San Antonio Personal Training

11/30/2010

Sarah and I spent last Wed-Sat in Vail, CO skiing for 1 day and enjoying the town for the other couple of days we are up there.  Normally, we are die-hard skiers and would not have skipped a day, but we got up to the resort about half way through the day on Wed, Thurs was a high of 5 degrees with a low of -20 (we are not that diehard of skiers) and Sat we had to head back to Denver relatively early to catch our flight.

Friday however provided us the perfect day to ski!  There was warm weather (about 30F), lots of snow and over 5000 ski-able acres!  We worked to ski all of it and by the end of the day we had skied multiple runs on each mountain (there are 4 total in Vail) and that included skiing a lot of the bowls.

What I was not ready to experience for was how unprepared my body was for skiing.  Normally, I am in really good condition heading into a ski trip, but I have been trying to expand a couple of my other businesses (http://www.travelfitnessequipment.com , http://www.workoutsontheroad.com and http://www.websites-for-fitness.com) and so I had not put in my normal preparation as we headed into the mountains.

While I pride myself on being a decent athlete I have never been a great skier.  In any other sport I have particpated in you want to be in a stance that has bent knees, a wide base, a low center of gravity and you want to stay up on your toes.  Skiing is completely different in that you want to be balanced between your toes and your heels, you want to keep your skis as close together as possible and you want to stay more upright.  This change has been difficult for me to grasp, so while my very athletic wife (who is a great skier) bounds down the mountain at record pace, I am bouncing off each mogul and making wide S turns to keep myself from going over the front of my skis.  After a day of skiing, my body was beaten down.  I had not prepared my quads for the rigors of moguls and having tired legs forced me to use my poles too much, which in turn caused me to get lazy and even more sloppy!

My reason for this post is to tell you that no matter what sport you are going to be participating in, whether you are participating in a 3 day adventure race or whether you are just going skiing for a day...you can prepare your body and make your experience more enjoyable.

Following the  old adage of "Do as I say, not as I do" I would highly recommend that if you plan on going skiing this winter, that you start working on the muscular endurance in your legs and do lots of high repetition squats, lunges, jumps and more to make sure that you ski to the best of your ability!

Make it a great day San Antonio!

Nicholas Wood

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(210)415-5934

www.sampt.com

9/23/10

In a recent magazine article that Sarah was reading, it was stated that you should focus on one side of your body at a time in order to "tone" your body.

"Toning" is a frequently used word to market fitness products and services.  That was the case in this article as well.  If you were to workout with one side of your body and then repeat with the other side of your body, you won't find yourself being "toned."  

However, what I think the article was saying and what I agree with is, using dumbbells and other exercise techniques which force both limbs to work evenly will help your body develop in a more well rounded manner.

For example, when you do a bench press rep with a barbell, you are likely going to create more force to push the bar up with your dominate arm.  This will leave your non-dominate arm getting less work and thus being under-developed.  If, however, you choose to do a bench press holding 2 30lb dumbbells then both arms will be doing 30lbs of work and therefore both arms will be developing evenly.

Typically, what we will do with our clients here at MPT is to have them rotate between dumbbell use and barbell use.  There are 2 reasons we do this.  Number 1, with a barbell the client won't have to use as many controlling muscles, which allows the muscles we are focusing on to use more oxygen and therefore do more work.  That's a fancy way for saying they can lift more weight using a barbell than they could using dumbbells.  This is important because the overload principle we have spoke of before on the blog.

We will then use dumbbells to make sure that the body is developing evenly, to force the body to use the various stabilizer muscles and to continue to create muscle confusion which is important in allowing yourself to continue to progress.

I have said a lot to basically say, in order to "tone up" you need to first reduce your body fat %.  You can do this by reducing your caloric intake and increasing your caloric expenditure (exercise and muscle growth).  Lifting with dumbbells will help you develop both your dominate and non-dominate sides more evenly and will help your body look more evenly "toned" when you reduce your overall body fat.

Make it a great day!

Best,
Nick

Nicholas Wood
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
(210)415-5934
www.sampt.com

9/14/10

The past few weeks have been a blur here at MPT as we add new clients and new programs to our tools to help clients get in better shape.

We have had a few chances to have fun though and in many cases members of MPT's boot camps and personal training programs joined us to take part in the festivities.

Here are a couple of pictures from the events:

Both of these pictures are from a run we did last Saturday at the Leon Creek Greenway.  Everyone did the 4 mile run and had a great time, even with the humidity feeling like it was at 99%.  Thanks to Belinda for recommending the park, it had great trails and relatively small crowds.

This picture is from the dove hunt we went on during our of day of Labor Day.  We didn't kill many birds but Dave, Jon, Sarah, Mike, George and I all had a great time.

If you have not been able to make any of our events, then hopefully you will be able to in the near future.  Thanks to those of you who have joined us, both Sarah and I have enjoyed our time with you.

Best,
Nick

8/31/2010

I love to use stumpleupon.com.  It is a neat website and it sends me to websites I would have never found otherwise.  Today one of the pages it sent me to was: http://www.marcandangel.com/2010/03/29/25-beautifully-illustrated-thought-provoking-questions/

Take a few minutes out of your day and read through these.  It will change your perspective and make sure you are in a good mood!

Make it a great day!

Nicholas Wood

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

(210)415-5934

www.sampt.com