Strickland Fitness

It's really hard for many folks to stick with an exercise or diet program. It really takes strong willpower to stay committed to one's physical goals. As we head into May and closer towards summertime, here's a great piece on how to keep your willpower strong and steady as you start a new exercise program. – Make it a great day, Chad

By Christine Carter, PhD / Huffington Post

Who among us has not made a plan to get up in the morning and exercise, but then hit snooze one time too many, sleeping through our morning jog?

We may have been super-inspired by the incredible brain-boosting properties of exercise. We may have had every intention to start an exercise plan and stick to it. But then… We didn't. Our warm bed sucked us in. We'll exercise tomorrow.

What we need is willpower. Once we get in the habit of exercising — or of staying calm in the face of a toddler meltdown, of not checking our email after 5 p.m., or of doing anything else we want to have the resolve to do — we don't need to try so hard. But for now, because we are in the habit of pushing snooze — or yelling, or checking email compulsively all evening — we need self-discipline.

Here are five tips for strengthening your willpower.

1.Get enough sleep. That's seven to eight hours for adults, at least nine for teens, or 10 to 12 for elementary and middle school kids.

Sleep deprivation makes us susceptible to temptations like Facebook and that chocolate-covered cookie over there, for physiological reasons. Self-control takes a ton of brainpower, and when we are tired, our bodies don't tend to deliver enough glucose to our brain for it to get the willpower engine going.

2. Meditate for five minutes a day. Sit up straight and focus your attention on your breath. When your mind wanders, as it will, you'll be building willpower when you simply notice that your mind has wandered and you bring your attention back to your breath.

As Kelly McGonigal notes in her awesome book The Willpower Instinct, the worse you are at meditation, the better it is as an exercise for building self-control. Here's why: In order to check your impulsive tendency to snag that donut off the counter, you need to build self-awareness.

When you are aware of what you are doing (e.g., "I'm feeling tempted to scarf that down."), you're actually engaging the part of your brain you need for willpower, rather than letting your impulses take over. Meditation gives you practice at engaging your self-awareness; as a bonus, deep, slow breathing also helps strengthen your self-control.

3.Lay off the cocktails. Science of the blazingly obvious, I know, but face it: We often have a glass of wine right before we need willpower to make healthy choices at dinner. Alcohol lowers your blood glucose, which a series of studies shows can dramatically weaken your willpower. (You'd be better off drinking sugary soda before testing your will, although I'm not actually recommending that.)

Alcohol also reduces self-awareness, and it is self-awareness that we need most to bring us back to our goals. (See numbers 2 and 5.) Read the rest of this entry »

It might be one of the most common and oft-done exercises around, but many people still don't know how to do a proper pushup. This is a great video from Men's Health that not only shows you one, but four ways to do a pushup. Please enjoy the video and share your comments. – Best, Chad

I wouldn't really say exercise makes one overeat as much as the extra activity and exertion might make one hungrier than normal. This piece highlights a couple of studies that show how exercise affects different people's brains. Interesting indeed. Please share and comment. – Best, Chad

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times

Some people respond to exercise by eating more. Others eat less. For many years, scientists thought that changes in hormones, spurred by exercise, dictated whether someone’s appetite would increase or drop after working out. But now new neuroscience is pointing to another likely cause. Exercise may change your desire to eat, two recent studies show, by altering how certain parts of your brain respond to the sight of food.

In one study, scientists brought 30 young, active men and women to a lab at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for two experimental sessions, where they draped their heads in functional M.R.I. coils. The researchers wanted to track activity in portions of the brain known as the food-reward system, which includes the poetically named insula, putamen and rolandic operculum. These brain regions have been shown to control whether we like and want food. In general, the more cells firing there, the more we want to eat. To continue reading, please click HERE.

I thought it would be a good change of pace to post this video, hopefully to get everyone pumped for Summer. That's right, it's Spring and bikini season is right around the corner. I found this cool video on using tether balls for a core circuit. Yes, tether balls – the same ones attached to those poles which we played with our elementary school buddies. Now they can get you fit as adults. Enjoy the video and please comment. – Best, Chad

Video from: Mensfitness.com