BrickhouseBodymind.com is a mind body fitness blog, encouraging personal transformation and bringing about total fitness through informative articles on integral lifestyle issues such as stress relief, sexuality and relationships, and transformative practices like strength training, meditation and yoga. The website is designed to help you train your body, sharpen your mind, and unleash your spirit, making total fitness a reality for everyone.
Juggling the tasks of working on this mind-body fitness blog of mine, doting on my stunningly sexy wife, and working a full-time job makes finding time to work out and burn off all those beers I drink on the weekends a difficult task. I try to be creative in working more activity into my off hours, but those are egregiously limited, so my solution to this problem is to get more creative in trying to make my working hours more productive … and by productive I don’t mean hammering out more TPS Reports, I mean burning off more calories during my workday so I don’t have to work as hard in my precious off time to stay fit.
For this article I put together my top ten tips for burning more calories during your workday. If you follow even half of these, I guarantee you’ll be ahead of the pack when it comes to staying lean and mean.
The physical fitness component of the Brickhouse Bodymind total fitness program is primarily designed to develop balance and coordination, improve cardiovascular conditioning, and make modest strength gains through the use of simple but effective bodyweight exercises. Sometimes, however, the desire for more significant strength gains demands a different sort of workout routine.
Whether you’re relatively new to physical fitness, or an old pro looking to improve muscle definition, the most effective way to build lean muscle mass is to demand that your muscles lift progressively more and more weight. Assuming your nutrition is up to snuff, your muscles will soon adapt to this increasing demand by making more muscle. This improves your physique and also helps you burn more calories on a daily basis.
While most of the people I advise don’t care much about gaining a significant amount of muscle mass, only a few are without some desire to increase muscle definition and amp up the “brickhouse” factor in their physique. Only problem is, many of these folks, particularly females, are not doing the right things to get them where they want to be. What they tend to do is lift lighter weights over more reps using isolated exercises and nautilus-type weight machines.
This is total maintenance mode, and it’s not a particularly efficient way to work out. It will help keep the muscle tone you already have, but if you are at all interested in improving your physique and muscle definition, you’re really going to have to change your mindset a bit.
Just wanted to take a minute to acknowledge that my father (at age 59) and I walked the sixth annual Little Rock Marathon Sunday. We finished together after 6 hours and 55 minutes. It’s a memory I’ll have the rest of my life.
Hey all. This is just a quick note to let you know that I’ve made a couple improvements to the first episode of BrickhouseBodymind TV originally released in this post about shoulder pain and stiffness. Graphics package has improved a bit, and I tried to place the exercises earlier in the video, while leaving technical exposition for later. As always, please comment below if you have suggested improvements or suggestions for future episodes.
Chronic neck and shoulder stiffness and pain are symptoms many of us deal with on a daily basis. Whether it’s a nagging crick in your neck, a pain that keeps you from being able to turn and check your blind spot while driving, or inhibited range of motion in your shoulder joint that keeps you from doing certain exercises in the gym, most of us in the modern world are affected by some form of this discomfort in the neck and shoulder area.
While there are cases where severe shoulder injury will require surgery or some other invasive intervention to realize recovery, these symptoms are more often a result of the modern human lifestyle, and that means you have the power to eradicate them by making a few of the following lifestyle changes.
Identify where you carry stress – Many of us, myself included, carry the bulk of their stress load in their neck and shoulders. The next time somebody cuts in front of you on the interstate, take inventory of your posture. Are your shoulder blades splaying outward? Are your shoulders creeping up toward your ears? Are the muscles in your neck collapsing your cervical vertebrae? Take note of these things and try to be more mindful in times of stress. Breathe deeply. As a rule, try to keep your shoulder blades parallel to the midline of the body and relatively close to the spine. Also work on relaxing your shoulders down away from your ears.
Push and pull together – A common cause of these symptoms is muscle imbalance between the front and back of the body. For this reason it’s imperative that you work your back at least as much as your chest when you’re in the gym. Overdeveloped chest muscles are a big culprit as they tend to pull the shoulders forward, causing the shoulder blades to splay outward, decreasing their stability. It’s important to pay attention to your levator scapulae, rhomboids, and infraspinatus muscles. These are very important in stabilizing the shoulder joint in overhead presses and other movements involving external rotation of the upper arm (humerous). Check out this great article by Medhi at stronglifts.com for more on working with the infraspinatus muscle.
Know your ergonomics – Another reason we have such problems with posture is the amount of time we spend sitting in front of computers every day. Slouching at the desk is probably inevitable, but check out this website for some great info on workstation ergonomics that could help you get your posture back on track.
Develop your range of motion – The shoulder joint is a ball and socket configuration, giving it a wide range of possible movements including flexion and extension, abduction and adduction, rotation around the center-line of the humerous, and circumduction (which is basically drawing a circle in the air with your hand). Take a look at the video tutorial below for some great mobility exercises to take your shoulder joint through its entire range of motion. This will help improve your kinesthetic awareness and increase your ability to stabilize your shoulder joint and your shoulder girdle (collarbone and shoulder-blade).
I’ll warn you, this video is a full 10 minutes long. I’ve made some improvements on the first edition, though. The exercises all happen in the first five minutes, while the latter five minutes is more technical. Please comment below and let me know how I might improve on my communications. Thanks for reading and watching!
