Water VS Soda

Alright, in one corner, we’ve got water. The basic fluid people have been drinking since the dawn of time, only it’s a lot cleaner these days.

In the other corner, we have Soda. A much more recent contrivnce made up of sugar, water, and chemicals.

Unfortunately for humans in general, Soda has become extremely popular of late, and many people, espically kids. Drink more then one can(12oz) every day.

Now there are a lot of unhealthy side effects atributed to Soda, but I’m going to cover just one of them.

Soda is mostly sugar, as such it has a great deal of calories, which your body cannot absorb, because they come from the sugar additive HFCS. Consiquently, these calories go straight to fat, but how many calories are there? is it really that bad?

Well, we are going to compair Soda a Water.

12 oz of water contain 0 calories and will keep you for a while. Cold water will even burn some calories in your stomach.

12 oz of Soda contains around 180 calories (it varies) in pure sugar, pure fake sugar anyway. It will probably keep you hydrated for as long as water, but I could not find any references to that.

Now heres another thought to consider, To be healthy and stay hydrated all the time, you need to drink about a gallon of water a day, especially if you take part in any kind of sport.

1 Gallon of water has 0 calories, and if it is ice cold when you drink it, it will burn around 150 calories in your stomach. It will also keep you perfectly well hydrated during the course of the day.

1 Gallon of soda has 1800 calories, If it’s ice cold, I doubt it will really help much. Since all of the calories are from fake sugar, your body won’t be able to process them, and will turn them into fat instead. It should keep you hydrated, but you will feel tired due to hte calories you body can’t use and because the carbonation hampers your muscles ability to absorb oxygen.

Also according to this. http://missourifamilies.org/features/nutritionarticles/nut83.htm that in a balanced 2,200 calorie diet 12 teaspoons of added sugar may be consumed, and a can of soda has 9-11. And if you are a short or skinny person, you should probably be eating even less added sugar then that. Or if you are an athlete or health geek like me!

So think about it next time you reach for a Soda, wouldn’t you be better off with a bottle of refreshing water instead?

Yakri~

Work out routine?

A general fitness routine for the average noobie. I wrote this for someone on yahoo answers too.

It really depends on what you want to do. I would suggest this to have all bases covered. Put your shoes on and go out and jog for 10-30 minutes. When you get back to your house, go to the area you want to workout at. Once you get there start stretching, (you must do this straight after your back from running) do every stretch you know of.

Now its time to get to the workout. Since I don’t know what your training for, were going to go for overall fitness and working out your entire body. Push ups! They are a good one to start with. Do push ups until you feel the burn, then do a few more, and stop. If you can do a great many push ups (say, 50-100+) do a harder push up variation. Such a star push ups, clap push ups, one handed push ups, and planche push ups. If you do not know what those are, look them up on google or youtube. Push ups will work out your arms and chest, some of there variations will workout various other muscle groups.

Crunches! Ok crunches are great for the abb’s I generally put them second in my workout routine, but the order doesn’t really matter. If you can do 50+ crunches without feeling the burn at all, then you can do some harder variations. These include, leg lifts, 6 inches/suicides, butterfly kicks, and dragon flags (the ultimate, they are crazy hard to do). As before, if you don’t know what these are you should look them up on youtube or google. All of these exercises work various parts of your abb’s, i suggest you do 2-3 of them, i.e crunches AND leg lifts, not crunches OR leg lifts.

Body weight squats. Squats are the best leg exercise ever! They work your the entirety of both your legs as well as your lower back. and glutes. If squats become easy enough that you can breeze through 20-30+ without breaking a sweat, i suggest you learn to do pistols/single leg squats. They build amazing balance and single leg strength, they are a great deal harder then squats because of the even greater balance and skill factor. Please remember that squats aren’t bad for you in anyway IF you do them right, so do try and learn the correct form for this exercise. A squat is when you squat down with your toes pointed outwards and slightly farther then shoulder width apart, until your hips become parallel with your knees (you butt will be slightly lower then your knees). Your back should remain straight and your chest should forward during the entire movement.

Here is the most important part of your workout routine. YOUR DIET. If you have a lousy diet your not going to get anywhere with your workout routine, so even if you don’t like the exercises i have suggested, keep the diet part in mind, please. You need to stop eating/drinking anything with High Fructose Corn syrup in it. (known as HFCS) And your going to need to stop drinking anything carbonated. Your body needs two things to repair muscle. Carbs and protein (this is over simplification, but w/e). You need to get carbs right after you work out, and protein both right after you work out, and pretty much any other time you can consume it.

You can find out if food has protein/carbs and how many of both, by looking on the daily values label, just above the ingredients. Fruit normally has a lot of carbs in it, good sources would be bananas or apples. You may of noticed earlier that I said “REPAIR muscle” not build muscle, this is because you become stronger by putting your muscle under stress, say, lifting a heavy weight repeatedly, this causes micro tears in the muscle fiber, then when the muscle is repaired, it repairs itself stronger then before so it will be more resistant to similar types of damage. I guess you could say that becoming stronger is a defense mechanism.

So, what has this got to do with your diet? Well, your body needs to have all the materials at hand for repairs, if it doesn’t, it will take longer to fix your muscles. Think of it this way, you have a massive work force, ready to put up a building, if they don’t have all the necessary materials then some of the men won’t have anything to do, but if you have everything ready to do, you can have all of your workers start building at the same time, utilizing the maximum capacity of your work force. The point is, if your body has all the protein it needs to repair muscles, then it can work to do so at full power, if you don’t eat enough protein daily then it takes longer. Junk food is bad, because it completely counter acts the entire point of working out, carbonated drinks stop your muscles from properly absorbing oxygen, and HFCS limits your body’s ability to convert sugar to energy and the HFCS itself goes straight to fat.

Whats more, these drinks and snacks lack any useful components such as proteins, or helpful fats (Nuts, like almonds, and fish, and a few other things, have fats your body needs to work properly, trans fat, and saturated fat, found in many snacks, will go straight to body fat, because your body can’t process them properly.)

So, the whole point of all this rambling I am doing here, is that if you don’t eat healthy while working out, don’t work out in the first place, because it will just be a waste of your time.

Yakri~

Building blocks of tricking and parkour shortened.

Well, I made a post a while back called Building Blocks of Tricking, Parkour, And Martial Arts. Part 1, and Its a lot longer then it ends to be, so I want to summarize it here.

Parkour

1)Parkour is a great form of exercise, but that isn’t going to get you far if you don’t eat right, and sometimes training in a gym to get stronger, or build more endurance, is better then just doing parkour for it, mostly because it won’t be as hard on your body.

2)A lot of great traceur’s have very little in the way of serious injuries related to parkour. This is because they don’t do stupid shit. Basically, remember that the goal of parkour is to get from A to B as fast as you can, not to show off. Breaking bones and what-not also isn’t supposed part of it.

Tricking
1)In tricking, training in the gym and at home is very very important. Its pretty easy to hurt yourself enough to take you out of sports of a notable amount of time in tricking, and conditioning helps reduce the risk of that happening. condition three times as much as you trick, and you will be tricking for a long time.

Condition, diet, then train.

2)Don’t go overboard, working out for two hours a day every day and then spending an hour tricking afterward, it won’t help you. Remember, stop while your ahead, if you land a trick perfectly, do it a few more times, and then stop before you get tired. This way the correct form becomes more firmly implanted in your muscle memory. And don’t condition and trick on the same day if you can help it.

That’s all I’m putting in here, I think this explains the important parts better.

Food busters 2: Diet foods

I don’t have much time today, so this will be an experiment in keeping it to the point.

Diet foods/drinks generally try to eliminate fats of any kind, based on the common misconception that eating less fat will help you to lose weight. The problem with this, is that what actually determines weather you gain or lose weight in the end, is how many calories you intake, and how many you burn daily. Though much of the fat they cut out is indeed bad, the problem is how they make up for the loss in taste from that process. To combat the somewhat lacking taste guess what they do? add sweetener, which is guess what? HFCS. The end result is that “diet” foods are much less healthy then non-diet foods. The most notably unhealthy Diet products are by far, sodas.

So if it says diet on it, think twice, it may be even less healthy then its normal (and often more tasty) counter-parts.

Yakri~