David Hansey
NASM Certified Performance Enhancement Specialist
NASM Certified Sports Fitness Specialist
NASM Certified Personal Trainer

This time of year, many people make resolutions about getting in shape, losing weight and getting healthy. Sadly, many of those resolutions fail. There are many reasons people cannot keep them. Sometimes they are too vague. People say “I will lose weight” instead of something more specific like “I will lose 20 pounds”. Often, they also fail because people do not help effect change in their family. If you have to cook separate meals for you and your family because you are on a diet, it is going to be even more difficult to stick with it. My answer to that is to make 2009 the year that your whole family gets fit and healthy.
Childhood obesity is at an all-time high. Kids don’t play outside like they used to. As parents, we play a key role in helping our kids to learn how to become healthy adults. This does not mean forcing them to do anything. It also does not mean depriving them of some of the joys of life such as ice cream or a piece of fine chocolate. It does, however, mean being a responsible parent and truly caring about your child’s health.
The best way to start is to look at fitness options that work for each family member. While the gym may be fun for you, it may not be best for each member of your family. It is important that each family member have a fun activity, especially kids. If your kids think it is a chore, they will not want to do it. If you are not sure what everyone wants to do, try a variety of things. Swimming, biking, rollerblading, tennis, golf – the options are endless. Some kids do well in organized classes such as martial arts, soccer, football, etc. Other children do better in individual activities or activities that seem more like play. Remember to do this same analysis on your own workout options. Decide on something that fits your life. There is no point in making it more difficult than it needs to be. While your intentions might be good in choosing to swim every morning at 5 am, if you have never been up at 5 am ever, then that is not the best option. Making it a part of your life is a KEY to making it last.
As far as an eating plan for your child, speak to your doctor about your child’s needs. Most children today eat way too much sugar, fat and calories. Their diets are loaded with soda and processed foods. Their diets are lacking in fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Every family should cut sugar filled soda from their diet. It is bad for your teeth, your weight and your health. All children need to learn portion control, especially with luxuries such as chocolate and desserts. Teach your child that candy and sweets are a TREAT. A bite or two tastes GREAT but they are not supposed to eat enough cake or candy to feel full. Don’t deprive them. This will only set them up to be unprepared when they have to make choices on their own. Teaching your children to sample new foods is one of the greatest gifts you can do as a parent. They will hesitate but if you don’t force them, you will find that children actually like salad, fruits, veggies, etc. They just don’t like you telling them to eat it or the feeling that they are being forced.
I hope this gives you some ideas on how you and your family can get a healthy start to the New Year and the rest of your lives.

Lots of people suffer from back pain. One study found that 62% of golfers suffer from lower back pain and one third of adults had back pain severe enough to warrant a visit to the doctor in the last five years. And if those statistics are not enough to make you think about your back, how about the financial impact, 30-40% of work absences are due to back pain and it is estimated that 50 billion dollars is spent each year in the pursuit of ending back pain.

Back pain can affect anyone so it is in your best interest to evaluate your risk and work on prevention even if you have never suffered from back pain. First, and I really can’t say this enough, if you suffer from any kind of pain, visit your doctor. It is his job to diagnose you and help you find a course of treatment. So let him do that for you by making an appointment. There are many causes of back pain, from disc issues to muscle weakness or tightness to issues with nerves or the spinal cord itself. So for people currently suffering from pain, visit your doctor to find out, you could be doing more harm if you put it off.

If you are not currently suffering from back pain, it does not mean you are off the hook. Do you ever hear stories of people whose “back went out” doing the most mundane tasks such as picking up their children or getting out of a car? Well those people are not necessarily more prone to injury than anyone else. Maintaining a healthy back is something that people should look at their whole life, not just when they injure it or when they are in pain.

Some really basic ways to help keep your back healthy:

learn to lift objects the proper way. This advice goes for a variety of objects from light to heavy as well as oversized objects and placing items on a high shelf. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons has a great chart on how to lift on their website (www.orthoinfo.org)

Wear flat shoes. Yes, high heel lovers, those shoes are bad for your back. A heel lower than 1 inch is best.

If you sit for extended periods of time, get up and stretch and walk around often and learn how to sit. In the car, this means not having to lean forward to reach the controls and at work, it means adjusting your seat or putting your feet up to have your knees slightly higher than your hips. And make sure your back is supported by your chair.

Review your sleeping habits as well as your mattress and pillow. Sleeping on your stomach or back is not as good as side sleeping for back support.

If you are overweight, lose the weight. You are placing undue pressure on your back not to mention your hips, knees and ankles.

There are also a lot of exercise options for strengthening your back from swimming to Pilates to Yoga to Strength training. So pick one that you like or ask a Certified Personal Trainer to design a custom program for your back conditioning. I hope this helps you prevent back pain.

David Hansey
NASM Certified Performance Enhancement Specialist
NASM Certified Sports Fitness Specialist
NASM Certified Personal Trainer

Do you enjoy watching professional sports? Who doesn’t! They make it look so easy. Whether it is wondering how someone can even hit a baseball going that fast, never mind make it an accurate hit or whether it is hitting a golf ball with such grace that it just sails in the air and goes 300+ yards. Have you ever noticed how EASY it looks for professionals? How do they do that? Is it their raw talent? Their professional training? Well, those both help but there is something much simpler that they all have too. It is something that improves your game and prevents you from getting hurt. It is something called perfect alignment.
Perfect alignment is what allows professional golfers to be so graceful. Their alignment is transferring the power from their legs through their torso to their arms to the club head. Professional golfers are not necessarily stronger than you. They are just conditioned to use alignment to ensure the maximum amount of force is transferred through their body. And that force transfer is not limited to golf. You see it in any sport that involves hitting, throwing, kicking, etc. So that would be almost all sports. Do you play soccer? That force transfer is how you get the power from your hip to your foot (without destroying your knee). Do you play tennis? Force transfer is what gets the power from your hips and torso to your racquet.
Is there a way to check your alignment? You bet! A board certified personal trainer has the skills to do what is called a posture and movement assessment. This assessment will show all of the tight or weak muscles that are throwing your body out of alignment. There are a few indicators that you have alignment issues. Have you ever experienced tennis elbow, golf elbow, knee pain, lower back pain when golfing or any joint pain during or after sports? Then, it is almost guaranteed that your alignment is off. Still not sure? Well try this part of the movement assessment yourself and see. Stand with both feet on the floor facing forward. Bend at the knees into a simple squat. Do your knees turn out, turn in? Do you lift your heels, bend at your waist? Do your feet turn out or in? These are all signs of imperfect alignment. Basically your body is making an adjustment for a weak or tight muscle somewhere and by doing so it is affecting your alignment.
So maybe by this point you say who cares. Poor alignment leads to not only poor performance but a dramatic increase in the chance of injury. So if you don’t care about getting better at your game and you don’t mind getting hurt, then don’t worry about it. For everyone else, there are ways to correct it. Focus your strength training and stretching routine on correcting the items that are affecting you. This means an individualized training program specific for you. So if your feet turn out and put pressure on your knee, you do stretches to lengthen the tight muscles that make you do that and you strengthen the weak muscles that support your knee that are allowing you to fall out of alignment.
Once you focus your strength and stretching program to correct your imbalances, you will see improvement in your game. You will also be preventing injuries from overuse and poor mechanics. I have seen golfers who find the “key” by improving their alignment and not only add 50+ yards to their drive, but improve their accuracy. And they end up leaving the golf course without the achy lower back and sore knees that they used to have.

David Hansey
NASM Certified Performance Enhancement Specialist
NASM Certified Sports Fitness Specialist
NASM Certified Personal Trainer

I see many people at the gym on a daily basis that consider their abs solely as a visual item if they consider training them at all. And while that may be nice, the muscles that make up your abs, your core, are a whole lot more important than just as a source of beauty. Your core consists of 29 muscles that surround your middle like a girdle. Its function is not cosmetic. Its primary function is to provide support and protection for your spine and to hold your body upright and to protect many of your internal organs.

In everyday life, a strong core protects you from those injuries where you can’t believe you just got injured. Like the pinching pain in your back when you got out of the car. Or that constant ache from helping your friend move a sofa. It also protects you from much more serious pain such as a herniated disc or a hernia. And as you age, it also helps you prevent slips and falls which are major causes of life changing injuries for seniors.

In sports, a strong core is critical regardless of your sport. It offers basic protection for sudden move changes such as in tennis and soccer. It also offers stability protection from sudden stops such as a football tackle. It also protects you from twisting and forced twisting movements such as hard tennis serves and golf drives.

But it is not just for protection that you should consider core training for your sport. The body is a finely tuned machine and the core functions in almost every movement. Athletic performance with a weak core is like an automobile with a powerful engine and plugged fuel injectors. You don’t get the most efficient amount of power delivered to perform accurately and quickly. Speed is decreased in many sports when the core is weak. Swimming and sprinting are two examples where there is a significant speed difference when core training is done as part of a regular training routine.

Play a game where throwing is important? Like basketball, baseball, football? Well, a strong core with make you throw farther and more accurately. Play tennis? Have trouble going corner to corner and making sudden changes? Guess what, you can run and run and run for training and never make as much difference on those missed balls as you can make by adding core strength training to your routine. Play golf? Want a longer, more accurate drive? Well training your core is scientifically proven to add dozens of yards to the average golfer’s drive.

The examples of how core training can help your sport are endless and there are dramatic scientific studies regardless of sport. If you are training for a sport and ignore your core, you are setting yourself up for injury. So whether you want to prevent injury or increase performance, core training is really a no-brainer to add to your routine.

David Hansey
NASM Certified Performance Enhancement Specialist
NASM Certified Sports Fitness Specialist
NASM Certified Personal Trainer

I write a lot about sports and fitness, but there is something that seriously affects every American and it leads to a multitude of health problems. So for July, I am going to focus on Stress.

Are you completely frazzled? Is the idea of adding anything more to your life overwhelming? Already overwhelmed? Many of us run on frazzled and it is not a good thing or a badge of honor to tell people how little sleep you get, how much travel you have to do, how many hours you are at the office. If you are feeling stressed, there is often nothing you can do to remove some of the stressors. It is hard to reduce work stress, debt, family obligations. These are facts of life.

But that said, here are some things you can do to reduce the effects. These things will keep you healthier and will also help to prevent the weight gain and other health complications that are part of a stressful lifestyle. First you must eliminate some of the things that make it worse. Psychologists call the following three things “avoidance coping” which means that you are using them to cope but basically, they offer no help because you are not confronting your actual stress issues. So, while it may be difficult, ditch the following three things from your life:

- Alcohol – Ditch booze from your diet. It is a depressant and while stress increases the desire to drink, alcohol will do more harm than good leaving you sluggish and depressed.
- Tobacco – Need I actually say it. Tobacco HAS TO GO. The “stress relief” is temporary, stop smoking!!
- Junk Food and Comfort Food. While these make you feel better very temporarily, they make you FAT and they do nothing to eliminate or reduce stress.

Now it is time to think of ways to DESTRESS, now that you have taken away those bad things that were doing nothing for you. While a little bit of TV time (like an hour) might be relaxing, sitting in front of the TV or Internet for hours on end is not and it is a MAJOR waste of time. Exercise is a natural way to reduce your stress and you need to find a way to make it a part of your life. Shifting a couple of hours away from the TV into activities such as walking with your family or dog or hitting the gym can make dramatic changes in not only your stress level but your health.

There are lots of different exercise techniques that help to relax you, the key is to finding the one that works for you. So if you are new to working out, try a variety of things. Breaking a sweat EVERY DAY significantly helps to not only lower your stress level but it also makes you feel like you are working toward a healthier you, taking away that helpless feeling that being overstressed can do to you.

For more information on Sports Specific Training and Personal Training, visit my website at www.4fitbodies.com.

David Hansey
NASM Certified Performance Enhancement Specialist
NASM Certified Sports Fitness Specialist
NASM Certified Personal Trainer

As you read this, you will be seeing more and more kids in the neighborhood and maybe in your household because school is out for summer. And many of those kids will be playing sports. And whether these are organized sports such as baseball or pick up sports like playing in the neighborhood or swimming. Even if it does not seem like a sport, things like inline skating, trampoline or skateboarding are still sports. And these sports still require your kids to be in shape in order to be safe. Think it won’t happen to your kid? Well, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), more than 3.5 million children under age 14 get hurt annually playing sports.

Yes, 3.5 MILLION!!! And it is a sad fact that children die every year doing what they love. This should also be a huge wake up call for you as a parent to ensure you are doing everything that you can to prevent your child from having any kind of injury. There are lots of things you can do to help prevent your child from being a statistic. First, ensure your child has had a recent visit with the doctor and that you discussed the sports they play. And be sure to LISTEN to your doctor. If they talk about your child being overweight or out of shape, then don’t assume your child can just bounce off the couch without you putting some work into it.

So along with ensuring your children are in shape or helping them to get there, you also need to ensure you invest (your money or your time or both) to ensure their safety. Do they have all the safety equipment (does your trampoline have a net – I mention this one because 3 of them in my neighborhood do not!) Do your kids have the right footwear that fits them properly? Do your kids have helmets and gloves and wrist guards and elbow pads, etc?

A missing thing with a lot of kids is knowing the rules of the game (and the rules of the road) Many kids are injured because they don’t know how to do something properly (such as how to hit a ball in tennis or swing a bat) and they end up with injuries from the poor mechanics. And millions of kids are injured because they are unfamiliar with how to properly ride a bike. And by ride, I mean stop quickly as well as which side of the road to ride on and how to signal.

Many kids also do not know how to properly hydrate their bodies. They do not know when to drink water and how much and it is your responsibility as a parent to ensure they have water available and also to tell them how often to drink. Keep in mind that many children visit the emergency room every year for heat related conditions that are preventable. And many kids are dropped off at group sports activities without a bottle of water so be sure that your kid is not one of them.

While these suggestions are directed at children, remember, these guidelines also apply to you!! So do what you can to have a healthy, injury-free summer for the entire family!! For more information on Sports Specific Training and Personal Training, visit my website at www.4fitbodies.com.