Corporate Fitness Professional/Self Employed

How many others are having issues getting there prescriptions filled at the pharmacy 👋👋👋👋

I keep holding on to yesterday. I keep holding on enough to say, that’s wrong. Lord I don’t know when I’ll see you I can’t reach anymore….

Ambrosia. I keep holding on to yesterday

Join me on a journey through the Science of Exercise. This Educational experience is free to everyone. Starting May 1, 2021 I'll pick a weekly topic and breakdown the science behind each and every muscle in the human body. I'll also answer the top 5 questions of the week. Look for my post right here "Corporate Fitness Professional/Self Employed. My bio is coming soon so check it out!

One of the things that personal trainers and sports medicine physicians do are develop exercise ‘prescriptions’ or exercise guidelines for their clients and patients. While almost anyone can safely exercise, some people may benefit from meeting with a professional trainer for an exercise consultation.

The top two reasons to get exercise prescriptions include safety and efficiency.

An exercise program needs to be designed specifically for your health status, goals, abilities, and interests.
A professional trainer can help integrate all of these pieces into a simple plan that can be followed and adjusted as needed.

Elements of an Exercise Prescription
A general exercise prescription will take into consideration the principles of conditioning and include the following basics:

Health Status Questionnaire / Physical Exam

Your physician will perform a general physical exam and may have you complete a questionnaire to determine if you have any health issues that would limit your ability to exercise or require modifications to your program. Most personal trainers require a physician’s clearance before they design your program.

Fitness Assessment and Evaluation

A fitness assessment is a next step in designing your exercise prescription. This assessment is used to establish a baseline of your current fitness and help determine what sort of exercise you can safely perform. The assessment often includes simple measurements of your blood pressure and heart rate, strength, flexibility, body composition, cardiovascular endurance, exercise history, and goals and interests. A variety of assessment protocols are used, and these are often repeated at regular intervals to gauge your progress.

Exercise Type

A big part of your exercise prescription is what type of exercises you will do. A good prescription will include a variety of exercises and a balanced routine to build core strength, endurance, flexibility, and base fitness first and then become much more specific to your fitness goals.

These goals may vary, such as running a marathon, enjoying a ski vacation or lowering your blood pressure.

Cardiovascular Fitness

Rhythmic movements using large muscle groups (such as bicycling, walking or swimming) is one of the best ways to increase blood flow to the muscles and raise the heart rate for a longer period. This type of exercise leads to improvements in the heart's ability to pump blood through the body to the working muscles and improves overall cardiovascular health.

Cardiovascular exercise is also linked to a number of health improvements including a decreased risk of many diseases, decreases in total cholesterol, blood pressure and levels of body fat.

Strength Training

Strength training is an important component of fitness and is one area of your exercise prescription that may vary widely from person to person.

A good program will include the core and all the major muscle groups in various combinations working against resistance and building strength, agility and balance. That resistance can be weights, gravity, tubing, your own body.

A capable trainer will find the right combination, but the most basic routine involves 1 to 3 sets of 10 to 12 repetitions for building strength.

Frequency of Exercise

How often you exercise is an important aspect of fitness in order to make safe, yet continued progress. This prescription often starts with two to three times per week and progress to four to five times per week.

Duration of Exercise

Depending upon your current fitness level and exercise history, your exercise prescription could begin with as little as ten minutes of steady exercise and build from there.

Ideally, you will strive for a minimum of 20 to 60 minutes of regular exercise about three times a week.

Intensity of Exercise

The intensity or your exercise prescription may be the most important aspect of an efficient, safe and fun program. This is also where the skills of the specialist or trainer are put to the test. Because every person responds differently to exercise, finding the right intensity and a balance between effort and rest are critical.

Trainers use heart rate as a basic measure of exercise intensity guidelines. A variety of protocols can professionals find the most appropriate heart rate range that will help you improve, but not overdo it. Your trainer will often monitor your heart rate and other vital signs while you exercise.

A beginner may start at 50 percent of their maximum heart rate range whereas an elite athlete may work at nearly 90 percent of their maximum heart rate range during intense interval training.

Exercise Session Order

Your exercise program will usually follow a similar order, but this varies depending upon your training goals. All programs will begin with a warm-up and end with a cool-down and stretching.

Exercise Progression

This is how your physician or trainer keeps you on track and reaching your fitness goal. It is essential for both you and your trainer to provide regular feedback and communicate openly.

Most trainers will keep a written record of your training details, but it’s wise to keep your own training log as well. Write notes about the type of workout, time, distance, weight, reps and how you felt.

The rates of progression for new exercisers are generally broken into three separate 6-week phases: (1) initial conditioning, (2) fitness improvement and (3) fitness maintenance.

Exercise Modifications

A good exercise prescription is adaptable and flexible and can be modified often and easily while still moving you towards your goals. Adjustments are a constant and ongoing part of your exercise prescription for the rest of your life. You will find that you need to constantly change your routine, try new activities, take breaks, increase and decrease your time and intensity over the years.

Periodic visits to your physician and personal trainer will help keep your routine fresh, but by this time, you will have enough skill and experience to go it alone, design your own exercise program, and set a personal best if that’s what you desire.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-art-and-science-aging-well/201805/how-free-radicals-oxygen-accelerate-our-aging

How Free Radicals of Oxygen Accelerate Our Aging The importance of diet and exercise

Exercise: When to check with your doctor first
Keeping physically active is key to a healthy lifestyle. But sometimes it's best to check with your doctor before you start to exercise.
By Mayo Clinic Staff

Regular exercise can help you control your weight, reduce your risk of heart disease, and strengthen your bones and muscles. But if it's been awhile since you've exercised and you have health issues or concerns, it's a good idea to talk to your doctor before starting a new exercise routine.

When to check with your doctor

Although moderate physical activity such as brisk walking is safe for most people, health experts suggest that you talk to your doctor before you start an exercise program if any of the following apply:
You have heart disease.
You have type 1 or type 2 diabetes.
You have kidney disease.
You have arthritis.
You're being treated for cancer, or you've recently completed cancer treatment.
You have high blood pressure.

If you haven't exercised regularly in a while, you may generally start exercising at a light to moderate level without seeing your doctor and gradually increase your activity.
You may also check with your doctor if you have symptoms that may be related to heart, lung or other serious disease such as:
Pain or discomfort in your chest, neck, jaw or arms at rest or during physical activity
Dizziness, lightheadedness, or fainting with exercise or exertion
Shortness of breath with mild exertion, at rest, or when lying down or going to bed
Ankle swelling, especially at night
A rapid or pronounced heartbeat
A heart murmur that your doctor has previously diagnosed
Lower leg pain when you walk, which goes away with rest
Finally, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends that you see your doctor before engaging in moderate or vigorous exercise if:
You have heart disease, kidney disease, or type 1 or 2 diabetes, but no symptoms, and you don't normally exercise
You have any symptoms of heart disease, kidney disease, or type 1 or 2 diabetes
When in doubt, check it out

If you're unsure of your health status, have multiple health problems or are pregnant, speak with your doctor before starting a new exercise program. Working with your doctor ahead of time can help you plan the exercise program that's right for you. And that's a good first step on your path to physical fitness.

One of the most heated debates in the world of fitness today is the battle of free-weights (low-tech apparatus) versus machines (high-tech apparatus). Each side has their arguments with both sides having some merit to their claims.
This article will try to separate some of the fact from the fiction of each of these types of training tools. At the end of this article it will make more sense as to why one would choose a free-weight or a machine and for what purpose.
Before we dive into the major differences between free weights and machines let us first agree on what we are calling a free-weight or a machine.
A free-weight can be classified as any object or device that can be moved freely in three-dimensional space. Some of the more common free-weights found in a gym would be:
Dumbells
Barbells
High/Low or adjustable pulley system
Lat pull-down and low-row device
Medicine Balls(all types including kettle bells)
Ankle weights
The human body the ultimate free-weight of all!
In all reality, any object that is free to move in three-dimensional space that is not fixed to any specific set of axis (as in a smith machine) can be considered a free weight. An exercise machine on the other hand, is not allowed to move in three-dimensional space and is usually only capable of moving in two dimensions.
Any exercise machine in a gym such as a pec-dec or a smith machine is a perfect example of what we are calling high-tech training apparatus.
So which is best, free-weights or machines? I would assume that most of you reading this article are frequent users of free-weights and cable systems.
However, I also know that many bodybuilders choose machine training for isolating and really targeting a specific muscle or group of muscles. So to answer the question on the superiority of free weights versus machines it is first important to know what one's goals are.
Structural Vs. Functional Goals
In studying human physiology we learn that structure and function are intimately related. In strength training jargon this means that if you want to change your structure (i.e. build mass) you must change the function of that structure (i.e. improve 8-12RM) which is ultimately a neuromuscular phenomenon.
So if ones wishes to gain mass (hypertrophy), one must change the function on the nervous system's ability to use that muscle (i.e. get stronger) so that the structure (soft-tissues) can adapt and grow.
The average reader on a web site called Bodybuilding.com is probably most interested in structural goals like building mass and losing body fat than say a sprinter, who is mainly concerned with improving a specific function (running 100m dash in 10 seconds) and thus prioritizes functional goals over structural ones.
This does not mean that sprinters omit structural phases in their training. It simply states that the main goal for a sprinter is not to get as big as a house but rather to improve a specific skill (run fast) which requires that the function of the neuromuscular system improve along with the structure.

Free-weight
Getting back to our discussion of free-weight versus machines, it helpful to know the main benefits of each in relation to whether we have primarily structural or functional goals. Free weights, with their extreme versatility are the ultimate tool for both structural and functional goals.
For instance if a bodybuilder is bench pressing and wishes to put on mass, a choice of reps in the 8-15 range would make a good choice. If one is also a football player who desires to put on some mass the bench press again is an excellent choice because it develops more real-life strength.
What is often called functional strength due to the need to stabilize and control the barbell in all three planes of motion, just like the athlete will need to do on the playing field.
However if the football player decides to use all high-tech Hammer strength machines for his chest work he may build some impressive pecs but will be lacking in the function department due to the lack of three-dimensional stability required in those exercises. Thus, his structure would have improved but without a corresponding increase in his function.
Now lets look at a scenario where a bodybuilder, who's chest development has been stuck for some time. His workouts usually consist of free-weight only with some standing cable fly's thrown in to finish off his chest workout.
If this person were to add some machine work at the end of his free-weight workout he may be able to add some more volume and thus trigger some new growth. After his traditional free-weight workout, his shoulder stabilizers may be so fatigued that his chest is unable to get more work during his final sets.
However, by finishing off with some machine training he may be able to exhaust and stimulate more pectoral muscle fibers because the machine is taking some of the load off his rotator cuff. This is a scientific application for the use of machines.
For the vast majority of exercises and goals, whether structural or functional, free-weights usually offer the most variety as well as total body stimulation because many muscles other than the prime movers (muscles responsible for moving the load) are stimulated as stabilizers.
Machines
Machines on the other hand, with their ability to isolate better, can be useful for structural or bodybuilding purposes when they are carefully planned in the workout which is usually to place them after all free-weight exercises. There is much more to the story here.
Hopefully, this article has shed a little light on the differences between free-weights and machines and specifically the scientific use of each in regards to your training goals.

https://www.emedicinehealth.com/strength_training/article_em.htm

Resistance Training Exercises: Benefits, Definition & Examples Get information about resistance training techniques, programs, benefits, types, common training injuries and strength training workout tips.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/weightloss/why-youre-gaining-weight-despite-working-out/ar-AAFZV54?ocid=spartandhp

Why You’re Gaining Weight Despite Working Out From poor water consumption to wrong snacks, read on to see what could prevent you from losing weight despite spending time in the gym regularly.