Now that we are wrapping up the shortest month of the year and close to leaving winter behind, I think we fit pros are craving a varied. menu of information on which to dine. I personally love the favorites of this month, in their wide range of topics, but I especially love when one of our new authors nails it on the first try with the most popular blog. Read why it’s important to remember to eat your meals at meal time, get a kinesiology lesson on the TFL, learn how to do leg curls with suspension bands, find out why gut health is just so darn important that its deserving of buzz-word status, which segues nicely into the nutritional considerations of “the way we eat”—the last in its series.
Here are the blogs you didn’t want to miss this month:
Remembering to Eat: Skipping Meals is Not Ideal
Personal trainers and clients alike can get so caught up in their workday that remembering to eat their meals at optimal intervals may pose a unique challenge. How many times have you gotten so focused on your job that you forget to eat? Intense focus coupled with stress hormones and a slowed metabolism can keep hunger pangs at bay and before you know it the clock says 3 pm and lunch has been skipped.
If you have clients with goals aligned with weight loss, better nutrition, or perhaps just improving consistency, waiting until the clock strikes 3 pm, 4 pm, or even 5 pm can sabotage those earnest efforts!
TFL Compensatory Patterns
Tensor fasciae latae (TFL) is a small muscle that makes a big fuss. An overactive TFL can result in pain in various parts of the body and this pain is often misunderstood and even misdiagnosed. To address the root cause of this pain and dysfunction, it’s important to understand the associated compensatory patterns.
How to do Suspension Leg Curls
There’s no question that working the backside of the body is important and specifically the hamstrings. Having strong hamstrings will help prevent knee pain and injuries as well improve your posture. While Romanian deadlifts reign supreme for hamstring strength, leg curls directly isolate this muscle like no other. Leg curls can be done in many different ways but one of the best ways is the suspension leg curl.
The Gut Health Connection
Perhaps the time-worn expression “having a gut feeling” holds more potency than any of us realized. Studies of the intestinal microflora reveal how disturbances in its biodiversity can affect everything from obesity and autoimmune diseases to chronic depression. As a follow-up to our article referencing the Mediterranean Diet and gut health, we will now delve deeper into the far-reaching effects of the gut microbiome.
Nutritional Considerations of the Way We Eat
There are a number of aspects of food and the food industry as a whole that affect our health. This article will be the last of a three-part series where we briefly examined the economic impacts of food, the environmental variables, then finally, here, the nutritional considerations of the way we eat.
Up until about 10,000 years ago, humans survived mainly on hunting and gathering. We were nomadic, moving our families and homes to where food was. There were many instances of feast and famine. The agricultural revolution changed all of that. Whether agriculture was developed as a necessary tool to support population growth, or population growth was an outcome of agriculture is left to question. But what’s for certain is that after millions of years of human existence, the way we eat has been forever changed.
