Your Newspaper - Your Health - Your Workout. Your Diet. Your Mind.

Posted on: May 31, 2006

Your Workout. Your Diet. Your Mind.

Do it Better.

By Deborah Douglas
CTW Features

The challenge of sticking with your health and wellness goals doesn’t always have to be about hitting plateaus and falling into ruts. Sometimes, when all is going well with your eating plan, you’re actually doing most of your promised workouts or you’re actually managing stress better, there’s always something you can do to tweak what you’re doing before you hit the proverbial wall.

There’s always a way to do it better.

Food Network chef Sara Moulton realized that recently. While she’s in pretty good shape, juggling family life and a career as the executive chef at Gourmet magazine and hosting cable TV’s “Sara’s Secrets,” Moulton needed more exercise.

“I had to figure out a way to do something more, maybe getting a pedometer and walking more,” Moulton says.

Enter the 20-block rule. The New York City resident vowed to walk any distance 20 blocks or less, which amounts to a mile. Since her job is 20 blocks away from home, she walks there and back every day. Moulton admits to being surprised, not only by how many calories she burns daily but also by how few she burns when she stays home on Sundays, a good reference point. (She fully intends to continue doing absolutely nothing on Sundays, though.)

Whether you’re upping the ante on your weight-lifting regime, trying to get more benefits out of your cardio workout or attempting more mind-body balance, healthy living experts say there’s always a way to do more and do better at it.

“Every four to six weeks, we hit a plateau,” says Hollywood exercise physiologist Dino Nowak, author of “The Final Makeover” (Strang Communications, 2005). “It’s important to keep challenging your body throughout the year. As people go through their programs, whether they’re aiming for body-fat loss or weight loss, the workload becomes easier.”

To keep the progress going, we must increase the intensity, resistance and complexity of our fitness programs to get continued results, says Nowak, who is impressively certified by the American College of Sports Medicine, The American Council on Exercise and The Cooper Institute.

“You can’t keep going with the same things and continue getting results,” Nowak says.

Moulton agrees: “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to exercise in front of anybody else, so I find [workout] DVDs I like and keep getting new tapes. I use basic things to work out at home like weights, a ball and a ring, and I just keep mixing them up.”

Introducing more variety to your program, such as leaving the gym a few times go swim or play racquet ball, gets your mind activated, too. Following are some of Nowak’s tips for boosting your personal workout challenge.

Now weight a minute . . .

Boost results of your weight-lifting program by mixing up your workout. If you normally do 10 to 12 reps, do what’s called “periodization,” and do five to eight reps for a while.

What this does: It challenges your body to adapt to new stimuli.

If you merely want muscle mass, you can simply increase your workload with more weight and volume (more reps and sets). But if you lift weights or use the circuits in your health club as part of your overall fitness plan, it’s important to develop more complex movements. For example, take a break from single-movement machines like shoulder or chest presses, which only require you to go up and down, or back and forward. Try working with cables, which will allow for a total across-the-body workout.

“Then you’re doing more dynamic movements, not just static movements,” Nowak says. “You’re working multiple planes of movement, the shoulders, legs and body, and it’s a much higher calorie burn.”

Rev up your cardio

Mix up your cardio routine by breaking the monotony of staying on one machine the whole time, Nowak says. For example, if you tend to do an hour on an elliptical trainer, break up your hour into 15-minute increments. So, start with 15 minutes on the elliptical machine, then do 15 minutes on a recumbent bike, then 15 minutes on a StairMaster, and so on.

What this does: It eliminates boredom, plateaus and reduces the risk of repetitive stress injuries. “It’s a better workout,” Nowak says.

If you want to stay at one machine, say, because you have a back problem and would rather stick with the recumbent bike, then add some interval work, Nowak says.

“Instead of keeping the same steady pace, go for five minutes, pick it up with by increasing the level one or two minutes, then scale it back,” he says. “By going into these little sprints, so to speak, that becomes more efficient work.”

A tip for dieters in particular: Get a 10- or 20-pound weight vest to increase your body load, Nowak says. It’s so much better than hand and ankle weights because it stabilizes your core and it’s safer. As dieters lose weight, the vest helps achieve more rhythmic movements and produce a higher energy drill.

Get some class

Take advantage of myriad fitness and dance classes health clubs offer these days, Nowak says.

What this does: Especially if you’ve been taking a particular class for a while or turning into a gym rat, adding in a variety of classes will correct muscle imbalances and stimulate your body in new ways.

“Guys especially tend to shy away from those sorts of things,” Nowak says. But, someone who has been focusing on developing muscle can correct muscle imbalances by adding a Pilates or yoga class to work their core and supportive tissues in the ankles, back and shoulders.

“Yoga and Pilates can help you come back stronger in your regular program,” he says. The different stimuli staves off wear and tear, and makes your whole body strong.

Keep it going . . .

Doing it better doesn’t just stop there. Now let’s discuss eating, more important, losing pounds. Even when you’re doing well, ruts happen. Before it does, though, again, mix it up, Moulton suggests: “I just start eating vegetarian.”

What this does: “If you eat mostly vegetables, you’re automatically going to lose weight,” Moulton says. “Even if you have some potatoes in your diet but you’re eating a lot of non-starchy vegetables, you will still lose pounds.”

Or you can try eliminating red meat for a while, she adds. Or get filled up by having a cup of clear soup before lunch and dinner.

Watch how you eat

Moulton relates how her college-age daughter recently went out to get a sandwich and started unwrapping it to eat before she got in the kitchen.

“I said, stop, get a plate and sit down. I’m totally against food and eating in the car. I’m not a fan of liquid breakfasts; I just don’t consider that dining. We’ve got to slow down our eating,” Moulton says.

What this does: It takes 20 minutes for your brain to communicate that you’re full, according to the American Dietetic Association, so you’ll avoid overeating and hopefully enjoy your meals better,

“We all eat too fast,” says Moulton, who noticed she was scarfing down her lunch in 10-minutes flat. “We’ve all got to slow down. I try to make [meals] last at least a half an hour.”

Don’t stop now . . .

OK, we’ve got some solid advice on looking good and putting good stuff in our bodies, but what about doing better at how you feel?

Well, anybody who has had to go on a job interview or ask for a date or persuade someone to see or do something knows how difficult rejection can be. But there’s a better say to “do” rejection: don’t.

“It’s all in the way you look at it,” says Jill Speigel, a self-described “flirtologist,” whose many books include “Flirting for Success” (Goal Getters, 1995) and “The Flirtologist’s Guide to Dating” (Goal Getters, 2004).“Instead of looking at it as somebody saying no to you, and saying ‘I’m not good enough,’ change that whole concept to ‘You’re doing me a favor.’ ”

What this does: “You score energy points, at the risk of sounding New Agey,” Speigel says. “It’s life doing you a favor.”

While Speigel says she’s always had a “loving inner voice,” she didn’t always listen to it. Now 41, when Speigel was in her late 20s, she’d jump through hoops for a guy she was dating. If he didn’t like something, like her hair cut, she’d change it immediately.

“I’d drive down to the lake and say ‘Please let it work out! Please let it work out!’ I would do everything to make this guy like me.”

But every time she changed herself for him, he found something else to criticize: Life, she says, was giving her signs to do something different. Today she’s been happily married 14 years to another man, and when she looks back at that other guy, she realizes she would have been miserable with him.

“I was being given clues to go in another direction,” Speigel says. “I totally understand why I needed to go through that time.”

Piggybacking off rejection is that nagging feeling of regret. Especially if you’re middle aged, there’s plenty of life to look back on and wonder about, says Stephen Pollan, author of “It’s all in Your Head” (HarperCollins, 2006). I should’ve continued my education. I should’ve made amends with my parents. These are typical regrets people suffer.

“I believe we do things to ourselves that we would never let others do,” says Pollan, also a life coach. Instead of berating ourselves for what we didn’t do, we’ve got to vow to treat ourselves with the same respect we give others.

“If I can establish at the time of my happenstance that I did the very best I could do and I had no malice and I was not being disingenuous, then I should have no regret,” Pollan says.

“You have to accept the deficiency that created that situation, but you resolve to never let it happen again to anybody.”

OK, you can rest now. Sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing.