Jeremy's Personal Training

This super simple protein smoothie is a great way to start your day.

Cinnamon has been linked to numerous health benefits. It contains high amounts of antioxidants, helps fight inflammation and improves insulin sensitivity -Great For Weight Loss.

Some noted benefits of nutmeg are – Helps Bad Breath and Can Improve Brain Function.

Cinnamon Nutmeg Protein Smoothie — Jeremy's Personal Fitness Training

I get it, we are all busy and only have so much time to spend at the gym. However, warming up before you perform your higher intensity exercise has many benefits.....

How To Warm-Up Before You Exercise l Jeremy's Training l Dallas, TX Personal Fitness Trainer — Jeremy's Personal Fitness Training The warm-up is probably one of the most overlooked aspects of a lot of peoples exercise program who are exercising for general health and fitness purp

Getting enough sleep each night will have a huge impact on your overall health. Even if you are exercising right, and eating right, a lack of sleep can have a big impact on your overall health. Sleep deprivation has been linked to numerous health complications.

According to sleep scientist Matthew Walker: "Every disease that is killing us in developed nations has causal and significant links to a lack of sleep"

Here are 4 quick tips to help make sure you're getting the most out of your nightly sleep....

1.) Make sure you get about 8 hours of sleep per night. Getting 6 hours or less on a nightly basis can lead to chronic sleep deprivation.

2.) If you can't fall asleep right away, try getting out of bed and moving to another room and reading a book. This will help your brain to associate your bedroom with sleep.

3.) You can't make up for a lost nights sleep. In other words, if you only get 4 hours of sleep the night before, you just can't take a nap the next day or sleep for 12 hours the following night to make up for the lost sleep.

4.) Avoid alcohol, caffeine, and sleep pills before going to bed. These are known sleep disruptors that prevent you from achieving the deep sleep that you need in order to reap the many health benefits of sleeping. The quality of your sleep matters.

Slow Cooker Beef Street Tacos:

This is a great slow cooker weeknight meal. Paleo friendly and packed with tons of flavor.

Ingredients:
4lb chuck roast
1 large onion, chopped
1 5oz. bottle Frank's Orignal RedHot Sauce
3 4oz. cans, diced green chiles
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp cayenne
Iceberg lettuce leafs

Directions:
1. Trim off any excess fat on the chuck roast and turn slow cooker on high.
2. Place the chuck roast in the slow cooker along with onion, Frank's Orignal RedHot Sauce, diced green chilies, chili powder, garlic powder, and cayenne.
3. Let cook for about 6 hours.
4. Remove chuck roast from slow cooker and place in large glass baking dish. Shred the roast using two forks.
6. Place shredded roast inside lettuce leafs, drizzle juice on top of the roast as desired.

Note: You can also add your choice of diced tomato, avocado, onion, cilantro on top of these as well.

When it comes to "superfoods" there are not too many, if any at all, more super than avocados.

They are packed with nutrition - monounsaturated fatty acids, fiber, potassium and much more you can read about here. In fact, most people are surprised to find out that avocados contain more potassium than bananas.

I personally try to eat at least one a day and generally recommend my clients to try and do the same (even if trying to lose weight).

Take a look at this detailed article on all the health benefits you can receive just from eating avocados on a regular basis:

http://www.well-beingsecrets.com/health-benefits-of-avocado/

19 Science-Backed Health Benefits of Avocado (#13 is WOW) You probably know that avocado has a lot of health benefits. In this article you'll learn all avocado health benefits BACKED BY SCIENCE. It will shock you!

Foam rolling should no doubt be a part of your regular exercise routine. Doing these simple, yet very effective exercises will help improve your joint mobility and increase circulation. Both of these things will help your body move better and recover faster from your workouts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/18/foam-rolling-mistakes_n_4980975.html

Foam rolling on a regular basis helps break up a fibrous layer of connective tissue called fascia. Fascia surrounds all your muscle tissue and can restrict joint movement when it tightens up, leading to potential joint pain.

Using a foam roller and various other similar "tools" is the number one thing I focus on to help keep my joints as healthy as possible.

Avoid some of the common mistakes people make by reading this article. Find out some ways to improve your foam rolling technique as well.

Are You Foam Rolling All Wrong? By Christine Yu for

A rep or repetition is simply the number of times you complete an exercise. For example, lowering your chest to the floor and then pressing yourself back up completes one rep for a pushup.

A set is the number of times that you will complete the given number of reps. For example, you could do 4 sets of 10 reps doing pushups.

Why is this important?

Your two most key variables when working out are how much work you are doing (volume) and how hard that work load is (intensity), to achieve a specific desired result. These two variables are primarily controlled by how many sets and reps you perform in a given resistance training workout.

If you want to get stronger generally you will want to perform more sets (4-6) and fewer reps (1-6). This would be considered to be a low volume workout, high-intensity workout.

If you want to lose weight and become leaner generally you will want to perform fewer sets (2-4) and more reps (12-20) reps. This would be considered a high volume, low-intensity workout.

Knowing how to manipulate sets and reps is key to making your exercise program progressive so that you don't hit a plateau. There are no perfect combinations of sets and reps to follow, your goals and overall fitness level will determine how to best combine them to get the result you desire most.

Corrective exercise is a term used to describe an exercise that addresses your bodies specific weak points and generally helps improve your posture.

Everyone overtime has muscles that will become out of balance, usually due to our daily habits. For example, most people develop tight chest muscles due to sitting with improper posture for hours each day. Along with tight chest muscles, they also will experience an increase in the curve of the middle part of their spine (i.e. thoracic spine).

Corrective exercise is designed to help correct this imbalance within our body that we get from our daily habits.

So given the above example, a corrective exercise would be doing a chest stretch to loosen the tight chest muscles and mobilizing (loosen) your thoracic spine using various exercises.

Using corrective exercise to address your bodies specific weak points will help you improve your posture, reduce joint pain, and overall feel better.

When talking with people about their current exercise programs they often refer to doing exercise's that they have heard are "good" for them. For example, people will tell me they do planks all the time because they heard that it is a good exercise for the abs.

Now planks can be a great exercise for your abs if they are strong enough to do them correctly and they are helping you achieve your overall fitness goal.

However, as good of an exercise a plank can be, it also can be just as bad of an exercise if you don't have the strength in your abs to do them correctly and they are not helping you achieve your overall fitness goal.

If you can't perform a exercise correctly for whatever reason, your injury chances go way up, and the benefit you will receive from that exercise goes way down. As well, no matter how great an exercise may be, if it's not appropriate for your specific fitness goals, it's not doing you any good.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear about how great "xyz" exercise is for you. Ask yourself, can I perform this exercise correctly? Is this exercise going to help me achieve my fitness goal?

Squatting is no doubt one of my favorite exercises. If you have ever worked out with me you already know this. Unfortunately, many people will shy away from doing squats because they are afraid of getting hurt or they simply just don't like to do them.

Here are 3 quick reasons why you should be squatting...

1. Squats Build Muscle: Not only will you build up your legs but if performed at high enough intensity you will notice muscle gains in other areas of your body as well. This is because of the large amounts of testosterone and growth hormone that get released with high-intensity exercise. This is great as well if you are trying to lose weight.

2. Improves Hip Mobility and Flexibility: Tight hip muscles and weak core muscle are a couple of the main causes of lower back pain. Squatting can actually help improve both. Moving your hips through a full range of motion can help combat the effects of long hours spent sitting at our work desk.

3.) Highly Functional Movement: Squatting is one of the most common movement patterns we perform each and every day. We have to squat every time we get in and out of our cars, sit down on a chair, doing yard work, have to lift an object up off the floor. Being able to squat efficiently and effectively is essential to performing everyday task, without getting hurt.

Start adding some squats into your exercise routine and not only will you start building more lean, toned muscle tissue, but also greatly improve your hips flexibility and mobility, making daily task easier.

When someone is talking about "doing" a superset, they are simply referring to combining two exercises back-to-back with minimal rest in between sets.

This is a great way to get more out of your workout in less time.

There are numerous different ways you can pair exercises to complete a superset. Two of the most common ones are...

1. Supersetting competing muscle groups (i.e. performing a set of squats, immediately followed by a set of leg extensions.)

2. Supersetting non-competing muscle groups (i.e. performing a set of squats, immediately followed by a set of bench press)

Which of these two methods works best for weight loss?

Alternating between upper and lower body exercise will help stimulate your metabolism more effectively because of the increased number of muscles engaged in a singular workout. Supersetting the same muscle group (competing muscles) generally works better for muscle growth (hypertrophy).

Try ramping up the intensity of your next workout by adding in some supersets!

If your goal is weight loss, you want to make sure that you are using compound exercises as your primary type of exercise selection.

What are compound exercises? Compound exercises are exercises that require multiple joints and muscles to work together to complete a given exercise (i.e. squats, bench press).

Compound exercises help to elevate your metabolism much more effectively than isolation exercises (i.e.bicep curls, seated leg curls). Raising your resting metabolism should be the main goal of your exercise program if you are trying to lose weight.

The reason these exercises will have a bigger impact on your overall resting metabolism is because you are working an overall larger amount of muscle tissue at higher intensities when compared to isolation exercises.

Using compound movements will also help you add more lean muscle tissue onto your body much quicker. This is yet another reason why these types of exercises will help you increase your resting metabolism. Muscle tissue is very metabolically active and helps you burn more calories while at rest.

If you're not currently incorporating compound exercise's into your resistance training and are trying to lose weight, your missing out. Get more out of your workouts by simply adding in some compound exercises.