Holiday Body Blitz (Part 1 - Introduction)

Congratulations on taking steps towards a better, healthier, happier life and welcome to the Holiday Body Blitz post. Over the next days this blog is going to serve as your go-to guide to burning fat during the holidays.

You see, the reason why I made this program is because without a doubt, the holiday season between Thanksgiving and right after New Year’s is the hardest time of the year to lose weight. There are a few reasons that contribute to this problem:

- No Game plan: the main problem is as simple as that. Not having any set structure of what your going to eat, when your going to eat and how your going to eat. Just by putting a plan in place you will be 10 times more likely to see results than if you just “winged it”.

- Always on the run: this is also the busiest time of the year for most people what with holiday shopping, kids, work deadlines and let’s not forget all the social gatherings.

- Holiday treats: they…..are….EVERYWHERE! Your boss has them on their desk, your co-workers have them on their desk, YOU have them on your desk or maybe in a dish in your living room or a little treat bag in your cupboard. Treats are constantly in your face for the next 40 days and there is little you can do about it.

- Social Gatherings: Work Parties, Friends Parties, Family Parties YOUR Parties…it’s an endless assault of alcohol and food.

So with these key points in mind I set out to design this plan in order to specifically combat every one of those excuses. I say excuses because let’s face it, once I expose the solutions to all of these problems listed above, 90% of people reading this will still use them as excuses to gain weight but they are really just trying to justify their own self-doubt and laziness.

YOU CAN DO THIS. YOU DESERVE THE RESULTS. STAY TUNE FOR MORE POST TO COME.

Fitness and Age



Fitness and Age

 On Oct 21st I will be 51 years old. While others my age are looking for rapid weight loss techinues and taking lipotropic injections for weight loss, I'm discovering the older I get the more serious I get about maintaining my level of fitness. My personal trainer once told me “you're certainly arguably the most athletic clients I've trained to date. That includes pro athletes in their 20s!”

While it is generally true that fitness level decline with age after about age thirty-five, it
is not an absolute. Getting older does not necessitate feeling older, losing strength and vitality,or limiting physical activities. Most people know someone aged seventy or older who continues o participate in physically challenging activities like weight lifting, bicycling, golf, tennis,
or jogging. For example, 75-year old body builder Ernestine Shepherd has made news worldwide with your lifestyle. Shepherd is in better shape than most people, decades her junior. Up at 3 a.m. every morning, she spends her days running, lifting weights and working out. She also works as a certified personal trainer at her gym.

There are a variety of prevalent age-related fitness myths, and Dr. Kenneth Cooper
exposes them in his book, Faith-Based Fitness. Many people believe exercising after age forty
is dangerous, but there is no support for this myth, as long as older continuing or beginning
exercisers have regular medical checkups. In fact, evidence shows that those who fail to exercise
are at greater risk than those who exercise regularly.

The average person loses between 30 - 40 percent of his muscle mass during his lifetime,
but the reason is because most people become less active and less fit as they age. It is commonly
thought that increasing muscle mass after age sixty is impossible, but muscle can be added at any
age with strength training. Cooper teaches that strength training leads to significant increases in
muscle size and strength and in functional mobility, even among nursing home residents up to
ninety-six years old. Likewise, people who engage in regular endurance exercise can maintain a
high aerobic capacity from age forty to about age seventy. It is only in the seventies and eighties
that older athletes normally begin to experience declines in aerobic ability, but even at late ages,
those who continue to train can remain remarkably fit.

Myths may be more about laziness than age-related fears. Research shows that people as
old as one hundred can dramatically increase their strength, improve their balance, restore bone
density, moderate diabetes, and diminish joint pain in just a few weeks of weight training. The
minute a person starts sweating, whether he is twenty or ninety, he elevates his heart rate, his
arteries get more flexible, and his blood pressure is lowered, thereby lowering the risk of heart
disease and stroke. For hours after exercise, bodies are more sensitive to insulin, keeping sugar
levels in check and reducing the risk of diabetes.

Herschel Walker is a great, modern example of the myths of age’s affect on fitness.
Walker won the 1982 Heisman Trophy (presented annually to the top college football player in
America) and was a world class sprinter at the University of Georgia from 1980– 1982. He
played professional football from 1983-1997, and competed in the 1992 Winter Olympics as a
bobsledder.76 On January 30, 2010, at age forty-seven, Walker competed in his first professional

Mixed Martial Arts fight. Critics ridiculed him for entering the sport at such an advanced age,
and concerns for his health were daily topics on national sports shows. Despite all the negativity,
Walker knocked out twenty-six year old Greg Nagy in a dominating performance.

Because of his age, Walker had to endure a battery of tests to be sanctioned to fight.
Allen Fields, chief physician for the Florida Boxing Commission that also oversees MMA
sanctioning, said that not only did Walker pass the most strenuous of all medical athletic tests,
but he produced the highest cardiac stress test score of anyone ever tested by his facility. Fields
said that Walker was in “as fine a shape as Muhammad Ali or any of these people we’ve had the care of.

This guy is 47 going on 22, as far as his physical fitness goes.”78 Like all world class
athletes, Walker is an anomaly. But unlike most world class athletes, Walker has maintained his
fitness as he has aged. Mike Tyson and Bo Jackson are contemporaries of Walker, and at this
stage of their lives, they look like any other middle-aged, overweight man. Everyone has the
choice to age like Walker, or to age like Tyson and Jackson.