The Triceps Kickback

So you want to work on your triceps eh?

Well then there is a fantastic exercise called the Triceps Kickback.

This particular exercise is great for toning the underside of the arm (the triceps) which for some people are notorious for being flabby because fat likes to accumulate there. To reduce the fat you will need to do cardio, but if you're looking to build muscle there then you will want to do exercises which use the triceps a lot.

It's only January right now but it's not too early to prepare for the summer, and last minute vacations to warmer destinations than freezing Toronto.

(I was outside skating yesterday at Ramsden Park near Rosedale and I eventually decided it was too cold even for me and went home.)

How To Do A Triceps Kickback

1. This exercise can be performed with one arm at a time, or both. If you have never tried this one before, or have any low back sensitivity, try one arm at a time.

2. Start by placing one knee and one hand (from the same side of the body) down onto a bed, bench, the couch or even a stability ball.

3. Your back should be really straight, parallel with the floor. The leg that is not resting on the bench is on the floor, stretched out of the way behind you. The free hand is holding a dumbbell, with the arm stretched down toward the floor. 

 

Note: Use a dumbbell which is relatively light the first time you do this. You can try it later with heavier weights once you learn proper form.

4. Bring the elbow up as high as it can go but keep it close to your body. It should be able go higher than your back. Throughout the entire exercise the elbow will remain fixed in the position.

5. With the forearm only, bend back from the elbow as far as range of motion will allow, until the arm is straight out behind you. 

 

Do 10 reps, 3 times total, repeat 3 times per week to see results.

Two Arm Triceps Kickback.

For two arms, start with both feet together and bend your knees slightly. Bend forward from the hips until your back is parallel to the floor. With a dumbbell in both hands, raise both elbows up and behind, higher then the level of your back. At the same time, bend the forearm back until both arms are straight out behind you.

What is wrong with the triceps kickback?

Unlike other triceps exercises such as: dips, skull crushers, push downs and overhead extensions, you will be really fighting a resistance to move the weight. With the triceps kickback the most beneficial part of the exercise is at the very end of the movement, when the arm straightens.

At this point squeezing the triceps is how the exercise activates the muscle fibers. Even better, squeeze the muscle, and try to raise the whole arm just a little higher.

 

What makes a healthy teenager?

Good grades and fun times are important aspects of the high school experience. But that happiness is often threatened by bullying at school, unhealthy weight and the temptations to party hard and hang with the "cool kids".

Parents need to play a strong role in ensuring their high school kids stay healthy. A lack of sleep and exercise, too many fatty snacks, and caffeine packed drinks don't produce a healthy teenager - but they can make for an overweight teen with a sleeping disorder and high stress levels. It is up to the parents to do what they can do to keep their teenagers in good health - both mentally and physically.

Breakfast - Don't skip breakfast!

Eating in the morning gets their metabolism going. What should they eat? How about some instant oatmeal, cream of wheat, fresh fruit, whole grain bagels, and/or low-fat yogurt. Even pancakes with maple syrup is better than nothing.

Waiting too long to eat causes over-eating and binging later - which can lead to eating disorders.

Snacks - Aim for the Morning and Afternoon!

Healthy snacks in the morning or afternoon boosts the metabolism. Snacking late at night, especially junk food, puts on extra weight. The body's metabolism slows down during sleep, which causes much of the bedtime snack to be stored as fat. Encourage your teens to snack during the day, around 10 AM and 2 PM, and to eat healthy snacks they enjoy.

Sleep - As if teenagers don't sleep enough already!

Experts agree that teenagers need 9 hours of sleep per night. Unfortunately, sleep isn't always a major priority for them. Teenagers should keep a regular bedtime so they know when they should be going to bed and when they are getting up. This will prevent sleep disorders and higher stress levels, and a proper night's sleep prevents over-eating on sugary/caffeine foods during the day. Most teens don't appreciate the benefits from sleep, such as improved mood, improved cognitive functioning, and better academic performance, because they become too easily obsessed with certain social activities - such as chatting online and texting these days

Teenagers should avoid late night studying and caffeine drinks after 2 pm. They should begin winding down (relaxing) about an hour before bedtime. They should also avoid exercise during that time too. During this time they should avoid bright light sources, including looking directly into a computer screen or television. This also means no fast-paced video games in the late evening hours.

Many teens stay up late at night text messaging friends. A "no cell phone in the bedroom at night rule" may be unpopular with your teenager, but sleep is more important than unnecessary text messages.

Nutrition - Aim for Balance!

Teenagers should eat a balance of vegetarian proteins or lean meats, whole grains, high fiber carbohydrates, fruits, and vegetables. Teach your teens to eat only when they're hungry. Many teens eat due to boredom or stress. Healthy snacks should be encouraged if they are eating due to boredom so try and find out what foods they like best that are healthy. One way to do this is to send them to the grocery store to buy fruit and see what they come back with. eg. Watermelons.

Exercise - 60 Minutes per Day!

Experts say that teens get at least 60 minutes of exercise each day. They need a good balance of activities including aerobic, flexibility, and strength exercises. The benefits include building and maintaining healthy muscles, bones, and joints; Controls weight; Reduces Fat;  Releases Endorphins, Better Sleep.

Teens should avoid exercising too close to bedtime.

Controlling Weight - Making Exercise Fun

Teenagers get bored really easily unless it is an activity they really enjoy. Try to find what activities they are interested in doing and then sign them up for lessons in that activity.

It could be something more unusual like archery, fencing, Kendo, martial arts... or it could be a sport like tennis or football, in which case for team sports they may need to train hard to join a school team or they may need to join a team that is more for fun.

The production of endorphins, which makes people feel happy, is increased when doing fun exercise activities - It is also addictive and teenagers hooked on a fun exercise activity (like skateboarding or rollerblading) will want to keep doing it. Such exercise can help teenagers who struggle with mild depression and help them to break away from addiction to video games (which also produces endorphins from the mental stimulation).

Most teenagers aren't too concerned about their health. Parents need to set rules and encourage a healthy lifestyle to ensure their teens stay healthy. Set a "no cheese puffs/text messaging/caffeine cola/action video game before bedtime" rule may seem rather strict, but if you can get your teenager out there playing tennis or doing archery instead it will be worth it because you will be setting them on a life of healthy balances.

The Canadian Daily

I have been invited to start writing exercise / dietary advice on the news website The Canadian Daily.

So far I have only done the following article:

How I Lost 50 Lbs of Fat + 12 Weight Loss Tips

I think I may contribute a new article to their site once per week or maybe twice monthly if I am really busy in a particular month.

Update

5 Common Factors in Weight Loss

Nutrition is More Important than Exercise

Not long after I became certified as a personal trainer in Toronto I began to wonder if I should have been a nutritionist instead.

If you read the title of this post you've probably guessed why.

Its because nutrition plays a huge role in whatever fitness goal you are attempting to achieve. Some estimate that the role is as high as 90% nutrition / 10% exercise. And the reason is because without proper nutrition, regardless of whether your goal is weight loss or muscle gain, you won't reach your goal anywhere as quickly as you would if you were eating properly for that specific goal.

So for example if your goal is weight loss then you want to cut back on carbs and sugars, avoid toxins entirely, and you want to limit your diet to approx 1800 to 2000 calories daily while taking in lots of vitamins, nutrients, minerals, protein and fibre.

If your goal was muscle gain you would want to do the same thing, but up the percentage of protein (possibly by using supplements) in an effort to match your weightlifting regimen.

Now you might think its possible to achieve great results without changing your diet. And depending on your current diet, that might be possible, except most people in North America probably eat a lot more calories than they realize. Try counting all your calories for a week and keeping a daily record and you would get a better idea of what you are really eating.

Lets say for example you had two twins named Jeff and Greg and they both do weight lifting and exercise the same amount daily.

Jeff eats healthy, gets lots of veggies and makes certain he is getting enough protein for his weightlifting regimen by drinking 3 raw eggs every morning Rocky Balboa style.

Greg meanwhile eats lots of greasy food. He is still getting some protein, but comparatively little, and his intake of nutrients / minerals from fruits and veggies is almost non-existent.

Which one do you think will get the most muscle gain and which one do you think will have some belly flab? The answer is pretty obvious.

Here's another anecdote, this time for weight loss.

I know a colleague who is also in the fitness industry. She lost 45 lbs back in 2004 by making some drastic changes to her diet and coupled that with running 3 - 4 times per week.

She later became a personal trainer here in Toronto, and took up weight lifting and a variety of other exercise activities to stay in shape, but her initial weight loss she credits completely to the lifestyle change with respect to her diet. She admits the running helped, but it was the dietary change that made the big difference.

Lets stop and calculate how many calories she was consuming and burning while running.

Before she changed her lifestyle she had a yo-yo diet and when she wasn't on the latest fad diet she was consuming 2500 to 3000 calories per day. So lets average that out to 2750. So by changing her diet to 2000 calories per day she cut out 750 calories per day and stabilized her diet. Thanks to that change she prevented herself from gaining 1.5 lbs per week.

Next she started off weighing 185 lbs and ended up at 140. So her average weight during that training period was 162.5. So if I feed that into a calorie calculator and estimate that she did an average of 5 km in an hour each time she ran then she burned an average 382 calories per run.

And if she did that 3.5 times per week she burned 1337 calories per week... which is a little over one third of a lb.

Now imagine if she had NOT changed her diet and was still eating an extra 5250 calories per week. Even with all her running she still would have been gaining weight because she hadn't changed her diet.

By changing her diet she cut out a lot of extra unneeded calories and began a fat burning process.

In her own words:

"I had not done any weightlifting yet and the idea of doing physical activities for fun still had not registered in my brain. In retrospect I can guarantee that it was not all the running that helped me to shed all of that weight in under a year. It was changing my diet and my lifestyle!"

Research now supports that nutrition plays a much larger factor in weight loss success. Don't get me wrong, exercise is certainly necessary and important and speeds up the process. And exercise will help you to tone up so that when you lose weight your skin will be tighter and not loose or saggy. Not to mention, you won't get a hard-body or six pack by nutrition alone!

So far in my career as a personal trainer I have found that many people not only underestimate how much they eat, but don't have a good handle on food quality. The  real trick to eating really healthy is to make the most out of your daily caloric intake by looking for foods that are highly nutritious - or making more nutritious choices even when choosing a tasty snack. It's a huge difference in both the quality and the quantity of food, and thus creates a better overall nutritional profile.

If you're having trouble shedding weight through your exercise regimen, the answer to your weight loss problem may be rooted in the nutritional choices. The extra calories you are consuming are holding you back from your dreams.

It only take 21 days to make a new habit, so changing your lifestyle doesn't really take that long to change.

Sweating Hard + 10 Exercise Myths

Everyone enjoys a good sweat during their workout (myself included). It feels great and the sweat cools you down. but sweating doesn't necessarily mean you are getting the best workout for your body.

Sweat is simply a cooling mechanism that is designed to cool your body when your internal temperature rises. We sweat in a sauna, and when eating spicy food, but that's not a good workout, is it?

When a person exercises, the body responds to the exertion, rather than the amount you are sweating. For example weight lifting is one of the best forms of exercise for a long term metabolic increase, defining the muscles, and providing all around benefits in terms of aesthetics, practical training and prevention for injury and disease in later life. But the sweat you are sweating during weightlifting is no more valuable than sweating while suntanning yourself at the beach. Sweat doesn't burn calories.

Swimming is a great example of a high exertion, sweat-free exercise. You don't sweat while swimming because water does the job of cooling you down.

Exerting your body means challenging yourself and using functional exercises that not only gets a person in great shape but also assist with body awareness, which assists in tuning the body for daily activities. Not to mention injury and chronic condition prevention. By gaining balance, co-ordination and increasing bone density, even if you do say, slip on the ice while skating (but you won't because you have such great balance and co-ordination!) your body will be able to better handle the fall with stronger bones and connective tissue.

Some sweaty exercises like running and cycling can cause you to lose a lot of sodium in the process so remember to take an energy drink like Powerade or Gatorade with you.

Don't use energy drinks like Cheetah Power Surge and similar crap with ginseng flavouring or lots of caffeine. The caffeine just dehydrates you and the flavouring is just that - flavouring. No nutritional benefit.

10 Exercise Myths

#1. Spot Reducing Exercises Don't Work

So you want to get rid of your flabby stomach fat and you want to do it by doing sit-ups? HA! Sorry, but spot reducing exercises don't do that. Sit-ups builds muscles in your stomachs, making your stomach look even bigger. If you want to reduce fat go running, cycling or swimming. Do cardio!

#2. Your cardio machine is NOT counting the calories you're burning.

Unless the machine knows your weight, height and your body fat percentage then it really has no clue how many calories you are burning.

#3. Women will NOT Bulk Up and look like Men by Lifting Weights

Lifting weights doesn't cause women to bulk up the way men do. Two reasons. First, female bodybuilders use steroids to bulk up like that. Second, female muscle tissue is different from men's - a difference of quality vs quantity. Women's muscle tissue can lift more per gram than male muscle tissue and is more resistant to ripping. Male muscle tissue rips easily and then due to higher testosterone levels men build new muscle tissue in-between the old ripped tissue. Women who lift weights will build extra muscle, but because of the type of muscle tissue they are building they won't bulk up the way men do.

#4. Heart Rate Monitors do NOT measure Exertion

Heart rate monitors do not measure how much exertion you are doing. Various exercises effect your blood pressure less than others, despite requiring more exertion. Instead your own body is better at telling you how much exertion you are doing. One way to do this is the TALK TEST. The talk test can measure how intensely you're working out depending on whether you can talk in full sentences, short phrases or if you're barely able to muster a few words.

#5. Your Weight Fluctuates Day to Day

You eat, you drink, you sweat, you urinate, you take a #2. Your weight fluctuates a lot in a single day, and thus measuring your weight on scales every day is not going to see much in terms of change. Check your weight at a specific time of day once per week (eg. Friday morning before breakfast) and then record the changes.

#6. High Intensity Exercises still DO burn fat

There is a myth going around that it is better to do low intensity workouts because they burn more fat and less carbs. This is only partially true. It is true that the more intensely you exercise, the higher proportion of carbs you burn. You may burn less fat, but the total amount of calories burned is higher and that is the bigger picture.

And if you don't burn the carbs it just gets stored as fat anyway. So it doesn't really matter if you are burning fat or carbs, because carbs ends up becoming fat if you don't use it. So you might as well do higher intensity exercises if you have the energy / motivation to do so.

#7. Protein Shakes do NOT make a replacement for real food.

You're actually better off eating real food because you get more nutrients and vitamins from eating a normal healthy meal. Protein shakes are really just meant to be used as supplements on top of a regular healthy diet.

#8. Going to the Gym does NOT Negate eating poorly.

Its actually the opposite. Bad diet negates your efforts at the gym and will hold you back because you won't be getting the nutrients to replace muscle tissue you ripped at the gym. If you go to the gym and then pig out on ice cream later you aren't just hindering yourself, you are hurting yourself because that is muscle tissue that won't regrow properly since you failed to eat a healthy balanced meal.

#9. No Pain, No Gain is NOT a way to measure exertion.

Some people think that they have to be in pain all the time while exercising otherwise they aren't achieving anything. Complete myth. Feeling discomfort during a workout is okay. Feeling pain after a workout happens sometimes if you over-exert yourself. If you are in a lot of pain you should NOT be exercising. Stop doing that before you pass out or injure yourself.

#10. Stretching does NOT prevent sports injuries.

There is a growing body of research which shows that stretching before exercising does not prevent sports injuries. The best time to do stretches is actually AFTER a workout, or DURING a workout to relieve muscle tension.

If you want to do anything before a workout do a series of warmup exercises, such as high knee jogs, walking lunges and similar warmup exercises. Keep the stretching for your mid-workout break or after the workout.

Having better flexibility does help prevent injuries, but stretching before a workout doesn't prevent such things from happening. Stretching after a workout helps stretch out ligaments and maintain your flexibility. Its meant to be done AFTER the workout.