All posts by NTrainers

How To Get A Stronger Core

December 31, 2017

For A Stronger Core

 
Do you want to know how to build a stronger core?
I call it the Center of your body.
  •  You have to remember that keeping your posture up when sitting in the seat.
  • If you have sciatica or chronic back problems be sure to make sure you sleep on your back with a firm mattress.
  • Stretch and make sure that you slowly build your core , at the same time strengthen your lower back by doing back extensions and Superman’s.
  • Yoga will also be beneficial for people with back problem’s.
I’m here to help!
 Are you ready to get stronger? Contact Joel today!

Being Thankful

The State of Being Thankful

There’s a big difference between saying the words thank you and the state of being thankful. Thank you in many situations has become obligatory and meaningless. We slap thank you on the end of an email or mumble it under our breath as the barista hands us our coffee. Thank you. It’s what we say when someone holds the door open or we receive a gift on our birthday. Saying thank you means nothing without feeling behind it. Life could be better if we allow ourselves to truly feel thankful more often.
Saying thank you is easy, but feeling thankful takes practice. With all of the distractions and demands on our time, feeling truly thankful can be as difficult as getting into shape. Make no mistake, the ability to be thankful, appreciative, and gracious can actually be strengthened just like our physical muscles. In order to get the benefit, be prepared to put in some practice time.

Here’s a simple method to achieve feeling more thankful each day

Every time you say or hear someone say, thank you, think of something to be thankful for. Let the words thank you be a cue to remind you how lucky you are at this moment. Consider your health, your friends, family or home. Appreciate the air you breathe or the weather outside. Become grateful for what’s good in your life as well as what’s not. A bad day can be averted by taking these brief moments to experience gratitude. Even if the present moment contains pain and suffering, feeling gratitude may be a first step toward defusing the problem.
Engaging in a gratitude practice plays both the short and the long game. In the short term, you engender good will by emitting genuine good feelings. In the long run, gratitude creates a state of mind that can help you through the toughest of times. In fact, we don’t give thanks often enough, and one time a year at Thanksgiving is just not enough.
We as adult professionals expect a lot from ourselves, our work, and our relationships. As a result, we run the risk of becoming dissatisfied or complaining when things don’t go our way. Important appointments get canceled, trains run late, the media reports bad news, and everyday we get older. In the face of disappointment, why not appreciate what we have rather than going down the road of doom and gloom? We have the power to find something, anything, to be thankful for in this present moment. We can then build on that feeling. How would life be different if we actually expressed how thankful we are that as a living, breathing person, we can get up, put on clean clothes, walk into a coffee shop, and afford a $5 handmade coffee? From this perspective the words thank you can and will mean much more. And that’s something you can be thankful for.

Stand Up From The Floor

Relearning to Stand Up from the Floor

In this holiday season when we are all focused on gratitude, one thing we often forget to be grateful for is mobility.  As we age, it can become harder and harder to get up from the floor.  If this is already a challenge for you, or for your parents or grandparents, this is a skill that can be regained!  People find it hard to get to the floor and come back up for a variety of reasons:
Balance – no matter how strong you are, if you don’t feel steady on your feet, getting up without holding on can seem scary.  There are many aspects to balance – vision, inner ear (vestibular), cerebellum (the part of the brain that controls balance), kinesthetic awareness (i.e. feeling the floor with your feet), etc.  A regular exercise program can address many of these and help you feel more steady.
Strength – as we age, we lose some strength and muscle mass, but strength training – with weights, bands, or just your body – can help you maintain your strength for as long as possible, and make it easier to get up from the floor and low chairs.
Mobility – if it’s been months or years since you sat on the floor regularly, you may have decreased mobility in your ankles, knees, hips, and back.  Regaining the range of motion in these joints will help you get up gracefully.
Confidence – fear of falling is a major issue for older adults.  Human nature is to believe that fear protects us, and sometimes it does.  (We all know the fear of being burned stops us from touching a hot stove!)  But a fear of falling actually makes us MORE likely to fall.  How?  People with a fear of falling move less (making them weaker and less mobile), shuffle more (shorter steps means more opportunities to trip and fall), and usually don’t practice balance (so their existing ability level will decrease over time with disuse).
Many gyms offer classes specifically for older adults.  Lots of physical therapy offices have programs specifically on balance.  And some trainers have extensive experience with older adults working on fall risk reduction.  You don’t have to go it alone!
My clients have different ability levels, different nationalities, different personality types, and have worked in different professions.  The one thing nearly ALL my older adults have in common is they tell me they waited too long to start working on balance and fall risk reduction!  Whether it’s in a class or 1-on-1, the time to get started is right now.

Personal Training for 2018 Goals

2018: New Year, New You, Get to the Gym

As 2017 comes to a close, it’s time to start thinking about your next year’s fitness goals. Maybe you want to finally run a marathon. Perhaps it’s time you benched over the 300-pound mark. Or maybe you just need some motivation to get off the couch and begin your journey to a healthier lifestyle.

Whatever your goals, don’t wait to get started. January 1st is right around the corner. If that is your hardline start date to victory, you need to make sure you have everything planned and ready to go.

One of the best ways to ensure a successful 2018 is finding yourself a Manhattan personal trainer. These professionals know what it takes to get you to your personal best. Whether you’re just starting out, or have been training for years, the knowledge and experience personal trainers can offer is invaluable.

Upper East Side Personal training is just that: personal

One-on-one sessions allow you to develop a close relationship with your trainer. He/she will be able to tailor workouts to your skill level, and instruct you in the proper way to execute the moves. This can help greatly in reducing the risk of injury.

With a routine made just for you, your results will be faster and longer lasting. Physical fitness isn’t something you do for a few months and then stop. Your trainer will help you develop a plan that will change your entire lifestyle for the better.

Going to the gym can be intimidating. But with someone right there beside you, guiding you through exercises and showing you how to use the machines for maximum effectiveness, the gym can turn into a place of rebirth. It doesn’t have to be a scary place filled with foreign technology. Gym time is when you get to focus on yourself and slow down.

It’s tough keeping up the motivation to head to the gym. After the first few months, there is always a steady decline in gym attendance. With a trainer on your side, you can keep the motivation. They will be there to cheer you on and make for certain you hit that fitness milestone.

Homeostasis- The Mind Body Connection

November 28, 2017

Interoception- Maintaining Internal Stability

Most children are taught that the human body has five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, but many neurologists identify nine or more senses, and some list as many as 21.

As a Human Performance Professional who teaches the importance of movement longevity and how it can be utilizedto relieve chronic pain, the sense that I am most concerned in having people comprehend is that of our “Interoceptive Sense” – The ability to maintain internal stability which, in layman’s terms, is called Homeostasis. 

Did you know there is an association between identity with self, emotion, breathing, and perception of pain?

We have all heard stories of friends or loved ones who fell ill from a certain type of dis-ease but literally neglected the internal signals that their very own bodies were desperately trying to warn them of until it was too late.

More common examples of interoceptive awareness are feelings of love, sensing danger, listening/following your intuition/gut feelings. Interoception includes both conscious feelings and unconscious monitoring of homeostasis which = safety & stability. 
The nervous system has a specific sensory nervous system, and a sense organ, dedicated to each sense. That system is called the Fascial system. Fascia is Emotion. 80% of peripheral nerves in Fascia are free nerve endings and 90% of those nerves are interoceptive free nerve endings which lie in your visceral fascia which ties directly into your BREATH.
Our body is constantly seeking emotional stability. We are always attempting to describe emotional internal states that are continuously being monitored/regulated by the Autonomic Nervous System which has two main parts – The Sympathetic ( Fight or Flight ) and The Parasympathetic ( Rest & Digest ).

When you are safe your breathing is free & easy. When you are not safe your breathing is short and labored and withheld.

Let’s say your hip is not stable. From a neuro-muscular perspective all the muscles that surround or pass through the joint lock down in order to protect the joint from being injured. The brain then elicits unsafe feelings to the motor units. Alas, when movement occurs, the brain senses pain in the joint, and you unconsciously hold your breath which inhibits fluidity of motion.

If the deeper joint is feeling stable and all the deep muscle stabilizers are doing their jobs and activating in the right coordinated order, that constitutes feelings of a SAFE joint.

Interoceptive feelings of a safe joint allow the brain to elicit the proper chemical responses providing the necessary signaling the joint needs to properly transfer forces, all while enhancing the distribution of oxygen to the tissues resulting in enhanced performance.
Now imagine that you are feeling a range of emotions with no sense of their origin, and that you are not sure what thoughts these emotional sensations are actually sourcing from.

Spontaneously, there are feeling-emotions arising in your body and they may overcome your awareness, so that you pay close attention to them. Sometimes, this can feel like a wave of emotion that came out of nowhere and filled your body with a certain sensation.

These are days when we may wake up from bed feeling sad or heavy or feeling light and happy with no direct reason. When we are more developed with emotional sensing, we can easily identify our feelings in the moment, we can sense the energy behind words and we can sense the feeling and emotions of others.

For instance, we may sense negative emotions in ourselves and other people with a feeling of sharpness, heavy-density, and drudgery.
Or sensing positive emotions within our selves and others, may feel buoyant, easy, relaxed, flowing, expansive and harmonious.

These emotional animations can be sensed in the body from the instinctual mind also known as the Pain Body ( I recommend the book “The Power Of Now” by Eckhart Tolle ).
Or, we can experience higher emotions that may be sensed from within the heart center.

For thousands of years this has been known as the internal Yin state, in which healing, regeneration and detoxification occurs. It is accompanied by increased parasympathetic tone, slowed heart rate, increased flow of saliva, increased bowel motility, feeling of relaxation or neutral emptiness.

Daily practice of meditation paired with deep breathingtechniques directly stimulates a parasympathetic response returning the body back into Homeostasis transmuting the DNA to activate the body’s INNATE healing response.

Breathing is the most under appreciated aspect of our incredible biology gifting us with the restorative ability of bringing harmony back within the human systems through the power of Oxygen.
***WARNING! It is hazardous to your health if you don’t breathe efficiently***
A chronic lack of oxygen is the root cause of inflammation that may lead to any and all types of cellular dysfunction. 

O2 is the HAPPY molecule of life – The GROWING molecule of Life – The ESSENTIAL element for EVERYTHING.
When we practice proficient breathing we increase our interoceptive awareness ten fold. A safe and happy nervous system is impervious to infection, states of depression, chronic pain, and feelings of dread.

Flooding the brain with oxygen develops and improves our psycho-emotional awareness through observation, we are capable of making changes to our mental state and unconscious mind at the same time we are observing it.
Changes to our mental state and inner thoughts impact our outward behavior and our physical actions.
This shifts how we respond to our environment and how we interact within every relationship and social setting.

NOW is the time to take an ACTIVE role in healing ourselves, healing our lives. 

When we can identify our emotional pain and are willing to take steps to heal our emotions, we empower ourselves in taking steps that lead us to spiritual freedom.
May love, peace and spiritual strength ( whatever sings to your heart ) bless you this holiday season!

Contact Bryan Mirabella today!

Exercising After An Injury

judyPreventing Workout Injuries after Health Hiccups
By Judy Kuan, personal trainer

Health. We take it for granted, until we don’t have it. It doesn’t take long – as little as a week – of being abnormally inactive for your body to rebel, making your normal workouts treacherous for vulnerable joints and areas of prior injury.
I have a client who was recently out with the flu. During that time, her “core-amnesia” – when her abs stubbornly refuse to do their job – had returned, and her back issues were flaring up. It took us two weeks – twice the amount of time she was sick – to really get her abs to activate again, for her back to feel better, and for her to get back to our normal “advanced monster mode” sweat sessions.

These things are inevitable. When they do happen, the key to not losing ground is to start getting active as soon as you feel better.
Obvious, right? But by active, I don’t mean returning right away to your “pre-sick” intensity levels and workout regimens. Your body may have other ideas, especially if it decides not to engage – literally. Recultivating muscle activation is critical to avoiding injuries as you return from a workout hiatus.
As self-aware as most of us are, we all have our blind spots. That’s why when you’re getting into a workout routine after any break, it can be particularly helpful to work with a fitness professional. Someone who can give you appropriate modifications, keep an eagle eye on your form, and make sure you’re working what you should be working. Core amnesia, glute amnesia…these things are so sneaky and can hit you when you’re at your weakest. Workout addicts aren’t exempt from this – in fact, we’re usually the biggest culprits, trying to push too hard, too fast after an involuntary break.
For example, feeling winded from a chest cold? Give your lungs a break and do some yoga and strength training instead. Not super confident you’re doing yoga poses correctly? Work with a yoga instructor to help you master the basics. One of the most enlightening aspects of going through yoga teacher training was that I’d been doing chaturangas (aka the yoga pushup) wrong for years in group classes, setting me up for chronic shoulder impingement issues.
Or perhaps you sprained your ankle when slipping on icy subway stairs? Get off of your feet and focus on Pilates and other mat exercises. I’ve modified boxing workouts to let clients who’ve had foot surgery be seated while they punch, or even had them lie on their backs to do kickboxing moves without having to stand up. Pilates is a tricky one – it’s often recommended for bad backs, but if you don’t engage your core properly, you’re just going to end up with more back pain. It’s another good candidate for some one-on-one help, especially when you’re just starting out.
The key is not to let health hiccups throw off your fitness momentum – the longer you’re out of the game, the more work it’ll take to re-engage your muscles. Why make things harder for yourself?

Do 20 Push Ups Before Showering!

Yes! 20 Of These Right Before A Shower

A great technique that I have used with all of my clients to battle the holiday bulge is to conduct 20 push-ups before you shower once a day. 
Make it mandatory to do this each and every day and after seven days you will have done 140 push-ups!
Push-ups are one of the best ways to tone your whole upper body as well as your core. Push-ups also get your heart rate going which therefore increases your metabolism.
You get all these benefits for just 20 push-ups a day which takes about 20 seconds! 
So put a reminder post it on the shower glass door or write in lipstick on the mirror but make sure to do 20 push-ups before you step into the shower every day and you will beat that holiday season bulge.
Ready for more? Contact Peter today!

Self Training Isn’t Always Enough

Why Self-Training Your Way to Fitness Goals Using Search Engines Doesn’t Work

Let’s be honest: we never really truly know what we’re doing when it comes to achieving a fitness goal.  As we approach a new year, a birthday, or the end of spring, we fantasize about the type of body we wish we had – A-lister abs, sleeve-stretching triceps, butt-forming pants. This as we declare, with futility, that tonight’s slice of pizza or morning donut will be the absolute last.

As those last bites are enjoyed, we pop open our laptop or take out our phone and search for fitness ideas and meal plans. We tell ourselves that we can sit on the shoulders of Adonis-bodied professionals and simply copy what they did on our own, in the comfort of our apartment on our yoga mat with a few dumb-bells beside, and that we’ll finally put that pull-up bar that’s hanging on our bedroom door to good use.

It doesn’t work like that.

After a few reps and the first hint of soreness, we pat ourselves on the back but then return to the same old habits. Why? Because getting fit doesn’t work like that. As newbies, we don’t have the self-discipline to go with the DIY-approach. We need someone to put us and keep us on track.

What’s needed is a Manhattan personal trainer; a truly dedicated professional who knows the biology and chemistry of how our bodies function to maximize its ultimate potential. A personal training session gives us the initial steps into a foreign world where we demand more from our bodies than we are used to. Stepping out of the comfort zone is what we need.

A web search of exercise routines simply does not compare to what Upper East Side personal trainers can offer to anyone who is serious about getting fit. One can spend countless hours watching videos on how to have proper form when doing a deadlift, but what will really motivate you to do them right and do them often is the help of a true professional.  With the right mindset, one will get what they put in with an investment into personal training sessions.

Try Personal Training to Exceed Limits

Know your limits… and then exceed them. Here’s how.

For a select few, getting and staying in shape isn’t always all that difficult to do.  In fact, if one has had athletic experience in the past, or has the natural will-power to be consistent with their routine and diet, then staying fit isn’t all that impossible. However, this doesn’t mean that that’s all one can be capable of.

Everyone has limits – or so they think. Perhaps after years of going to the gym at a consistent pace the rate of progress may have steadily declined. Suddenly you’re not lifting heavier every other week or so. Your speed and distance on the treadmill appear to have plateaued. Moving on to heavier reps with more sets appears challenging. In addition, you may feel the urge to eat more of your food, and perhaps indulge in some unhealthy carbs, all to increase the number of calories needed to fuel the energy required to lift, run, or swim more.

With the added pressures of daily life and work, it is unreasonable to expect that you’ll be on top of things at every facet of your life. So much requires our time and attention, and yet our diet and fitness may be the last in being addressed. An answer to this dilemma would be to outsource this work to a professional.

To overcome these limits and to truly see what our bodies are capable of, it’d be wise to get an opinion and evaluation by a New York City personal trainer.  These individuals are educated in their field, both in practice and in theory, and are best equipped to give the advice and guidance anyone would need to maximize their full potential.

NYC Personal training provides a dedicated service where your needs and goals as an individual are taken into consideration. We all think we already know what we can do but you’d be surprised at what you’re capable of doing when you have dedicated NYC personal trainers working day and night to give clients the routines that’d best work for them. Furthermore, they are also educated on the kinds of foods to eat, the calorie amounts, nutrients, vitamins, and overall diet needed to achieve your personal objectives.  Having someone push us into uncharted territory can be an adventure in self-discovery, one that’s hard to do when going at it alone.

 

NYC Personal Training Gym: ATOMIC Total Fitness

November 5, 2017

Midtown Personal Training Space Available

ATOMIC Total Fitness is a boutique space conveniently located in the heart of Midtown East Manhattan. With the many options available for independent training in NYC, our goal is to exceed both you and your clients expectations.

If you are an independent trainer looking to deliver sessions in a professional, fun and stress free environment, ATOMIC is the place for you.  We welcome professional career personal trainers who take their job and the safety of their clients seriously.
Your first session is on us! 
Contact us now to get started.

information@atomictotalfitness.com

 
 WHAT TO EXPECT
  • Clean full service facility
  • Use of towels and showers included
  • Dedicated space for you and your client. We never overcrowd.
  • The best and most essential equipmeny
WHAT IS AVAILABLE
  • Come To ATOMIC for a few sessions a week
  • Set up your full time business at ATOMIC
  • No restrictions on prime time or weekends
Your first session is on us! Contact us now to get started. 

WHAT YOU WILL NEED
  • Proof of insurance with “ATOMIC Total Fitness” added as an additional insured
  • Copy of most current certification
Know someone who might be interested?Gray
 
 
 
*A fitness community partner email distributed by NeighborhoodTrainer.com
Set up your trainer profile today!