as your leg pushes forward not up like a runner.
I've been getting in some good 200m and 400m times but I need to have someone video me to make sure that my technique is as I think it is.
Thanks for reading.
Rambling Panda
Saturday, February 27, 2010
To Abs or not to Abs!
Ever wonder why you can tighten your stomach and it feels nice and hard but you have no definition? You do feel a thin layer of soft pudgy covering it though, right? That thin layer is what is causing you to not see any definition. So what do you do about it?
Your body doesn't know that you make a good living and can eat regularly and when ever you want to. That's because it's designed for survival and you keep sending it the wrong messages. Your body is always prepared to help you survive the hard lean times and when you tell it the lean times are here it goes into overdrive to protect you.
Your body doesn't know that you are trying to lose a little weight, it only knows that when you cut down on your intake of calories that you must be going into a lean time so it slows down your metabolism and starts storing fat, fat for you to live on now that the lean times are coming. The bad thing about this is that the body can make all the fat cells it feels you need and fill them, it can't destroy them. A fat cell is like a storage balloon, your body can make it and fill it, but then it can only empty it not destroy it.
So when you do lose weight to where you have a nice flat stomach, you still have that layer of empty fat cells covering your hard earned abs. So what do you do? All you can do is remove as much of the fat stored in the cells as you can. The only way to get rid of those empty cells is to have them removed by surgery.
What is one to do then if they want to get as close to those defined abs as possible? You need to convince your body that it's ok to empty the fat cells. Always eat a little something before you start your workouts. That way your body knows food is available so it will release the stored energy you need. Then when you have finished your workout eat a little something shortly after so your body is content that food is still available. Yep it's as easy as that.
When you do a hard workout and you haven't eaten anything since the day before your body thinks the hard times are here and will not release anymore stored energy (fat) than it has to. That means less energy for you and a workout that's harder than it should be.
Then during the day eat small meals about 5 hours apart. If you just eat a few large meals the body is going to take advantage of the extra calories to refill those fat cells with energy for later.
Thanks for reading.
Rambling Panda
Your body doesn't know that you make a good living and can eat regularly and when ever you want to. That's because it's designed for survival and you keep sending it the wrong messages. Your body is always prepared to help you survive the hard lean times and when you tell it the lean times are here it goes into overdrive to protect you.
Your body doesn't know that you are trying to lose a little weight, it only knows that when you cut down on your intake of calories that you must be going into a lean time so it slows down your metabolism and starts storing fat, fat for you to live on now that the lean times are coming. The bad thing about this is that the body can make all the fat cells it feels you need and fill them, it can't destroy them. A fat cell is like a storage balloon, your body can make it and fill it, but then it can only empty it not destroy it.
So when you do lose weight to where you have a nice flat stomach, you still have that layer of empty fat cells covering your hard earned abs. So what do you do? All you can do is remove as much of the fat stored in the cells as you can. The only way to get rid of those empty cells is to have them removed by surgery.
What is one to do then if they want to get as close to those defined abs as possible? You need to convince your body that it's ok to empty the fat cells. Always eat a little something before you start your workouts. That way your body knows food is available so it will release the stored energy you need. Then when you have finished your workout eat a little something shortly after so your body is content that food is still available. Yep it's as easy as that.
When you do a hard workout and you haven't eaten anything since the day before your body thinks the hard times are here and will not release anymore stored energy (fat) than it has to. That means less energy for you and a workout that's harder than it should be.
Then during the day eat small meals about 5 hours apart. If you just eat a few large meals the body is going to take advantage of the extra calories to refill those fat cells with energy for later.
Thanks for reading.
Rambling Panda
Monday, February 22, 2010
Crosstraining
Crosstraining means exercises that are different from your primary form of training. For a walker or runner that means activities other than walking or running. Crosstraining should make you better at your primary sport, unless you are just seeking overall fitness in lew of practicing a primary sport.
The first thing you need to do to plan your crosstraining is determine which muscles you are using with your primary sport. I'm a race walker so I use the leg muscles that propell me forward more than the muscles that raise the knee. So I do an exercise like running in the pool with a high knee lift to work those muscles.
I walk on level hard surfaces normally so an exercise like hiking trails or even just walking on grass will work my legs differently. In addition walking or hiking works the stabalizer muscles that help with balance. You can't go fast on grass or dirt but you can build strength.
A good way to crosstrain with your primary workouts is to vary the speed and the elevation. I do hills at least once a week and if I can I'll do some hill work with every workout. Hills not only build strength but they make you faster in races with hills. The muscles used for hills are used differenty than the same muscles on flat land.
When you vary your speed you work different fibers in your muscle, everyone had heard of the fast twitch and slow twitch. When you do accelerations, sprints and interval track work you are working the whole range of muscle fibers.
Hummm, sounds like you can crosstrain and do your primary sport all at the same time, what a concept. A walker uses more core and upper body muscles that running but you still need to make sure you are as well rounded as possible. Classes like pilaties and muscle pump are great for hitting all the upper body muscles if the instructor's routine is a good one. But you can do a routine that works everything with just a little thought as to which muscles are working when you are doing a routine.
Our bodies have muscles on the front, back and sides so you need to make sure you get some twists and bends during your exercise. A good way to do that is to add trunk twists to your warm up and toe touches to your cool down. Remember don't stretch before exercise stretch when you have warmed up, or better yet after your training to cool down.
Thanks for reading.
Rambling Panda
The first thing you need to do to plan your crosstraining is determine which muscles you are using with your primary sport. I'm a race walker so I use the leg muscles that propell me forward more than the muscles that raise the knee. So I do an exercise like running in the pool with a high knee lift to work those muscles.
I walk on level hard surfaces normally so an exercise like hiking trails or even just walking on grass will work my legs differently. In addition walking or hiking works the stabalizer muscles that help with balance. You can't go fast on grass or dirt but you can build strength.
A good way to crosstrain with your primary workouts is to vary the speed and the elevation. I do hills at least once a week and if I can I'll do some hill work with every workout. Hills not only build strength but they make you faster in races with hills. The muscles used for hills are used differenty than the same muscles on flat land.
When you vary your speed you work different fibers in your muscle, everyone had heard of the fast twitch and slow twitch. When you do accelerations, sprints and interval track work you are working the whole range of muscle fibers.
Hummm, sounds like you can crosstrain and do your primary sport all at the same time, what a concept. A walker uses more core and upper body muscles that running but you still need to make sure you are as well rounded as possible. Classes like pilaties and muscle pump are great for hitting all the upper body muscles if the instructor's routine is a good one. But you can do a routine that works everything with just a little thought as to which muscles are working when you are doing a routine.
Our bodies have muscles on the front, back and sides so you need to make sure you get some twists and bends during your exercise. A good way to do that is to add trunk twists to your warm up and toe touches to your cool down. Remember don't stretch before exercise stretch when you have warmed up, or better yet after your training to cool down.
Thanks for reading.
Rambling Panda
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Finding Me, Am I Out There?
This year has been a time of mixed emotions and mental healing for me, I was officially divorced a month as of yesterday. I have had ups and down but the ups are getting longer and the downs are getting shorter. So to celebrate the one month anniversary I decide to make some changes.
To start with I went through my cabinets and evicted the junk, out went the trail mix, the Pringle's BBQ chips and the peanut butter crackers. When I go to the market again there will be no more large frozen pizzas or Hot Pockets. That phase of finding comfort in food is at an end. I don't need it and I was eating it pretty much because it was there anyway.
I was feeling sleepy last night after I got home from work, I had been up since 5am anyway, so I went to bed at 7pm. I'd been fighting off a cold so the extra sleep helped with that to. I slept through to 5am this morning and woke feeling refreshed, optimistic and without the cold symptoms.
After my morning banana, vitamin, glass of water and cup of coffee I headed off to the mall for a 4 mile walk. My energy level was amazing and I had one of my fastest mall walks ever. It's hard to go fast in the mall because of the turns and the other walkers. I should be able to walk regularly outside again soon, since hopefully the weather is changing.
What does all this have to do with finding me? Well I've been using to much mental energy wondering about where I'm going to find another companion and not enough energy finding out who I am. I've decided to let the princess finding just happen when it will and press forward with being the best me I can be.
Thanks for reading.
Rambling Panda
To start with I went through my cabinets and evicted the junk, out went the trail mix, the Pringle's BBQ chips and the peanut butter crackers. When I go to the market again there will be no more large frozen pizzas or Hot Pockets. That phase of finding comfort in food is at an end. I don't need it and I was eating it pretty much because it was there anyway.
I was feeling sleepy last night after I got home from work, I had been up since 5am anyway, so I went to bed at 7pm. I'd been fighting off a cold so the extra sleep helped with that to. I slept through to 5am this morning and woke feeling refreshed, optimistic and without the cold symptoms.
After my morning banana, vitamin, glass of water and cup of coffee I headed off to the mall for a 4 mile walk. My energy level was amazing and I had one of my fastest mall walks ever. It's hard to go fast in the mall because of the turns and the other walkers. I should be able to walk regularly outside again soon, since hopefully the weather is changing.
What does all this have to do with finding me? Well I've been using to much mental energy wondering about where I'm going to find another companion and not enough energy finding out who I am. I've decided to let the princess finding just happen when it will and press forward with being the best me I can be.
Thanks for reading.
Rambling Panda
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