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In my last post, I reviewed the importance of both back strengthening exercises and stretching as a method for staying mobile and preventing injury. Since I wrote the post, I’ve been wondering how I could offer more resources to help you incorporate more back exercises into your regular workout routine.

Today I found a great answer. I came across a fantastic YouTube video that demonstrates some excellent back & core strengthening exercises that will fit into any weight training workout.

The video is done by a personal trainer and offers a good explanation of about ten exercises. It’s about 8 minutes long and the exercises are demonstrated in quick succession. If you are serious about performing some of these exercises, you may want to take a quick set of notes or watch it a few times in a row.

Toward the end of the video, he demonstrates some exercises that should be excluded from your back routine for 4-6 weeks. I am not really sure of his reason for avoiding these exercises, but if you decide to follow his recommendations exactly, let me know about your results.
Follow this link to watch the back strengthening video.

Including two or even three different exercises everyday or every other day along with two or three stretches is something I highly recommend, especially if you fall into one of the following categories:

• You are over 21 years old.
• You have had back pain at any time during your life.
• You regularly participate in sports that require jumping, cutting, running, or sprinting.
• You have a job that requires a lot of sitting.
• You perform heavy lifting on a regular basis.

So that basically includes 95% of the people living in the United States! I’m serious, take notes on a few of these exercises and do them! You’ll thank me…If you already do your exercises and still have chronic back pain, you might want to check out this website I found that deals with rehabilitation and natural pain management.

Tags: back strengthening exercises, core strengthening exercises

Back strengthening exercises, specifically lower back strengthening exercises, are an important part of any well balanced workout routine. For me, even though I know it’s important, I find it very easy to skip the strengthening and stretching of the lower back. The exercises are kind of boring, I don’t get overly fatigued, and it takes time away from other fun exercises like running, jumping rope, or lifting weights.

The only way I can motivate myself to make an effort to perform lower back strengthening and stretching on a regular basis is to remind myself that it helps prevent fluke injuries and develops my body strength in a balanced way. It helps me stay motivated enough to do the exercises at least once per week.

In case you needed some direction on which exercises to do or how to do them, I found two reference articles you can use as guides to incorporating lower back exercises into your routine. The first article demonstrates back strengthening exercises with the use of an exercise ball. The second article shows lower back stretches and strengthening moves you can do at home, without any equipment.

I also wanted to give you some of my strategies for incorporating these exercises into your regular workout.

Strategies
*One of my strategies for including lower back exercises in my routine is to perform the exercises between sets.

*Rotate between lower back and core exercises to keep your heart rate elevated during your workout.

*Lower Back exercises and stretching at the end of my workout as a cool-down.

In addition to preventing injuries, improving strength and flexibility of abdominal and back muscles helps to stabilize the spine and make it easier to maintain correct posture. Five or ten minutes a week of invested time can prevent weeks of slow recovery and continual pain (I know about this very well). Instead of ignoring the importance of these exercises, just give in and do them! You’ll thank me!

Oh ya…If you do your exercises and still have chronic back pain, you might want to check out this website I found that deals with rehabilitation and natural pain management.

Tags: back strengthening exercises

Health & Fitness products & services make up what is becoming a trillion dollar industry. Part of the reason for that is because people in our country are experiencing a real issue with weight control, body image, and obesity related diseases.

Weight loss has even become a popular subject for television shows, talk shows, and news stories. In America, most of us (unless living in extreme conditions of poverty or debilitating illness) have all the information and every resource we could possibly ever need to lose weight. My Fitness Pal is another one of these resources, it’s a free online calorie counter that gives you the calories contained in all different types of foods, the calories you need for your body type, and the calories you burn during various exercise routines. So…will this neat tool actually help you reach your goals? Let’s do a quick review of what you’ll get.

Learn the Caloric Value of Lots of different foods.
It is very helpful to know the various calories contained in different foods and this is a great free tool to improve your knowledge in this area. As your knowledge grows, you’ll understand that counting calories is not for everyone and it might not be for you, using this website makes it easy. They give you a daily calendar that allows you to enter the types of food you’ve eaten for each meal. It keeps a running tally of your calories for the day.

Daily Activity Log and Calories Burned.
In addition to learning the caloric values of various foods, you’ll be able to enter your daily activities and meals into the same database. This is helpful because it allows you to understand calories in vs. calories out (the only way to actually lose weight).

Goal Setting Calculations
This part of the site was a little disappointing in my opinion. When you first sign up, you are asked your height, goal weight, and etc. I signed up and put my goal weight as 105 lbs. just to see what would happen. At 5’7”, 105lbs is an extreme goal. Well, the software just gave me how many calories I should eat today and sent me on my way, saying I would lose 5 lbs by August 5th.

Is This The Answer?
Not exactly, but I can say I feel this site is valuable in many ways. You can use it as an educational tool to learn more about calories, nutrition, and activity levels. But be aware that this type of program can get tedious. Logging in and entering all that information takes dedication and time (nothing wrong with that) but can get really old after a while.

This website is fully automated, but it does have a forum for support. In the forum you can interact with other dieters on your path to success. I think the forum is a good idea; it’s so much easier to reach your goals when you are working together with another person on the same path.

How Does this Help Me Reach My Goals?
This website will help you to understand the calories in/calories out part of weight loss, which is an important part. The entire Weight Watchers program is based on that alone. You will not however be using the best calculations for BMR (basal metabolic rate), ideal weight, or body fat %. In fact, nothing in what I saw mentions body fat %, which is indicated as a factor in many degenerative diseases (and it also makes a difference in what you look like at a certain weight).

This is a basic tool and everyone could learn something by using it. To actually lose weight, you’ll need dedication and commitment to actually using the software on a regular basis.

This review was sponsored by MyFitnessPal.com