Your Health and Fitness

Its the time of year when we start to get all the ridiculous, Get a Bathing Suit Body For the Summer, articles. I am constantly amazed that this crap gets re-cycled every year in magazines, newspapers and television shows. The same weight loss based garbage every year. I cannot believe editors keep asking for these stories and writers keep churning them out. And people pay attention to them.

In general, weight loss goals are a bad idea. Weighing less is meaningless. Making a short-term effort to lose 15-pounds by Memorial Day, even if you do it, will usually be worse for you in the long run, and doesnt even mean that you will look better.

Set a goal of improving performance of a given task by the time you have to get into your bathing suit rather than focusing on weight or appearance.

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Meditation has become increasingly popular, and also increasingly available, to the average consumer in the past five to 10 years.

While anyone who practices meditation on a regular basis can attest to its positive benefits ; reduced stress and anxiety ; going “om” may also lessen physical pain and provide other benefits.

How and why meditation is so effective in this way has been somewhat of a mystery in the past, but now thanks to modern technology, scientists are beginning to discover the brain changes that occur during meditation and that contribute to its benefit.

In fact, there’s a new field of inquiry known as contemplative neuroscience, which is the study of how the brain physically changes when people meditate.

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There are a lot of ridiculous things going on in gyms out there, things I feel compelled to speak out about, and against. This weeks rant will focus on the ridiculousness that is the seated chest and shoulder press, in all inefficient iterations.

First of all, anyone who has been a regular (or even semi-regular) visitor to the site knows that I am not a big fan of machine-based exercises. They are inefficient and ineffective and in every way inferior to their free-weight and body-weight exercise brethren. Name a weight-stack machine and Ill give you a better machine-less exercise.

And while not all exercise machines are equally putrid, youd be hard pressed to come up with worse exercises than the seated chest and shoulder press machines.

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Whenever on vacation I make it a habit to visit a local gym and over the past 30+ years I have worked out in gyms in Jamaica, Italy, California, Florida, Ohio, Bermuda, Vermont and countless other places. Besides restaurants, there are no better places to really get the local flavor and mix with the natives than the local gym. However, while restaurants are easy to find, depending on where you visit you may have to look harder in some cases much harder to find a gym.

This month our family went to Italy and we stayed in a town in Umbria called Trevi, which is why I havent posted anything new over the past 2 weeks.

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View full sizeCoutesy of The CWAllison Skinner and David Young, of Auburn, is shown in a scene from the reality TV show “Shedding for the Wedding.”

Auburn, NY — Allison Skinner and David Young lost more than 60 pounds combined to get ready for their wedding. Losing weight for a wedding isnt all that unusual, but the Auburn couple did it in front of a national TV audience.

The couple were contestants on Shedding for the Wedding, a reality show on The CW channel that featured nine engaged couples competing for the wedding of their dreams. Young and Skinner finished in third place in a segment that aired Wednesday.

It was a grueling experience, Young said Friday.

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