The 5 foods to avoid if you want a six pack

Carrying a spare tire around your belly? You're not alone: Fifty-four percent of U.S. adults now have abdominal obesity, up from 46 percent in 2000, according to a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association. If you fall into that category (male abs are considered fat if the waistline measures more than 40 inches), it's time to consider cutting down your consumption of these five foods:
1. Refined grains
Not sure what a refined grain is? It's an ingredient found in foods like white rice, white bread, and regular white pasta. The unrefined stuff (whole wheat, brown rice and quinoa) is always healthier. Pennsylvania State University researchers found that people who ate whole grains in addition to keeping a healthy diet—of fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy and protein—lost more weight from the abdominal area the group of people who kept the same healthy diet but ate all refined grains.
2. Potato products
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine followed the weight changes of more than 120,000 men and women for up to 20 years. The participants were checked every four years and, on average, they gained 3.35 pounds each time—so almost 17 pounds by the time the study was finished. The foods associated with the greatest weight gain? You guessed it—potato chips and potatoes.
3. Red and processed meat
The same 20-year study found that people who ate more red and processed meat gained weight, too—about one extra pound every four years. In another study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers worked with more than 370,000 people and found that folks who ate the equivalent of a small steak a day gained about five pounds in five years.
4. Frosting
Those cupcakes your coworker makes for special occasions? Yeah, don't eat them. While the FDA has basically declared war on trans fats, store-bought frosting still contains a not-so-healthy dose of the stuff. How bad can trans fats be? Researchers at Wake Forest University gave groups of monkeys two different diets; one group ate trans fats and the other ate unsaturated fats.
The results: The group eating trans fats upped their body weight by 7.2 percent in six years and the other only gained 1.8 percent. Not only did the trans fats add new fat, it was also responsible for moving fat from other areas to the belly. Check for trans fat in other foods like pre-made baked goods, snack foods, and frozen pizzas.
5. Diet soda
It's easy to get fooled by the zero-calorie label, yet sodas made with sugar substitutes are believed by many to play a role in weight gain. A new study published this month found that people who drank diet soda gained almost three times the amount of abdominal fat over nine years as those who didn't drink the no-cal stuff.
Sure, that study only looked at adults ages 65 and older, but consider this: Recent research from the Weizmann Institute of Science found that mice drinking water with artificial sweeteners (saccharin, aspartame and sucralose) became vulnerable to insulin resistance and glucose intolerance—two things known to lead to weight gain.

Seven Tips for Winter Running

Frigid weather and shorter days are no reason to stop running. These seven tips can help you keep going strong outdoors all the way until spring
Put on the Right Clothes
 Layers that you can shed are essential. Start with a moisture-wicking base, a mid layer for insulation, and an outer shell for blocking wind. A vest  keeps in body heat without sacrificing mobility.
Protect Your Extremities
 Most of your body heat is lost through your head and hands, so gloves and hat are a must. Make sure whatever you pick is compressible, so you can shove 'em into a pocket or your waistband if you get too hot. For your feet, choose wool running socks, like SmartWool PhD Running socks . They're thin, breathable, and warm, even when wet.
Be Route Savvy
 Stick to a fairly short, well-lit loop. "Winter brings slick and icy conditions plus less light, which can hamper your ability to see and be seen," says Jason Glowney, M.D., an internist with the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine in Colorado. At night, wear plenty of reflective gear and always run against traffic. If possible, run into the wind on your way out and with the wind on the way home. Running into the wind when you're sweaty will subject you to much greater stress and cold exposure, warns Glowney.
Do a Good Warm-Up
 Take a few extra minutes to get your joints and body loose. Do your warm-up indoors, if possible, and focus on dynamic stretches like leg swings and walking toe touches, which warm muscles quickly.
Think of Your Lungs
 "Cold, dry conditions make the respiratory system work harder since it has to warm the air you're breathing," says Glowney, who is also the team physician for the Garmin-Transitions U23 cycling team. To protect yourself, cover your mouth with a balaclava or ski mask to hold in your body's existing warmth and humidity.
Stay Hydrated
 "Winter months tend to be drier, and athletes may be less aware of the amount of sweating that's actually occurring," says Glowney. The cold makes you feel less thirsty, but your body is still sweating so you need to diligently replace fluids, just as you would in the heat.
Have a Goal
 Pick an early-spring 5K or 10K and use it as motivation for when the cold months make outdoor running seem unbearable. If you're looking for a race or running club near you, Road Runners Club of America  is a great resource.

The 6 Most Basic Hydration Rules Every Athlete Should Know

Nutrition rules are great for taking the guesswork out of eating and drinking right. But they also often lead to gross miscalculations and, in many cases, perpetuate some of the biggest myths. Proper hydration is no exception, whether it’s the old eight-glasses-a-day chestnut or that you should down a sports drink every time you work out. Yet nothing influences your overall well-being more than healthy H2O habits. Here are some of the biggest hydration myths, as well as the truth behind them.
1) Myth: You need 8 glasses of water per day.
In reality, eight glasses might not be nearly enough, especially if you’re an endurance athlete or live in an arid climate like the Rockies or Southwest. A much better guideline is the pee test, says Katherine Zeratsky, R.D.N., a nutritionist with the Mayo Clinic. “If you’re peeing every couple of hours and it’s a very pale lemonade color, you’re good.”
2) Myth: You need constant water breaks while training.
A typical gym session doesn’t require any extra hydration at all (as long as you’re well-hydrated to begin with). And even a sub-one-hour cardio workout requires only a slight uptick in water intake. However, once your workout surpasses 60 minutes, you do need to start replacing salts and electrolytes lost during training.
Exercise physiologist Marni Sumbal, M.S., R.D., says to aim for roughly 200 to 400mg of sodium, 25 to 50mg of carbs, and 50 to 100mg of potassium, a ratio found in most sports drinks. You can also add a powdered mix to bottled water. To expertly dial in your personal needs, weigh yourself before and after a workout. If you’ve lost more than two pounds, you need to drink more during subsequent workouts. And for every pound of weight you lost, that’s 16 ounces of H20 you need to down.
3) Myth: In winter you don’t need to drink as much.
While you may not feel as thirsty, your hydration needs are no different in winter—and may even be higher. A small study of 17 men in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise suggests that guys working out in 39°F were 40% less thirsty than guys working out in 80°. “You’re not sweating as noticeably, but you are still sweating,” says Zeratsky. “It’s just evaporating rather than sticking to your skin.”
4) Myth: Vitamin- and mineral-infused water is better.
Unless you’re losing these vitamins and minerals in your day-to-day life—which most of us aren’t—there’s no need for the additives. Marion Nestle, Ph.D., professor of nutrition at NYU, says you’re likely getting enough of these nutrients through your diet.
5) Myth: Coffee doesn’t count.
Coffee, tea, and other caffeinated pick-me-ups count toward your daily H20 goals. A three-day, observational study of 50 male coffee drinkers (who consumed three to six cups of coffee per day) published in the journal PLOS One suggests that coffee, when consumed in moderation by caffeine-habituated males, provides similar hydrating qualities to water. But it’s even better if coffee is your second drink of the day, following some water.
“Downing eight ounces first thing helps you rehydrate and flush out waste,” says Zeratsky. “It also helps your body to better absorb nutrients from breakfast.”
6) Myth: You can “catch up” by chugging a liter of water at 3 p.m.
The workday is nearly over and you realize you’ve had one glass of water all day. Unfortunately, you can’t make up for it by downing a whole bottle.
“If you take in a large volume of liquid all at once, it’s going to go right through you,” says Zeratsky. “It’s too much for your body to process.”
Instead, don’t get into this situation in the first place: Always keep a full bottle of water in sight on your desk during the day. And set alerts on your phone to remind you to drink every 30 minutes.

By Caitlin Carlson

How To Make Any Exercise Harder

Is your current workout not cutting it? I hear you.
Whether you’re traveling and stuck in a poorly equipped gym or just need to supercharge your workout regimen build more lean muscle, there are small tweaks that can make a world of difference in your training.
No, I’m not talking about completely changing your program; rather, making subtle changes to how you’re performing exercises.
These tweaks will help you unlock greater strength, improve your stability, and build new muscle.
Timed Sets
Instead of counting reps, set a timer and work against the clock. This might sound strange, but there’s a powerful benefit to it. When you’re fatigued, you’ll need to maintain your focus on the quality of each rep rather than finishing the set in a certain number of reps.
Even better, timed sets focus on two underrated factors for muscle growth: tension and metabolic stress. By keeping your muscles under constant tension, you create more muscle damage while producing by-products of muscle contractions (such as lactic acid) – which creates metabolic stress.
Focus on longer duration sets (between 30-75 seconds) to increase metabolic stress. This allows you to lift less weight but keep a better focus on each muscular contraction to build more lean muscle.
Stuck with a single dumbbell to do your squats?
Try this:
Hold a dumbbell in the goblet squat position and perform as many reps as you can for four sets of 40 seconds — staying just shy of locking out at the top of the movement.
Increase Your Range Of Motion
Increasing the range of motion of any exercise requires muscles and joints to contract and stabilize to a greater extent. A greater range of motion means greater muscle activation to overcome resistance — while also requiring more stability to prevent injury.
This is a very effective trick but your technique must be perfect to reduce injury risk.
Try this:
If you’re only training with barbells, start using dumbbells. For example, swap your regular bench press for a dumbbell bench press. This allows a greater range of motion for each arm while increasing stability demands.
For the lower body, try elevated reverse lunges using a small step or elevate your front foot during a Bulgarian split squat. These methods can breed extreme soreness: Proceed with 2-3 sets of 8-12 reps and plan on spending extra time recovering.
Lift Explosively
If you’ve been counting tempos and working with slow lifting speeds, lifting weights explosively can help you build new muscle andimprove your athleticism.
No, you won’t feel a crazy burn or pump from these methods — but that doesn’t mean they’re not effective.
Why do they work?
You’ll improve the efficiency of your nervous system and stimulate greater muscular recruitment. By lifting lighter weights faster or heavy weights with the intent of being explosive you can activate a greater number of muscle fibers during exercise.
In the short term, explosive exercises activate high-threshold motor units (HTMUs), which means you recruit and use more of your muscle. And that means lifting heavier and building more mass.
Try this:
Before your next lower body workout, do 3 sets of 5 jump squats with 60 seconds of rest in between sets.
In the long-term, explosive exercises allow you to recruit more muscle fibers with less effort. This makes it easier to smash heavy weights. You can also maximize this muscular recruitment by lifting heavy or by lifting, jumping or throwing lighter loads faster.
Pause At Your Weak Points
Think back to the last time you saw someone squatting or benching at the gym.
Chances are, they started lowering the weight slowly and then “bounced” through their transition, right?
By adding a pause during the weakest point of an exercise, like at the bottom of a squat or near your chest on a bench press, you’re forced to stabilize your body at its weakest point. This can improve joint stability through the toughest part of lifts and prevent injury.
The pause also eliminates one huge compensation factor: elastic energy stored in your ligaments. To overcome the pause, you must generate pure strength.
This method requires you to decrease the weight you’re using but it will build tons of strength. Once you return back to your usual training, you’ll feel strong, stable and powerful.
Decrease Your Base Of Support
A narrow base of support requires greater balance and control for a wide range of exercises. Unilateral exercises like lunges are the first that come to mind, but even modifying typical bilateral exercises (like narrowing your stance on squats) triggers a new muscle recruitment pattern and fresh muscular activation.
Try this:
Instead of keeping your feet apart during push-ups and planks, bring your feet closer until they’re touching. The decreased base of support creates an extra challenge to stabilize your trunk and hold the position.
Metabolic Circuits
If you’re stuck in a lousy hotel,  chances are you don’t have access to more equipment than a few janky dumbbells, a couple of machines, and some cardio equipment.
In this case, you’ll need to do more with less and focus on training density.
Training density — doing more work in less time — is an ultra-efficient fat loss training method that requires you to combine multiple exercises with minimal rest between them. This increases metabolic stress, helping you burn more calories and build mass. According to this study in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, metabolic stress is one of the primary mechanisms of hypertrophy.
When you’re short on time or equipment, create total-body metabolic circuits to challenge yourself.
Try this:
Pick a push, pull, lower body exercise, and core exercise. Let’s say: Push-up, pull-up, goblet squat, and plank. Perform 4 sets of 10 reps for each exercise and hold your plank for 30-60 seconds. Keep rest time between exercises to a minimum.
And remember that just because an exercise is difficult doesn’t mean it’s effective. These methods have been used countless of times and are both difficult and effective—giving you a new training stimulus to force new muscle growth.

By Eric Bach

6 WORST things you can do if you want to ignite your body's own fat-burning furnace

Here are the 6 WORST things you can do if you want to ignite your body's own fat-burning furnace and get lean, strong & totally ripped in less time:
Mistake #1:
Doing Isolated Exercises
Doing isolated exercises like bicep curls and tricep kick-backs will NOT get you any significant results. These one-muscle-at-a-time moves simply don't stimulate enough muscle fibers to build lean muscle or expend enough energy to maximize your calorie burn.
If you want to build lean muscle while burning fat so you can get serious definition, you need to perform exercises that stimulate as many muscles and expend as much energy as possible at the same time. Using these types of exercises (which I'll reveal on the next page) will dramatically accelerate your results.
Mistake #2:
Working Out With Machines
Fancy machines may make the gym look high-end, but truthfully, about the only thing they're good for is for sitting down while you tie your shoes or catch your breath! The problem is this: Machines alter the way your body naturally moves and restrict your range of motion. This severely limits your ability to fully activate all of your muscles fibers -- that means less fat burning and less muscle definition. Worse yet, machines can cause excessive strain on your joints, leading to nagging injuries down the road.
If you want fast results, it's critical that you incorporate exercises that allow your body to move naturally with full range of motion so you can skyrocket your metabolism and tone your entire physique. In minute, I'll explain the 6 primary movements that are the foundation of these full-body exercises...and I'll also fill you in on the best types of weights to use for your workouts.
Mistake #3:
Doing Long Bouts of Cardio
Look, you need to do cardio if you want to lose weight and burn fat...BUT there's a right way and a wrong way to do your cardio workouts. If you've been pounding the pavement or the treadmill with nothing to show for it (except sore joints and a pair of stinky worn out sneakers), you already know it takes a lot of effort to get minimal results.
In this article, I'm going to reveal the most effective way to pump up your cardio routine that will get you insane results in half the time of your regular cardio workout -- without causing unnecessary stress on your joints. Seriously, don't skip this article because once you learn this simple trick, you'll kick yourself for not doing it all along.
Mistake #4:
Doing Crunches & Sit-Ups To Get 6-Pack Abs
If you want washboard abs, doing traditional ab exercises like crunches and sit-ups WILL NOT get you a six pack. In fact, doing any exercises that target your abs won't get you a six pack either! These so-called "ab" exercises are a complete waste of time. They don't make your abs get any more defined and they definitely don't burn any fat.
The key to getting sculpted abs is to burn off that stubborn layer of belly fat that's hiding them! In the next few minutes, I'll show you how to burn away the "ab flab" while stimulating all 6 of your abdominal muscles at the same time so you can finally carve out your six pack abs.
Mistake #5:
Repeating The Same Workouts Over & Over
Repeating the same workouts over and over is a surefire way to STOP getting results. We're creatures of habit and we tend to stick to things we're familiar with and good at. But when it comes to your workouts, if you want to keep making progress and keep seeing changes in your body, you've got to start switching things up.
You see, your body has an amazingly ability to adapt quickly and when it does, that's when you hit the dreaded plateau and you stop making progress. On the next page, I'm going to tell you exactly how often you need to change up your workout routine so you can keep your body guessing to accelerate the results process.
Mistake #6:
Doing Loooong Workouts
Longer workouts do NOT equal better or faster results. If you've been slaving away at the gym and your body isn't visibly changing, you can't do more of the same thing and expect a different result.
When it comes to getting lean and fit, your body responds to quality over quantity. I'm going to tell you the #1 way to super-charge your workouts -- this simple, yet overlooked method is the single fastest way to getting lean and ripped while cutting your workout time almost in half. No joke - this technique will open up a can of whoop-ass on your workout!