The Ironsmith Personal Training Blog

Alright everybody, glad you can make it to our blog. Here are some basic rules of thumb to help stir you in the right direction. This can seem like typical common sense, and it really is. But sometimes we need to be reminded of these common sense principles to help keep us on our course. So lets begin..

Move-As a human being,we are meant to move. I know….duh! But are we really moving enough? Some people may think that taking the stairs once a week instead of the elevator or taking out the trash more than their roommates is enough. Now a little is better than nothing but this small time movement is not enough. We need to move more! Exercise can help provide more movement in your life. Functional movement dates back to our pre-historic ancestors. These nomadic people moved in search for abundant food sources, if they didn’t move the tribe would die. Of course we do not need to walk from state to state or kill bears with our bare hands. We just need to realize that in today’s time, our technology has made a dramatic impact on our movement. Everything is designed to make you execute any task at the convenience of your chair. This type of sedentary life style has caused an increase injuries and other health related issues like osteoporosis, obesity, muscle pains, and heart disease, just to name a few. Our bodies are biological marvels that are designed to move. The whole premise of ” If you don’t use it, you lose it” is so true in this case. Movement helps our  bodies stay functional by working muscles, moving blood, and stimulating the nervous system. Movement challenges all our other body systems! So start small and work up to it. You do not have to be in the gym for hours on end. Start doing 15 minutes of anything active, whether it be walking, bicep curls, abdominal crunch, or garden work. Than build on that every week till you get a appropriate exercise time that works for you. Remember to keep it moving! Your body would thank you.

Eat-Lets face it, eating is a ritual for all of us. It is hard for us to treat food as a medicine. Especially when we can crave food items that contain high levels of fat, sugar,and salt. We know that eating unhealthy can eventually come at a cost. In time, everything adds up. When dealing with proper nutrition, we need to realize that our eating patterns are 70% of our journey towards health. We can not achieve  our health goals without providing our bodies with the proper macro nutrients, micro nutrients, minerals, and trace minerals. The  processed foods today contain many chemicals that our bodies can’t identify. These chemicals are not just easily removed from the body. To protect itself from these foreign invaders, the body will store them in our fat cells to help contain them. These can stay there for many years if not the rest of your life! Putting organic sourced foods in your body is like supplying your car with its proper fluids to keep it running efficiently. By feeding your body proper nutrition, you can give your body fuel it needs for all of your bodies systems to operate efficiently. This is preventive medicine at its best! Start by making baby steps towards eating. Choose either breakfast, lunch or dinner and make one of those healthy. after you feel you have got the hang of that, add another eating time to it. Pretty soon every meal would turn healthy. Make rewards for yourself. If you do good throughout the week, make a “cheat” day for yourself. Set small goals you know you can achieve so you can build momentum and motivation. Don’t do fade diets, just eat healthy.  Keeping it simple can help keep you on course till you are ready to get more detailed about eating. Eating right just doesn’t effect your body but also helps with mental clarity. You will think clearer and respond quicker. Nothing wrong with that!

Rest- Sounds simple? But is it simple when your day is filled with the stresses of work, family, daily errands, balancing friendships, balancing yourself, etc… It happens to us all..our heads hit the pillow only for our minds to hit the track. Running through thoughts and things to do like if your life depended on it. It can be very frustrating. Our bodies and minds need at least 8 hours of sleep to help repair and reset itself. 4 for the body and 4 for the mind. If any one of these hours  are disrupted, than the body and mind hasn’t fully rested itself.  A poor nights  sleep can set us up for a bad day at work or impair our ability to have a productive day. We all have been there before. So how do we get a good nights sleep. Some cases are very extreme and require a doctors attention but for most of us, we can practice certain habits that can help us wind down. Make sure you do not eat too late, the sugar in the food can cause you to get a sugar rush as it is digested, 3-4 hours before you go to bed is most recommended. Read a book or do a puzzle, this type of brain activity can help tire the mind before bedtime. Don’t do late night work, checking emails, crunching numbers, etc, this will only cause your mind to race! Get your morning ritual set up the night before so you do not have to worry about it in the morning, or when your head hits the pillow. Adjust your lighting, bright lights can over stimulate your brain via the optic nerve. Mediation, stretching , or yoga can help calm down the body and mind through the breathing and light blood flow. Also have ” me time”. Hash out anything that can be on the mind(negative or postive) so it doesn’t  become   bottled up, these thoughts will spill out when you try to sleep. Maybe taking  a walk or finding  a comfortable place  can be the place to think about your worries or frustrations. Hope some of these can help, if not maybe holistic supplementation can work like a melatonin supplement.(our body produces this from our pineal gland- responsible for sleep). Good luck and sweet dreams!

I hope some of these tips can help you, they have helped me and I am honored to share them with you. Good luck in your pursuit towards health! It will be a tough journey but you are a tough person, believe in yourself! Never doubt what you can achieve! Eat well be well

Gary Snyder

We are doing our own version of “Groupon”….called Fit Gift’s!!!!
Our first Fit Gift’s offer is a (4 Session) Personal Training Packages for $120.00 !

That is 4 uber awesome personal training sessions for $ 30.00
The offer is limited to new clients and to a maximum purchase of 2 Fit Gift Certificates per person.

Call 454-IRON ( 4766 ) to give the gift of health.

Everyone is always looking for a better way to exercise.  We all want to find a more efficient way to burn the most calories. Should we exercise for 2 hours, 1 hour, or 45 minutes? Should I use heavy, moderate, light, or a combination? These are valid questions, and studies on the  duration of a workout  really have not  been studied. But in the past few years, new research has came out on the comparison between short intense exercise to longer bouts of exercise. Yeah!

The school of Kinesiology at the University of Western Ontario compared the effects of short intense strength training with those of longer bouts of moderate exercise. Members in the first group did sprints( full power) for 30 seconds and rested in between each  set for 4 minutes.They did 5 sets total and their workout was about 25 minutes.The other group did 60 minute of moderate jogging . Both groups exercised for 3 times a week for six weeks. At the end of the week, the sprinter group lost 12.4 percent of their body fat while the other group lost less than half of that. Now there always are factors that effect a study, like how many man  or woman where in each group, want was their caloric intake, their genetics, and so on. In the past years there has been numerous studies like this one, each yielding the same result. Coming from my own personally experience, I workout no longer than 30 minutes a day with a approach of more intensity. This has helped my clients and I lose and keep off excess body fat. Niccole Pizzi, master of public health, explains that when you push your body to its limits, the body requires energy(fat) to repair and strengthen itself. Which means you are constantly burning fat through out the day from that intense workout. These are just a couple of studies and there are many more out there that compare the same efforts and register the same results. So please take time to time to do your own research. So how to get  intense?

There are safety tips to take when trying to increase your intensity. Coming out of the gate is not advised,  since your body has not adapted to the demands of exercise yet. If my clients are ready to move to a more intense training program, than we do it. So please start at  a beginners level before sprinting down the track or lifting weights that your body is not used to lifting with proper form. You want to ease into intensity so you do not hurt yourself resulting in weeks to months of inactivity. So when you get to this level of training , listen to the body, execute proper form, and take breaks. If the body is telling you that it has no more in the gas tank, than you want to stop, pushing past that can result in other muscles trying to come in and help the bigger muscles in contraction. That extra load on those other muscles ( which tend to be smaller) can result in  a injury. When increasing your weight load you always want to have proper form. Proper form indicates that you are safely moving the weight and the  weight is not moving you. When I train I go until my form starts to drop, once that happens I am done.  Everyone is different with which load is challenging. I do  a scale test to myself. 10 being 100% of my max effort and 1 being 10%. When I get to 8 or 9 on the scale, I know I am pushing myself. So try using that scale test to help you find what is a good intense load. After a high intense exercise, the most important thing you can do before moving on to something else is to rest. Be patience and rest for at least 2 minutes if doing 85% of your max effort. The body has natural energy in the form of ATP. This restores itself after time has relapsed. ATP helps with muscle contraction and can fully be restored after the 2 minute mark. So utilize your rest so you can have max energy for the next exercise or set!.

Keeping it short and intense  can  help with fat burning and  can save you time in the gym. When adding  intensity to your exercise program it doesn’t necessarily mean to add more weight, you can just add more movement to a exercise.For example,  doing  lunges with a bicep curl or a squat with a  calf raise or a ab crunch to  a hip bridge.  So do not feel you have to be like a Olympic lifter or sprinter, just be you and do what works safety for your situation. Alright, have fun and be safe! You can do it!!

Gary Snyder

Most people do not understand that your nutrition starts with the soil. A plant or animal’s nutrient profile begins with which top soil it has had access to.  The top soil, to me , is earth’s digestive system. Top soil is the first 2 to 8 inches of the earth’s crust.  A gram( weight of American penny) of healthy soil should contain 600 million microorganisms and tens of thousands of different species of bacteria and fungi. The microorganisms are the unpaid work force of the farm. Constantly breaking down minerals and the soil  to make them bio-available for the plants and also given up themselves  for plant consumption. The life cycle begins with these microorganisms.

With this type of bio-activity going on in the soil, the plants have top notch nutrients and water to absorb in its   rhizosphere( the sphere of its roots). What do you think happens when insecticides, pesticides , and other chemicals are placed on the top soil to  “aide”  in plant production or protection. Well, these type of chemicals kill and destroy the microorganisms and the production of humus( soil’s own compost). Humus helps hold water preventing water run off and helps with regulating the soil’s temperature keeping it cool and moist. The plant will absorb chemicals in the soil and water if present in its top soil!So, the more organic the soil, the more  healthier the plants. This is why shopping for organic fruits and vegetables is highly recommended for superior nutrient intake. Remember, what we do to the soil (Earth’s digestive system) we do to our digestive system!

When shopping organic, I like to approach food as a natural medicine to my body. A natural medicine that my body knows how to identify. With this identification comes  proper utilization of that plants nutrients. It is a guilt free shop, since I know that plant has had proper nutrition through its life as I am having through my own.  Eat well, be well!

Gary Snyder