Justin G. Walls, Certified Personal Athletic Trainer

The NY Times  has an article from this week about training with kettlebells, and how successfully training with them can reduce back pain by training the posterior core muscles that are often weakened by long hours of leaning of desks and computers at work. The best exercise for relieving back pain is the Kettlebell Swing: When the Swing is executed correctly, it incorporates every posterior chain muscle, loosens tight hip muscles, and improves abdominal strength. The back is kept straight through the movement and the head is always 'looking down field'. Knowing the correct weight and proper form are important to correct execution of the Kettlebell Swing requires some flexibility and patience with getting the form. 

In today's NY Times, a Pennsylvania University study  concluded that: "they could find no correlation at all between obesity and attending a school where sweets and salty snacks were available ." There must be a problem with food preferences and not just availability, price, or just blaming school lunches. If this is your regular lunch, with high fat, high carbohydrate, and very low nutritional content, and combined with little physical activity, then you will have childhood obesity problems. Instead, lunches should look more like this: Higher fiber, higher vitamin, higher protein, and lower fat and carb content. Now about that physical activity thing...

If you are pressed for time and need to move out some of that energy from being stuck at the desk or in meetings all day, then I have a quick solution for you involving no equipment. You should do all five exercises for 60 seconds and have three rounds (5 exercises x 60 seconds/exercise x three rounds = 15 minutes). Here's the basic workout: Burpees - Push-Ups - Squats - Mountain Climbers - Deadlift Perform each exercise for 60 seconds. Take a one to two minute break between each round of exercises if necessary. Here are some of the exercises mentioned above: This is a video about the progressions of Burpees The next video is about Mountain Climbers and its progressions: Deadlifts can be performed with any 'dead weight' lying around the home, such as a full backpack, a box of books, bag of kitty litter, whatever. It's imperative that one should learn proper deadlift, push-up, and squat techniques from an expert before attempting them on your own. Fee...

Today's post is from the IYCA Newsletter about the mental component of athletic training: Why Performance Training Alone Isn't Enough By Melissa Lambert As a former collegiate athlete, I remember spending my off seasons training every opportunity I had including weight lifting, running and playing with the men's team to increase my speed of play. I took pride in having the top times in running and physically being able to outplay others. However, I remember playing our rival team and making a huge mistake that could have resulted in the other team scoring. What could have possibly gone wrong when I was in the best shape of my life? I neglected the most significant component of an athlete, my mind. The mental aspect of any sport can make or break a talented athlete regardless of their training regiment. I didn't spend nearly the amount of time training my mind as I did training my body. It wasn't until becoming a girls' premier soccer coach and a licensed the...