Love Notes by Jari Love

Wash It Out With Water

by Jari Love

When you step onto that scale, you suddenly weigh more than you did the day before. Think about it some more. Your scale could be lying to you…

It only tells you how much you weigh at the time you are on it. It doesn’t tell you that you did not drink enough water the previous day or you had too much sodium. Think about what you ate yesterday. The extra weight could have come from the excess sodium consumed in the previous day. Those extra pounds could just be from water retention.

Fun Fact: One teaspoon of table salt is around 2,000 mg of sodium and if we consume more than 3,000 mg per day we start to retain water.

The old adage is that the "more you put in, the more you release" and someone who attentively consumes eight glasses of water each day is going to shed just as much fluid - if not more. The less water you drink, the more your body will hold on to.

Always aim to drink plenty of water and at least 30 minutes of exercise everyday. This will be the key for a happy digestive system and rolling out a flat abdomen. Now let’s talk about what you are eating.

Beginning Runners Should Start with a Run/Walk Routine

Many beginners lose their desire to run when they overshoot their abilities during their first time out for a run. There’s nothing wrong with starting slow and progressively working your way up toward longer, more rigorous runs. In fact, rushing into things is a sure way to develop injuries and other health problems.

When just getting started out on a running routine, you might consider jogging at a comfortable pace for a few minutes, then walking for a minute, jogging for a few minutes, walking for a minute, and so on. Set a goal to do this for 20-30 minutes. As you begin to boost your endurance levels, you can increase the amount of time that you spend running until you work up to a full 20-30 minutes of jogging.

Once you feel comfortable, you can increase your pace and/or the length of your runs. By taking things easy at first, you will allow your body time to adjust. This also has psychological benefits since, by allowing yourself to climb the fitness ladder one step at a time, you will feel a greater sense of accomplishment as you reach one goal after another. By giving yourself time, you will be able to develop the endurance and other health benefits you were hoping for.

8 Essential Tips that Will Help You Get in Shape for Spring

During wintertime, it’s easy to put exercise and healthy eating habits aside. Sitting inside, relaxing with a book or watching television is often more appealing than bundling up for exercise outdoors or to travel to a gym. However, many people are surprised at just how much they have let their health go when they put on a t-shirt, a pair of shorts, or a swimsuit once warm weather returns. The following tips will help you to shake off your winter hibernation habits so that you are prepared to walk out of your door in confidence when warmer weather arrives.

1. Find Your Source of Motivation

Is running 5 miles a day not your thing? Don’t worry, there are plenty of options when it comes to fitness training. If you enjoy bicycling, spring is a great time to get outdoors to enjoy the fresh air while maintaining a rigorous cycling workout. If you are an extrovert who becomes energized when around other people, look for an exercise buddy who can help you to push yourself harder during exercise.

2. Mix Things Up

Just as your mood may change from day to day, so may your preferences for exercise. Give yourself plenty of options. For instance, take on an exercise class a few times a week. Run, cycle, or work out at a gym on the other days.

3. Exercise Variety for Better Results

By including exercises in your routine that work your core, upper, and lower body, and that also provide a great cardio workout, you will ensure that you are able to optimize your overall health. Come up with a fitness routine that targets all aspects of your health for the best results.

4. Professional Instruction

When it comes to preparing for warmer weather by maximizing your workout efforts in the spring, time really does fly. If you are worried about not achieving your fitness goals in time for summer, consider hiring a personal trainer or joining a fitness class led by an experienced fitness instructor. This will help you to maximize your time and effort while providing some form of accountability to stick with your fitness routine.

5. Set a Date for a Physical Challenge

To give yourself added motivation to get in top shape by a certain date, sign up for a physical challenge that coincides with your goals. For instance, if you are giving yourself three months to lose so many pounds and to build up a certain level of endurance, sign up for a running or cycling race. This will give you something specific to prepare for so that you are less likely to skip workouts.

6. Share Your Fitness Achievements

In today’s world of social media, you will find plenty of websites and blogs dedicated to those working toward achieving personal fitness goals. Use these forums as support groups to share your achievements and to receive tips on how to further your goals. Discuss your goals and achievements with friends and family who are also working to optimize their health.

7. Don’t Forget About Your Diet

Maintaining a healthy diet is essential for maximizing the effects of your workouts, for losing those excess pounds gained during the winter months, and for optimizing your overall health. Work towards making healthy eating a lifestyle change and not a short-term solution. Avoid starvation diets or other types of dieting techniques that cannot be sustained long term. Instead, focus on eating a well-rounded diet that includes unprocessed, nutrient-rich foods.

8. Maintain a Positive Attitude

When setting goals for yourself, do not go over the top. Setting unrealistic goals will put yourself in the inevitable position to fail and to feel poorly about yourself. Instead, set realistic goals that you will be able to achieve over time. Reward yourself whenever you achieve your goals. If you have any setbacks in your fitness routine, don’t beat yourself up about it. Get back on track as soon as possible, and have fun in the process of getting fit. Follow the fitness techniques that are the most enjoyable to you, make sure that you have emotional support and professional fitness guidance if needed, and use a variety of motivational tools so that you can maintain a positive attitude while you work your way toward improved health.

Five Steps to Cardio Success

Is cardio fitness as easy as running a mile? Are you "in shape" when you can walk two miles in less than 30 minutes? How do you know when you are a success with cardio fitness?

One of the first things to keep in mind is that cardio workouts are only successful when they are "effective". This is something that seems a bit vague but is best translated with another simple word - fatigue.

When the body experiences a mild sense of fatigue after a workout, it usually means that it has been effective. For example, you could jog in place gently for 15 minutes. This might allow you to take enough steps to equal a single mile, but if you are not the least bit tired after doing this, it could mean that you didn't challenge the body enough to gain any cardio benefits.

So, let's understand what it takes to perform cardio workouts that lead to fatigue and success:

1. You must warm up - While you could just start running at your maximum level and keep going for a few miles, you would not get the benefits of a good warm up. By warming up we do not mean stretching. You should only stretch once the muscles have been engaged - or during the cooling down period. Warm up means a good transitional period between being sedentary and at full capacity.

2. Know capacity - Understanding the heart rate is often a key way of getting the most out of your cardio routines. You want to always experience at least 15 to 30 minutes of intensity that demands you work at 65% to 85%.

3. Can we talk? - The best place to maintain your cardio level is at a place where you CAN talk, but you would rather not. In other words, you are winded but not gasping and whooping for breath.

4. Benefits from cooling down - Never, as in NEVER, stop dead in your workouts. This causes you to experience a forced cooling down. Instead use the final five to seven minutes to gently head back to a sedentary state.

5. Stretch - Use another five or ten minutes to stretch the body from head to toe. This ensures full circulation and only mild soreness if you have pushed it a bit too hard.

Using these five tips will help you to succeed at all cardio workouts - no matter how short and simple or long and demanding.

Use the Elliptical Trainer Dashboard to Stay Motivated

Modern elliptical trainers come equipped with a dashboard that includes features such as time and distance, a pulse monitor, resistance level, strides per minute, calories burned, and a number of additional statistics. Checking in on dashboard statistics every once in a while during your workout will help you to monitor your workout and stay motivated.

It is a common habit for exercisers to continually check their watches or the wall clock to determine how much longer they have for an exercise session. This can lead to a tedious workout. With an elliptical trainer, you won’t have to constantly check the time since you can preset the machine for a specific type of workout that lasts for a certain period of time.

Elliptical trainer dashboards will keep you more involved in your workout as you can physically see an estimate of how many calories you are burning, how many strides per minute you are accomplishing, and so on. By keeping tabs on these statistics, you will also be able to gauge whether or not you should be pushing yourself harder. The dashboard is an excellent tool that you can use to progressively increase your fitness level. As you watch your progress on the dashboard, you will become motivated to continually push yourself to take on more challenging elliptical workouts.

Increase Intensity to See Results

Don't wait to hit a plateau to begin upping the ante in your workouts. Rather than allowing your body to enter that "groove" that eventually puts you on the dreaded "plateau" (where the impact of your exercise regimen does not produce any notable results), keep boosting the intensity on a regular basis.

Now, that doesn't mean that you are going to eventually hit maximum limits and get stuck in a plateau at some point down the road. This is because intensity can be radically different from what most fitness enthusiasts believe.

Here is what we mean:

• A typical route for increasing intensity would be to use more effort for the exercise routine you have chosen, increase reps over time, add more weight to any strength training, or work to go faster or longer in a shorter amount of time.

• An alternative route to increasing intensity (and the one we would recommend) would be to use cross training and to challenge the body to adjust to new patterns on a regular basis.

As an example, one of the best total body workouts is found with the use of a single sort of exercise. This is a kettlebell swing. It incorporates a squat, a controlled lift, and engages the entire body from the feet and all of the way through to the neck.

Now, that is a pretty intense sort of workout if you partner it up with some cardio workouts. However, if you do sets with kettlebells of varying weights, and you integrate rounds of explosive movement in between sets, you are going to challenge the body on a persistent basis.

Consider this sort of routine:

• Do 15 kettlebell lifts, rest for one minute, do 15 burpees, rest for one minute, and complete a circuit with a series of kettlebell lifts at a higher or lower weight then originally used. Repeat until fatigued.

• The next day could be about cardio conditioning that incorporates strengthening such as 100 burpees integrated with sets of lunges, squats, planks, and other body conditioning work.

• Repeat the first day, but use different explosive movements and different weights.

• Repeat the second day, but use a different form of cardio.

This sort of regimen would not allow the body to "predict" or become used to any sort of training, and this sort of challenge is what always generates great results and long term success.

New Exclusive: Jari Love Blog

Jari Love is a certified personal trainer and the creator of Get RIPPED!™, the five-phase, no-nonsense full body workout system designed to help people of any fitness level shed unwanted pounds in just weeks. The hot-selling and critically acclaimed Get RIPPED! series enables individuals to burn up to three times more calories than the traditional weight-training program, and has received rave reviews from fitness critics throughout North America since the first title debuted in late 2005.

In fact, one of Jari’s latest DVDs – Get Extremely RIPPED! 1000 – was rated a Top Pick by Oprah & Friends satellite radio network personality Gayle King in her “December 2010 Gift Guide” column in Oprah magazine. It also was rated “Best Calorie-Burning Session” in the February 2010 issue of Fitness magazine.

After many years as a recording artist, model and actor, Jari obtained her Personal Fitness Trainer (PFT) certification and began working with clients as a personal trainer. A competitive runner since her teens, health and fitness has always been central to Jari’s life. However, with increasing responsibilities over time she had fewer hours to devote to training, so she used her knowledge of physiology to create Get RIPPED!, a results-oriented workout for the busy parent and business person whose goal is to maintain peak fitness. Jari named this five-phase program Get RIPPED!after the weight-lifting term meaning increased muscle and decreased body fat. After many of her personal clients were able to meet lifelong fitness goals as a result of doing the program, Jari decided that it was possible to develop group fitness classes based on the same concepts.

Since the release of the first DVD – Get RIPPED! – in 2005, she has developed a fanatical fan following from consumers and news media alike. Jari’s Get RIPPED! craze was further fueled by the June 2006 release of Get RIPPED! Slim & Lean and Get RIPPED! To the Core, the November 2006 release of Get RIPPED! 1000 and the November 2007 release of Get RIPPED! & Chiseled. Spring 2009 brought along four new and innovative workouts to add to the mix, launching with Get Extremely RIPPED! and following with Get Extremely RIPPED! 1000, Get Extremely RIPPED! Body Rock and Get Extremely RIPPED! Lean Machine.

The popularity of these DVDs have generated unprecedented demand in Canadian health clubs for her personal classes and consistent Top 10 sales rankings month upon month on leading international fitness video websites. In the fitness category, her DVDs have ranked as high as No. 1 on CollageVideo.com.

With fitness critics, Jari and her products have received exemplary reviews, and the accolades continue to stockpile. Jari and her series have been featured in a number of major health and fitness magazines as well as regional and national newspapers throughout North America. Jari’s Get RIPPED! & Chiseled DVD was highlighted in USA Today as one of the top 10 workout videos. She was featured in the New York Times as one of the leading DVD makers, and in the Los Angeles Times as a fitness guru whose “high-intensity ‘Get RIPPED! series tackles the fat by working muscle groups two-by-two.”

Jari’s background as a certified trainer, fitness club owner, author and creator of the successful Get RIPPED! series garnered her a coveted spot on the Fitness Magazine Advisory Board where she previously served as a regular fitness expert for the magazine. Jari also is a frequent contributor for Replay Magazine which is distributed all across Canada. Locally in Calgary, Jari has secured a regular spot as a contributor to ‘Neighbors,’ a section of the Calgary Herald.

In her hometown of Calgary, Jari serves as a regular fitness expert for Chum television and Shaw Television, and also has appeared in promotions for related fitness products (Webber Naturals protein powder), among many other activities. Jari was nominated and selected for Global TV’s “Calgary Woman of Vision” in 2009. This honorable award is presented to outstanding female entrepreneurs who contribute to the community and are driven in their careers.

Jari enjoys spending time with her family – husband Ray and two children while staying connected with her love of fitness. Maintaining her health has also allowed her to play an active role in her community. Jari gives the gift of her time to local programs that aid marginalized persons as often as she can.

Helping others be the best that they can be is Jari’s ultimate goal. The value statement that summarizes Jari Love’s approach to life is: Take good care of yourself to ensure that you can give your best in everything that you do.