May Is National Bike Month!!!

Not only is May Skin cancer Awareness Month, it is also National Bike Month!! This is the time to get out your bike and travel in a healthy, green and invigorating way. Bike to work week is May 17-21 and Bike to work day is Friday, May 21. Leave those excuses behind, if only for one day, and try your legs at commuting on two wheels. Not only will you get the best parking spot, you will burn calories, enjoy the outdoors and pump happy brain chemicals throughout you body. This isn't some new-wave thing: May has been recognized as National Bike Month since 1956. Don't forget to wear your sunscreen!

Happy Cells

If you want to be happier, move your body.Research overwhelmingly shows that people who exercise regularly are happier. When you dance, you brain gets more oxygen, but even more important, it causes your body to produce valuable chemicals and hormones that impact energy, mood and health. In a recent study done on athletes, Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey found dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, those wonderful happiness chemicals were all elevated after exercise.
Anxious? Exercise creates a calming effect that last about four hours, increasing endorphins, the bliss neurochemicals responsible for that wonderful exercise high by about 500 %
Try getting in a fight right after Zumba session. It's not likely to happen!
That every day you replace about one percent of your cells, getting a whole new body every three months. When you sit around like a couch potato, you muscles let out a steady trickle of chemicals that tell your cells to die. When your exercise, your muscle release substances that tell your cells to grow. What powerful motivation! Start exercising, and get a whole new body of strong, happy cells by the end of the next three months. Moving your body on a regular basis will work wonders and keep your smile in good shape, too.

Eat your Fruits and Veggies firts

It's a smart move for your waistline and your health. According to a new study from the University of Florida, people who began each meal with fresh produce consumed more nutrients and less saturated fat all day than those who didn't. A salad fills you up, so you won't eat as much of the heavier main course.

Hang with the happy!

We catch the emotions of those around us just like we catch their colds- it's called emotional contagion. So it's important to make wise choices about the company you keep. Create appropiate boundaries with emotional bullies and happiness vampires, who suck the life out of you. Develop your happiness dream team. Happily ever after, isn't just for fairy tales or for only the lucky few. Imagine experiencing inner peace and well being as the backdrop for everything else in your life. When you are happy for no reason, it's not that your life always look perfect. It's that, how ever it looks, you"ll still be happy!!!!

Keep the joints jumping!!

Joints problems are fairly common, and none of us wants to miss out on Zumba, Kickboxing, pump class because of knee pain! How do we keep our joints in good working order? here some suggestions based on knowledge from the medical and fitness communities.

Think Ahead
Keep joints healthy by practicing good habits: 1) Get sufficient rest before exercising. 2) Eat balanced, nutritious meals to avoid vitamin and minerals deficiencies. 3) Don't exercise on an empty stomach, and stay hydrated. 4) Commit to keeping your weight withing healthy parameters to avoid stress on the joints.

Make over your moves
If you already have pain in your knee, choose moves that don't put pressure on your joints. Minor adjustments to your form can make a difference.
To keep knees in good shape, you can boost neuromuscular control and reduce your risk of injury with joint stability exercises and balance training.

Ask the experts
For joints problems, seek medical knows what drugs are safest for you and may prescribe analgesics or anti-inflammatories.
Glucosamine and Chondroitin sulfate are popular dietary supplements intended to prevent or reduce joint pain.

Give it a rest
Marathon runners take their rest day as seriously as their race days. There is a message in this: Don't overdo. Give your joints the care- and the time off- they deserve, and you'll always look forward to your exercise.

The Happiness Zone

In an uncertain economy, we may be forced to ask ourselves, "What do i truly need to be happy?" Research shows that long-terms satisfaction doesn't really come from material things- or even personal achievement- so how do we learn to be happy regardless of what is going on in our lives?

Incline your mind towards joy. Have you noticed that your mind tends to register the negative events in your life more than the positive? If you get ten compliments in a day and one criticism, what do you remember? For most people, it's the criticism. Scientists call this our negativity bias- our primitive survival wiring that causes us to pay more attention to the negative than the positive. To reverse this bias, get into the daily habitat of consciously registering the positive around you: the sun on your skin, the taste of a favorite food, a kind word from a co-worked. Take a moment to savor it deeply. Spend a full 20 seconds soaking up the happiness you feel.

Boost your Mood. The way that you eat, move, rest and even your facial expressions can shifts the balance of your body's feel good neuro -chemicals in your favor. To dispense some extra joy juice, smile. Smiling decreased stress hormones and boosts happiness chemicals, which increase
the body's t-cells, reduce pain, and enhance relaxation.
You may not feel like it, but smiling- even artificial at first- start the ball rolling and will turn into a real smile in short order.

Overtraining, It's all relative

Overtraining defined: The state where the athlete has been repeatedly stress by training to the point where rest is no longer adequate to allow for recovery.

Symptoms of Overtraining:

*Fatigue
*Moody
*Irritable
*Altered sleep patterns
*Lack of motivation
*Decreased appetite and weight loss
*Muscle pain/soreness and increased incidence of injury

Stress is Stress.
Treatment for Overtraining: REST

I ran 6 miles today!!!

Today I started my journey with a 6 miles run, was amazing!!!! The weather was great, my friend Nicole ran with me; we went from Irene street to Biddle street at Wyandotte, to the golf course and came back; the only bad thing is my right knee is killing me, but that will not stop me from my Focus!!! I only need to teach one Zumba class today :( It's good for my knee but I miss my other classes.
Always remember Give you body " Time" to relax:
Remember that you are the one who caused and trained your body to look and act the way they do. Resolve to give them permission to relax, and re-make you in a better image of suppleness.