Fitness Guide for Men | Women | Beginners

A sprained or broken toe is an injury that can easily sideline an athlete or postpone an exerciser’s commitment to a regular workout routine. The pain can radiate from that one single toe through the entire foot, and even spread up into your leg if the sprain or break is severe enough. Because you don’t want a toe getting in the way of your workouts or fitness goals, it is important to grant this injury the attention and TLC it deserves to heal. Unfortunately, it’s also an injury that often just needs time and proper care to get back to normal; doctors will usually just send you home with instructions to rest and commit to the subsequent care plan; here’s how to treat a sprained toe. Ice your injury. As soon as you’ve injured your toe, start a routine of applying ice. For the best treatment, minimize swelling and discomfort by icing the toe at least 4 times throughout the day, for increments of 15 minutes. Put your feet up. Elevating your foot will immedi...

Water retention can make you feel bloated, achy and uncomfortable. Weight gain due to condition can be avoided by adopting certain healthy habits and steering clear of a few that are not. How to get rid of water retention Cut out excess salt. One of the biggest causes is a diet with excess sodium. One way to avoid this scenario is to eat a well-balanced diet that is not overloaded with salty foods. Fast foods, processed meats, and “low fat” microwave meals are all loaded with salt and can cause the body to retain fluids. Clean up your diet. Eating a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, and foods that are not processed can help keep your body in a healthy balance. Include as much fresh food in your diet as you can, and be weary of salt content in packaged and canned foods to keep retention from coming back. Drink more water. Drinking enough fluids can also help you drop extra weight; however, plain old h20 is the only fluid that provides a real benefit in helping you flush o...

Some people steer clear of exercise because they have trouble mustering the motivation, while others avoid it because working out just doesn’t make them feel good; it literally makes them a bit nauseous. Often with nausea during physical activity, there’s something about the routine that just isn’t quite right. Here are some of the most widespread reasons people feel ill during or after a workout, and what can be done to avoid the nausea. 1. Eating too close to your workout. For most people, eating any closer than 2-3 hours before a workout can cause indigestion issues because of the undigested food that you still have in your stomach. Laying on your back with a full stomach can often cause discomfort by itself; when you add in heavy breathing and contracting your core muscles during an exercise, the added pressure can push food and acid back up into your esophagus, causing heartburn and even nausea. 2. Eating too much, or eating food with high fat content. If it...

Fruits and vegetables are essential for a healthy diet, but they can be even more beneficial to wellbeing when their vitamins, phytochemicals, sterols, enzymes, and minerals are in liquid form. With vegetable juicing, the liquid form of ingestion makes the nutritional properties more readily available and accessible for the body’s absorption. Fresh fruit and vegetable juice offers the building blocks necessary to rejuvenate and nourish the cells, improving cell metabolism, and in turn rebuilding the body’s natural defense against chronic fatigue and disease. One of the benefits of juicing is that the vegetables do not need to be broken down any further; all of the enzymes and minerals are readily absorbed into the bloodstream, giving the digestive system a much-deserved rest. Raw fruit and vegetable drinks provide the advantage of unaltered nutrient content; cooked vegetables have a changed chemical composition and are not nearly as nourishing as their unprocessed counterp...

Extra virgin coconut oil (EVCO) has a myriad of health benefits. When eaten, it can help regulate blood sugar, fight heart disease, speed up weight loss, and improve the immune system. Used topically, it can dramatically recover the condition of both skin and hair, preventing wrinkles and making your tresses stronger and shinier. One of the best things about coconut oil benefits is the fact that it eradicates the need for some of the most toxic, potentially harmful and drying “beauty” concoctions out there on the market. Look on the back of any one of your shampoo or conditioner bottles and you will almost without fail find alcohol of some sort or another as one of the main ingredients. How does adding alcohol to a product that is supposed to moisturize hydrate anything? Another common culprit in most beauty products is petroleum- despite being a known carcinogen that potentially causes cancer, it’s in almost everything. Seriously, it’s in almost everything ; t...

With the problem of childhood obesity looming, finding ways to increase our children’s physical activity levels is becoming increasingly important. Even so, lowering our children’s body fat percentages is just one small aspect of the bigger picture. Along with the multitude of health benefits, there are also many inadvertent advantages exercise and physical activity has on learning in the classroom. Exercise and the Brain In a study done by Georgia Health Sciences University, researchers had 11 to 17 year olds who were overweight commit to 20 to 40 minutes of vigorous play everyday such as jump rope, running games, and hula hooping. The activity was done every day after school for three months and the results of their fMRI scans at the end of the test period showed an enhancement in brain activity. The prefrontal cortex increased in activity while an area just behind it showed less activity, which is common for those who are rapidly developing cognitive shills. All of the ...

Everyone should know by now that exercise is essential for good health, but what many people don’t realize is exactly how beneficial it is. Exercise is not only useful for helping you lose weight, maintaining a healthy body weight, and making you feel good but exercise can also help treat many medical conditions - many times more effectively than the medications intended for that specific purpose. If the effectiveness of exercise to treat chronic disease and conditions was considered and exercise was a pill, it would be the most prescribed medication in the world. However, drug companies don’t make any money promoting free and natural solutions that work better than the medications they’re selling, so you are bombarded with the message “take this pill and call me in the morning”. Below is a list of the top ten medical conditions that can be treated with exercise as effectively, or more effectively, than medication. Before you ditch your meds for exercise,...

     Each day we get a lot of really motivating, incredibly encouraging feedback from you guys. We wanted to compile a list of just a small sampling of all of the kind words that you’ve shared with us – the words that have kept us working hard for you guys. We know that this is a long post but we think too much of a good thing will be okay just this once. Fitness Blender Reviews, raves & feedback: Love this site! It's like having a personal trainer at home :O) This is freaking amazing!!! Nicely explained & easy! I can feel my body being healthy again already! Woo hoo! Thanks so much for this!!! Fitness Blender has given me hope for my future health. Hey, nice work!! I'm actually a very fit guy whose schedule is getting tighter and tighter, gotta say your vids are helping a great deal in keeping fit and rock!! All the way down to Mexico! Congrats! I don't think that I can every thank you guys enough for posting soooooo many incredible...

     With the average American working a 40 hour work week, the number of calories that you burn during your working day is no small or dismissible variable in staying fit.      Unfortunately, many of us have sedentary jobs that have us staring into a computer screen while sitting on our bums all day long. I thought it would be fun to apply a rough equation based on the average steps taken in an occupation to work out a guesstimate of how many calories any given specific job burns throughout the day.      All calculations are for an individual weighing 145 pounds. As always, a person's energy expenditure will depend on weight, muscle content, gender, age, and many other factors. How many calories are burned at work? Calories burned in a desk job Examples: Receptionists, counselors, customer service telephone workers, writers, graphic designers, accountants, commercial and public transportation drivers, cashiers, tech sup...

     Everyday we are bombarded by images and messages created by people who want to sell us something that are telling us that we aren’t good enough in one way or another. It’s an endless stream of you aren’t thin enough, rich enough, young enough, you don’t wear the right clothes and you don’t drive the right car, you have wrinkles, your hair needs to be dyed, you need dangerous plastic surgery if you want to look the way you’re “supposed” to and you need to be flawless inside & out if you are to believe that you are worth anything at all.      We thought we’d put a message out there that was a little different. Yeah, it’s cheesy, and yes; we all have legitimate personal things that we can work on to improve ourselves, but positive self talk will get you there faster than negative self talk every time – with a whole lot less misery involved, too.      A lo...

We just got back from a vacation and a question that came flooding in was regarding how we eat while we're on vacation - Do we cheat? Do we maintain the same clean diet as we do at home? We know a lot of you end up wringing your hands about this one so we thought we'd share our outlook on it. There are two things that you need to think about when considering your vacation and your eating habits - first, how often do you get to go on vacation, and second, how long is your vacation? If you're going to be gone for less than a week, there's only a certain amount of damage that you can do - although that's definitely not a license to eat complete junk and be completely sedentary while you're away. If you're gone for more than a week, you're going to need to think about ways to incorporate a good amount of physical activity (like any one of our hundreds of free workout videos) and finding some ways to maintain a relatively clean diet - cooking at least som...

     When it comes to working out what you eat, when, and how much, can all have an effect on how efficient your exercising is.  Fueling your body properly for your next round of physical activity can be a science and this video and article are intended to help clear up some of the questions you have and give you a general understanding of why. Now keep in mind while reading this that our suggestions are based on what would work best for the largest population of typical exercisers. If you are a competitive athlete or have special dietary issues then you might not fall into the population that this is meant for. Pre-workout Snack      Eating before a bout of physical activity falls into two main categories; having access to food, or the ability to eat 2 to 3 hours before or 1 hour or under. This time frame is important specifically because of how your body digests different types of food.  For example the higher the fat content is in...

Here are our best tips for how to enjoy the holidays without gaining weight. Buckle up, it might not be what you expect. Don't count calories. Don't practice portion control. Don't starve yourself the week before, or after a holiday. Don't punish yourself with a restrictive diet or brutal workout video the next day. Don't weigh yourself after a great big holiday cheat day. Don't worry about weight gain. Don't throw up your hands over minor slip ups or even giant whole-day slip ups and declare that the entire rest of the year is a wash because you have failed, that you will instead start your clean eating and exercise habit January 1st. Just like one meal or one workout isn't going to make you fit or lean, a couple of cheat days in the form of holidays is not going to ruin your progress or make you gain weight. What matters most around the holidays is that you realize that the actual holidays only take place around several days. Do your best (practici...

We use a large number of variables to give estimates of "Calorie Burn" for every single Fitness Blender workout. In this video and article, we give you a rundown of the factors that we consider in order to create these figures, which will hopefully help you determine where on our ranges you might fall. How Fitness Blender calculates calories burned ranges Here are a handful of the most influential factors we consider to give our calorie burn ranges. Bodyweight - Our calorie burn ranges typically reflect the calorie burn of someone who weighs between 110-200 lbs. Heavier people will burn a higher number of calories than people who are lighter. If you're lighter than 110 you may burn lower than our estimate range; heavier than 200 and you may burn higher than our estimate range. Workout length - The amount of time spent exercising is an important variable in calorie burn. Additionally, longer workouts may create more of a metabolic disturbance (depending on the intens...

Nearly everyone at some point has been told to "just wait", to see what happens to their bodyweight, metabolism, fitness, flexibility, body fat percentage once they hit a certain age. program of cardio and strength training (like they should be) then the entire aging process is going to be that much "nicer" to you. In reality, weight gain with age is often times due to a decrease in caloric expenditure (less exercise) and/or the wrong kinds of exercise (for example, all cardio and no strength training to help maintain that muscle mass). In a vastly oversimplified, quick explanation; your body operates off of a "use it or lose it" principle. If you don't use your muscles, your muscle mass will diminish, which will in turn slowly lower your metabolism over the years. So if you don't put in the effort to stay active and maintain that muscle mass, it will inevitably become much harder to stay at a healthy body weight. While this initially might se...

Be warned, the content of this video is as random as the title of this article. And yes we really cover all of those topics, including Ryan Gosling. There are a lot of things that bother us about the fitness industry, things that really make us grind our teeth and bite our tongues - and surprisingly we're not talking about florescent leg warmers, unitards or bad workout music. To be honest, we are growing tired of biting said tongues, and have decided that we are no longer going to hold back when it comes to calling out the misleading, misinformed information relating to health, fitness, and body image pushed by some of the less-than-trustworthy media outlets, fitness industry players, and fitness personalities. From now on, part of our mission is calling it like we see it in an attempt to arm people with what they need to live long lives with healthy bodies and minds. Here's the rundown of topics and a summary of what we want you to take away from this video. Fitspiration ...

Living is expensive. It feels like literally everything costs an arm and a leg and healthy eating is just one of the things that tends to fall to the wayside when money is tight, but it doesn't have to. With some savviness in the grocery store, and a little creativity, you can have nutrient dense, delicious tasting eating habits, without having a sky high grocery bill. seems cheaper. Often times those quick, convenient already-prepared meals and snacks are very literally more expensive than healthy whole foods, but that's not even taking into account that a wholesome diet can save you thousands and thousands of dollars on health care bills. A healthy diet can serve as preventative medicine (the best kind of medicine), saving your health and your money in the long run. Here are our food group essentials that are great clean eating staples, as well as a list of ways to make them more affordable. You don't have to like the same ones we do; find ones that make you...

We get this question frequently, but the only person that can really answer it is you - though I’m happy to give you some guidance as well as a get-out-of-jail-free card for workouts on days when you’re feeling extra crampy and fatigued. Technically, you can carry on with your workouts as you usually would while you’re on your period. However, if you’ve got bad cramps and you’re feeling overly tired, it’s okay to either take down the intensity of your training session, or skip the workout altogether - though there are certain types of training that can actually help reduce symptoms.  Working out can help boost your mood, reduce your pain, and help you feel less sluggish; yoga, stretching, Pilates, and really light cardio are all great options - check out the links below for a few suggested workouts for times when you want to be active but you’re not feeling so hot.  27 Minute Stretching, Pilates, Yoga Workout Blend - Relaxing ...

Harvest bowl are the ultimate celebration of produce in seasons. No matter if it is summer, spring, fall or winter, Nature offers a variety of colorful and vibrant veggies to delight our tastebuds and nourish our bodies. This harvest bowl is a beautiful example of this transitional period between winter and spring. We still enjoy earthy and juicy beet, but combine it with cleansing and nutrient-dense greens for optimum energy and nutrition. Check out some of our other recipes:  Healthy packed lunch idea - Quick & easy to-go lunch    Nutrition Powerhouse Beet Veggie Burger Easy Homemade Mushroom Mozzarella Pizza This recipe is so easy you can make it on the go, pack it for lunch or take it out on a weekend picnic. Do not forget to customize it depending on the season (and your fridge leftovers) so that you get a variety of nutrients and enjoy a new flavor each time! Type: Vegan, vegetarian Prep Time: 1 h Cook time: 15 min Serves: 2  Ingredients: 2-3 cups ...

Slow cookers are life savers! It takes no time to throw everything in and forget about it over the next few hours. We frequently use a slow cooker to make homemade beans but there are a ton of different options when it comes to these incredibly convenient kitchen allies. Beef has the property to become quite rubbery when not cooked properly - that’s why slow cooking it is always a good option if you want your meat nice and tender. It doesn’t need searing but you can definitely do this if you like it crusty and brown on the outside. It is a very important step to season the meat well before roasting it. Using flavorful herbs gives it such an amazing aroma. They also season the vegetables and help infuse all of the ingredients together. Herbs like thyme, basil, oregano and sage are also great digestion boosters. Their oils have a soothing effect on the intestines which is important when eating meats that are generally hard to digest.  When it comes to vegetables, fee...