Hello again everyone! Coach Jimmy here with yet another batch of the best health & fitness articles from last week. If this is the first recap you’ve seen, I post the five best articles that pass through my inbox to help you have one less thing to worry about keeping up with while you’re navigating your hectic schedule and fitting in your workouts. I want you to hit your weight loss goals and staying on top of the latest fitness trends can be time consuming.
This week we cover how not all shoes are created equal, if you can freeze your way to losing weight, how to stop feeling so tired all the time, sodium content in performance drinks, and a killer (and uber healthy) kabob recipe you can fit in before winter hits.
Best Health & Fitness Articles From Last Week
The Best Shoe for Every Workout
What you put on your feet can determine how fast you see results, and when it comes to training, one size doesn’t fit all. To maximize your performance and optimize your gains, you need to match your shoes to your workout.
If you’re lifting weights in your living room, you won’t want to wear high top basketball or running shoes and if you’re hiking, you don’t want flat soled court shoes. You need the right tool for the job to maximize your performance and get the results you want. Your choice of footwear should never hold you back. If your feet are hurting, you may be wearing the wrong shoes.
Some people may say to go barefoot with your training if you don’t happen to have the right shoes, but the risk of injury isn’t worth the cost of the shoes. Yes, your feet can be strengthened to handle light ballistic exercises, but you should really only do low intensity workouts like yoga or Pilates and find the right shoe for your higher intensity workouts.
Can You Freeze Your Way to Weight Loss?
Whole-body cryotherapy — or “cold therapy” — has actually been around since the late 1970s when it was introduced as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.
I know, it sounds like something you’d read in a sci-fi book where a person steps into a cold chamber and steps back out refreshed with a higher metabolism and a few pounds lighter. This isn’t too far from the truth. Elite professional athletes have sworn by cold immersion therapy as a way to improve recovery, sooth sore muscles, and reduce inflammation.
There are reports of weight loss being a byproduct of this therapy, but there isn’t much concrete evidence of a link between the two. Now, lowering your body temperature does cause your metabolism to kick up to burn more calories to keep your core temperature and some cryo clinics and spas claim to boost energy, kill stress, and a smattering of other benefits, but those claims are purely anecdotal at this point. It’s still too early to tell.
Stop Feeling So Tired! Here Are 5 Ways to Fight Fatigue
If you’re in your late 20s to early 30s and have a career, odds are that you’re overworked. Tack that on top of an active social life and a lack of vacation and you have a recipe for perpetual fatigue. In the short term, you can handle it. You’re young, you’re bulletproof (not really), and you can recover relatively quickly. However, there will be a tipping point where you won’t be able to bounce back and you’ll need these 5 tips to fight fatigue. Your body needs rest and if you don’t give it what it needs, it’ll take it.
Ask the Expert: Beachbody Performance Has 645 mg of Sodium! Isn’t That High?
NFL players have been shown to sweat out up to 6.7 grams of sodium per hour during preseason training! Even if you’re not a pro athlete, you can still lose between 480 and 1840 mg of sodium per day doing an intense workout program.
So, sodium intake is relative. If we’re talking for a regular person, with a regular schedule, and regular diet, yes, it is high. However, if you’re exercising, you’re not regular. You’re sweating when you work out and that means you’re losing sodium that has to be replaced and if you’re doing high intensity workouts, you’re sweating a lot.
Sodium is a necessary component of a healthy diet, in moderation, and it’s gotten a bad rap because it is health-threatening if over consumed. Many fad diets typically overcompensate for these potentially harmful foods by removing them completely and that’s nearly as harmful as consuming too much as your body can shut down with insufficient sodium. Bottom line, if you’re working out, you need a performance drink that is somewhat “high” in sodium to replace the salts you’re losing during your workouts.
Pork and Sweet Potato Kabobs
Barbecue season is almost over, which saddens me greatly, and to send the season off in style, this kabob recipe is a complete meal on a stick! the beauty of these pork and sweet potato kabobs is that anyone can make them and they taste as good as they look. This delicious recipe is enough to feed three people or prep for three of your meals throughout the week.