As I’m sure you know, to lose weight and keep it off long-term your exercise programme needs to be varied and regular and include cardiovascular exercise, muscle toning and work on your core as well as eating a reduced calorie diet.
However, it is perfectly acceptable and possible to spot-tone particular areas of the body, such as the abdominals. This is the part of our bodies that tends to show excesses more than anywhere else! Saggy tummies and weak abdominals upset us every time we look in the mirror and nearly all women claim that the area they would most like to change is their abs.
A good addition to any home gym with the abs in mind is the Ab Flyer, which consists of a seat that can swing in an arc and handlebars to support your upper body. You kneel on the seat and use your ab muscles to swing it upwards to tone the lower abdominals, and from side to side in an arc to tone the obliques.
Most people know about traditional ab crunches done on the floor; they involve raising your head and shoulders while lying on your back with your knees bent. The idea is to move your ribs towards your hips which contracts the upper part of your abdominals and make them work. However, this exercise does not engage the lower abdominals so you are only doing half the job and will only get partial results – your pooch will still be there!
Also, the main problem with the traditional ab crunches is that they look simple to do but aren’t, and in most cases all you do is strain your head and neck as you haul your torso up, while your abs do no work at all!
With the Ab Flyer, your neck and back are in good alignment and get no strain, and the exercise specifically targets the lower abs so there is no wasted time or effort – the full emphasis of the exercise goes into those lower abdominals. Believe me, your lower abs will start feeling this very quickly! The hanging seat can also be moved from side to side using your obliques – these are those muscles down your sides that give you a nice, trim hourglass waist when toned up.
Experts have known for a long time that reverse crunches focusing on the lower abdominals are very effective for flattening the abs, but the usual way to do them was by hanging from a bar and lifting the knees. This exercise is not practical for most people as it puts tremendous strain on the arms and shoulders as they must support your entire bodyweight against gravity.
With the Ab Flyer, this amazing reverse crunch is made available to everyone without any fear of injuries to the shoulders, neck or back. This excellent addition to any full-body fitness routine costs just under $200 (plus S&H), is quick and easy to set up and can be folded for convenient storage.
For more information on The Ab Flyer why not visit this site.
Since being released onto the exercise market earlier this year, the Ab Circle Pro has had a real combination of reviews, ranging widely from customers who absolutely loved it to those who would cheerfully chuck it in the garbage.
If it was a contender on Dancing with the Stars it would have been in the bottom two more times than I care to name; always however just managing to scrape through into the next round.
So what’s it all about? Is the Ab Circle Pro as good or as bad as they say it is and does it work at all? The answer to this is to keep things in perspective; it can be as useful as any other fitness machine in that it may actually get people to do some exercise on a regular basis.
The idea behind it is good, as the all-fours positioning makes it much easier to work the muscles of the waist and sides correctly without putting strain on the back or the neck, which up to now was the major problem with trying to tone and shape the abdominal area. What isn’t so good, however, is the build quality and the customer service (although the latter has recently improved).
What people seem to forget all the time is that you simply cannot target just one area to try and lose fat, as weight loss and reshaping your body is a combination of several things, including various different types of exercise and altering your eating habits. That is the only thing that is going to work in the medium and long-term.
Look at it this way; if you crash diet but don’t exercise – sure, you’ll lose weight. But it won’t be fat, mainly muscle – which is the one thing that you truly need to get and sustain weight loss. Added to that, you will feel as hungry as a wolf and as grumpy as a bear and as soon as you give up in disgust and go back to eating the way you were before, the weight will pile back on – this is what the billion-dollar diet industry relies on.
Then there are the people who do a little exercise (for a while anyway) but don’t overhaul their eating habits as well. In their case they lose a little bit of weight and tone up a little, but because they are still eating too much they don’t get the results they want so they decide that Exercise Doesn’t Work and go back to being a couch potato. Deep down we all know what the answer is — eat a little less and move around a little more. Problem is, we don’t really want to do it for various reasons, the main one being that it’s too damned hard!
The secret is to make small changes – start with a few minutes exercise a day and a few less calories a day until you get accustomed , and then make more changes. In this respect, the Ab Circle Pro will come in very useful. If you use it three times a week for 10 minutes and add in other different types of exercise (such as an aerobics or step class, a few brisk walks and maybe some swimming), plus some weights exercises to tone your muscles, then you will achieve good results.
As I mentioned earlier, most of the complaints that I have heard are in regard of the quality of the Ab Circle Pro and frankly, it isn’t great; the kneepads can split and the wheels squeak, although many people have told me that wearing kneepads and the judicious application of WD40 does the trick nicely.
The bottom line is that you get what you pay for, and it stands to reason that a machine costing under $200 (plus S&H) is not going to be as well-built, tough and hard wearing as a treadmill that costs five times that much. But that being said, I believe the Ab Circle Pro is very useful as part of a weight loss plan and is nowhere near as ugly and bulky as a treadmill!
Yes I’m back! I have to apologize for not posting for some time I think the last post is way back in August.
Life has been so busy recently that I’ve had to cut back on a lot of my commitments and unfortunately this Blog has been one of them.
Anyway things have settled down a bit and I’m determined to post at least once a week. Since August a lot has happened in the health and fitness industry and I’ll be commenting on these trends soon.
I’ll also be reviewing the latest pieces of at home exercise equipment to hit the market along with the expected rush of new stuff that will be released just after Christmas. If history tells us anything most will be a complete waste of money and I’ll give you the heads up on what’s hot and what’s completely useless!
If you would like me to review a particular piece of fitness equipment please feel free to leave me a comment below and I’ll do my best to oblige.
Rough and cracked dry skin on your heels and feet is no fun and having to hide your feet from view particularly in the summer is just plain awful.
If you spend a lot of time exercising and have your feet in trainers for prolonged periods you’ll know how rough your feet can get!
.Solving the problem is tougher than you may think and trust me if you’ve spent 30 mins scraping and filing the rough skin away with a pumice stone or file you’ll know what I mean. If you’re like me it’ll leave your feet red, sore and not much smoother than when you started.
If you’ve been watching the Infomercials (I do I’m addicted) you’ll have seen one of the latest products for solving this problem introduced by Pitchman called Heel Tastic. This heel balm has been formulated specifically to work on cracked skin and is very easy to use just roll it on and watch in amazement how in only a few short days your skin becomes baby smooth again. This product will work for the man in your life as well so don’t keep it all for yourself!
Heeltastic claims to have the following benefits:
Easy and gentle to use
Specially formulated for cracked and dry skin
Contains Anti Fungal and Anti Bacterial oils
Can be used on your elbow and knees (as well as feet)
Results visible in just days
Leaves skin feeling soft and smooth
Contains Neem and Karanja Oils which heals your skin from within
So if your tired of having ugly feet and want super model soft sexy and smooth feet why not take a look for a measly $10 + S&H you to could have the soft and smooth feet you’ve always dreamed of.
Stop hiding your horrendous heels - Show them off instead and start wearing sandals and fashionable shoes again.
The Ab Circle Pro is a great device to help you lose that ugly belly fat and those sagging love handles and give you those taut, toned abs that you’ve always dreamed of. It is a new piece of equipment for the home exercise market that lifts you up from the floor and makes combining your ab exercises with your cardio workouts easier and more effective than you ever thought possible.
To lose weight safely and correctly while toning and tightening all your major muscle groups, there are several components of exercise that must be combined. The first is cardiovascular exercise which is described as sustained rhythmic exercise using large muscle groups and carried out for a period of at least 20 minutes three to four times a week.
Cardio should be at an intensity that makes you sweat, gets you warm and makes you slightly breathless. There are two types of mistakes people make in cardiovascular exercise; one is not working hard enough – I see folk all the time in the gym sitting on the exercise bike reading a magazine; if you can read a magazine your heart and lungs are not working hard enough!
The second mistake is performing cardio at too high an intensity for too long at a time (as this puts your body under stress) and then not training again for several days. You will lose any benefit gained if you do not do another workout within 96 hours.
The best and most effective way to exercise is to take the middle path; walk, pedal or swim at a moderate intensity, enough to make you slightly short of breath and give you a warm glow, for at least 20 minutes three times a week; every other day would be perfect. This exercise alone can greatly reduce your risk of early heart disease and some cancers.
Cardiovascular exercise on its own is not enough for optimum health and weight loss, as you need to also do exercises to overload your main muscles in order to keep them strong and functioning correctly. Strength training does not mean big burly men in leotards lifting huge weights; it simply means exercises using hand weights or body weight to challenge your muscles and make them stronger, especially as you grow older.
Just as important as cardio and strength training is core training to keep your deep abdominal and postural muscles strong, which also will shape your stomach and make you look much taller, as you will stand up straight rather than stooping. Pilates exercises and most forms of yoga are perfect for this.
If you use your Ab Circle Pro as part of your regular workouts, you will be well on the way to correctly combining the principles of fitness for increased health, strength and a perfect shape, as the Ab Circle Pro combines cardio without abdominal and oblique toning to help you shape your body to the look you’ve always dreamed of.
I could write a book about this one! But to cut a long story short, if your body thinks it’s being starved it will hang on to as much fat as possible. In fact it will actually start to burn muscle for fuel in preference to fat. And seeing that muscle is your body’s fat-burning furnace, the less muscle you have, the fewer calories you will burn!
You are killing the very thing that will help you lose fat.
Some diets claim that this won’t happen. You have to make sure that you eat enough so that it doesn’t. Everyone is different; you have to tailor your eating and exercise to suit YOU.
Tricky one, this! Most overweight people would say they are motivated to lose weight because they want to improve their health, feel better and be able to fit into their clothes.
The problem is, every time you fail to reach your target weight, or worse – reach target and then pile the weight back on – you are reinforcing in your mind that it’s just not possible. The next time you TRY to lose weight, you are defeated before you even start. After all, your brain now knows with some certainty (because you’ve trained it to expect failure), that putting in the effort required just isn’t worth it. It convinces you that failure is inevitable.
Sticking to a strict diet is hard, makes you miserable and as bad-tempered as a weasel, and is 90% likely to fail! You starve your body which tries to hang on to every ounce of fat it can. You deprive yourself of all the things that make life enjoyable,and you feel like there’s nothing to look forward to. It is hard – for you and everyone around you. Crash dieting has even been cited as reason for a divorce!
(I’d be a bit suspicious of that last..)
If you want to learn more about how permanent fat loss is possible take a look at some of these fantastic pieces of at home exercise equipment like Ultraflex Fitness and Kettleworx.
We get fat for a very simple reason – We eat too much. We take in more energy from the food we eat and drink than we burn by moving around. Put simply, to lose fat we need to eat less and exercise more! That’s it – in one paragraph the secret to losing fat. So why do people find it so hard to follow this simple advice?
There are many reasons:
Poor eating habits
Lack of exercise or activity
Emotional eating (distracting from a feeling you don’t like)Dieting
Lack of muscle tissue (no fat burning machine)
No motivation (lots of past failures)
It’s too damn hard!
We are programmed by nature to seek out and enjoy calorie dense foods. We hate the feeling of being hungry and gain satisfaction by feeling “full”.
This is a very sensible survival trait for people who have a limited food supply (us many thousands of years ago). The problem is we are now surrounded by these calorie dense foods and they are not in short supply! Worse, our food comes packaged and processed, with most of the goodness taken out – it neither satisfies nor nourishes us, so we eat more to compensate.
The supermarkets are full of these foods and to make matters worse, some of the most unhealthy food choices are also the cheapest! A double negative whammy for those with a large family and a limited budget. Combine that with fast food outlets dotted on every street corner and it’s easy to see why as a nation we are becoming fatter and fatter. It is possible to eat healthily on a limited budget but it takes time, preparation and planning.
We don’t need to go back many generations to find activity levels much higher than they are today. Were people obese then? Not many, and only those who could afford to be! Today most of us work at a desk all day. We drive to work, the store, the school, rush from place to place when we’re not working and are mentally drained and physically inert at the end of the day! Where’s the healthy activity that’s going to burn fat and will also make us feel much better?
We even jump in our cars to visit the local store, which may only be a couple of hundred yards away. Combine that with an unwillingness to join a gym or do any exercise at home and is it any wonder we’re piling on fat at an alarming rate?
If you want to learn more about how permanent fat loss is possible if approached the right way, then why not start exercising at home? There are some fantastic pieces of at home exercise equipment available that can really help with your fat loss goals. These include Kettleworx, The Firm Wave and Ultraflex Fitness systems.
Take a look and see what you think it’s a lot easier than you think.
Now that you have decided to give yourself the body you’ve always desired in terms of slimness and muscle tone, a great piece of equipment that will help you do this at home is the UltraFlex, a lifestyle and exercise system that will slim you down and tone you up in the time you’ve got available.
In this busy everyday world we are always balancing earning a living with running a home, and whatever time is left is devoted to ourselves (often not a lot!), with exercising coming very low down on the list of priorities. The usual option up until now, has been to join a health club but then you end up paying a lot of money and wasting a lot of time using the various exercise machines.
Getting to the gym in rush-hour is hard enough, then you have to find somewhere to park and then you often have to wait in line with your turn to use a machine which wastes time and raises your blood pressure to dangerous levels!
If you have the UltraFlex Fitness exercise and lifestyle system at home, then you will never have to wait your turn for a gym machine again! With no complicated weight stack and height adjustments to deal with, the UltraFlex is easy and convenient and will spot tone any and all of your major muscle groups.
The UltraFlex comes in two sizes and strengths; one for men and one for women. The man’s UltraFlex has more resistance as men’s exercise goals are usually to strengthen and bulk up their muscles, and heavier resistance and fewer reps are needed to achieve this.
Women don’t want to bulk up and they aren’t particularly bothered about getting stronger, so a woman’s UltraFlex bar offers decreased resistance for increased numbers of sets and repetitions, which will give toned and shapely longer-looking limbs for that perfect silhouette.
You can tone any of your muscles with the UltraFlex just by moving the bar or altering your hand position, whether you want to specifically tone your upper body, lower body or abdominals. The best approach is to do a balanced programme of full body toning which will give you all-over reduction as well as burning lots of calories.
It is recommended that you also do regular cardiovascular exercise as well as using the UltraFlex toning system. If you wish, this can be carried out at the same time, bending the UltraFlex as you walk. If you do choose to put your exercises together in this way, be very careful to keep your attention on where you are going, as you are more likely to fall if you are distracted; my personal preference would be to do your cardio workout separately, either before or after the UltraFlex workout.
