Saved By The Bell

You've walked by the kettlebell rack a million times as you make your way towards the dumbbells, barbells, medicine balls and weight machinese. If you haven't tried using them by now, I can guarantee you that you've barely tapped into how ass kicking of a workout you could be getting.

Perhaps you think that exercising with a kettle bell is more or less the same as exercising with dumbbells. What most people don't realize is that it is not necessarily how heavy the weight is (although I am always an advocate for increased weight) but how the weight is distributed. Because it is not evenly distributed, you will force all of your stabilizer muscles to work even harder. Therefore, you will be conditioning your entire body, increase resistance to injury, improve range of motion and increase your ability to simulatenously train aerobically and anaerobically.

Want to know another incredible benefit of kettlebell trianing? An average exercise can torch up to 20 calories per minute! Which means you'll receive maximume results in less time. However, this fact will not be true if you swing a kettlebell around with improper form and low intensity. You can't be a little bitch about it. Make it count for each and every rep and I promise you will reap the endless amounts of benefits.

There is a surplus of exercises you can do with a kettlebell, but I've chosen and outlined a few staple moves which activate the most muscles at once that you should be incorporating into your fitness routine.

1) Two Handed Swing 

    Targets: Shoulders, back, core, hips, glutes and legs

    How to do it: Stand with feet slightly wider than hip width apart. Hold the kettlebell with both hands in front of your body. Sustain a slight bend to your knee while driving the hips backwards and lowering the body. Now explosively drive your hips forward while swinging the kettlebell forward, keeping your glutes and core engaged, ending no higher than your chest. This motion should come from your hips, not your arms. Perform this movement for 12-15 reps. (3-4 Sets)

 

2) Push Press

    Targets: Shoulders, core, glutes and legs.

    How to do it: Stand with your feet about hip width apart while the kettlebell is in your left hand and in a rack position. Lower into a squat and speedily explode upward while pressing the kettlebell overhead. Return to starting position and repeat. Perform this movement for 30 seconds on each side, with NO rest in between. (3-4 Sets)

3) Kettlebell Lunge Press  

    Targets: Shoulders, back, arms, core, glutes and legs

    How to do it: Stand with feet hip width apart while holding the kettlebell in front of your chest with both hands, arms bent. Lunge forward with one leg while raising the kettlebell overhead. Return to your standing position while returning the kettlebell to your chest. Perform this movement for 12-15 reps and alternate to the other side. (3-4 Sets)

No Pain, No Gain...until you throw your back out

It's no secret that I workout harder than most women and even some men (guys, I hate to break it to you, but your 65lb front squats aren't all that impressive...especially when I do 100lbs). Although, as invincible as I'd like to believe that I am, I am just as prone to injury as anyone else...a fact that I've recently proven.

It's Wednesday afternoon when I meet my trainer for a full body circuit workout. The first exercise is a hang power clean. So basically, it's a dead lift to a power clean to a front squat. It's a quick and dynamic movement that offers almot a total body workout. I perform a few practice reps with a 45lb bar with ease and add 20 more pounds for the actual workout. My trainer told me to do 8-10 reps, and being the over achiever that I am, of course I don't stop at 8 and go right to 10 reps. Big mistake. By the 9th and 10th rep, I can feel that something in my back isn't right. I have back problems as it is because of my scoliosis that I've had since childhood, but this wasn't a normal pain. I finish the set and my back is absolutely killing me, but I suffer through the rest of my workout figuring it's just still sore from yesterdays back and shoulders workout and not much of a big deal (actually listening to my body is something I haven't exactly mastered yet). 60 minutes have passed and I go over to the stretching mat and it takes me a solid 5 minutes to get up from the floor. I walk down the stairs in excruciating pain and barely make it 30ft before I am completely debiliated. My boyfriend helps me over to the functional training area to help stretch me out and relax my back. At this point, I feel completely crippled. Without exaggeration, I can't move an inch without tears strolling down my face. I've broken toes, pulled muslces and sprained ankles...but nothing is anywhere close to comparable to this type of pain. It takes me an hour to finally have the strength to get off the floor. Whenever I injur myself, I tend to have hypochondriac tendancies. I start researching what the possibilities that I just did to myself are and have suddenly come to the conclusion that I need back surgery. It's ridiculous, I know, but in such a time of physical agony, I can't help but think of the worst case scenario.

Now here comes the real challenge: resting. This in itself is a complete and utter foreign concept to me. I give myself one rest day per week to allow my muscles a bit more time to rebuild, but the last time I took this many consecutive days off in a row from exercise was the last time I injured myself (which was a series of injuries actually from a pulled glute muscle, a pulled hamstring and ending with a sprained ankle). I am just like my father in the sense that I can not sit still for more than ten minutes at a time. I hate feeling lazy and I hate being unproductive. Though when you throw your back out, you don't really have a choice but to lay the fuck down. It's been three days of physical and mental agony, although as each day progresses I feel better and better.

My trainer told me yesterday that his high school coaches would take one week off completely from exercise every couple months. I instantly thought to myself  "oh, hell no". I've only taken that amount of time off from working out when I was injured, and even then I'd push my luck when I probably shouldn't have. My fears were always that I would lose most of the strength and muscle that I've worked so hard to build, and I'll be honest, I don't want to gain weight that isn't in the form of muscle mass. But I'm laying here in bed, with nothing to do other than to think, and start researching why it's so beneficial to take that much time off every couple of months, and what I found was actually pretty interesting.

What you do outside of the gym is equally, if not more, important as what you do inside the gym. This isn't something I didn't already know. But why an entire week? Why every couple of months? When you train hard day in and day out for so many days, weeks, months at a time...a lot of stress and wear and tear is put on your body. Physically, your body just needs a rest approximately every 8-12 weeks to recover. Aside from the physical benefits of resting, it gives yourself a mental break as well. Because let's be honest, waking your ass up in the early hours of the morning and/or dedicating hours of intense exercise a day is enough to mentally break down anyone after a while. The above makes enough sense, since your muslces obviously need a recovery period in order to grow, but what about losing everything you've busted your ass working for? I don't know why this didn't hit me before, because really it's just common sense. You've spent months, and more realistically...years, transforming your body. Do you really think your muscles are going to atrophy in only 7 days? No, and you're a complete idiot if you think otherwise.

Even though I don't have a choice but to relax and take some time off from exercise, I'm trying to take advantage of the opporunity. Before my injury, I would have never done this on my own. I think in a strange way, throwing my back out was a blessing. I forget that I'm not a superhuman, I'm not invincible and I can't do it all. You need to push yourself in life and working out, however, I'm realizing that I tend to overestimate myself. As much of a mental challenge this is proving to be, I'll take advantage of this recovery week that I know my body so badly craves. I'll tell you what though, once I'm fully healed and able to exercise again, I'm going to step into that gym like a boss and come back stronger than ever.

In the meantime, I just need to chill the fuck out.

"Six Weeks to OMG" will NOT melt the hot fudge sundae from your thighs!

Regardless of who you are or where you are at in your health and fitness journey, I am certain you have heard the laundry list of diet over the years. From Atkins to South Beach and everything in between, most of you have probably tried a few. I have a huge problem with diets first of all. I don't believe in them, because I think healthy eating should be a lifestyle not  a quick fix. But before I write a 7 page rant about my issues with diets in general, there is one in particlar that I absolutely have to talk about. "Six Weeks to OMG: Get Skinnier Than All Your Friends" by British actor, Venice Fulton.

This isn't a miracle diet plan, because guess what? It's all bullshit.

It is a book cleverly marketed towards desperate women who will do just about anything to lose weight and look better than most people they know and filled with a whole bunch of unbased and unproven methods of losing fat, becoming more toned and even keeping your nails, hair and skin healthy. Now since I don't want you to spend your money and support his mans book in any way, I will break down all of the principles he suggests are essential to being successful at weight loss.

Take Cold Showers & Baths
The diet suggests that since your body has to use energy to keep your core body temperature at approximately 98.6 farenheight, you're body will burn more calories than if you took a hot shower. Although this is true, you aren't reducing the amount of cellulite on your things by eating a bag of potato chips, not exercising and taking a freezing cold shower/bath instead. Honestly, this is a recipe for acquiring hypothermia.

Skip Breakfast & Exercise on an Empty Stomach
Fulton recommends that you should skip breakfast and shouldn't eat until after you've exercised. He claims that exercising on an empty stomach causes the body to use its energy stores, fat. First of all, once you've woken up from your nights sleep, your body has just gone (hopefully) 8+ hours without food or water. Due to this, your blood sugar leveles are far lower than normal and your body doesn't have enough fuel to for an optimal workout. I don't know about you, but there is no way in hell that I am running 4 miles and lifting weights as soon as I wake up without putting anything into my system. That is a recipe for disaster coupled with diminshed performance and a higher probability for passing out. Also, there have been countless studies proving that breakfast is the most important meal of the day since it keeps you energized throughout the remainder of the day and keeps your metabolism up. So if you're a morning exerciser, have a light breakfast before your workout and replenish afterwards. It's not rocket science, it's common sense.

Stay Away From Fruit
Umm...what?! I'm so unbelievably sick and tired of people trying to promote that people ought to stay away from fruit because of it's sugars. There is a very distinct difference between the sugar you find in a honey bun and the natural sugars you'd find in blueberries. How in the world can you advocate not eating something that is healthy and comes from our own earth? Fulton recommends not eating much fruit because the body processes fructose differently and this will interfere with appetite hormones. Though this may be true, that doesn't mean you should cut it out of your diet. I promise you, that if you don't incorporate fruit into your diet, you are going to feel the effects and you'd be missing out on plethora of incredible health benefits. Don't listen to this idiot.

Carbs are Carbs
This is probably the most infuriating opinion of his. Fulton promotes the idea that all carbs are the same and that there is no difference between the carbs you find in chocolate cake and the carbs you'd find in an apple. Right, because all of this evidence and factually based studies about complex vs. simple carbs are all a bunch of lies. Let me tell you this...eating a piece of chocolate cake will not give you the body that eating an apple will. Plain and simple. So stop being so engulfed in this dream world that you can make shortcuts and cheat your health and still look like a smoking hot bombshell. Life doesn't work that way.

The above are only a handful of the points that Fulton makes throughout this disgusting diet book. Plain and simple..this book is a concoction of bullshit, lies, and shortcuts that are all a recipe for disaster, no results and quite possibly a window for eating disorders among young women.

 

Up & running....literally.

Hello fellow fitness fiends! After many months of perfecting my blog...from the name, layout, design, images and most of all direction....I have finally been able to launch "Eat Clean, Exercise Dirty". The name says it all really, and I truly believe in the lifestyle. For me, exercise isn't just a hobby, it really is a way of life...and I couldn't imagine living without it. Quite frankly, you wouldn't want to know me if I had to, because I'd be the most miserable and bitchiest woman alive. As pissy as I am when I'm hungry (and anyone who knows me knows first hand that is a side of me that you don't want to see), I'm even more horrible when I don't incorporate exercise into my daily routine. So for the sake of my mental stability, and the well-being of others...I eat, breathe and sleep eating clean and exercising dirty.

I understand that a training routine which works for one person, won't work for everyone. I like yoga, pilates and all that...but I simply cannot commit to that type of training on a regular basis. If I wasn't able to lift a weight that was at least 50% of my body weight, I'd start having some serious withdrawls. I have an intense and extreme personality, and it comes through in how I train. I run fast, lift heavy and go hard...every, single time.

As much as I love exercise though, it isn't all that effective if you aren't nourishing your body properly. It took me a long time to actually realize that fact. When I was younger, I could honestly eat whatever I wanted to. Mostly because of my lightning fast metabolism and because of how active I was in dance and sports. Although, after the luxury of my incredible metabolism started to diminsih, my body showed me that I couldn't eat whatever I wanted to and still stay fit...no matter how hard I tried working it off in the gym. I figured I could just spend a couple extra hours at the gym and I would stay exactly the same. Wrong. It doesn't work like that. Although I believe that exercise is absolutely crucial, it all starts with what you feed your body. You know that age old saying "you are what you eat", well guess what, it's true.  

I'll lay it all out on the line now, this isn't going to be your typical health and fitness blog. I'm not going to sit here and say "It's ok that you didn't finish your last set, just finish it tomorrow" or "Go ahead, eat that heart attack on a bun with a side order of diabetes, you'll burn it off on the elipitcal later". What I will do, is be straight forward and to the point. In many regards, I usually have to filter myself or tone down my personality so that others are more comfortable around me, because let's face it, I'm a lot to handle sometimes. So here, I've decided Im' not going to filter myself or tone down anything.

So if you're looking for a blog to the likes of articles you see in Shape, Self or Fitness magainze, I will tell you right now that you haven't come to the right place. However, if you are looking for an intense and extreme approach at motivation...no need to search any further! I will post my opinions, tips & advice, facts, workout routines and even some recipes that I swear by as frequently as I am able to. So stay tuned & enjoy!