Blue Star Fitness Blog

Per your requests, here is our famous trail mix

recipe that we always talk about. If you’ve been to

our Fitness Through Empowerment Seminar in the last

few months, then you’ve tried it too. Seminar

attendees also know that eating a supportive meal

consisting of visually equal portions of lean

protein, starchy carbohydrates and fibrous

carbohydrates every 3 hours will boost your

metabolism and stabilize your blood sugar to the

point were you will see body fat literally melt away

at a rate that you could not have ever imagined.

We make a batch or two of this trail mix each week

and put it right into ½ cup servings in small Ziploc

baggies. It is a great supportive snack that you can

carry with you for when you can’t get to a good

supportive meal. Laura always has a baggie in her

purse. Donald keeps some in his car and gym bag.

Blue Star Fitness Trail Mix

• 1 cup protein

  We use soy nuts, but you could mix in some nuts

  too, roasted with no salt are best

• 1 cup starchy carbohydrate

  Look for a low fat, low sugar granola, Kashi Go

  Lean Crunch, Cinnamon Life, Puffins

• 1 cup fibrous carbohydrate

  Raisins, craisins, chopped dates, or other dried

  fruit

• Optional

  Sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds

Mix it all together in a bowl and package in 1/2 cup

portions. We like to combine different ingredients

within each category to make the full cup. For

example, we mix golden raisins and craisins to make

one cup of fibrous carbohydrate.

Here are some of our favorite combinations:

soy nuts, roasted almonds, Cinnamon Life, Crunchy

Apple Sticks

soy nuts, sunflower seeds, granola, craisins and

golden raisins

Have you made a tasty trail mix combination that you’d like to share with our list? Email us.

©2006 Blue Star Fitness

We are often asked what is the best exercise for this body part. As our clients and Fitness Through Empowerment Seminar participants know, you can not spot reduce. Unfortunately, your body chooses to put fat wherever it wants. The only thing you can control is the amount of fat you have through diet and exercise. This myth that you can reduce a specific area by adding an exercise for that body part to your routine has given rise to many popular machines at the gym that you should not use. These include the weighted seated crunch machine and the hip abductor and adductor machines.

Seated Crunch Machine
The weighted seated crunch machine should not be used, especially by women who want to trim their waistline. First let’s look at the functionality of the rectus abdominus muscle or the “six pack”. The function of this muscle is to bring your body from spinal extension back to spinal neutral. If we use a baseball pitcher as an example, the rectus abdominus helps to bring the torso from the wind up through the pitch. The seated crunch machine takes you from spinal neutral to spinal flexion. This is not a movement you need to strengthen. Secondly, when you place a muscle under tension with weight you increase the size of that muscle – think of a bicep curl. This means that the seated crunch machine builds the rectus abdominus muscle OUT making you look less trim.

What’s the solution? Train the underlying transverse abdominus muscle which serves as a natural girdle and supports the spine. Train this muscle using functional movements – anything that mimics a natural body movement. We like to use the plank to train this muscle isometrically to improve posture and stability. To add work for this muscle in any of your other exercises, add an element of instability by standing on one leg or using a stability ball.

Hip Abductor and Adductor Machines
These two machines are very popular with most women we see at local gyms because they want thinner thighs. However, please keep in mind that you can not spot reduce. Let’s look at the functionality of these machines. Based on our societal norms and lifestyle, most Americans have tight adductor or inner thigh muscles. When you strengthen a muscle, you also tighten it which is not what these adductor muscles need. They need to be stretched. Moving to the abductor machine, please note that there is no abductor muscle. There are muscles that help to abduct the hip, but there is no specific abductor muscle and this is not the primary function of the muscles involved. Add to this fact that most of these machines are in a seated position and you have a completely nonfunctional movement. Does the human body ever demand that you press your knees out in a seated position? If you have any knee injuries, pain or have had knee or hip surgery, you should absolutely avoid both of these machines.

Other Machines
Blue Star Fitness believes in training the body functionally using the 7 primary movement patterns. We avoid the use of most machines in general unless in a post-rehabilitation situation. As a general rule, weight machines isolate muscles which is not the way our body works. Our body is integrated. All movements involve many muscles, tendons and ligaments so training a muscle independently is not training the way the body works. This isolation puts undue stress on the connective tissue associated with the muscle so many lifters will begin to have associated joint pain.

Before using machines again, please use this information to evaluate the machines in question based on your goals and the functionality of the muscle you are training.

Blue Star Fitness can help you develop an appropriate workout or adjust your current workout. We work with many clients on an as-needed basis, only meeting with them to update and change their workout. This works especially well for clients who are motivated and already work out on a regular basis on their own or at a local gym.

©March 2006 Blue Star Fitness