Healthy Side Dishes

Healthy Side Dishes

Looking for a side dish to go with your grilled chicken or fish that is both healthy and easy to prepare; then checkout Saute’ Sweets by Alexia Foods.

This new product can be found in the frozen vegetable section at most local grocery stores.  The bag contains a tasty blend of sweet potatoes, black beans, sweet corn, red bell peppers, and onions.  Just thaw the included pouch of chipotle-infused olive oil and combine with the rest of the ingredients in a skillet; then saute’ for 10 to 12 minute.  The finished product yields a very tasty side dish that delivers 7grams of fiber, 5 grams of protein, 100 percent of the daily vitamin A requirement, 20 percent vitamin C, and 10 percent iron (per serving).     Best of all one serving is only 240 calories, 1.5 grams of saturated fat, and 310 milligrams of sodium.   It has received a “thumbs up” from the Nutrition Action Healthletter. 

Nutrition Facts           

Serving Size 1 cup (177g)

Amount Per Serving

Calories from Fat 100Calories 240

% Daily Values*

Total Fat 11g            17%

 Saturated Fat 1.5g            8%

 Polyunsaturated Fat 0.5g           

 Monounsaturated Fat 9g           

 Trans Fat 0g           

Cholesterol 0mg            0%

Sodium 310mg            13%

Potassium 450mg           

Total Carbohydrate 30g            10%

              Dietary Fiber 7g            28%

              Sugars 10g           

Protein 5g           

Vitamin A 100%                        Vitamin C 20%

Calcium 6%                        Iron 10%

*            Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000 calorie diet. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs.

Newsflash: New Suspension Training Equipment

***News Flash-Fit For All Now has...***

  

 Suspension Training Equipment

In my ongoing quest to provide my clients with the latest and best innovations in exercise technology, I am excited to be adding Suspension Training to my exercise programs come November 2011. 

What is Suspension Training?

In actuality, suspension training has been around for a long time in one form or another.   Think of the rings in Gymnastics as a form of Suspension Training.  The roots have even been traced to exercise manuals dating back to the year 1866.  However, this form of training did not make its way into the mainstream exercise world until just a couple of years ago.  A Navy Seal developed a mechanism utilizing a pair of straps that could be suspended from a strong tree branch or vertical pole.  The Leverage Principle is then utilized to use your own body weight to perform a multitude of exercises to improve strength, mobility, balance, endurance and flexibility. 

The refined version of the system was eventually marketed as the TRX Suspension Training System.  Other versions of this system have since followed.

The real value of this system is that is will give us another tool in our arsenal of training apparatus that excel in providing workouts which facilitate Functional Strength, Constant Core Activation and Balance Training.  

By Functional Strength, I mean exercises that require the human body to act as an entire unit, not just isolating out one specific muscle group (a very powerful concept).  When I talk about Constant Core Activation, I am referring to 360 degrees of trunk involvement (not just simple rectus abdominis crunches).

This allows us to work the body in a way that mimics natural everyday motions we are required to perform (i.e. getting groceries out of the back seat of the car; lift a squirming child); thus making us less susceptible to those nagging little injuries.   The equal value to having a strong core and a central nervous system (which are trained to connect) is that we will become even more proficient when performing the other exercises in our program and  “Keep the Results Coming!”

As we go forward with this new system the possibilities will be endless:  from body sculpting to injury rehab/from sports specific training to weight loss/from cardio conditioning to flexibility.

I have purchased the latest incarnation of this system, so it will be available to all clients regardless of location.

What is good exercise form?

This is one very frequent question that I get asked in the gym as I am training my clients.  When performing a particular exercise and see another person doing the same exercise differently; perhaps in a manner that I had previously cautioned my client against.  My client will then ask –Is their form wrong?  Should we correct them?

I wanted to make this one of my first issues to tackle in the blog since I will be addressing exercise form time to time. 

In the “real world” I prefer to think about exercises in a realm of Risk vs. Benefit—rather than Right vs. Wrong.

Your goal may be to excel in a particular sport, requiring your exercises to mimic the extreme movements of that sport. This in turn may jeopardize you living pain free life years down the road. 

To illustrate this take one of the most popular exercises –The Bench Press.  When I first started training I worked with a trainer who had been a competitive Power Lifter most of his life, he did very well in his sport, thus winning several competitions.   Unfortunately when performing a “Competition Bench Press” the rules requires that the barbell is lowered all the way to the chest. The study of Kinesiology has sense taught us that performing the Bench Press in this fashion places the rotator cuff at risk  (in a future blog we will go into the specifics on this).  Anyway, as a result of years of doing the Bench Press in this fashion (with very heavy weight) this trainer was forced to rely on shoulder injections every three or four months just so he could sleep at night.   At the time I lost track of him he was considering shoulder replacement surgery.

By doing the exercise in this fashion he saw the benefit of winning the competition outweighing the long-term consequences on his health.   Also, he may not have been aware of the long-term consequences because back when he did a lot of this we didn’t have the scientific information that we do today. 

The goals and workout of a Professional Football Player might be very different from workout and goals of a 45-year-old Female.  Anyone who has know a Professional Football Player after his retirement from the game knows that they physically pay a price for the intensity of the sport.  

Problems arise when certain exercises (or the way we perform them) work their way into the mainstream that have a higher risk to benefit ratio than the average exerciser might want to take.

In the future when we critique certain exercises be aware that we are not calling them wrong, but wanting to alert you to a high risk to benefit ratio.   When possible we will show ways to make the exercises safer.

In the end for most of us it is finding a balance between our goals and exercises can help us safely and effectively achieve those goals, thus allowing us to maintain our exercise program well into our senior years. 

New Blog, New Website, New Attitude...

Fit For All Now has officially joined the realm of social media and blogging. We plan to keep you up-to-date on the latest fitness techniques, health related materials, nutrition, diet tricks and plans and a whole lot more. Stay tuned in the coming days, weeks and months as we grow into a new marriage of fitness and social media!

Check out our new site while you are here! Let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing your feedback. The new site has a discussion forum, customer testimonials, links to the locations where we train, live feeds to our Twitter and Facebook accounts and much more - videos to come shortly. Make sure you like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.  We are so excited about all the new changes and what this means to our current customers and future customers.

Thank you again to everyone and have a great evening.