The Importance of Daily Vitamins

We all know that vitamins are vital to our overall health. Your body cannot function properly without receiving the necessary vitamins and minerals every day. Sometimes called "micronutrients" by doctors and nutritionists, vitamins and minerals work in conjunction with proteins, fats, and carbohydrates to keep us healthy.

In our fast-paced world, many of us have problems meeting all of our nutritional requirements each day from diet alone. We are on the run and do not always have time to eat healthy meals. To make up for some of the vital vitamins and minerals we may be missing, many doctors recommend that everyone take a multivitamin each day.

Since vitamins and minerals help your body function properly, you cannot afford to miss out on the daily requirements. Sure, you may not notice health problems immediately, but over time, missing out on essential vitamins and minerals can really take a toll on your body.

Moreover, studies have shown their importance in combating certain diseases, such as cancer. Vitamins and minerals help in many ways. For instance, they keep your organs functioning properly, aid in healing fractures, and help your eyesight remain clear and sharp.

Take vitamin A as an example. Among other things, this vitamin helps your immune system. To get the required amount of this vitamin each day, you need to eat four or more servings of vegetables and fruits.

Also found in vegetables and fruits is vitamin C. Chances are, you may not be getting enough of this essential vitamin, especially if you smoke. Smokers often do not get enough because they need more than non-smokers.

Other people need additional vitamins and minerals as well. For instance, pregnant women need vitamins rich in folic acid. Some people need additional iron in their diets. Your lifestyle may necessitate that you need more of certain vitamins.

In addition to a multivitamin, many doctors recommend that some patients take omega-3 supplements. Heart patients, for instance, routinely are told to take additional omega-3 supplement pills to help maintain a healthy heart.

Just as not getting enough vitamins is bad for you, taking too many vitamins is equally bad. Your body has trouble eliminating certain vitamins, such as A, D, E, and K. You want to take the correct amount of these vitamins to optimize the healthful benefits.

Taking a multivitamin is one way to insure you are getting all the valuable vitamins and minerals you need. But which one should you take? The marketplace is flooded with vitamin supplements.

The best way to choose a multivitamin is to look for ones that contain 100 percent of the recommended daily allowance of most vitamins and minerals. Also, buy from a reputable brand name that has been around for years. It's important that your supplement not contain hazardous materials, and the manufacturer of your multivitamin should have research information available on their website.

You can find most major brands of vitamins at your local drug or grocery store. In addition, many companies sell vitamins on the Internet. Like the companies at your grocery store, online companies offer multivitamins that helps you meet your daily requirements.

When deciding what vitamins you need and how you can stay healthy, do your research. Visit the websites of several companies and see what their products have to offer.

More important, read about what testing they do to ensure that their products are safe and meet your nutritional needs. A company that is sure of its products will have performed testing and will have a proven record of success.

Although supplement manufacturers have had to meet certain requirements for years, in June 2007, the FDA augmented existing laws. Now companies that sell vitamin and herbal supplements must test their products for impurities and contaminates.

Moreover, all companies must prove their claims. Some companies have been testing their products for years and publish this information on their websites.

When choosing vitamin supplements, always look for a company that strives to make the safest and most effective supplements on the market. After all, when it comes to your health, you can't afford to take risks.


By Brue Baker
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brue_Baker

No Respect? Go to the Basement!

No Respect? Go to the Basement! I have had some interesting conversations with Jim Wendler. One in particular struck a chord with me quite heavily. In fact, it has helped mold a process I use at my gym when training new athletes. Jim and I spoke about the lack of respect for the weights nowadays, specifically by those who spend too much time on the internet and at these fancy gyms. I see how kids casually skip workouts that their parents pay for without a care in the world. I see how countless high school athletes don’t work jobs because they are full-time high school students who are “too busy” to work. I see how incoming clients want to get started immediately on the same program as the experienced wrecking crew on their very first training session, completely dismissing the amount of blood, sweat, and tears it took to be able to follow such a program. I see how high school athletes think squatting half-way down actually means “squatting.” I see how way too many people have no ******* clue what it means to be committed, intense, and passionate about something, especially getting strong! I have turned down prospective clients many times. I have also fired clients due to their lack of effort or their overbearing parents who think smashing their son to the ground during every workout is what it’s all about. The last kid I “fired” was prepping for college football. Weighing around 160 lbs on a good day and skipping more than half his workouts led me to tell his father that I simply could not take his money anymore and that his son was no longer allowed to train with me. Problems with a girl, this hurts and that hurts…before I knew it, more than half of his workouts were no shows. Some were even late shows. Kids like this do NOT deserve to train among other motivated kids. I suggest to my athletes that they help their parents pay for their membership with me. You need to earn your way to train with me. Kids like this need to be sent to the basement, locked up for one hour four days a week, and told they must figure it out on their own. “Here you go, son. I bought you a beautiful 300-lb weight set from Costco. Now, get the **** downstairs and figure it out on your own. No radio, no mirrors, no guidance, no asking for help. Figure it out on your own. Don’t let me see this door open up until I tell you that your one hour is over!” Can you get jacked and strong using a 300-lb barbell set? You better believe it! And NO, there is no power rack. EVERYTHING begins from the floor. Our new clients go through a baseline program that can last anywhere from a few workouts to a few months. The time spent on this baseline program depends on their intensity, progress, physical improvements, mental readiness, and commitment to growth, inside and out. We have them do hand walking, pull-ups, recline rows on thick ropes, box jumps for high reps, jumping rope, sled and Prowler work, high rep medicine ball throws, high rep medicine ball slams, sledge hammer work, push-ups, sit-ups, leg raises, recline rope climbing, and more of the same. The pace picks up every single workout, progress is expected, intensity is expected, sweating is expected…. Complaining is not allowed or accepted. Saying “I can’t…” or stating some other unacceptable excuse does not go over well with me. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to be challenging. In case you were wondering... If you are warming up and it looks like you don’t want to be here, LEAVE! We don’t want you here, and the weights don’t want to be touched by you. Negative energy has NO place in a hard core weight room. Don’t try to fool me either. I can tell who respects the weights and who doesn’t. If I see an ounce of disrespect, you’re going to get smashed. You’ll be hitting circuits of wheel barrows, pull-ups, recline rope climbs, and leg raises on the dip bar. I’ll have you pushing the “Prowler of death” until you’re seeing stars and laying in the middle of the parking lot dazed and confused. The weight room was once a special place. Nowadays, everyone wants fancy this and fancy that and cries a river like Justin Timberlake because they see box squats, clean and presses, floor presses, pull-ups, sled work, and farmer walks on a program. They wanted fancy shmancy. Why do they want fancy? Because fancy is WAAAAY easier than the basics. It will always come down to the basics and gut busting effort if you want results. This will NEVER change. Louie Simmons kicks people who don’t show respect out of the gym. George DeFranco did the same when he owned a gym. I’m doing this today and will do so until my very last breath on earth. The kids who respect the weights nowadays seem to be those who have jobs and need to make their own money to support their gym membership. I used to cut lawns as a teenager to earn money for my gym membership. I also washed cars. I worked full-time plus overtime at a summer job to save cash for my first car. I had to stop working overtime when someone posted a sign on child labor laws and found out I was only 16-years-old but working 50 hours a week. I rode my bike to the old school YMCA and could barely walk my bike home after some of my workouts. Today, a kid plays football for one hour and is too tired to go to the gym afterward and skips a training session that mommy and daddy are paying for! I’m sick of the bull shit….maybe some of these kids do not deserve to go to the basement. Might be too warm and cozy. How about a 300-lb barbell set in the backyard, regardless of the weather, and some time to figure it out. It’s time to raise the bar regarding what we expect of our youth or anyone else who starts a strength program. Donald Trump said the young generation is turning into a bunch of wimps. The schools focus so much on positive reinforcement and making everybody feel good that no one can handle the truth. The truth is hard work—gut busting hard work—on the basics is where it’s at. From my point of view, it looks like we’re going to have some very crowded basements. It’s time to instill some morals, values, and work ethics. Hard is not what we do! Challenging is not what we do. We have it easy my friends, and when I hear complaining or whining, it sets me off like a time bomb. I almost lost it when one of my own clients requested me to change the rules of our LIFT Strong fundraiser because he was not a sure win. I told him not to compete because he has no clue what it means to fight for something, which is exactly why we hold LIFT Strong events. It represents the fight that Alwyn Cosgrove fought for several years. Rather than complain about the “challenge,” we must be grateful for it, embrace it, and become better people because of it. Hard is what guys like Alwyn Cosgrove have fought through as well as those like Lance Armstrong, Mrs. DeFranco, Deon Anderson, and the like. These are the people who have experienced what “hard” is. That’s my rant, and yes, I’m pissed off! And if you walk into my gym, you had better believe that I’m going to take it out on YOU! So be ready! By Zach Even-Esh For www.EliteFTS.com

Lies in the Gym

The great objection to women exercising—namely, the fear of becoming muscular—is quite without foundation. It cannot be too often repeated that woman is not simply a weaker man: she is physically an entirely different being ... In women the muscles simply become firm, close-knit, and well-rounded, and show under the layer of fatty tissue intervening between muscle and skin only in soft, hardly discernible masses, just sufficiently to give a delicate moulding to the form.

Eugen Sandow, Sydney Mail, October 22, 1902.

You don't have to go far in the average gym to find someone willing to give you bad information. People are full of ideas and advice about women and weights. The other day I heard the most ludicrous thing yet: that cardio work was bad for you because it built muscle that pushed the fat out farther. Yep, I guess that's why marathon runners are all so obese—duh. Some of the worst offenders are fitness magazines and personal trainers. This is somewhat distressing, considering that people look to such sources for help and information. The other day, reading a fitness magazine, I learned that yoga will firm my breasts (it won't, unless they meant to write "plastic surgeon" instead of "yoga"), and that over 90% of all long term exercisers exercise in the morning (oops, I guess all the evening regulars at the gym are just fooling themselves).

Anyway I've compiled a list of some of the most common myths floating around like the alligator in the sewer stories. The difference is, of course, that there really ARE alligators in the sewer. And snakes that pop out of your toilet, heh heh.

LIE: Weight training will make you huge and masculine.

Probably the worst lie ever. People look at women bodybuilders and say, "Ohmigawd, they're huge and if I lift anything heavy I'll look like that too." Nope. In general, women are not able to build monstrous muscle mass in the same manner as men, due to a number of physiological factors. It's a rare woman that can become a competitive bodybuilder, and to get that big she has to combine genetics, extensive long-term training, strict diet, and supplementation (legal or otherwise).

If you enjoy watching bodybuilding, have a look at the tested (natural, i.e. steroid free) shows versus the untested (anything goes) shows. You will notice a great difference in the builds of the women onstage. A natural female bodybuilder is lean, almost wiry, and certainly not the mythical monsters whom exercising women fear resembling (have a look at my reader letters page to see some examples). Also, women bodybuilders do not normally have the low levels of bodyfat that they do while in competition. Low bodyfat makes muscles stand out, and it changes the contours of the face, making jawlines and cheekbones prominent, which contributes to a rather unnatural look. Bodybuilders about to go on stage for a competition look quite odd, actually, due to dehydration, extremely low bodyfat, and deep tans. During the offseason, competitors' bodyfat is higher, and in clothing, most wouldn't stand out as unusual in any way.

The average woman (that's you) cannot achieve a masculine monster look simply through strength training. You're not going to wake up after a workout and be huge. You don't believe me? OK, then, try to get huge. Just try. And see how far you get. If you don't believe me, check out what happened in my before and after pics. I've had people tell me that they think my legs are "too big" (too big for what?) but the old gams were a whole lot bigger before I started training.
shehulkitude
Thanks to the Mighty Lingster for his artistic interpretation of the right kind of pink weights!

LIE: Men train, women tone.

To be serious about strength training, eliminate the T-word-"tone"-from your vocabulary. Lifting a tiny weight for a hundred reps is a waste of time and energy, plus it never really stresses your muscles enough to make them much stronger. As the good Sgt. Robo says, "More isn't better, better is better." In fact, according to one study in which men and women trained the same muscle group 3 days a week for 20 weeks, "the women made significantly greater relative increases than men in strength." (MacDougall et al, McMaster University)

Women and men have exactly the same skeletal muscle composition. It would not be possible to tell biological sex from muscle tissue alone. But more importantly, there is no such thing as "toning". There is muscle mass and strength gain, and fat loss, and that's it. In purely technical terms, "tone" refers to the ability of the central nervous system to provide passive muscular resistance to being stretched. What you probably think of as "toned" muscles are merely muscles which are not hidden by a lot of bodyfat. In other words, there is no reason why you should waste your time on the stupid little weights when you could be getting tough and strong.

LIE: There is a difference between toning, sculpting, and firming.

Please don't write me asking how you can tone but not sculpt, or firm but not tone, or whatever. There is no such thing (see the next lie). There is only building muscle mass and losing bodyfat, nothing else.

LIE: Muscles grow different ways depending on how you work them.

This school of thought says that if you lift heavy, you'll get huge, and if you lift light weights with high reps, you'll just "tone". AAACK! The T-word again! Muscles only know how to grow one way, and just how big they get depends on gender and genetics.

Okay, this isn't exactly the whole picture. A helpful reader emailed me recently, encouraging me to clarify this point. We have several different types of muscle fibres which respond to different types of training. BUT nevertheless you won't be able to get freaky big unless you try very, very hard and you have one-in-a-zillion genetics. And ultrahigh rep training is a complete waste of your time.

LIE: You can change the shape of your muscles.

You hear a lot from nimrods at the gym about which exercise is better for reshaping your muscles, or for building big peaks on your biceps, etc. Sorry, but the shape of your muscles is genetic. Muscles are attached to bones and joints in a way that is specific to each person's body. As an example of this, look at the bump of people's outer thigh muscles above the knee. You will notice that some people's quads make a bump almost right at the knee, while other people have their quad bump higher up, sometimes quite high above the knee. This is merely an individual variation in muscle attachments. So, no matter what exercises you do, you're not going to change where your muscles attach, and you're not going to change their individual shape. You can, however, make them bigger and stronger.

LIE: Women shouldn't work their leg and butt muscles, otherwise they'll get too big.

Once again we have the fallacy of the "big muscles". Have a look at women bodybuilders' butts and you'll see this isn't the case. The truth is this: by building muscle, we can speed up our metabolism, resulting in more effective fuel (calorie) consumption. In other words, more muscle means less fat in the long run. And where do we find the largest group of muscles in a woman's body? Why, her legs and butt, of course! Neglecting these means neglecting the best area for building calorie-burning muscle. In addition, women tend to have much better lower-body than upper-body strength, so it's very satisfying to work the lower body and see some great results!

LIE: Women should stick to machines and stay away from free weights.

This is another heinous myth. In fact the opposite is true for a variety of reasons. Have a look at the article called "Don't Fear the Free Weights."

LIE: If you build muscle, it will just push the fat out more and make you look bulky.

Sorry to burst the bubble girls, but you're not going to wind up like the Incredible Hulk, ripping through your shirt with the massive expansion of your muscles. The amount that muscle contributes to visible size is negligible compared to the bodyfat.


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