Martial Arts Training

    One of my favorite workouts has to be Martial Arts training. This is a simple but effective way of burning some serious calories and staying in great cardiovascular shape. If you like learning martial arts and different styles I would recommend learning Capoeira. I have recently started Capoeira and within the first ten minutes or so of constantly moving around I break a pretty good sweat.
    Capoeira is very different from a Chinese of Japanese style of martial arts. Your fighting stance is not stationary but it is always moving (this is called the ginga). From there you learn all sorts of kicks, escapes, dodges, and (if you want to) some aerial moves.
    I would highly recommend Capoeira to anyone who likes to constantly move around and is looking for a replacement to their old cardiovascular activities. However Capoeira is very technical and it will take lots of practice to get the moves down correctly. I recommend finding a trainer who can instruct you, but if you don't want to spend to money and learn on your own like I do here is a fantastic website for you.
http://www.capoeiranation.com/
watch this video for a Capoeira demonstration

Crazy With Weight

  Almost every gym is like the other. You have a few people huffing and puffing on the treadmill, Personal Trainers are running around with their clients saying "you can do it, just one more rep". When you walk to the free weights area of the gym there are always a few people there (usually men) curling 40 pound dumbbells and benching press more then twice your weight.

  Even if these people look like they are in the shape of their lives you have to ask yourself do they really lead a happy healthy life? My personal method of fitness is to get out and get active, move around and try to stay away from the heavy lifting as much as possible. The problem with gaining pound on pound of muscle and spending hours bench pressing is that you are only working on one of the areas of your personal fitness. Fitness can be divided into three categories strength, endurance, and speed. From their you can divide that into all sorts of subcategories but if you are spending most of your time curling dumbbells you are only working on your strength. In order to achieve you own personal fitness goal you need to be outside running, biking, spending time on the elliptical, or even playing sports like soccer that get you to move around. Strength training is great but when it is the only thing that you are doing it can become detrimental to your fitness goals.  

Flexibility

Most athletes i know groan when I ask them to stretch after a practice. Now when we think about it... stretching is pretty boring. Even though we all have our personal opinions about stretching it is an extremely important habit to get into. The reason that my first real post on my blog is about stretching is to underline the importance of it in everyone's life not just athletes.

Why stretch?

stretching can help you increase your range of movement, it will help decrease the amount of soreness after you exercise, and most importantly it will help reduce you muscle tension. 

Two different types of stretching

1. Dynamic Stretching

Dynamic stretching help prepare the body for whatever activity you will be doing. So you should use dynamic stretches BEFORE a workout. When you do a dynamic stretch you should use a slow and controlled motion, at this point in your warm-up your muscles are still tight and jerking them around could cause an injury. 

to see a list of dynamic stretches go to this website

http://www.stretchingworld.com/dynamicstretching.html#test 

2. Static Stretching

Static stretches should be immediately following a workout. These stretches help cool down the body and will help reduce the soreness from exercising. Static stretches are done without moving and while stretching you should hold a position right before a place of discomfort. If you stretch too far you could cause an injury.

to see a list of static stretches go to this website

http://www.stretchingworld.com/staticstretching.html#test

Stretching should be an important facet of your training program. A simple stretching program could take as long as ten minutes or if flexibility is something that you would like to work on you could take as long as an hour doing more sets of stretches.

First Entry

Today marks my first real blog entry. For months I had the idea of starting a blog and sharing my knowledge of fitness with a larger crowd. But months and months of never ending homework and late night practices kept me from my goal. But now I am very content because as the school year slowly winds down I have more and more free time so I was able to start this blog something that I kept on the back burner for awhile.
I hope you enjoy, this blog is the product of a great deal of research and experience.
MUD7DDMWCNGA



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