What is so great about women’s fitness and why is it so important to stay fit? Not only will maintaining fitness keep your weight down and give you a long, lean body, it also plays a major part in keeping your body healthy and alive. It has been proven time and again that regular exercise, a sensible and nutrient rich diet and an active lifestyle are important factors in keeping your body working to its maximum potential.

Simple tasks such as bending to pick up a child or reaching for a book on a shelf can be potentially harmful and can result in injury when our fitness is compromised. Delicate muscles, especially those in the back and neck can be injured easily when they are not exercised and strengthened regularly. Once injured, it takes a muscle even longer to reach a healthy fitness level. That’s just one of the many benefits of staying fit through a women’s fitness program.

Staying alive is probably one of the most vital benefits of maintaining your fitness. While nothing guarantees our longevity, it has been proven that a fit and active lifestyle does make a big contribution towards it. Your heart is strengthened through cardiovascular exercise and these exercises also burn calories to help you lose weight. Building your cardiovascular strength means it will be much easier to complete every day tasks without fatigue as well as those unusual times when you may need extra strength to accomplish a new challenge. For instance, if you have to chase down a taxi, it will be much easier if your heart and legs are accustomed to running short sprints.

Keeping your body in shape with resistance exercises will probably mean less chance of injury when you perform a task that your body isn’t accustomed to. Staying agile through exercises such as yoga or Pilates, is also a great way to keep your body long and lean. Each exercise works various muscle groups, to lengthen and strengthen your muscles, organs and improve your health to make you healthier mentally, physically and spiritually.

Having a long, lean body is an achievement many women only dream about. The truth is, no matter what your body type or level of fitness, you can make improvements and increase your overall fitness ability. Set goals for yourself, write them down and make a solid plan to achieve them. Don’t allow anyone or anything to stand in the way of your women’s fitness program.

Most days I stay busy from sun up to sun down. It’s not that I like to have such a crazy schedule, but there are so many things I want and feel the need to do each day that it’s hard to take it easy. I confess, I do take a restful day usually on Sunday, to enjoy time with family and friends because I believe one day of rest is needed to recharge and refresh. All throughout my busy days however, I find motivational moments that inspire and encourage me along the way.

Motivational moments are those tiny gusts of motivation that hit you for a minute and if you aren’t quick enough to grasp them they are gone like tiny sands in the wind. These tidbits of motivation come from various sources. I may look out the window and spot a butterfly moving from flower to flower, or see one neighbor helping another. I may watch a football game and feel motivated from the team spirit or listen to a heartfelt story of someone’s struggles that emulate my own challenges.

These motivational moments are not unique to my world and my life. Each and every one of us is blessed by these occurrences every day. It is how we use these occurrences that determine whether or not we are taking advantage of the motivational moments in our lives.

Motivational moments or any type of motivation is the key to sticking with your diet and exercise program. As a women’s fitness trainer, I have seen so many women who start out motivated to lose weight and they stay that way for about the first 30 to 45 days. During that time, they are full of enthusiasm and usually proud of the weight they are losing. However, around the 7th week or close to the 45-day period, the weight loss hits a plateau and they become discouraged because they aren’t experiencing the same euphoric success they felt in the beginning. These women are literally starving for some motivation to keep them going and when they don’t find it, many give up and return to a sedentary lifestyle.

Although I try to head off these low points and offer lots of encouragement to the women I work with, I know how hard it is to stay motivated in the face of low to no results. Women start to feel as if they are exercising more than ever and eating less than ever but still not achieving the weight loss goal that they have set for themselves. The good news is that if you switch to a healthy diet and combine that with an active lifestyle, you will do much more than drop a dress size. Every part of your body will benefit from these healthy changes.

Your motivational moments can turn into a motivated and purposeful life. Once you harness the power of self-motivation, you can be a motivational guru to those around you. People looking for motivation will see the enthusiasm that you have for life and will want to achieve the confidence and improved self-esteem that is apparent in everything that you do.

Dean Karnazes is known as the Ultra Marathon Man. He has accomplished super-human feats in racing and endurance events. While the average person may not dare to attempt to do what he has, it is still interesting to read about how he trains, eats, as well as what he has managed to accomplish. Here are some of Dean’s most notable achievements:

• Ran 350 miles (560 km) in 80 hours and 44 minutes without sleep in 2005
• Single-handedly completed “The Relay”, a 199-mile (320 km) run from Calistoga to Santa Cruz, eleven times
• Ran a marathon to the South Pole in -13 °F (-25 °C) temperatures without snowshoes in 2002
• Ran 50 marathons in all 50 states in 50 consecutive days in 2006

With a record like that, you have to wonder about his mentality and training habits. Here is what I scoured up around the interwebs:

Training Advice from Dean Karnazes

Endurance:
“Build your endurance with dual cardio workouts,” Karnazes says. “Do cardio in the morning and repeat it in the evening — a minimum of 45 minutes each on the treadmill, the elliptical, or whatever your preferred machine is.” [source: mensfitness.com]

Strength Training:
If he could do one strength training exercise it would be push-ups. [source: ultramarathon.com]

Recovery: Listen to everyone follow no one. I never stretch. There are other guys I run with who are elite runners that do a whole lot of stretching. To me active recovery is better than passive recovery. So I always try to follow up a long run with some sort of activity. I’m also a big proponent of ice baths. [source: marathontrainingacademy.com]

Long Distance Training:
I do a lot of marathons as training runs. If I’m somewhere and there’s a marathon, I’ll sign up and just go run it. I’m also very opportunistic in my training. If I’ve got half an hour, I will throw on my running shoes and train. I have my whole office set-up at waist level, I don’t sit at all during the day. Sitting, to me, is the devil. [source: huffingtonpost.com

Diet:

• Favorite healthy food: Wild Pacific Salmon
• Food or meal eaten before/after an event: Water
• I eat nothing that’s processed or refined — no high-fructose corn syrup, no sugar, no trans-fats. I eat a lot of fish and monounsaturated fats from olives, olive oil and nuts. A lot of organic, fresh fruits and vegetables. No bread. No gluten. No wheat. No rice. I use a formula of roughly 500 to 700 calories per hour of running I do, based on the intensity and heat.

Besides all of his training advice, I feel his diet is of most importance. He stays away from all processed food. You can tell that he views food as fuel for the body. In one interview I came across, he mentioned ordering a pizza during one of his long distance events because it was convenient and he needed the calories. However, it also made him feel worse after eating it. I think it’s important to view food as fuel as it helps to avoid the junk food that is so readily available.

As far as his actual physical training goes, it may be extreme for most of us but it is very motivational. Dean Karnazes is definitely someone to admire and use as motivation when you feel like skipping a workout.

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Last month I gave you the first five of ten tips for boosting your results from the Bar Method. The manager of my home studio in San Francisco, Kate Grove, and I first shared these tips with our students during a student workshop at my home studio in San Francisco. The next three tips are the ones we gave our students for the exercises they do midway through the Bar Method workout.

Tip #6: During “standing seat,” find vertical on your body.

Standing seat can transform your body, if you do it in the right form. Here’s how you can be sure yours is correct: Imagine a vertical line stretching from your ears, through your shoulders, hips and working thigh, and keep these body parts centered on the line. Staying vertical during this exercise is easier said than done. Your mind gets the idea, but your body instinctively craves a more comfortable stance. Lose focus for a moment, and when you snap back to attention you might discover that your head has dropped forward, your seat as arched back, your torso has leaned one way or the other, or your working thigh has wandered off the line. How do you avoid falling out of vertical? First use the mirror to check that your torso is upright. Next, keep re-gripping both sides of your glutes, and remind your lower back to relax. Maintain a vertical spine, and finally, keep your working knee unwaveringly under your hip (give or take an inch). This level of good form requires self-honesty and determination, but it’s worth the effort. When you succeed, standing seat will give you gorgeous posture and could become your favorite killer exercise.

Tip #7: During “flat-back,” don’t worry about a little “pooching out.”

If you’re like many students, you’re hesitant to take the option of lifting both legs during flat-back because whenever you try to raise them, your abs push out. In fact, a little pooching during flat-back is a natural stage your abs go through on their way to getting flatter. Here’s why you pooching out happens. Your “rectus abdominis” or “six pack” muscle, which lies on top of your other three abs is potentially sexy-looking but is often weaker than your “oblique” abs underneath it. So when your “obliques” contract, they shrink inwards around your waist, leaving your not-yet-strong “six pack” nowhere to go but out.

There’s another reason your abs might be misbehaving during flat-back. Your four ab muscles tend to store fat in between their layers, and that fat can bunch up when you contract them. In either case, raising both legs during flat-back, even if your abs pooch out a few inches, is harmless and will ultimately help you achieve flatter abs. Simply put, the more you work your rectus abdominis during flat-back, the stronger and flatter it will get in relation to your other abs muscles, and the more “belly fat” you’ll burn. To accelerate your results, exhale sharply each time you lift both legs, and the contraction of your diaphragm will help pull your abs in towards your spine.

One caveat: if you’re very over-weight or have very weak abs, they may pop forward more than three inches when you raise your legs. In that case, hold back on the lifting both at the same time until you lose some weight or get stronger. 

Finally, if you just can’t lift your legs no matter how hard you try, sit on one-to-three “risers,” which are firm cushions designed to raise you up a few inches from the floor. If you’re tall and need to use risers, go to a stall-bar, lay a riser against it, and place three of them under you. By sitting up higher, you’ll be able to get your legs airborne and derive the full benefits of doing flat-back.

Tip #8: During curl, imagine your favorite super-cut celebrities doing ab work.

Students have been known to say that Bar Method ab work is “worse than childbirth.” Maybe so, but this thought is not the most motivating one to have in mind when getting through the last reps during “curl” section! Switch it out with mental picture of a hunky super star working his way through is own ab-sculpting routine. Stars grunt through hundreds of crunches a workout just as you do, so picture the abs of celebrities like David Beckham, Matthew McConaughey or Ryan Reynolds doing ab exercises such as the Bar Method’s “high curl” or “clam.” Your “inspiration” hunk will get you into the spirit of embracing a macho zeal for the burn!

If you just plain have trouble staying in the burn, try this approach: Devote just as much energy to the “back” part of each crunch as you do to the “forward” of it. This techique keeps you tightly in the muscle as you proceed through the reps, and doubles your benefits along the way.

Next week: Tips for finding your inner dancer during the last part of class.

When asked what my secret is for staying in shape, my response varies. I could answer that it is my diet or that I exercise 6 days a week or that I truly believe that a fit body is a healthy body. The truth is that journaling is the real secret behind my success.

Journaling is the act of keeping a journal. While there are all sorts of journals, like work journals, travel journals, or personal journals much like diaries, the journaling I am referring to is a fitness journal. Within the pages of a fitness journal, I record everything that I eat and everything that I drink. I record my physical activities such as my strength training sessions and my cardio workouts. I make notes of the level and intensity of each exercise and write down how much time I spend walking, running and playing.

There are many advantages to keeping a fitness journal. It gives me a starting point and helps me to visualize my goals. The very act of writing these acts in a book, make them more of a reality than if I just keep it all in my head. When I am ready to take my workout to the next level, I write these goals in my journal and then form a plan to make them happen. It’s not always easy, it’s not always convenient, but I truly believe that it helps me.

It has been proven time and again, that people who keep a journal of every thing they consume and all the activities they do to burn off calories have a far better chance of success in losing weight and getting in shape than those who do not. It’s such an easy and rewarding activity and it really does help to validate your fitness goals.

You can purchase a journal with pages that can be removed or added or you can just use a composition notebook. In this digital age, many women prefer using their phones or computer to record their food consumption and workouts. I prefer the old school method of actually taking pen to paper and writing. I enjoy writing and the act of journaling both soothes and energizes me in so many ways.

The wonderful thing about writing down your goals, is reading them later and reflecting on how much hard work, commitment and dedication it takes to achieve the goals that you set for yourself. Begin journaling today and you can turn your dreams into reality.