Answer Fitness®: Practical Fitness Advice for Everyone

Five Ways to Make That Glass of Water Taste Better | Diet Tips from Answer Fitness®

Try these five tricks to stay hydrated and enjoy drinking water at the same time. 

Water is essential to good health, but let’s face it, compared to soda, juice, wine or beer, water is pretty … um … boring. But it has zero calories, no sugar, is filling and may help with fat-loss, so drinking plenty of water makes sense.

The problem is, water just doesn’t have much zip to it.

Until now.

Try one or more of these tricks and products to meet your daily fluid requirements while making water a beverage that you actually enjoy:

1. Make It Fruity: Adding wedges of lemons, limes, oranges and other fruits like strawberries, kiwis and even blueberries can add a subtle fruit flavor to water. Even better, when you get to the bottom of the glass, you have a few pieces of fresh fruit to reward you for your effort.  Can’t keep fresh fruit with you everywhere you go? No problem. Check out True Lemon®, an all-natural crystallized lemon powder (it comes in lime and orange, as well) that’s perfect for adding to your water bottle. They’ll even send you a couple free samples!
2. Make It Juicy: Adding a splash of fruit juice to your water is a nice way to add some additional flavor and nutrients (as well as a little sweetness.) Good choices include grapefruit, orange, cherry, cranberry, and grape juices. Or try adding a blueberry-pomegranate juice like POM for some additional flavor and a dose of powerful antioxidants.
3. Make It Fizzy: Love the fizziness of soda, but could do without all of the sugar? Try making your own “light” sodas by adding fruit juice to sparkling mineral waters like Perrier or San Pellegrino. If the price tag that comes with mineral water is a little steep, you can also substitute bottled carbonated water, which you can find in the soda or water isle. They’ll often come pre-flavored which makes them a tasty, convenient option to soda.
4. Make It Frozen: Ice is water. Consider whipping up a frozen smoothy with a couple scoops of your favorite flavor of protein powder, a handful of ice cubes and a little water to get things going. Throw in a banana for some sweetness and whip it up in a blender to a nice frothy consistency. Instant milk-free, milkshake! And you get some protein along with the water.
5. Make It Into Tea: Yes, that’s right, tea counts toward your daily water requirements. While tea is a mild diuretic, the amount of water it causes you to lose is far outweighed by the total volume of water you drink. And, a 2006 study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that drinking tea is actually healthier than just drinking plain water. The high flavanoid content of tea may protect against heart disease and cancer. So whether you like it green, black, white or herbal, tea is a great way to meet your daily hydration needs. Just skip the sugar or cream. 

Remember, The Institute of Medicine  advises that men consume roughly 3.0 liters (about 13 cups) of total beverages a day and women consume 2.2 liters (about 9 cups) of total beverages a day. If you are more active, your requirements may be higher.

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How Often Should I Workout? | Fitness Tips

Workout frequency is highly individual. Learn how to find your perfect schedule and avoid over training.

How often you should work out is really a matter of your current fitness level, the types of exercises you are performing, the intensity of your workouts, and how much time you actually have available to spend in the gym.

Current Fitness Level

Your current fitness level is one of the primary factors used to determine workout frequency.

Beginners will typically need more recovery time between workouts than more advanced trainees, bodybuilders or well-conditioned athletes or runners.  Nearly everyone has experienced one of those workouts where you “over did” it and couldn’t move for three days. While this can happen at all levels of fitness, it’s more common among beginners who are still gauging their strength, stamina and recovery ability.

The body also makes certain adaptations with training over time that may shorten the required recovery time. So while some people can go heavy in the gym every day, others may need to take a break every-other-day.  

As a general rule of thumb, a good training frequency for someone who is new to the gym, or returning after a lengthy break, is three resistance workouts a week lasting between 45 and 60 minutes. This will allow you to work each major muscle group with at least one exercise and give yourself 48 hours for recovery between workouts.

This full-body workout is ideal because it helps build a solid foundation for later, more advanced training; encourages overall core development; discourages the development of muscle imbalances that can accompany “split routines”; and may burn more calories after training.

And by the way, this is actually also an excellent workout for an advanced trainee. The difference is they will work with heavier weights and may do more total sets for each exercise than a person who is less-experienced in the gym.

Continue reading How Often Should I Workout? | Fitness Tips…

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How to Choose A Gym That’s Right For You

Ask yourself these nine questions to make sure you’re choosing the perfect gym … before you sign the contract.

Whether you are looking to get in-shape and choosing a gym or fitness club for the first time or have a current gym membership and are looking to make a change, finding the right place to work out can be a confusing and intimidating process, especially for beginners.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

The International Health Racquet & Sportsclub Association (IHRSA) estimates that in 2006 there were 29,000 commercial fitness centers in America. If you live in a major metropolitan area, you can expect to find between 10-25 fitness centers competing for your membership. In smaller towns, your choices may be more limited, but between local rec centers, nearby colleges, the YMCA and commercial gyms, it’s easier than ever to have access to a gym, regardless of your location.

So with so many options, how do can you be sure you’re making the right choice?

Continue reading How to Choose A Gym That’s Right For You…

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Why Answer Fitness®?

So I finally did it. I took the plunge and started a blog.

First, an admission. And then some explanation.

The admission: I started Answer Fitness®  for some pretty self-serving reasons.

Now the explanation.

Answerfitness.com exists because I really needed a single place to collect all of the fitness tips, diet tricks, health and nutrition research, recipes, and workout regimens that I currently have scattered in various bookmarks, Microsoft Word documents and yellow sticky notes. So at the most basic level, this website is a way for me to organize my own training and health.

But there are some other reasons ….

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About Answer Fitness®

Answer Fitness® provides practical fitness advice and information on diet and nutrition, exercise , weight-loss and weight training for people who are passionate about fitness and staying in shape, regardless of their experience level.

My Goal

This is not a diet blog.

While food is major focus of Answer Fitness®, my goal is to shift people’s thinking regarding good nutrition from something that they pay attention to only when they need to lose weight, to something that they think about every day. Once you begin eating healthy, you should never have to go “on a diet” again. 

So who is this “Matt” guy and why should I listen to him?

The simple answer is that I’m one of you. I’m not a professional athlete, competitive body builder or a doctor. 

What I am,  is a “fitness nerd.”

And I wear this badge proudly.

This means I feel strongly that working out is 75% mental. 

For me, physical activity is a medititation of sorts. And I love the science of it all. The amazing ability of the body to adapt to whatever we heap on it. The chance for us to live longer, be healthier and more fit than our parents or grandparents. The physical challenge to be better than what we are drives me. 

I also want to break the stereotype that being fitness-minded means you can’t be … um … minded.

I have dual bachelors degrees in Philosophy and History from the University of Michigan and am working on my personal trainer certification … just for the hell of it.  I’ll probably never make a dime at it, nor do I care. It’s a personal challenge thing for me. That’s all.

Finally, I don’t blog because I need income.

I do it instead, because,  like my readership, I’m passionate about eating healthy, staying in shape and passing on some knowledge.

I don’t know it all and I admit this. So I spend a lot of my free time (what I have of it), digging through scientific research to try to come up with something objective and proven that I can pass on to the people who visit my site.

My day job is interactive marketing, which means I spend a lot of my time sitting behind a computer or in a meeting room. Fitness for me is both a hobby and a necessity. Working out let’s me blow off steam, clear my mind and focus for 90 minutes each day on something other than Google algorithms or website conversion. For me, exercise and eating well are just as important as feeding your mind. I try to do all three. 

In the end, it always comes back to the basics: eat well and close-to-the-earth, exercise frequently and workout hard in the gym. There are no “magic pills” or “revolutionary” diets that can substitute for these three principles.  Period. I know it, because I’ve been there.

Answer Fitness® was inspired by my experiences as a Top Contributor to the Diet and Fitness category in Yahoo Answers.

Fitness and healthy eating seem of the surface to be very simple things, but people are perpetually confused. Between the seemingly contradictory scientific research around diet that people read online and in the news, the amazing claims of diet and supplement marketers, and the practical challenges of staying active in an increasingly sedentary society, people are looking for answers, not just hype, to stay healthy and fit.

Finally, you’ll see me talking a lot about food. Yes, I want you to eat. While it may seem counter-intuitive, you can’t lose fat without eating. But I also want to challenge the perception that a lot of people have that you can’t eat healthy and burn fat and have your meals taste phenomenal.

I actually flirted with the idea of naming this blog “No Boiled Chicken” because the idea that eating healthy requires you to consume bland foods like boiled chicken, canned tuna and brown rice drives me crazy.

I have bodybuilder friends who struggle to gag down yet another boiled chicken breast, when — with a little help – they really could be eating “clean” and enjoying their food, instead of dreading it. I want to change that.

So welcome to Answer Fitness® and say goodbye to canned tuna!

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