I love to travel and so do many of my clients. In fact, to ensure proper balance in one’s life I strongly encourage it! However, if done frequently or for extended periods of time it can significantly push back the timeline you had originally set to accomplish your fitness goals. Here are my 3 suggestions on how to transition back into workout mode as smoothly as possible when returning from a vacation...

​Getting to the gym is half the battle, but once you’ve arrived just how long should your workout last?  Unfortunately there is no simple, one size fits all, quantitative answer to this question.  To figure out the most optimal duration for a workout, we need to look at several things, but first and foremost you need to define what kind of a workout you PLAN on doing at the gym.  Feel free to re-read that last sentence, because I did in fact just say you need to have a plan before you stroll through the doors of your local fitness center.  Decide whether your workout for the day will be strength training based, targeting the major muscle groups or cardiovascular based, testing the endurance of your heart and lungs.  Since a lot of my readers despise cardio, let’s save that topic for another day and assume your workout will be centered on weight training.  Here are some things to consider.

​A good friend of mine started a roundtable discussion on Facebook centering around the phenomena of overtraining and I figured my response would make a good topic for my weekly blog post. I suppose first I should preface that for this article we’re concerned with the physical aspects of overtraining since there are behavioral and emotional conditions that can accompany it.   For those that may be unfamiliar with it, overtraining is the end result of a person exceeding their body’s ability to recover by incorporating too much volume and intensity into their exercise program.  I use the term exercise program loosely as it can affect all sorts of athletes such as weight lifters, runners, swimmers, and even golfers.  The individual stops making progress, and CAN even begin to backslide in terms of their performance in their respective sport.

There is nothing worse than going to the gym and dredding the workout you're about to experience.  I'm not saying that you have to be like a kid in a candy store when it comes to your workouts, but at least have some sense of optimism going into your workout.  Each individual will vary, but typically, the human body will adapt to a given exercise program within 6-12 weeks.  Before I sound too critical, I want to commend anyone who exercises.  You are the minority in this country.  However, as you and I both know, most people do the same workout for months on end and continue to look and feel the same.  As I eluded to earlier, this is due to the adaptive response our bodies have when a certain stimulus is placed upon it.  Our bodies tend to gravitate towards homeostasis, a stable, constant condition of properties and unless a different stimulus is placed upon the body, it will continue to do it's usual thing.  So just how does one go about placing a new stress on the body?  The simplest answer is to do something different, but more specifically, here are 5 ways you can change up your current exercise program.