Pilates

Fitness
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Pilates

Pilates is a series of about 500 exercises inspired by calisthenics, yoga and ballet. Pilates lengthens and stretches all the major muscle groups in the body in a balanced fashion. It improves flexibility, strength, balance and body awareness.

  Pilates improves both muscular and postural strength. These Pilates workouts are only 20 minutes long and you can do them on rest days or every day to improve core strength and flexibility and lengthen and sculpt your body. Pilates is all about improved quality of movement, so make the movements continuous rather than stopping even for a second. Continue the movements as if ten repetitions were one rather than one repetition repeated ten times. Pilates takes time and practice, as with everything the more you practice the better you are.  The more you do the better the result.  So do as much as you can and get the benefits. Your sense of wellbeing will be greatly improved. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Yoga

Fitness
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Yoga

I am a strong believer in the connection between our body and mind, which makes me believe in the power of Yoga and the benefits of daily stretching exercises. I notice with my own training the effect that stretching has on my mind and my mood. Yoga brings the body and mind together and is built on three main elements – exercise, breathing and meditation. There is nothing better than the feeling of a great Yoga routine to re-balance you. The more you workout without stretching, the tighter your muscles get.  You want your body to remain strong, supple and flexible so make sure you find the time to do Yoga and to put stretching into your weekly routine. Yoga and stretching exercises are somewhat synonymous in that yoga routines include stretching movements, but you can do stretching activities without them being yoga exercises. Yoga and stretching have a variety of benefits, including relief from chronic and acute conditions, increased flexibility, improved posture and promoting a sense of relaxation to name a few. Calm that busy mind by encouraging mindfulness. Yoga and mindfulness can help break up repetitive negative thought patterns. Yoga makes you aware of your breathing; improves balance, strength, and flexibility; and contains a meditative component to relax the mind. Try this restorative yoga sequence to release stress and lift your mood. So do these Yoga routines sometime during your week, enjoy them and use them as a workout or as recovery and relaxation. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Stretching

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Stretching

  Stretching is often neglected, as we may feel we don’t have the time or it’s a bit boring.   If you want to create balance in your workouts and help keep your body running injury free then stretching is your long-term investment. Your body will love you for it. Ideally you want to stretch everyday.  To gain flexibility, tissue must be stretched daily to maintain steady gain day-to-day. Muscles need recovery between training sessions to repair, but they need daily stretching to become suppler.  

When to Stretch?

There is a very outdated notion that we should static stretch before exercise to prevent injury. Stretching cold muscles is far more likely to cause injury than to prevent it.  Instead do dynamic stretches and warm-ups.  Dynamic warm-ups literally prepare the body to workout.  Jog in place, do a few bodyweight exercises if doing a strength workout with weights, leg swings or light exercises to warm-up before going into the HIIT’s or Strength workouts. Following a workout make sure you stretch. Use one of my stretch workouts or stretch out on your own. When doing your daily stretching on a rest day, either go for a walk, jog in place, do some jumping jacks, run through sun salutation a few times – something to warm up a little. Understand that when you stretch without a workout you will be a little tighter. Don’t force the stretch.  Breathe into it and relax.  

Brain Power

Fitness
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Brain Power

The brain power workouts are all about toning your body through resistance training. Most of the workouts use some sort of resistance.  If you don’t have dumbbells or a kettlebell, its not a problem as you can use a weighted backpack or other items you have at home. Check out the tips on how to add weight in the intro to the "Brain Power" workouts. There are also workouts in this program that use no equipment. Our brain power workouts make you feel strong and powerful and can reduce depressive symptoms according to recent studies. Researchers discovered that lifting weights improved the mood of all study participants. It is all about mastery and control, something that you may feel you lack while struggling with depression. Lifting requires your full attention and concentration and you can feel the benefits immediately and see the results soon after. Strength training kicks ass and makes you feel as if you can accomplish anything. It also makes you look pretty damn good too. When we are happy with our appearance our self-esteem and outlook on life improves. Do it. You are stronger than you know.

Benefits of Resistance Training

Resistance training is what allows your body to move around every day and do activities that you enjoy. The stronger you become the more you can enjoy life and everyday activities. So think of resistance training as something you do so you can play. Traditional strength training is always good for you but another option is to focus on functional strength training. Functional training involves dynamic, whole body movements that make you stronger for real life activities like gardening, building, chopping wood, housework, lifting, carrying etc. The more you use your muscles and strengthen them, the faster your metabolism will become. This will mean you are burning more calories each and every day. This means you will lose body fat! However if you don’t use your muscles you will lose your muscles. Muscle mass naturally diminishes with age.  If you don't do anything to replace the lean muscle you lose, you'll increase the percentage of fat in your body.  Strength training can help you preserve and enhance your muscle mass — at any age. Muscle is metabolically active tissue, so as you gain muscle your body begins to burn calories more efficiently.    
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HIIT Core

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HIIT Core

  Core exercises are an important part of a well-rounded fitness program.  A strong core is essential to correctly perform strength-training exercises and reduce chance of injury. Core exercises train the muscles in your pelvis, lower back, hips and abdomen to work in harmony. This leads to better balance and stability, whether on the playing field or in your daily activities.  Weak core muscles leave you susceptible to poor posture, lower back pain and muscle injuries.  Great abs look good too! :) These workouts incorporate core work with some aerobic activity to hit those abs and give you maximum results.   Do them twice a week with other workouts or on their own on a walk/low intensity exercise day.    

Fresh Start

Fitness
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Fresh Start

  These workouts are for you if you haven’t exercised before or haven’t exercised in a while.  Do the Beginner workouts instead of the Uplift if you find that the Uplift workouts are too challenging for you. These workouts, like the Uplift's, combine both cardiovascular training and resistance training in a short period of time.  The workouts are only between 8 and 15 minutes long. Do the Fresh Start workouts for 4 weeks 3-4x week then check in with me and let me know how you got on.  I will help you from there.   Even if you can only do 1 round or 5 minutes - get started….  You won’t regret it!  Do it now! :) [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Uplift

Fitness
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Uplift

The Uplift workouts are High Intensity Interval Training. These workout sessions involve no equipment and are fast and effective training just using your body weight. However, there are options to use some weight if you want an extra challenge. The entire Uplift sessions are between 5 - 20 minutes, so it is an excellent way to maximise a workout that is limited on time.  

What is Uplift?

What It Is and How It Works

  • Uplift is a form of interval training that involves short intervals of maximum intensity exercise separated by longer intervals of low to moderate intensity exercise.
  • Uplift increases the amount of calories you burn during your exercise session and afterward because it increases the length of time it takes your body to recover from each exercise session.
  • Uplift causes metabolic adaptations that enable you to use more fat as fuel under a variety of conditions. This will improve your athletic endurance as well as your fat-burning potential.
  • To get the benefits of Uplift, you need to push yourself past the upper end of your aerobic zone and allow your body to replenish your anaerobic energy system during the recovery intervals.
  • The key element of Uplift is that the high intensity intervals involve maximum effort.
  • After you exercise using Uplift, your body goes into a state of increased metabolic output. Simply put, this means that your body will continue to burn extra calories long after you complete your workout. This is known as EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) or the ‘afterburn’ effect.
In contrast, if you had a long session of steady cardio, your calorie burning would stop quickly after you finished.
Embrace Uplift and watch how quickly your body begins to transform.
If the workouts are too much, just do one round.  The main thing is to get started……… Don’t wait for the perfect time, do it NOW and afterwards you will feel amazing![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Banana Chocolate Muffins

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Banana Chocolate Muffins

[/vc_column_text][dt_gap height="30"][vc_column_text][emember_protected for=5-2]   What You Need  
  • Coconut Flour ½ Cup
  • Tapioca Flour 1 Cup
  • Cinnamon 2 teaspoons
  • Baking Powder 1 teaspoon
  • Cacao Powder ½ Cup
  • Butter or coconut oil 50 grams
  • Honey 1 Tablespoon
  • Egg 1
  • Coconut Milk 1 Cup
  • Vanilla Extract 1 teaspoon
  • Bananas 1C  (2-3)
  What To Do   Preheat oven to 210° C. In a large bowl sift tapioca flour, coconut flour, cinnamon, baking powder and cacao powder. Melt butter or coconut oil in a saucepan on a low heat.  Add honey. Remove from heat and add coconut milk, egg and vanilla.  Beat well. Mash bananas and stir into liquid. Tip all the liquid mixture into the bowl with the dry ingredients.  Fold everything together mixing until smooth.  Leave for five minutes for coconut flour to absorb liquid. Grease a muffin tray with coconut oil and spoon mixture into muffin tray.  Fill to about 2/3 of muffin cup.   Bake for 15-20 minutes until muffins spring back when touched. [/emember_protected][/vc_column_text][dt_gap height="80"][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Introduction To Fitness

Fitness

What does it mean to be fit?  What does fitness mean?

  Fitness means something a little different to everyone.  For us at Her Mind, it's more than just what time you can do a race in, or how much weight you can lift.  Being fit and healthy means an increased enjoyment in life.  Fitness has so many benefits: getting sick less often, relieving stress, burning calories, better sleep, improved disposition, and so many more. Keeping fit means you will have more energy and vitality and you will manage the activities of your life more easily.  Being fit will help you control your body shape and improve your brain fitness which makes you feel better about yourself. Exercise and movement are essential for your body to remain mobile and healthy. The more sedentary your days are, the more immobile your body will become. We at Her Mind believe in functional movement. The best workouts for your body move it in the way it was designed to move. Our bodies are a web of interconnected muscles, joints, fascia, ligaments, tendons, bones, and other tissues and organs that work together seamlessly.   Why would we focus on only one muscle group during a workout or one type of exercise activity?  Focusing on only one muscle group in a workout is not efficient, nor is it athletic.  At Her Mind, we believe you should focus on movement patterns, not muscle groups when exercising to develop a functionally strong body.   These are the seven basic primal movement patterns that form the foundation of our workouts and exercise programs. 1: Squat 2: Lunge 3: Push 4: Pull 5: Twist 6: Bend 7: Gait / Combination (walking, jogging, or sprinting)   Functional training is the best sort of training that you can do for your body. It is training that your body is designed to do naturally and it gets results. This type of training is fast and effective combining cardiovascular and resistance thus recruiting more muscles and working your body as a functional unit.  This in turn will burn calories during and long after the workout is over. If anything else is just too hard, start with walking for thirty minutes every day. If that’s too much, exercise for at least ten minutes at a time. You could break it up into three ten-minute sessions throughout the day—for example, a ten-minute walk, a ten-minute dance around your living room, and then ten minutes doing some resistance training. Don’t think ten minutes isn’t enough so you’ll just do nothing. It is enough for now. Just do it every day at the same time. After you have been doing the ten- or thirty-minute walk for a month, add in some cardio (like running, a spin class, or a seven- to ten-minute 'Uplift' or 'Fresh Start' workout in the Mind Gym) to lift your heart rate, make you sweat, and get you out of your head. Do it now, even if its just five minutes get started.  Put that workout gear on.  Leave the dishes and the vacuuming, put the baby to sleep or safely playing.  This is YOUR time, you need it.  Remember No One Regrets A Workout Ever.  You may think it’s only a few minutes so it’s not enough?  You may think, I won’t do it until I have more time?  WE are working smarter not longer; you do not need to spend hours in the gym to get results. All of the online daily workouts are short, sharp and smart!  You will feel invigorated and energised not exhausted mentally and physically like long ineffective workouts make you feel.  Knowing you have to do an hour’s workout, that can be hard to fit into your day and you say to yourself 'I don’t have time, tomorrow I will start….' Tomorrow never comes! The workouts in the Mind Gym can fit into everyone’s day no matter how busy you are. Achieving fitness and working out does not mean an hour or two on the treadmill every day, and it doesn’t mean marathon weight training.  The key to achieving and maintaining fitness is keeping training and workouts fun, challenging, and varied. There are workouts in the online gym from beginner to advanced and every workout will challenge you. Check out your workout videos. Why not do one right now. You have the time.  If you feel tired go for a walk or do five minutes of 1 workout.  Just get your workout gear on and go for it.  If you get your gear on and tell yourself you will only do five minutes you might even find you do ten.  I promise you, you will feel better. Trust me. Just do it. If you are feeling good then head on into the online gym and start your workout. We're here to help if you need it, get in touch :)