Category: Weight Loss Exercise

If you want to make changes in your life you need to look at two places, where you are today and where you want to be in the future. The trouble with these two questions is that they are far too wide ranging, are these really fair questions or is there an easy way to break them down.

I have asked this question of myself many times because it seems that some people make great strides in changing their life and some people seem to be stuck in a rut for years at a time.

I myself have occasionally made big changes but my life but just like most people these changes are a bit more random than I would like.

So what is the secret to making changes in your life that are lasting and are what you really want? What do you really want?

Well a little while ago it dawned on me, the real secret is to make the small decisions in all parts of your life and then incorporate those changes.

What Do You Want In The Future?

Look through your day and see what you want to get out of it. Go through your weekend and see what you want to get out of it. Go through your workday and see what you want to get out of it.

Take a look at your life in general today. How does it look? What are you happy with? What are you disappointed about. Take a day and write these things down (You didn’t think nirvana was a 10 minute process did you?).

Let’s say that you now have a broad idea of what you would like to keep and what you would like to change in your life. This is a very broad list so do not get hung up on it. The list is a general direction that we can look at and then apply then next step to try to put our life into alignment.

A Lot Of Little Questions

The next process is 100 questions or so that you need to ask yourself in a deliberate manner from the moment you wake up in the morning until the moment you go to sleep at night. Some of these questions you ask too often and some of these questions you never ask yourself.

This is the stuff of your life and once you question it you can make 100 little changes and your life will never be the same

Here Is The Question List

Morning

• What time did you get up?
• Should you get up earlier or later?
• When you woke up what did you think, and I mean the very first though? Positive or negative?
• What did you do next? Shower? Eat? Exercise?
• What do you want to do?
• Get in shape?
• Sleep more?
• Organize before work?
• How long is the time that you take to get from bed to leaving for work?
• Would you like some relaxing time?
• Do you get too much relaxing time?
• Do you eat at home?
• Do you read the paper?
• Watch TV?
• Listen to the radio?

Going to work

• After leaving for work do you stop to eat?
• Do you go to a restaurant for breakfast?
• Do you have enough time to get to work?
• How do you get to work?
• Do you take a bus?
• Do you drive?
• Do you walk?
• Do you carpool?
• Do you go to the home office/ desk and work?
• Once you get to work do you plan your morning?
• Surf the net?
• Have a meltdown because everything hits you at once?
• Look at email?
• When you get into work do you eat breakfast?
• Do you drink coffee?
• Do you have a donut or Danish?

The Workday

• As you go through your day at work do you get hit with tasks or do you create your schedule?
• Do you go to meetings or set meetings?
• Do you allocate your time or do you just get hit with whatever is someones bad planning?
• Lunchtime hits, do you go out for lunch?
• Did you bring lunch?
• What kind of food do you eat?
• Do you have lunch at your desk?
• Lunch with others?
• How long is lunch, 30 minutes? An hour? 2 hours?

After Work

• After you get off work do you go straight home?
• Out for drinks?
• Out to a park?
• Out for dinner?
• Stay at the office until you are too tired to work?

Evening Schedule

• In the evening do you stay home to watch TV?
• Do you go out to the bar?
• Do you go to a hockey or baseball game?
• Do you rent a movie?
• Do you have friends over?
• Do you go over to other peoples homes to visit?
• Do you go to a gym or fitness center?
• At night do you read a book?
• Watch TV some more?
• Fall asleep watching the tube in bed?

Sleep and rest

• Now that the day is over do you sleep 6 hours, 8 hours, 10 hours?
• Do you get enough sleep?
• Do you pack the sleep in on the weekends and sacrifice weekday sleep?

Was that a lot of questions or what? Actually that is only about 63 questions so you could ask a lot more if you would like. Now in answering all of those questions do you think that you have a better method of changing than just using an affirmation of  “I want to lose ” or thinking about exercising? This method should really give you a better set of ways in which change can be made

Time Is On Your Side

I think that realistically we all have about 16 hours of time between the time we wake up and the time that we go to sleep and even if you go to work for 8 or 10 hours a day this still leaves a lot of time that we have a lot of control over. These are just all of the questions for a weekday. You can probably do the same for the weekends, or planning vacations, or changing jobs to something that you want to do more.

The essential thing is that if you are not happy with the answer to anything in your life then ask yourself more and smaller one or all of the questions what do you do about it? You have the opportunity to change any part of your life and just by asking a lot of small questions you will make those big changes that you want to make but do not know how.

I am sure that this process is the easiest way towards change. If you want to lose ask all those eating questions and exercise questions and research a good answer. If you are single and want to change that ask all the questions of the things that you do yourself and get others involved in them. If you want to take more control of your life ask all of those questions for work and home that you let others dictate and answer them the way that you want.

The real key to all this is to go to those first few questions that I said to ask about your life and what you want. The really broad questions are a direction and get hints from all of these little questions as to what you do next to make that big thing happen.

After 40 years of living a happy as well as unhappy life I wish someone had told me to ask as many of these small questions as I have laid out here. I hope that all these little things do in fact change you life into the type of life that you are looking for.

Papaya is a great tasting fruit that is common around the world but not so much in North America. It’s a shame because the taste and texture of Papaya is great but the health benefits are also fantastic for all of us.

Papaya Vitamins and Antioxidants

A serving of Papaya has 14% of our daily requirement of Folate (Vitamin B9)and some other B vitamins, as well as 11% of our Potassium.

Papayas also contain healthy antioxidants called carotenoids that are better absorbed than other sources into our body. They are especially high in a type of carotenoid called lycopene. Lycopene is shown to be good for our eyes, bones, brain, and a healthy heart.

Benefits of Papaya

Cancer Help – When we talk about gut health, Papayas Lyocpene has been shown to reduce cancer cells in the stomach as well as help heal from cancer treatments.

Eye Health – There are two things in the Papaya that help eyes. Lycopene of course as stated earlier but also Zeaxanthin which has been shown to reduce macular degeneration and protecting the eyes

Tooth Aches – If you can find the root of a papaya plant you can make a  make a paste and massage it on your teeth and gums for few minutes it will stop that sharp pain. Inner bark of a papaya can also be used as an alternative to roots.

Weight Loss – I have found a Papaya based diet that involves even the eating of the seeds to help to detoxify and lose weight – not sure how well this works as I have not tried it myself at all

Bone Health – The Vitamin K in Papaya is great for bone health and helps with Calcium absorption which is critical for our bones staying strong as we age.

Nice Shiny Hair – You have probably seen Papaya based shampoo before and that is because not only does it smell great but also the Vitamin A in it is a nutrient required for sebum production in the scalp, which keeps hair moisturized

Digestion – There is an enzyme in Papayas called papain that aids digestion. Often when people want to improve their digestion they will take some kind of digestive enzymes, however these are built right into this fruit

Skin care – This is a bit different. When you rub Papaya on a burn the papain in it will help to heal the burn. Some hospitals have even found this enzyme helpful for bedsores and other skin irritations.

Papaya Recipes

I found this great tasting Papaya recipe on YouTube for a Thai Papaya salad

Also there is also a lot of other ways to prepare papayas. Here are a bunch of Papaya recipes at the Food Network

 

I mentioned that my son was my new workout partner in another article and I also mentioned that he got injured just a few weeks after we started working out and the he needed to take a week off before coming back to workout.

The injury my son has was a pulled muscle in his back and it is an issue that lots of people run into.

Heres what happened.

Jaiden was using a full machine type squat. So this is a squat in a rack where the weight will go straight up and down so that you don’t have to worry about balance. Using a very low weight he did a set, had a bit of tightness in his back, and then on the next set something pulled and he had to stop.

As you can imagine, when I got home with Jaiden my wife was pretty mad. Immediately blamed me for letting him do too much weight, but really something seemed strange to me. Jaiden is careful with form and the weight he was using to squat was low with the reps isolated by the machine and speed controlled by him.

Doctor and Referral to Physio

We went to the doctor, he knew what the problem was right away with spasming muscles on one side in the lower back and sent us to Physio.

Jaiden and I went to Physio which was probably about 5 days after the injury. It was a real wake up call as to how we treated form, core, and the levers of our joints.

When you do leg press or squats you tend to push with your quads and try and keep you back straight. This is really important as a hunched back doing squats can really cause a lot of stress on the back that it can’t handle.

What we really learned from our super Physio guy is to instead look at the muscles that are involved with the hinge points of the exercise.

As you can see from the image below, the hinge in your hips is where you are doing the work of the squat, therefore it is not just the quadriceps on the front of the let that are involved but also the Glutes (your butt) that have to do most of the work.

 

The trouble with relying on the glutes for an exercise is that we tend to not activate the glutes at all and instead run into a problem where on one side of the hip the quads are doing work and on the other side of that hinge in the hips your lower back is trying to do the work of the inactive glutes. Your poor back can not do that work itself at all!

Another problem that the physio guy found was that Jaiden was much stronger on one side of his body than the other and so over time he unconsciously compensated by relying on the weak side for the strong side.

So you can imagine how bad this set of squats was for Jaiden. He would go down, then as he was coming up his back would be doing a lot of the hinge closing instead of his glutes, and then one side of the back was taking the work of the other side of his back. His poor back didn’t stand a chance, even, or maybe especially, with a low weight.

So each visit the physio guy gave Jaiden a new exercise. The first ones were clamshells, which involved lying on his side and pulling a knee up with a band holding his knees together. This works the hip abductors on the outside of the thigh

Next was an exercise that involved squeezing a ball between his knees to strengthen the hip adductors muscles on the outside of the thighs.

Next we had an exercise that is a lot like the fire hydrant that you can see below. The difference is that instead of having the leg go straight out to the side, the knee was further down about 6 inches or so. Also the idea is to hold it for a long time instead of just doing reps with this. This means that instead of simply activating the glutes it will strengthen as well.

 

Here are some more exercises for activating the glutes. These have really helped me and I am sure they can help you as well

So after this Jaidens back was feeling a lot better and we were able to move on to making sure that the motion was good. The fourth appointment was mostly checking to see if his strength between left and right side was evening out and then doing leg presses.

With the leg press there is a trade off between pushing with the quads and pushing from the heels to make the glutes active and take up more of the work. Jaiden did a few sets of this with the Physio guy giving tips on keeping knees at a consistent distance apart and pushing through with the glutes to make sure that they were taking much of the power of the exercise.

Finally we waited two more weeks until we went back. This was the last appointment and Jaiden found out more about doing unweighted squats, front squats, and very very deep squats to make sure to be strengthening the butt instead of the quads as much.

All of these exercises focus on using the body correctly and doing squats in a way that Jaiden will be able to relieve the pressure on his lower back and instead work with the quads and glutes instead.

This type of training will be interesting over the next few months. Most people look at squats as being a very good exercise for building quads and we will see a bit of that. More though we will be getting the whole chain correct from the lower legs up. The exercises that will help us with quads more will likely be the leg presses and leg extensions.

Hopefully I have been able to give you a much better idea of the role of glute activation and glute exercises to help protect your back.