Current Trends in Health and Fitness-2012

Earlier this year I attended the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) Personal Trainers Conference. During the conference, I learned some useful information and received validation that I am on the right path when it comes to my personal approach to workouts and fitness in general. Since these types of conferences are a good reflection of current trends and future directions of the health and fitness industry, at least among true fitness professionals, I thought you might be interested in learning about the most discussed topics during the conference.

On a side note, there are always personal trainers and other health and fitness employees who have no interest in increasing their knowledge or providing better information to their clients/customers. These people are not representative of the entire health and fitness industry, although they do make up a significant portion of it. The true professionals realize that health and fitness information is constantly evolving and we have to keep learning if we want to provide our clients with the most accurate information and the best quality service.

Personal trainers and other health and fitness employees who are not interested in improving their knowledge or staying up to date with information are usually more concerned about making money than they are about their clients. Naturally, it is best to avoid these people whenever possible, because they generally provide lower quality products or services that will not help you effectively reach your goals and generally result in disappointment and frustration.

Okay, with that little diversion out of the way, let's get back to the conference. There were many different topics covered during the conference including nutritional issues, performance enhancement for athletes, training special populations (children, elderly, people with injuries, etc.), and more. However, even with this wide variety of topics, there were some topics that seemed to keep coming up over and over in different presentations.

Probably the most frequently discussed topics were related to movement, specifically the importance of moving correctly and training to correct poor movement patterns. If you have followed my writings over the years, it should be no surprise that proper movement is very important to me and it is great to see that movement issues are taking a more prominent role in the health and fitness industry.

There are many reasons why movement technique is getting more attention, but one of the driving forces is actually the rising cost of health care. As health care slowly shifts from just treating problems to actively preventing them, research has found that people who have incorrect movement technique are more likely to develop muscle and joint problems later in life, which results in higher numbers of joint replacements, falls, and other major problems. To make matters worse, these problems are not only found in the elderly.

With the removal of physical education from many schools, children are growing up being less active. This not only has implications for increasing levels of childhood obesity, but it has consequences for movement as well. We are finding that inactive children are much more likely to have poor movement technique when they grow up, which results in premature deterioration of their body. Younger people commonly have physical problems that should not occur for another 10-20 years or more and many of these problems are the direct result of poor movement technique putting excessive wear and tear on their muscles and joints.

The good news is these incorrect movements can be retrained and when poor movement patterns are replaced with correct ones, people can dramatically improve their long-term health. Unfortunately, training biomechanically correct movements is more complicated than just performing random exercises and exercising on traditional machines will generally not do the job. It takes concentration and awareness of what muscles are contracting and how each segment of your body is moving, along with the knowledge of how each movement is technically supposed to be performed.

When all these elements are put together in a well-designed training program, people of all ages and ability levels can improve their overall health and physical function. This was evident at the conference, because there were sessions on exercising and training movements with many different types of people including, children, elderly people, athletes, pregnant women, and people with injuries. It is clear that training is advancing past simply working individual muscles and becoming more about training each muscle to work correctly with the rest of the body.

Proper movement was not the only topic covered and many of the usual subjects were represented as well. On the nutrition side, protein intake and supplementation are still popular, because people are always interested in learning things they can do to improve their results. Another topic that continues to be noteworthy is eating disorders, along with the importance of developing good eating habits. People with bad eating habits (eating too much before they go to bed, eating too few calories, etc.), almost always have a hard time making progress, because even a great exercise routine can be undone by poor nutritional habits.

There were also many sessions with practical information about different types of training and demonstrations of new training equipment. Much of the focus was on training to improve specific attributes, such as speed, agility, power, and balance. Improving these different characteristics is important for improving physical performance in athletes, but they also have applications for improving performance in everyday tasks and improving the quality of life in all segments of the population.

Of course, no conference would be complete without sessions on core training, because everyone cares about their abdominal muscles. Fortunately these sessions were not about generic topics, such as training to get 6-pack abs, but rather training to improve the function of your body. The core muscles are essential for protecting your spine, maintaining good posture, preventing back pain, and much more, but many people still only think about how they look and not about how they function.

The topics discussed above were not the only ones covered during the conference, but they were the most common ones. When looking at everything, it's clear the overall theme and general direction of the health and fitness industry is learning to use specific exercises and movements to improve physical function in people of all ages and ability levels. As time progresses, hopefully training not just to improve appearance, but also to improve physical function, will become a standard for personal trainers and others in the health and fitness industry. Unfortunately, right now we are still a long way from that happening.

Diet Health and Acid Reflux

Your diet health is critical if you have acid reflux and don't want to experience all of the uncomfortable symptoms associated with the condition. Therefore, you need to educate yourself on what foods you should be eating.

Many doctors and other health experts will tell you that there isn't really any specific diet to help acid reflux sufferers and you really have to find out what you can and can't eat for yourself by trial and error.

That is such nonsense and doesn't solve anything. You don't have to experience more uncomfortable symptoms just to find out what you can't eat.

Diet Health and Fitness Never Fails

What you need to understand is that you didn't just happen to get acid reflux. Diseases don't just happen to people. They are caused by the way people think and the lifestyles they live.

Your reflux was probably caused by poor diet health and lack of fitness in your life. If you are sick of the uncomfortable symptoms of this condition you need to get honest with yourself and focus on making some positive changes. These changes include a strict diet change, exercising hard everyday for one hour, and making a commitment to feeling good and living a long healthy life.

The exercise is often the hardest thing for people who have lived a sedentary lifestyle to get the daily motivation for. So try to always do something that is fun for you. A lot of people think fitness has to be done with weights in a gym or pounding the pavement for five miles, but that is not true.

Just get out and move. Have fun, do whatever you want as long as you are getting significant exercise. Also, once you make it through the first two weeks of consistent exercise your body will want to exercise and you will enjoy it even more.

If your acid reflux is severe you may need the help of your doctor to help you make some of these lifestyle changes. But the good news is that these diet and health changes, once you make and work at them, will enable you to completely rid yourself of the condition.

The Diet

You need to switch your diet to one that is full of organic fruits and vegetables and nuts. I know you have probably heard this before and it may sound to simple to be true, but I assure you it works.

Have you ever really tried eating a healthy diet for a prolonged period of time? Probably not if you have acid reflux, so give it an honest try for six months and see if you have any problems anymore.

However, there are just a few foods in this group that you may want to avoid because they could spur symptoms. They are:

* Raw garlic
* Tomatoes
* Raw onions
* Fats and oils
* Peppermint
* Citrus fruits

Get real with yourself and understand that the days of eating processed food and going out to eat at restaurants all the time are over. You can still eat unhealthy sometimes if you want to. However, if you really want to feel better you need to mostly make healthy choices when it comes to your diet health.

Improve Health and Fitness With Nutrition

Vitamins and minerals supplement can improve your health. There were controversies about the daily use of supplements. Many studies have proved that taking multivitamin and multi mineral supplement regularly does not cause any harm but helps in improving the health and fitness. They facilitate the smooth functioning of the entire body by providing the essential nutrition.
It is proved beyond doubt that anti oxidants are more effective when taken for long periods. Vitamin A, E and C are known as anti oxidants. They have the ability to remove toxic free radicals or cells from the body. These toxins and free radicals cause various diseases from allergy to cancer. Anti oxidant vitamins, gradually, build up the resistance power.
B vitamins like thiamine, riboflavin, pyridoxine and B12 helps in over all body functions. Vitamin D strengthen the bones, vitamin K and folic acid helps blood. A multivitamin aids many body functions.
Minerals are also essential. Calcium is needed in plenty for the bone, marrow and blood. Other minerals like potassium, iodine, sodium, selenium, zinc, copper etc. are required in small amounts. Some of them help in hormone production. Iodine helps in producing thyroid hormone. Some helps in body protection like selenium and potassium.
Hence, a multivitamin and multi mineral supplement helps in improving over all body functions like circulation, hormone production, digestion, assimilation and nerves.        
We can not get the daily requirement of essential vitamins and minerals from our best nutritious food. It is always not possible to eat nutritious food either despite best of our intentions. Addition of a multivitamin and multi mineral to the regular food sounds practical and useful.
Deficiency of vitamins and minerals in our body can cause variety of health problems. Vitamin A deficiency causes night blindness and reduced vision, vitamin D deficiency causes rickets, vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy. Similarly a host of diseases are caused. Some may become chronic with passage of time.
Good news is that we may avoid vitamins and minerals associated health problems with proper supplements and care. But, you should always remember that supplements are supplements and not replacement of healthy food. Without food, they will not work. Their nutrition providing ability is nullified. Taken under proper guidance, they can prove to be be very beneficial. You become healthy, fit and radiant.
Quality of life also improves and gets better when you are physically fit and healthy. That, in turn, improves your mental health too. You become more positive and confident. I believe the old proverb 'sound mind in a sound body'.
I am running an internet business. I keep myself healthy and fit as i combine healthy food with good supplements barring very occasional splurge of rich food. After all, i am human too. I believe, being health conscious and proactive is very beneficial.

Purchasing Fitness Equipment For Health And Fitness

Are you looking to find and purchase fitness equipment? Supreme health and fitness is possible when purchasing fitness equipment and actually using it! As you read this article, you will discover how to purchase some great equipment, as well as discover some great benefits of doing so!
There are many different ways that you can get fit, however, one of the best things that you can do, to stay committed to achieving great health and fitness, is by purchasing fitness equipment, and using it regularly.
This is an easier discipline than going for a run, jog or doing press ups, and other activities. Why? Because when you have something tangible, you will be more apt to work it daily!
The good news is that there are many options out there, and investing the time to finding and purchasing fitness equipment that is right for you, is a good idea. There are many options, such as treadmills, weights for weight training, and rowing machines, aerobic training equipment, and much more. Investing the time to finding the best, is a great idea.
This can happen with some research.
The first thing to do, is look at what you like. If you are new to health and fitness, exercise, etc, then it can take a bit of soul searching to be able to find the suitable options that you like, and would like to invest time into using.
If you use a gym, and want to add to this with your own fitness gear, then you likely know what you like, and selecting the best options is much easier than if you didn't know. Whether you use a gym or not, purchasing equipment for home is a great idea. Not only does it save a lot of money, but it can also can actually make all the difference in your fitness level, as it is there, and doesn't require scheduling time at a gym, which can be expensive.
There are many ways to purchase fitness equipment. For example, the fitness magazines are generally full up with options to buying fitness equipment.
Locally, you may also find stores that specialize in this equipment or at least have these kind of items for sale. A better solution I like to go with, is to buy fitness equipment online. When you purchase online, you will ultimately find that you have access to a better range of options, and this can make all the difference.
Being able to buy the best, is a good idea, and most local stores don't have the range of options we need. Buying online also has the added benefit that you can actually go through and order, and then get home delivery!

Health and Fitness Program

Most entrepreneurs and solopreneurs that I work with have a dream of incorporating a health and fitness program into their lives so that they can enjoy a fabulous life style. However, this dream can cost them a bundle if they are too busy to stop and work out.
There are several simple and overlooked ways that not only can improve your health and make your dream a reality. Here's the good news: I am going to reveal to you, how you can start a health and fitness program which will change your life style even if you have never done it before.
Health and fitness are partners in living a happy and fulfilling life.
It is nearly impossible to enjoy your life to the fullest without being healthy. Part of being healthy is being physically fit.
Your quality of life will decrease if you are obese, abusing drugs or alcohol, or not getting the rest your body needs.
We want the best quality of life that is possible. A good health and a fitness program will help us have that.
#1: What is the most overlooked key to health and fitness?
One of the most important and most overlooked keys to good health is starting your day with breakfast. Your body has gone without food for the night as you slept. You need to fill up your tank before you start the day.
This has several benefits; the most important being it jump-starts your metabolism and helps you burn fat.
#2: Here are some good choices for breakfast...
Good choices for breakfast include whole grain cereals, yogurt and fruit, and whole grain toast with peanut butter. You will notice that foods with refined sugars are not included in what is considered a healthy breakfast!
3#: How can you make physical activity a part of your day?
Stay active during your day. You can make time for physical activity even if you are holding down a job or spending six hours in class. Try to get in at least 30 minutes of exercise each day.
#5: OK, let's look at some simple ways to stay active.
There are simple ways to get in physical activities. Use stairs instead of an elevator and park farther out in the parking lot and walk those few extra steps. Take a break every hour when you get up and get your body moving.
Now that you understand there is not only hope but a define course of action you can take to start your dream of a health and fitness program and move beyond any question or concerns once and for all. Just imagine how much more energy, clarity and fun you can have in life.
Now I would suggest you get started by taking action on one of the suggestions I outlined in heart of the article. Peace.

Heath and Fitness For Everyone

If there is one concern that all of us have it is directly focused toward our well beings. For being well is the only way to live, both physically and mentally speaking. Specifically, it is our health and fitness levels that are, whether we truly choose to accept it or not, all too important factors in our lives. They keep us going. Keep us living. And having poor health will not allow us to fully live and enjoy what life has to offer. And being out of shape is nothing to be satisfied with as it proves to make us incapable of doing many activities we would otherwise love to do.
So, hopefully with all this said, it would make individuals like yourself say to themselves "Well, am I healthy...am I, fit?" Or, "Am I happily living?" And they're questions that should be inwardly asked and answered accordingly. If you're not healthy or physically fit you need to ask yourself why. Usually, lack of a healthy life is not simply put upon individuals. Instead, it's gained from something that's done, or, more likely, from something that isn't done.
Ask Yourself If You Live A Healthy Lifestyle
You need to ask yourself if the way in which you live is in line with being - and, more importantly, striving to be - healthy. Do you eat well on a regular basis or do you eat poorly day in and day out? Or is there a bit of a combination, of monitored and carefree eating? Do you exercise to keep yourself in decent shape or do you prefer vegetating, inadvertently keeping yourself unfit? Or again, do you exercise intermittently and still partake in being a vegetable too?
After asking yourself the above questions give yourself some answers. If you do eat without care daily, do sit around and opt out of exercising then it's likely you're a bit unhealthy. Yet, this unhealthiness can easily be addressed and fixed.
Changing The Way You Live - Becoming and Being Healthy
All that needs to be done is a little reorganization of what you typically do day to day, both concerning eating and exercising habits. As far as eating goes, it's a matter of eating healthfully. This means that you eat wholesome foods, in fair amounts, around 3-4 times a day. Stay away from junk or filler foods. Avoid eating till you're stuffed or considerably "satisfied." And eat on a schedule having 3 full meals each day, trying to snack rarely and healthfully, if and when you do.
As far as exercising and activity goes you should aim to be active at least 3-4 times a week to maintain a fitness level that is in line with being healthy. Exercise can be moderate to strenuous based on your current physical shape or fitness goals. Just be sure to stick through exercising even if at first you seem unable or not strong enough - the effort put into a workout is completely worth it, as is your overall good health that will surely follow.
Truly, Anyone Can Have Great Health and High Fitness Levels
And don't underestimate yourself through the process of becoming a healthy individual. You can (stressing the word "can") eat well and be active all at once. It will just take some initiation and unbendable determination on your part. For, no one ever said that being healthy was a matter of just proclaiming yourself healthy. It takes work. It requires drive. But, in truth, it's really not all that difficult to work toward; having good health and being fit is easy enough for everyone to achieve.

What Is The Big, Fat Health And Fitness Lie?

Kevin:

Good evening, everyone. So Craig, you've been in the fitness industry for over 26 years and with that, I imagine comes a bit of wisdom. Why don't you start with your story and how you've gotten to where you are now?

Craig: Sure Kevin. Well, first of all, I started out in the fitness industry as a personal trainer making $3.50 an hour.

Kevin: Wow.

Craig: So I've been in it for awhile and I grew through the ranks in the fitness industry to the executive level. I was the president of two of the largest fitness organizations in the United States. I was the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the largest chain of fitness clubs in the world operating in 11 countries. I also successfully owned and operated my own fitness company. I've visited 30 countries and evaluated health and fitness trends all over Russia, Asia, Europe. I've been to dozens of fitness conventions, purchased millions of dollars worth of equipment, supplements and other health and fitness related products and I've also had the ability to train thousands of health and fitness professionals around the world and help them to help other people improve their lives. So this really kind of led me to where I am today, which is to where I just got to the point where I want to do something more and that's why I wrote my book The Big Fat Healthy Fitness Lie and founded the Fit Advocate website so that I could create a platform to protect and enhance the lives and health and fitness consumers.

Kevin: Now you just mentioned your book, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie which I absolutely love. What is the big fat fitness lie. Let's just lay it on the table.

Craig: Why mince words? Let's dig right in. The lie is that there are these billion dollar industries out there getting richer while we get sicker and fatter and with all the so-called solutions available for losing weight and improving our health, we are literally in the worse shape in the history of modern civilization. There's big profit in sickness and in fatness, and a lot of times people question that and they think, "Oh, well we live in the United States, we're in great health and we have the best health care system" which is a complete fallacy. Here's an interesting fact that people should be aware of, we're approaching some 300 million people in the U.S. and we have every year 200 million diseases that are diagnosed for conditions that could be prevented with simple lifestyle changes.

Kevin: Wow.

Craig: And we spend in the United States, 270 billion dollars on 3.7 billion prescriptions written to, not to cure anything because there's really very few cures in modern medicine, medicine is meant mostly to mask our symptoms. So taking into our bodies a lot of toxic chemicals and you know there's so much confusion out there and misinformation about health and fitness. So there's a huge opportunity, unfortunately, for people to make big money on the lack of knowledge that people have about how to lose weight, improve their health, get in shape and live better. So millions of people are out there paying thousands of dollars that have no chance of helping them achieve their goal and that's really the big fat lie.

Kevin: And let me just ask you this, you've been on the other side, you've been a part of the industry that is making a lot of money in the fitness clubs and the organizations and everything. When did you suddenly say, "Hey, you know, maybe I need to educate people about this."

Craig: Well, first of all I never felt that the club industry was a bad industry.

Kevin: Okay.

Craig: And in my book I still am a big proponent of joining a fitness center for the average person, there are, of course, some caveat of how to get a quality club. I have an article on the ten worst tricks for the fitness industry. So I try to expose the things that I think are bad but there's also a lot of good too, but what I did notice while I was operating all of these clubs and trying to help people is that I would talk to thousands of consumers, face to face. For a big part of my career, my job was to get out there and help, work with people in the field, club operators, managers, sales people, fitness staff members, personal trainers, to talk to them about how to help people make decisions that are good for them and the guiding principle, of course was always don't focus on making money, focus on helping people and you will make money as a natural result, as a natural bi-produce of helping people. That's always been one of my guiding principles, but in speaking with all these consumers, you find that the average person spends thousands and thousands of dollars on products and services that have no chance of helping them. They spend hours and hours of wasted time on information that will never help them improve their health or change their lives. So I got tired, frustrated and really kind of outraged at all of the quick fix solutions that are out there that people jump from one to the other and without really understanding the true cause of why they're in such poor health. So I wanted to try to educate them on all of the things, the lies the deceptions while also trying to give them simple solutions for how to improve their health, how to lose weight, how to get in shape, how to live better, how to feel better with no tricks and no gimmicks for the rest of their lives. That's really what the big fat health and fitness lie is all about and that's really what the Fit Advocate website is all about.

Kevin: And you take a different approach in your book as opposed to a lot of the other books that I've read about health and fitness and it's related to addiction. You say addiction feeds this whole lie. What do you mean by this?

Craig: Well, many people live a self-inflicted toxic lifestyle that destroys their health and feeds this lie. So what do I mean by that? Well, the definition of toxic, first of all, is poison and in our society we are surrounded by poisons, in our air, it's in our water, some of them we can't avoid and many of them we can, however. A lot of these poisons, they're not going to kill us today, but instead what they do is they slowly and quietly deteriorate and destroy our health.

There's two specific types of poisons or toxins that I talk about that create these health problems. The first, of course is chemical exposures. There are thousands of untested chemical combinations in our food supply to improve taste, texture, color or to extend shelf life. There are low calorie, low carb foods laced with toxic sweeteners that has contributed to obesity and diabetes. We've been conditioned to believe that sodium fluoride, for example is good for our teeth. Yet it's a known chemical waste bi-product of the aluminum and phosphate fertilizer industry. This chemical has been pumped into our water supply and put into our dental hygiene products for years but fluoridation has been flatly rejected by many developed countries because of the dangers and the lack of really any scientific evidence of any health benefit. Beyond that, we have toxic chemicals in our household products, our cleaning products, personal hygiene products. Fruits and vegetables have been treated with herbicides and pesticides. Chickens and cows are fed ground chicken and beef. Then pumped full of antibiotics to stave off disease from the horrific conditions in which they live and where they're slaughtered. So we have all of those, you know, all of this chemical toxicity. That's the first concern.

The second is the biggest toxic exposure which is related to stress, and people don't realize this but as much as 80% of all disease is the result of stress and having had the ability to travel all over the world and visit, you know, I believe I've been to over 40 countries now, you find that we in America are the most stressed out country on the planet. We work more than any other activity other than sleep. Just think about our normal lives, we wake up every day and we're running on empty from morning to night. We've got the pressures at work, at home, the challenges sustaining some sort of happy relationship with our significant others. We've got the demands of the kids, trying to pay the bills. We have all of the negativity in the news. We're all trying to live the American dream which is predicated on financial freedom, but the truth is only a fraction of people out there actually ever realize the American dream and the rest of us are simply trying to get by, and, you know, we're buried in a mountain of debt. All of these things add up to a lot of worry and stress and to cope with this stress, what do we do? We drink, we smoke, we take drugs, we over eat, we eat the wrong foods and we spend hours in front of the television or surfing the internet. All of these activities, unfortunately make us fat, lazy and out of shape, and what happens is this poor health that's created from this self addictive lifestyle creates, and opens the door for these big fat health and fitness lies. One of them is companies that market, manufacture and market and sale products that have no chance of helping us and then, of course, the worse thing is when we look to synthetic chemical compounds, prescription drugs, as the first line of defense to handle our self inflicted health problems. So we really have a lot of issues that we have to deal with in order to be healthy, but people need to understand the basis of where it starts, the cause.

Kevin: Yes. How does someone take that sort of addiction or quote unquote addictive personality and turn that into fitness success?

Craig: Well the first thing they have to do is identify it.

Kevin: Yes.

Craig: You have to realize it. Here's, here's a fact that's pretty important that people should know about, the number one reason that people give for not exercising regularly is that they don't have enough time, okay. Yet the average American watches four and a half hours of television a day. So there's an issue there with priority and people have to understand that time is the most important and the most valuable thing that we have because once it's gone you can't get it back. If you want to improve your health, you have to make time to do all of the things that are necessary to improve and enhance your health and your life and it's not just exercise but it is one of the key components. So they have to first understand the issues and then have the right motivation and set the right priorities to get them to where they need to be