Getting the most out of your workout should be one of the top priorities you want to achieve. Whether you workout for thirty minutes or two hours at a time, you should always have a goal to get the most out of your workout. I personally love to workout 2-3 times a week. At first I was happy to get through my workout program and do all the reps needed to achieve my workout session. But as I got more into perfecting my workout regime, I began to understand that the fitness equipment I was using was very important in maximizing my workout.
These days I workout regularly with a few exercise machines in the gym which really benefit me in so many ways and help to drive improved results. In this article I am going to talk about a few of these exercise machines and how they have helped me in maximizing my workout. Most fitness experts will tell you that when you implement your exercise workout with the right fitness equipment and a nutritious balanced diet, you can really up your game! Lets talk about some of these fitness machines below…

The Treadmill

The first machine I want to talk about is the Treadmill. I personally love these machines as I like to walk and run on a regular basis. If its too cold or even too hot outside, I will hop on my treadmill and exercise on it for a good twenty to thirty minutes at a time. I find that the treadmill really helps to maximize my workout as it helps me to warm up and loosen my muscles. It also benefits me during my workout as its very versatile and allows me to perform different endurance workouts such as incline and decline programs (walking/running up hill and downhill). Modern Treadmills also enable you to monitor your heart rate as you exercise. This helps a lot in determining the pace at which you should exercise.

Staying motivated is an important part whilst exercising. If you are a novice when it comes to working out, you’ll probably have experienced a slop in motivation when it comes to your next workout. I find that using my treadmill, which allows for you to dock your ipod or mp3 player really helps to motivate me as I get to listen to all my favorite tunes as I workout.

The Multipurpose weights Gym

Next up on the list is the multipurpose weights gym. Yet another fantastic piece of equipment to help you build strength to all your upper and lower body muscles. The multipurpose weights gym can only be effective as long as you perform the exercise’s correctly. Failure to do so can increase the likely-hood of you obtaining an injury whilst working out. However, performing exercises correctly on a weights gym can really benefit you in terms of building strength to all of your body parts. Its best to follow the advice of a trained fitness professional to help you develop a plan that will enable you to get the most out of using a weights machine.

The Rowing Machine

The last piece of fitness equipment I want to mention is the rowing machine. The thing I like about the rowing machine is that it helps you to develop your cardiovascular workout as well as toning up your muscles in both upper and lower body. As you begin to row in motion, you will notice all your body parts working together in contributing to the rowing stride. A few multiple reps of the rowing stride and you’ll begin to notice how effective this machine is. If I have limited time on my hands, I will use this machine to warm up my muscles and perform about 70-100 reps. I then proceed with lifting weights soon after.

So to conclude… in my personal experience using a treadmill, weights and rowing machine’s really do help to get the most out of your workout regime. They offer versatility and support to help me achieve my fitness goals.

It turns out that chocolate—especially dark chocolate—reduces body mass, prevents blood clots, improves numeracy, may prevent cancer, and doesn’t ruin your complexion.

A new study suggests that eating chocolate can help you stay thin. Researchers at the University of California-San Diego found that people who frequently eat chocolate have lower body-mass indexes than people who don’t. Other evidence indicates that chocolate can also ward off strokes, heart attacks, and diabetes. So here are 11 reasons to indulge in some s’mores this summer (no word yet on the health benefits of marshmallows) …

1. Chocolate decreases stroke risk

A Swedish study found that eating more than 45 grams of chocolate per week—about two bars worth—led to a 20 percent decrease in stroke risk among women. Chocolate contains flavonoids, whose antioxidant properties help fight strokes, the study’s author, Susanna Larsson, told HealthDay.

2. Chocolate reduces the likelihood of a heart attack

Other studies show that eating chocolate prevents blood clots, which in turn reduces the risk of heart attacks. Blood platelets clump together more slowly in chocolate eaters, the studies say.

3. Chocolate protects against blood inflammation

Eat one Hershey’s dark chocolate bar per week, and your risk of heart disease will decrease, a 2008 study found. About 6.7 grams of dark chocolate per day keeps the blood inflammation-inducing proteins away. Just like your mother always told you.

4. Chocolate helps with math

British psychologists found that flavanols (a class of flavonoids, which are found in chocolate) helped people with their mental math. Study subjects had an easier time counting backwards from a randomly-generated number between 800 and 999 after drinking a cup of hot chocolate than they did without the cocoa. “The findings suggest students who binge on chocolate when revising for exams may gain a real benefit from doing so,” the British Telegraph reported.

5. Chocolate may prevent cancer

Cocoa contains a compound called pentameric procyanidin, or pentamer, which disrupts cancer cells’ ability to spread. When researchers from the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University treated cancer cells with pentamer back in 2005, the proteins necessary for cancer growth were suppressed and the cells stopped dividing.

6. Chocolate reduces the risk of diabetes

The Italians know a thing or two about good eating.And a small study from the University of L’Aquila, in Italy, found that eating chocolate increases insulin sensitivity, which reduces the risk of diabetes.

7. Chocolate is good for your skin

“Some people say that I eat too many chocolate bars …” Remember that acne infomercial from the 90s? No? Well, it doesn’t matter. Not only does it not cause breakouts, it’s actually good for your skin! (Well, dark chocolate at least.) Flavonoids found in dark chocolate protect women’s skin from the sun’s UV rays, according to German scientists. But that doesn’t mean you can skip the sunscreen.

8. Chocolate can control coughs

The most delicious way to kick your cough, apparently, is chocolate. One of the sweet’s chemical components, theobromine, seems to reduce the activity of the vagus nerve, the part of the brain that triggers coughing fits. Scientists are even working on a cough-quelling drug that uses theobromine in place of codeine—a narcotic common in cough medicine.

9. Chocolate improves blood flow

In 2008 Harvard scientists forced test subjects to undergo “two weeks of enhanced chocolate intake.” A fortnight of chocolate face-stuffing, they found, sped up blood flow through their subject’s middle cerebral arteries. In other words, more chocolate means more blood to your brain.

10. Chocolate strengthens your brain

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University found that dark chocolate shields cells in your brain, and accordingly protects it from damage caused by stroke. Epicatechin, a compound found in chocolate, significantly reduced the brain damage in mice who suffered strokes, they found. Scientists at California’s Salk Institute also found that epicatechin improved mice’s memories.

11. Chocolate makes you live longer

Jeanne Louise Calment lived to the age of 122—the oldest anyone has ever lived. She ate two and a half pounds of dark chocolate per week. Harvard researchers found that eating chocolate actually adds two years to your life expectancy.

But don’t just start binging on chocolate! Most of the chocolate you buy in the grocery store is heavily processed, which means that it has lost many of its healthy chemicals. And some of the research supporting chocolate’s healthy characteristics was paid for by chocolate manufacturers.

Original post-The Daily Beast

They say that some people look at a glass as half-empty and others see it as half-full. Well, if there is calorie-laden soda in the glass, chances are it’d be better for someone to view it as empty and save themselves the sugar overload. Thanks to Japanese researchers and some augmented reality ingenuity, it may be possible in the not-too-distant future to change someone’s perception of how much and what type of food they’re eating.

The “diet devices” and results of using them are described in an article published in The Province, a Canadian paper:

On one device goggle-mounted cameras send images to a computer, which magnifies the apparent size of the cookie in the image it displays to the wearer while keeping his hand the same size, making the snack appear larger than it actually is.

In experiments, volunteers consumed nearly 10 per cent less when the biscuits they were eating appeared 50 per cent bigger.

They ate 15 per cent more when cookies were manipulated to look two-thirds of their real size.

In another project, Hirose’s team developed a “meta cookie”, where the headgear uses scent bottles and visual trickery to fool the wearer into thinking the snack they are eating is anything but a plain biscuit.

Users can set the device to their favourite taste so they think they are eating a chocolate or strawberry-flavoured cookie.

Hirose says experiments so far have shown 80 per cent of subjects are fooled.

A brief look at the lab’s website gives provides additional insight into their augmented reality projects, which range from a lifelog to a wearable olfactory display. Though there are no plans at present to commercialize these devices, we hope that they, or similar ideas, come to fruition so that dieters can have their cake, but not necessarily eat it too.

by Shiv Galani
Source: http://medgadget.com/2012/06/the-augmented-reality-diet.html

Kids Need Their Morning Meal
While adults need to eat breakfast each day to perform their best, kids need it even more. Their growing bodies and developing brains rely heavily on the regular intake of food. When kids skip breakfast, they can end up going for as long as eighteen hours without food, and this period of semistarvation can create a lot of physical, intellectual, and behavioral problems for them.

A Good Investment
If you and your kids regularly skip breakfast in the interest of saving time or getting a few more minutes of sleep, remember that eating a wholesome, nutritious morning meal will probably save you time in the long run. By recharging your brain and your body, you’ll be more efficient in just about everything you do. Interestingly, studies show that kids who skip breakfast are tardy and absent from school more often than children who eat breakfast on a regular basis. Preparing a good breakfast can be as quick and easy as splashing some milk over cereal. Time invested in breakfast is much more valuable than the few extra minutes of sleep you might get by bypassing the morning meal. If you and your kids seem unable to make time for breakfast, consider enrolling your children in a school breakfast program, if possible, or pack a breakfast brown-bag the night before so that you and your kids can eat on the way to school and work.

Break the Fast to Shed the Pounds
Some people skip breakfast in an effort to lose weight, but the practice is more likely to cause weight gain than weight loss. Skipping breakfast is strongly linked to the development of obesity. Studies show that overweight and obese children, adolescents, and adults are less likely to break the fast each morning than their thinner counterparts.

According to research, skipping meals, especially breakfast, can actually make weight control more difficult. Breakfast skippers tend to eat more food than usual at the next meal or nibble on high-calorie snacks to stave off hunger. Several studies suggest that people tend to accumulate more body fat when they eat fewer, larger meals than when they eat the same number of calories in smaller, more frequent meals. To teens, especially teenage girls, skipping breakfast may seem like a perfectly logical way to cut down on calories and lose weight. It’s important for moms to educate their kids about the importance of the morning meal and the role it plays in maintaining good health and preventing obesity.

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