The exercise band has been slowly building its reputation as an efficient fitness tool. Although they’ve had a slow start and are yet to catch up in popularity with other fitness devices such as dumbbells and exercise balls, more and more fitness experts are now vouching for the efficacy of the exercise band in toning muscles and developing balance.

The Challenges

Even with its proven effectiveness, many people still do not know how to use the exercise bands. While it is easy to determine what to do with the dumbbells the moment you get hold of them, you would need a little more analysis to figure out how to use the bands.

Some fitness enthusiasts who have tried the exercise bands also claim to feel less tension as compared to the tension felt when using dumbbells. This could be attributed to the fact that it is easier to know the intensity of the workout when you have numbers to go with what you’re lifting. The absence of these numbers in elastic bands makes it difficult to determine this intensity.

Overcoming the Challenges

Not knowing how to use the bands does not automatically mean that it is not effective. There are several training videos to help you get the full benefits of exercise bands. And when you have learned the correct tricks, you would realize that it gives you the same level of tension as when using other fitness tools.

Exercise bands now come in different types and tension level enabling you to vary your bands to work out different muscle groups. It is important to identify the needs of every muscle group that you want toned. This will be the starting point for your fitness plan. For beginners, it is best to start with the basic long tube. Once you get the hang of it, you can purchase other band types for variety.

Exercise bands also allow you to modify your exercise programs. You do not have to mainly rely on the force of gravity to give you resistance. You can attach the bands to the stairs or a steady pole to target the muscles in the arms and legs.

Aside from that, exercise bands offer convenience when traveling. You can take your favorite fitness device anywhere you want without much hassle, as the exercise band is compact and light. You may even just opt to buy a new one instead since the bands are so much cheaper than most fitness tools.

The exercise band has already established its significance as a tool for injury prevention and rehabilitation, and while it still needs to keep up with the popularity of its counterparts, it is consistently gaining more and more satisfied users for strength training.

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By Shaun T, creator of Get Real with Shaun T

Oh sure, everyone always says to me, “Shaun, I swear, I eat very healthily. I have a clean diet.” But when people are experiencing “stubborn pounds” that won’t budge off their bodies, I see uncertainty and fear in their eyes when I say, “I bet it’s a common eating habit that is undermining your hard work.”

Nutrition Label Oh yeah. It’s natural for us to be less than honest with ourselves about where we’re cheating on our nutritional plans. We work out and have the best of intentions for our daily meals, but we end up falling short of our goals for having a balanced nutritional plan for various reasons. Some of the most common pitfalls can be avoided simply by being aware of them.

Walking, Good Food, Journal, and Small Portions

1. Stress eating. Hey, I readily admit that food is comforting—especially comfort food. You know, the mac and cheese; the meatloaf and buttery mashed potatoes; an entire pint of butter pecan ice cream . . . enough said. But there are so many better ways to beat stress than by eating yourself into a stupor.

   Walking on the Beach – Do this instead: My favorite thing to do is to get out and just take a walk. Focus on your body and forget the snacks, and get some air deep into your lungs, clear your head, feel your blood pumping, and stretch your legs out. It won’t take but a few minutes for you to reap big benefits from taking a brisk walk . . . away from the vending machine. Or if it’s raining, put on some great music and dance—that works too! You can get plenty of this done with Hip Hop Abs or my Dance Party Series.

2. Grazing. Many people have a complete lack of structure to their daily meals—they actually never stop nibbling throughout the day—from bits of bagels and bites of donuts in the morning all the way through to chips in front of the TV for late-night channel surfing. Grazers have absolutely no set meal times, and end up shutting down their bodies’ natural calorie-burning cycles through the constant onslaught of fat and calories.

   Eating Fruit – Do this instead: Of course, avoid the bad stuff. Instead of vending-machine junk and food with a low nutritional value, pack healthy snacks for nibbling. And make time for balanced meals that will satisfy your appetite so you won’t be reaching for whatever’s near. See the action plan for #3.

3. Unconscious eating. Eating without paying attention to what you’re doing, or without even realizing that you’re consuming calories.

   Writing in Journal – Do this instead: Keeping a food journal is the best way I know to determine whether you have unconscious-eating tendencies. One of my clients confessed that while keeping her journal, she would catch herself working at her desk and suddenly realize that she needed to jot down the cookie she’d just eaten at a coworker’s desk. They’d offered her a homemade cookie, and she’d eaten it without even thinking about it—much less factoring it into her daily planned food intake. Cha-CHING! Those 200 sweet calories needed to be added to her daily tally in her food journal to get an accurate picture of what she was eating.

4. Double portions. It’s not just restaurants that are offering us bigger portions to show us the value of their meals; it’s loved ones and friends and ourselves who proudly serve up much more than our bodies need for fuel at mealtime—on a regular basis. It’s because we think we’re showing love, or are being shown love, through food. We’d also feel stingy if we were to serve the plate with less on it. The sad fact is that “normal” portions in the U.S. aren’t just a fraction more food than needed for having a balanced meal—they’re like double, which is in excess of what your body requires, and WAY more than you can burn through your daily workout!

   Small Portions – Do this instead: Ask yourself, “Do 20 bites of a huge sandwich really taste that much better than 10?” How do those 10 extra bites taste when you know you can’t burn them off that day and at least half that sandwich is going to turn into those “stubborn” pounds? Stick with sane portions; listen to your body.

Yes, these are four common pitfalls. They’re all too common—but that doesn’t make them any less devastating to our fitness results and our ultimate health goals (and don’t forget that it can also be discouraging to the mental image you have of where you want to be). Be aware of where you might be defeating yourself, and take some time to form a personal plan to help you avoid these pitfalls on a daily basis.

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Exercise routines are normally made more challenging and intense by adding resistance. For cardio routines such as dance aerobics and kickboxing, you will normally get a better workout by holding small dumbbells in each hand. This could be a bit bulky, though. A good alternative is to use weighted workout gloves.

Weighted workout gloves are gloves that go over the hand and are strapped around the wrist. Small weights are distributed evenly in the gloves. A pair of gloves may have as little as 1 lb worth of weights to as much as 6 lbs.

The Intensity They Bring

You will find the weighted workout gloves useful if you want to amp up your cardio routines. You can strap them on when you go jogging, walking or running. The moves in non-contact shadow boxing and kickboxing will become more intense with these additional weights on your hands. They are also great when worn during dance aerobics and step aerobics, as well as for cross training.

Aside from cardio routines, the gloves can also be used for toning exercises, especially for beginners. Aside from the extra resistance, having the weights distributed evenly and actually wearing them allow you to keep your balance more easily while working out.

Getting Your First Pair

When shopping around for a pair of weighted gloves, the first thing to check will be the kind of fabric used. Go for a more lightweight fabric so that your skin can breathe. Make sure that the fabric is easily washable. Remember, you will be wearing them close to your skin and you will most probably need to wash them after each use. You will also want to check whether the fabric is something that is suited to your particular skin type.

Next, check the weights. Some gloves will have the weights sewn in, while others will allow you to remove the weights. Removable weights will give you the option to increase or decrease the weights depending on how intense you want your workout to be, so it might be more practical to get gloves that allow you to do that.

Check the seams that hold the gloves together. They should be tight, signifying strong construction. The last thing you will want is to have a pair of weighted gloves that go apart during a workout.

If you want that extra power for your workout without having to carry cumbersome weights, check weighted workout gloves and see how it can be great for your program.

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By Steve Edwards

Fat Darth VaderWe at Beachbody are at war against the most formidable opponent the United States has ever faced: obesity. It’s killing more people a month than our two other more high-profile combatants—terror and drugs—have killed this decade. Obesity is the Darth Vader of all the dangers we’ll face in our lifetimes. Smoking once ruled our universe, but a new master has taken over the dark side. Here, in the final installment of our latest trilogy on obesity, we offer a new hope of getting the Force back on our side.

As usual, we begin in what appear to be ever-darkening times. Just last week, a report was released showing that an obese 10-year-old kid may have the arteries of a 45-year-old. Each time we offer a solution, the obesity empire rebuffs our efforts. Earlier this year, we released Shaun T’s Fit Kids® Club. Vader laughed as our infant mortality rate skyrocketed compared to the rest of the world. We offered Kathy Smith’s Project:YOU! Type 2 and then saw the number of people who either are pre-diabetic or are already diagnosed with type 2 diabetes skyrocket to nearly a third of our population.

Earlier this month, we offered 10 solutions to the epidemic. Last week, we’re told that over half our kids are projected to be obese within a generation. Admittedly, things look bleak for the rebellion. But read on and you’ll see that we don’t need a Jedi to guide us in this war. The Force is very powerful. And it’s controlled by us.

Junk Food Pyramid

In the film Idiocracy, we’re offered a glimpse at a possible future should we continue to follow our current patterns of regression. In the film, society has devolved into an anti-intellectual state completely controlled by corporate advertising interests. We’re at a crossroads-we’re watering our plants with a version of Gatorade, the only beverage we consume, and our plants will no longer grow. The corporate-controlled Food and Drug Administration’s food pyramid features nothing but fast food, sports drinks, and mind-altering legal substances: alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco. And while it’s an over-the-top comedy, one can’t wonder whether the most unbelievable thing in the movie is that it’s set 500 years in the future. At the rate we’re going, we could be living—or at least eating—this way before the end of this millennium.

Obese Kid Case in point: the latest studies on obese children. At the American Heart Association’s conference last week, two studies, done independently in different countries, showed that obese children had a “vascular age about 30 years older than their actual age.” This, of course, greatly increases their chances for heart disease. So much so, in fact, that the American Academy for Pediatrics is now recommending cholesterol-lowering drugs for some children. “As the old saying goes, you’re as old as your arteries are,” said Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of Children’s Hospital in Kansas City, to the Associated Press. “This is a wake-up call.”

But the wake-up call needs to ring louder. How we’ve become so unconcerned with our health isn’t a mystery. We’ve simply followed marketing trends, which have seen junky foods and other easily consumable items become more and more a mainstay in our diets. Gas stations and convenience stores are filled with virtually nothing but junk food and drug-filled beverages. Supermarkets are only slightly better, placing their healthy items on the fringes and filling the middle aisles with premade medleys of genetically modified corn and soy. The companies that have become successful marketing this said junk now dominate our airwaves to the point where a person dropped into an American city could easily assume that we, indeed, do live primarily on fast food, sports drinks, and mind-altering legal substances.

Our next wartime strategy is going to be to consolidate our resources and simplify. If society’s attention span is dwindling, we’ll offer a simple three-point plan to unify our rebellion. With or without the help of Obi Wan, this might be our only hope.

1. Kids Bicycling – Exercise. Somehow, someway, we need to find a way to exercise more. Exercise levels have fallen dramatically over the last 30 years, and our health has gone along with it. Nothing has a greater effect on our health than exercise. It’s only through exercise that our bodies produce hormones at healthy levels. And if we exercise enough, it even combats an unhealthy diet.

   Unfortunately, we’re doing a lot less instead of more—especially as children. It’s estimated that children get somewhere between 20 percent and 25 percent less exercise than they did in the 1970s. Oddly enough, this decline is almost inverse to the rise of obesity rates among the same group.

   The solution to this might be as easy as turning off the TV. The American Journal of Public Health published a survey stating that 59 percent of children watched between 2 and 4 hours of TV and an additional 22 percent watched 5 or more hours per day—which didn’t include hours in front of the computer. This is more TV than any kid I grew up with was allowed to watch. We didn’t watch this much TV in a week. Children are easily bored. Take away their TV (and computer games), and there’s a pretty good chance they’ll end up doing something active.

2. No Soda – Eliminate soft drinks (including “energy” and sports drinks). It’s estimated that American teenagers are getting around 15 percent of their total calories from soft drinks. Consider that this 15 percent contains nary a useful calorie, and you can see how these drinks can be problematic.

   We don’t need any sugar in our diets, but we get a lot of it. When we find sugars in nature, they’re generally wrapped around other nutrients that minimize their negative effects and actuate their positive effects. In candy and, especially, beverages, sugar’s negative effects are enhanced by the formulations because they are designed to perform more like drugs than nutrients. This effect, commonly known as a sugar rush, does a lot more harm than when we experience a sugar crash. This rush and crash effect is one of the conditions that leads to type 2 diabetes—the world’s fastest-growing illness.

   Energy and sports drinks can be effective for sports. Unfortunately, they are rarely used for these activities anymore. In fact, they are commonly used for exactly the opposite—to give us an artificial high that we once induced by actually exercising.

3. Person VotingEffect change in local government. Our ancestors went through a lot of trouble to set up a government under that moniker “of the people, for the people, and by the people.” We’ve let their hard work fall by the wayside as we’ve become victims of the new American cry “of the corporation, by the lobbyist, and for the shareholders.” But corporations, in reality, still work for us. And making changes is less daunting than it seems.

When deregulation began in earnest back in the late 1960s, the United States sat among the top of the statistical world in education, health care, infant mortality rates, and life expectancy. We’ve been steadily declining. In all of those categories, we now rate near the bottom of what we refer to as “first-world” countries. This has happened while the top 1 percent of our country has become exceedingly rich and our middle class has all but disappeared. Our society became lazy and complacent about our world status. Now our statistical leadership among modern nations has been relegated to the obesity epidemic.

Fortunately, our government still reacts to our bidding. Individuals can and do effect change in the way we do business. We have many examples of Beachbody members who have promoted effective change on the health of their local communities. Your school’s lunch program, the effectiveness of that school’s recess periods and afterschool recreation opp
ortunities, and even the type of foods carried by your local market are all controlled by you.

Our government wasn’t set up to tell us what to do. It was set up for us to tell it what we want. By accepting policies and reacting to marketing schemes that lower our quality of life, we’ve been acquiescing to a doctrine that doesn’t have our health in mind. And all we really need to do to change it is to realize we’ve been duped and demand something different.

Farmers’ Market – You don’t need to run for office to effect change. Steps as simple as taking interest in what your local market sells, that your community offers a farmers’ market, that your schools serve decent food, that recess is not only offered in school but enforced are all simple steps that lead to real results.

Because the obesity epidemic isn’t a plague, it doesn’t require doctors, politicians, or Jedi Knights to change it. It only requires simple alterations that anyone can make to his or her everyday life. Anyone can eat better, exercise more, lose weight, and get healthy. And anyone can inspire others to do the same. And, like the Force, when our collective individual minds change, we effect change across the world.

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