FITNESS FOR THAT FLAT TUMMY AFTER PREGNANCY

By Herb Duncan

Twitter:@nexlev

After the initial excitement of your brand new child sets in you notice the bulge of your belly and wondering “Will I ever be able to make it go away?”  The great news is a loud yes! But let’s speak a little about science.  Right after birth that protruding belly could be at worst caused by what is called diastases, a separation of the outermost abdominal muscles that sometimes occurs during pregnancy. Left unworked after pregnancy this muscle separation will never improve.  This is one of the reasons a woman will continue to have backaches after pregnancy.  To prevent this problem and many others, general exercise is a must before and after pregnancy.

Rakesh C. Patel MD, Arizona Sun Family Medicine, recommends a good exercise and diet program as an important part of normal pregnancy. It has also been shown that women can increase their fitness levels during pregnancy without significant problems. There is also very little data to show the need to lower target heart rates or decrease the intensity of a exercise routine, although it is routinely recommended to keep heart rate at levels below 140 beats per minute or below 60 % of maximum. Regular exercise has been shown to decrease stress and anxiety and promote self-esteem. These are two areas that cause many women problems since hormones are running wild during pregnancy. The overall benefit for a good fitness program before and after pregnancy is your ability to return to your normal size quicker after pregnancy. The more lean tissue the body has the better it burns body fat.

The main muscle that returns that flat mid section to its pervious form is the transverse abdominal muscle. This innermost muscle wraps around your abdomen and back like a corset. It is one of the main muscles used in delivery of your child. Lamaze class teaches women how to control this muscle through certain breathing exercises, which help with a smoother childbirth since this muscle does most of the squeezing. The problem that remains is women are not taught how to properly strengthen this muscle before and after birth. Left untrained this muscle is one of the major reasons so many women have troubles losing this area after childbirth. Regaining this abdominal strength is crucial for women for many reasons.  It supports the back and helps avoid many after childbirth problems associated with daily activities and will speed up the process of this problem area regaining its flat form after childbirth. It’s crucial to learn how to draw this muscle in properly to activate it properly during exercise. Standing up straight place your right hand index finger on your naval. While continuing to breath draw your naval in as far as you can as if you were trying to touch your spine with it. Once you have gone as far as you can squeeze as hard as you can with your draw in abdominal muscles. Hold this for 15 to 20 sec and then relax. If done correctly you have just done your first abdominal exercise including your Transverse abdominal.

What types of exercises will achieve this result? Functional strength training is the key. Functional training, when done properly, demands these and other abdominal muscles function properly in order to perform the exercises.  The proper workout must demand these muscles strengthen. The stronger this muscle is the faster that flat tummy will return to its previous state.  Excellent ab fitness tools include JC bands, medicine and stability balls as well as airex pads. Also utilizing a trainer with good physiological knowledge of the human body and you will be on your way to a much firmer and slimmer mid section after that new born arrives. Until next time happy training!

Reference: Danforth's Obstetrics & Gynecology

Editor(s): Scott, James R., Gibbs, Ronald S., Karlan, Beth Y., Haney, Arthur F.

9th Edition © 2003 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Rakesh C. Patel MD

Arizona Sun Family Medicine, P.C.

Twitter:@drrcpatel

Email us at nexlevfitness@nexlev. com

TRAINER SHARES SIMPLE SECRETS TO BETTER FITNESS

By Larry Ward Staff Writer                                             When Herb Duncan played professional football he had a following. Things didn't change much after he retired from the Arena Football League where he was a member of the 1997 world champion Arizona Rattlers. But now, instead of giving autographs he is dispensing advice and facts on health and fitness through Nexlev, a innovative science based company at 633 E. Ray Rd. in Gilbert Arizona. Duncan's intimate storefront facility with a half-dozen exercise balls and a minimum of exercise machines is smaller than the lobby of some national franchise centers, but it is where clients like Maria Hernandez feel comfortable. "I was one of those people who was very intimidated by a gym," Hernandez said. "I couldn't do this by myself and I like the idea of not having to think about it and having someone else tell me what to do." An administrative assistant at a Phoenix hospital, she lives in Mesa, but has followed Duncan, a certified trainer, through two other more conventional facilities for almost three years. That may have been why she wasn't surprised to find exercise and medicine balls instead of heavy iron muscle machines at Nexlev. "The first thing people notice when they come in is that we're totally different from what they've seen before and right away it's stress time," Duncan said. "They see equipment and moments that they haven't seen before and, of course, the balls." The exercise balls are more challenging than they look, but they work, Duncan said. He uses one for a chair at his office desk. "Using nothing but the balls, I can have anyone sweating in an hour because it exposes all the weakness and requires more muscle discipline than people realize," Duncan said. "They require the body to operate the way it was designed as a unit, just sitting on one forces certain muscle groups to function. When you see tape of the Phoenix Suns doing a shoot-around in practice, or a boxer training for a fight, you'll see all kinds of movements and functional training equipment  in the background. "But health and fitness is measured by more than a pint of perspiration, Duncan added. It's part of the myth and twisted tales, according to Duncan "Promises at other places are very much exaggerated," Duncan said. "We Americans want stuff to happen overnight and there are people who play on that stuff. If someone came out with something that worked in five minutes you'd sell a million of him or her, and I'd be the first to use it. Professional athletes have $1 million bodies and if any of this stuff came close to working, especially for longevity, we'd be the first to use it." "But it's not as hard as it's made out to be to be fit for life," Duncan said. Magazines and media give people unreasonable expectations, with results based on temporarily fixes rather then life longevity Duncan added. "People are getting a twisted version of how to get fit and healthy," he said. "Not eating before you go to bed, for instance is a myth. The body wants smaller meals throughout the day instead of one at the end of the day. If I don't overeat and exercise, I'm not going to gain weight. But we tend to make a lot of excuses for why we gain weight, including what we eat." Duncan isn't training bodybuilders or football linemen. . "Something as simple as a golf swing requires getting stronger core functions," Duncan said. "Tiger Woods figured that out a long time ago and everyone else had to get over the idea of drinking beer and eating doughnuts to stay competitive. "Professional athletes do things to get stronger in movement that they use daily and we apply the same thing to simple everyday things like carrying groceries or stepping sideways to look for something on top of the refrigerator without getting hurt. We trains everyday people to strengthen their bodies to enjoy life, family and daily activities that we take for granted until we get hurt doing them like just picking up our children at the park" Hernandez explained most of the encouragement to continue is subtle. "Once you start to feel the difference," she said, "you want to work at it more." Duncan has heard the story before. "About 80 to 90 percent of my clients are finding something totally new," Duncan said. "It becomes a way of life and they really start enjoying things and do things that they haven't been able to do for a long time. It doesn't take as much effort as they think.".  The report can be reached at (480) 898-7915 or by e-mail at lward@aztrib.com.

Set Realistic Fitness Goals!!!

By Herb Duncan

Every venture begins with a goal and your health is no different. It’s much better if you set a realistic goal. Many people set fitness goals but many set unrealistic ones. You might say to yourself, “I’m going to lose 30 pounds in two weeks and lose 3 belt sizes!” That’s a pretty ambitious goal. As a matter of fact if you watch enough television all those infomercial companies are hoping you make this type of goal. But unless you know what is physiologically possible, you’ll be setting yourself up for failure every time. Don’t set a goal that is next to impossible to achieve, or achieved in an unhealthy way.  This will eventually bring you right back to square one, only twice as bad. The fact is, if you lose more than two or three pounds per week, you will end up burning precious muscle tissue which is needed to burn off body fat. You will end up slowing your metabolism to a snail’s pace, which will make it very hard and you will most likely binge.

So what is a realistic goal amount? You can safely lose about two to three pounds of fat per week without hitting starvation mode or losing muscle or yanking all of you hair out in the process. So let’s add that up. You can reasonably expect 15 to 35 pounds of fat to drop off in 12 weeks. How much depends on you:  how well you eat, exercise and give the body what it needs. Basically stick to that very obtainable planned goal. Don’t be surprised that over the time period that marvelous body of yours gains 10 pounds of lean tissue while dropping 20 pounds of body fat.

Lean muscle is a great thing! It gives your body those shapes and curves in all the right places and lean muscle is a body fat scavenger to boot. This is why most people fail. They are more concerned with just losing weight rather then the type of weight they are losing. And all the fad weight loss companies are banking on this. By the time next year rolls around they will have introduced a new fad that works twice as fast and you will have put back on your weight with a little extra and more jiggle. Most people that have tried a new fad diet in their lifetime have, on average, tried four or five fad diets all with the eventual same results - failure!

As I stated earlier, set a realistic goal write it down and put a realistic timeline on it. Goal setting gives you a clearly defined objective to build a good routine around.  Writing you goal down makes it real. Stay away from fads. Find out how your body truly works from an educated professional and get on a realistic program you can do for the rest of your life and enjoy. My mother is 68 years of age and she runs circles around me - really. Its not genetics or luck she set a realistic goal some 30 years ago and hasn’t looked back

Give the body what it needs and it will work miracles for you, just give it a chance.

Until next time happy training.

Exercise for Life and your Family

When you sleep your body was designed to be almost continually active. It tosses and turns throughout the night while you sleep for very good reasons. Immobilize a limb for just a mere three hours and it starts to degenerate.  Even during sleep your body will automatically stretch and flex and turn more then a hundred or so times a night. It’s amazing to me that people in America become more and more sedentary trying to figure out the simplest way to answer the phone without moving a muscle and wondering why it hurts so much to do basic things such as walking or playing with the kids.  I could lie and say none of it is your fault but, of course, that would be a lie. So I will stick with the truth. Disuse is deadly. The fact is, the more you lead a sedentary life style the more damage you cause to your body! How do I know this? In a paper published way back in 1982, Dr. Walter Bortz from the Department of Medicine Clinic in the Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed 100 studies showing that sedentary lifestyles cause widespread bodily damage.¹ This damage occurred independently of other health risk factors such as smoking, alcohol, fat, age and family history of diseases. This study included some very amazing finding about individuals leading an inactive life style.

So what does a sedentary life style help cause? First, it reduces vital capacity.² In laymen’s terms this means sitting like a slug reduces your body’s ability to take up and use oxygen. So muscles, organs, and the brain become partially oxygen deprived. Secondly, inactivity reduces cardiac output, that is, the ability of your heart to pump blood around the body. So the tissues of couch potatoes become doubly deprived. They get less oxygen and less blood and the essential nutrients blood contains.

The fascinating thing is the body, in an effort to make up these deficits, constricts arteries, thereby raising blood pressure. This arterial constriction on top of a weakened heart not only increases things like blood clots and stroke, but it also makes your cardiovascular system less capable to respond to sudden movements or changes of position. Consequently that’s why sedentary people often get dizzy when standing up.  The restricted system of blood flow cannot respond efficiently.

Inactivity also helps increase levels of cholesterol and triglycerides. Triglycerides are fats you store. Inactivity continually shrinks the amount of muscle on your body which is the very thing you need to keep the fat off or get rid of those ever developing love handles. As muscles disappear and fat replaces it, over the years simple things like chasing the kids or walking up a flight of stairs is impossible without feeling like you need to call 911.

Bones become weak and thin because your skeleton requires resistance exercise to grow new bone matrix. A combination of inactivity and proper nutrition is a major cause of the current epidemic of osteoporosis today. Sex hormone levels also decline with inactivity which is now linked to the current increase in impotence in America. This number has tripled since the 1940s. Don’t take my word for it.  The studies exist for everybody to see.

I could go on and on with study after study showing how inactivity is responsible for most major problems people are encountering today, but that would be a book in itself.

The plain truth is exercise can save your life! A good exercise program helps strengthen heart and lungs by increasing vital capacity, protects blood pressure, aids in lower cholesterol, strengthens bones, helps protect glucose tolerance against the degenerative changes in insulin metabolism that leads to diabetes, and best of all for most, keeps the FAT off.   Exercise to the body is like an oil change to an automobile. If you change your oil every 3000 mile that car has a very good chance of clearing 200,000 miles easy. But take that car for granted and don’t change your oil and there’s a good chance that car will seize within 2 years.  The body is the same way with one difference:  You can’t go buy replacement parts at your local store. Well, you can to some degree, but be prepared to be bedridden or confined to a motorized chair for your remaining years.

Most people say they “Don’t have time to exercise” or “My family is more important”. I respond “if you are not around then who is going to take care of the family?!”  Give yourself and your family one of the biggest gift you can ever give…exercise. It won’t prevent everything but it will sure give you a good chance to have a long and fruitful life. Until next time happy training.