Fitness Guide for Men | Women | Beginners

     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...