15 Former Couch Potatoes Share Their Best Tips For Getting In Shape – Carolyn Kylstra – BuzzFeed

So you want to eat healthier and get in shape? That’s great! Learn from some people who’ve definitely been there.

3 Signs You Need a New Pair of Running Shoes

BY: Julia Naftulin – Health.com

The relationship you have with your running shoes isn’t meant to last forever. Here’s how to know when to buy a new pair to prevent injury and prolong an enjoyable running experience.

A comfortable and supportive pair of shoes are a runner’s best friend, but even the best aren’t built to last forever. Avid runners know working out in worn-out sneakers can cause unwanted running injuries like shin splints or runner’s knee. But how do you know it’s time to trash your sneaks and invest in a new set? Here, two running experts share the signs that cue a much-needed trip to your local shoe store.

You’re racking up miles

“As a rule it’s best to update your running shoes every 300 to 400 miles,” says Nikhil Jain, senior footwear product line manager at Brooks Running. Since wear and tear on the shoe itself isn’t always obvious, this method ensures you get new shoes before your worn ones cause pain or an injury.

You can easily track your runs with apps such as Strava, MapMyRun, or Wahoo, or with a fitness tracker. You could also opt for an old-school approach and hand write your runs in a journal. If you’re looking to eyeball your mileage based on time, take advice from a pro: New York City-based running coach John Henwood says he replaces his own shoes every two months.

You feel aches and pains

“As soon as one of my runners feels a shin splint, the first thing I do is ask them how long they’ve had their shoes for,” says Henwood. Knee pain and shin splints, which cause pain in the lower part of the leg, could both signal you need new shoes, especially if you haven’t changed up your running routine at all.

Not ready to part with your precious sneakers? Jain suggests keeping them around for leisurely walks or running errands. “While they may no longer be in good condition to run in, it’s likely that you won’t need as much cushion and support in your other activities,” he says.

Your shoes look shabby

According to Henwood, there are three areas on the shoe itself that signal it’s time for a replacement: the sole, the tread, and the exterior fabric.

“The cushioning in your shoe will be the first thing to break down because midsoles are designed to absorb shock and protect the body,” says Jain. “The tricky part is that this wear isn’t easily visible.” If the soles are shot, the shoe may appear lopsided from putting more pressure on one part of your foot than the others.

The tread of the shoe will be the next area to wear out, so if the bottom of the shoe appears flat and smooth, chances are your soles have lost their support and cushioning. Any holes that appear in the shoe’s exterior fabric provide a third red light that they’ve deteriorated.

To prevent your shoes from wearing out before you hit 300 to 400 miles, Henwood suggests using them exclusively for your runs. “If you’ve got running shoes, don’t walk around in them,” he says. “Have your running shoes for running and other shoes for walking because how you use them changes how they last.”

Jain also suggests rotating between two pairs of running shoes to prolong each pair’s life. “In addition, having more than one running shoe in your rotation helps you work a slightly different set of muscles in your feet, helping you strengthen them,” he says.

I’m a physical educator/coach and I’ve been teaching Physical Education for 17 years in Texas. I was at a conference in early June and another teacher told me they had read about Fit Radio and it might be a good app for us to use and safe to play for the kids.

After my 3 hour trial ran out I was SUPER sad! When I figured out that Fit Radio was $28 for the year I decided it was worth the investment. I’ve had Spotify Premium before, but felt like it was a little expensive. I don’t normally buy a year’s subscription to anything yet alone pay for a music service, but Fit Radio was SO dramatically different than anything I had used before.

Since July, I have deleted Spotify and Pandora.

Maybe it’s my ADD, but I like Fit Radio–even just to enjoy music–not necessarily for working out, but all the time.

I plan tell our teachers about Fit Radio because it’s the perfect fit. You can safely play continuous music with clean lyrics without pauses or ads, you can start/stop whenever you want, and there are plenty of genres/mixes/etc. to choose from.

I also plan to use it for my after-school teacher workouts that I do for my staff members. I’m always genuinely excited to play Fit Radio during these classes because I know they will most likely ask what app I’m using. They agree, nothing is more annoying than using Spotify and having an ad interrupt a workout.

Every Summer I try to find a few new games/activities/strategies for my gym – this year Fit Radio is at the top of my list!
Music is HUGE in my gym/classroom so Fit Radio is something that I need everyday.

Do you love Fit Radio? Tell us about your experience for your chance to be featured! Click here to learn how.

Our team had a chance to catch up with Fit Radio‘s, Treblemonsters last week. This is what they had to say:

Q: Of all your pet-peeves, which is the strangest?

A: Wasteful people. I.e. the ones at the gym that use about 4 towels per person or run through half of a paper towel roll to wipe something small down.

Q: What is your favorite animal? Why?

A: Cats. They are clean and do not need much attention. (Like everything else in this world.) Also, most cats have a spontaneous/random/energetic, but innocent personality.

Q: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

A: FIJI

Q: What would you do with one million dollars?

A: First, I would just cash it and pile it in my living room to stare at it for a small period of time. Then, invest most of it.

Q: Would you rather have money or love? Why?

A: LOVE. Because if we were able to materialize LOVE, than it would be worth much more than MONEY.

Q: Are you a good dancer?

A: Rusty now, but yes. I used to break-dance back in the day.

Q: What is the best feature about Fit Radio for our users?

A: It’s a mobile app. Anyone can access at anytime and anywhere.

Q: What are the perks being a Fit Radio DJ?

A: Other than a good resume builder and exposure, it challenges me as a DJ to come up with new and creative ways to supply high energy mixes in different genres. It steers me away from the generic and overplayed songs.

Learn more about Treblemonsters and listen to their latest Fit Radio mixes here.

Do I Need Sports Drinks?

By Jen A. Miller
Author, “Running: A Love Story”

Do you need a fitness drink when you run? Or is water good enough? To answer these questions, Anahad O’Connor, a NY Times Well reporter, spoke with a few experts on the need for hydration during exercise. Here’s what he learned:

If you’re running for less than an hour, then water is just fine. But for longer sessions – or a marathon – you should consume some kind of carbohydrate-based sports drink, says Dr. Jordan Metzl, a marathoner, endurance athlete and sports medicine doctor at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.

“After an hour you start depleting muscle glycogen stores to the point where it becomes difficult to keep the level of energy expenditure,” he says.

That being said, you should also be careful not to overdo it on sports drinks. A little goes a long way.

“If you just drink sports drinks, you’ll be taking in a lot of sugar and your stomach won’t be able to handle it, said Dr. Laura Goldberg, a sports medicine expert from The Cleveland Clinic.

Dr. Metzl said he prefers sports drinks with higher levels of sodium because they help to prevent muscle cramping, especially on hot and humid days. His go-to in that category is “Gatorade Endurance,” which has double the sodium (300 milligrams) and triple the potassium (140 milligrams) of original Gatorade. “I’m increasingly a fan of the double-sodium sports drinks,” Dr. Metzl said.

Be sure to stay hydrated on your runs this week. And there is some good news you should keep in mind as you head out for a run this month – training in the heat will help you perform better once it’s cooler.

Don’t forget to check out our top tips to stay cool during your Summer workout too.

Got a Minute? Let’s Work Out

According to a lovely new study, a single minute of intense exercise, embedded within an otherwise easy 10-minute workout, can improve fitness and health.

Just one minute.

This is good news for busy people who have tried, unsuccessfully, to fit even short workouts into their schedules. The overall time commitment for interval-training sessions is not quite as slight as many of us might wish. Consider, for instance, an interval session in which someone rides a stationary bike as hard as possible for 30 seconds, followed by four minutes or so of easy pedaling. If that person completes four of these intervals, with two or three minutes of warm-up and cool-down added at the beginning and end of the workout, the entire session lasts for almost 25 minutes, a time commitment that some people might consider unsustainable.

These concerns reached the laboratory of Martin Gibala, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Ontario. He and his colleagues have conducted many of the most influential recent studies of high-intensity interval training, and many of the scientists there regularly exercise with interval training.

They, too, had noticed that interval-training sessions were not quite as truncated as some people hoped and had begun to wonder if it might be possible to lower the overall time commitment.

But if so, they wondered, how low could someone go in terms of time and still gain health and fitness benefits?

To find out, the McMaster researchers recruited a group of 14 sedentary and overweight but otherwise healthy men and women. They focused on these volunteers, because sedentary, overweight people often are on the cusp of serious health issues such as diabetes, which might be kept at bay with exercise, but sedentary people also often cite a lack of time as their reason for not exercising.

They invited the volunteers to the lab, where researchers took muscle biopsies and measured their aerobic endurance, blood pressures and blood sugar levels.

Then they asked the volunteers to complete a truly time-efficient, interval-training program using computerized stationary bicycles. Each session consisted of three 20-second “all-out” intervals, during which riders pushed the pedals absolutely as hard as they could manage, followed by two minutes of slow, easy pedaling. The riders also warmed up for two minutes and cooled down for three, for a grand total of 10 minutes of total exercise time, with one minute of that being the intense interval training.

The volunteers completed three of these sessions per week, leading to 30 minutes of weekly exercise, for six weeks.

Then they returned to the lab to be retested.

Their bodies were, it turned out, quite different now. The men and women had increased their endurance capacity by an average of 12 percent, a significant improvement. They also, as a group, had healthier blood pressures and higher levels within their muscles of certain biochemical substances that increase the number and activity of mitochondria. Mitochondria are the energy powerhouses of cells, so more mitochondria mean better endurance and fitness.

Interestingly, the male volunteers also had significantly improved their blood-sugar control, but the female volunteers had not. The researchers suspect that fundamental differences in how the genders burn sugar or fat to fuel exercise might affect how each responds to some aspects of interval training. But more research is needed with both men and women before scientists will be able to understand the import of this difference, Dr. Gibala said.

In the meantime, the message from the study that most of us will grasp at is, of course, that one minute of exercise is all you need. But Dr. Gibala would like people to remember that 10 minutes of overall exercise time is involved for a total of 30 minutes per week.

He also suspects that, with this study, scientists are plumbing the lowest limits of worthwhile exercise time. “We’ve dropped from 30-second all-out intervals to 20-second intervals,” he said, “because for many people those last 10 seconds were excruciating.” Most of us, however, can complete 20-second all-out efforts without wishing to cry, he said.

Halving the intervals again, however, to 10-second efforts, probably would mot provide the same benefits, Dr. Gibala said, although “maybe if you did more of them, it might work.” He and his colleagues are studying these and other questions related to interval training.

For now, relying on one minute of hard exercise to ease you through the holidays with your health intact seems feasible, he said. And the exercise does not need to be cycling. Sprint up stairs in 20-second bursts, he said, or even run hard in place. The point is that time constraints shouldn’t keep anyone from exercise. In the time it took to read this column, you could be done with your workout.

This week we had a chance to sit down wth Fit Radio DJ, DJ Spryte. This is what he had to say:

Q: Who do you think should run for president in two years?

A: Daenerys Targaryen. (Yep I went there!)

Q: How many push up’s you can do?

A: In a row, I would say about 45. Then, I would fall over.

Q: Would you eat a bowl of crickets for $100,000?

A: Are we talking live crickets? Would some kind of seasoning salt be permitted? (Either way, I’d still most likely do it!)

Q: What are your top 3 gigs you have ever DJed?

A: This is a though one. Actually, I think Fit Radio has worked with them. I did a Night Nation Run Festival in Los Angles last year with 15,000 people. That would definitely be one of my favorite shows. The other 2 would have to be when I played in South Korea at Club Answer and I love Canada so I would say the shows I’ve done up in Grande Prairie, Alberta.

Q: What did you think the 1st time you played the Fit Radio App?

A: Great App! People needed something like this. Especially for running, gym sessions, or even road trips.

Q: How does Fit Radio help people’s workouts?

A: Music has a tremendous effect on the way you feel. The right mix can motivate you to go the extra mile or keep pushing through your workout when you feel like quitting.

Q: What is the best feature on Fit Radio?

A: The Selection of mixes available. Plus having them all categorized really helps you navigate to exactly the style of music you’re looking for.

Q: How do you prepare a mix for Fit Radio?

A: I really like finding different and new styles of music and mixing them together with familiar elements of songs that are more recognizable to people. It’s a great way to introduce new music to the listener. When I start making the mix, I try to pair up vocals from hit records with newer, more abstract tracks. I think of a mix as a whole piece of music, as opposed to a collection of songs. So, it’s very common to always hear something going on, even in the spaces between tracks.

Learn more about DJ Spryte and listen to his latest mixes here.

Casey Patterson, nicknamed “Mr.Boom,” is a member of the USA Men’s Beach Volleyball team set to make his first Olympic appearance in Rio this week. Known for his passion and signature style on the court, we are proud that Casey is just one of the many incredible athletes that have joined our Fit Radio Fam on the #RoadToRio!

Other athletes living the #FitRadioLife include:

A.J. Ellis – MLB Catcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers

Cody Gibson – aka “The Renegade” – Professional MMA UFC Fighter and current Tachi Palace Fights Bantamweight Champion

This week we had a chance to sit down wth Fit Radio DJ, DJ Rolemodel. This is what he had to say:

Q: Of all your pet-peeves, which is the strangest?

A: When people are ordering food and they reach over the sneeze-guard to point at what they want (think Chipotle or Subway).

Q: What is your favorite animal? Why?

A: Koala bear. (Probably because it’s the best emoji there is.)

Q: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

A: Venice, Italy or b some small village in Norway overlooking a fjord.

Q: Would you rather have money or love? Why?

A: Money, only because I don’t look for love, I create it.

Q: Would you consider yourself to be a good dancer?

A: In college I took 5 different dance classes, however, you will never see me dance. (Unless it’s a few head bobs in the DJ booth.)

Q: What do you consider to be the best feature about Fit Radio for users?

A: The best feature about Fit Radio is when it updates users to let them know there is a new mix from DJ Rolemodel.

Q: How can Fit Radio change your workout?

A: Fit Radio has helped me because I don’t have to worry about the music that’s coming up, I can relax and focus on cardio instead of skipping from song to song.

Q: What are the perks being a Fit Radio DJ?

A:  The main perk of being a Fit Radio DJ is the exposure. That and of course having tons of new friends from the ATL.

Learn more about DJ Rolemodel and listen to his latest mixes here.

When Summer hits and warm temperatures rise, just thinking about heading out for a workout can be draining. However, it’s actually not all in your head — working up a sweat during the serious summer heat puts a lot of added stress on your body. Mayo Clinic explained that hot weather leads to a more dramatic increase in body temperature. Therefore, your body sends more blood to circulate through the skin as a way to cool off, but, at the same time, increases your heart rate. The humidity makes high temperatures even worse, because it prevents sweat from evaporating off of your skin.

We all know the heat can make you feel bogged down, but it can also be harmful if you aren’t careful. The most important thing to remember above all else is staying hydrated. According to Livestrong, adequate hydration not only aids in maintaining your fluid levels, but also helps to cool your core temperature. When the temperatures soar, these six tips will help you keep your cool so you don’t have to miss a workout.

1. Invest in a water bottle

Carrying water with you is an absolute necessity if you’re exercising outside. There might be a drinking fountain or two nearby, but you’re going to need more than a few sips to keep yourself cool. Classic plastic models aren’t always the best choices either. Even if your water might be chilly when you leave the house, the extreme heat will go to work on the liquid pretty fast. It’s a good thing that today, there are a multitude of water bottle brands that are designed to keep your beverage cold much longer than a plain, plastic bottle.

2. Get out there early, or late

During the Summertime, it might be wise to avoid your lunchtime workout and opt for a more cooler time of day. Not only will it save you the heat, your body won’t feel as much of the exhaustion from the scorching temperatures. According to Active.com, unless you are training for an event that takes place in the daytime heat, you should avoid exercising from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m because it’s the hottest part of the day. Generally, the early morning is the best time to workout, especially if it’s going to be scorcher that day.

3. Wear loose, light-colored gear

The lighter colors will help reflect heat and while performance fabrics are the best option (since they are designed to keep you cool), cotton materials also help the evaporation of sweat.

4. Try something different

Biking, running, and tennis are fantastic exercises any time of the year, but they can all prove extremely challenging during the heat of Summer. If it’s just too hot for your go-to activity, try something different. Swimming is an incredible workout and if you live on the coast, why not take a stab a surfing? You’ll still be able to enjoy the outdoors, but the exercise will be more manageable from the cool water.

5. Head indoors

Active.com says that runners should be particularly wary of hot weather if they live in an area with a lot of pollution. So, hitting the treadmill or elliptical in the gym is probably a safer bet.

If you insist on putting in some time outdoors, consider adapting your workout. Kenny Boyd, athletic trainer for the football team at the University of Texas, told U.S. News and World Report to try just the core part of your workout outside. You can use the gym for your warm up and cool down.

6. Listen to your body

The most important thing is to listen to your body. If you’re out in the heat and begin feeling dizzy, faint or nauseous, stop immediately. Overall, just be smart about your expectations. No need to try to set a new record in 100-degree weather.