To get the most out of your workout, your body needs vitamins and nutrients that promote muscle growth and strength. At the same time, you also need the energy to complete your workouts and increase the intensity in order to see results. Choosing the right protein bar allows you to support your workout goals by giving your body important vitamins and the energy to help you achieve results. All bars are not the same and many may not help you at all, so how do you know which to buy? Keep the following in mind on what to look for when shopping for a protein bar.
How to Choose the Best Protein Bar for Your Workout
There are a lot of factors that go into finding the best workout for your body. A workout program should be developed around a person’s biology, age, goals, diet, time, etc. Developing a workout routine for yourself can be nerve-racking but its really not difficult and can be a game-changer once you understand the basics. When it comes to full-body workouts, you are basically doing the same basic movement patterns and just adding weight or making the movement more advanced. The basic movement patterns include:
Planks are one of the most effective workouts you can do. They work all parts of your body at the same time giving you a better full-body workout. Planks are also great because they achieve substantial results in a relatively short amount of time. Work your core and support your spine by doing planks every day.
Check any fitness blog and between articles on the best high protein nutrition bars and secrets for the perfect workout, and you’ll probably see dozens of entries about squats. In the past few years, squats have become an incredibly popular exercise in the fitness world, thanks to their ability to engage multiple parts of the body and give them a strenuous and effective workout.
Planning on jumping right into the most strenuous part of your workout routine the minute you hit the gym floor? Think again. Failing to properly warm-up before exercising can make injury more likely and can also reduce the effectiveness of your workout.
Warming-up before exercise is just as important as every other aspect of your exercise plan, such as doing the right exercises and using nutritional bars and protein supplements to enhance muscle-building. Exercise experts suggest the following workouts to ensure a safe and effective workout:
Increase Your Heart Rate
Pumping up your heart rate helps prepare your muscles for exercises and activates your nervous system. Before your workout, briefly jog, or run on the treadmill or bike. Jumping jacks or skipping rope can also help get your blood pumping at a faster rate.
Stretches Matter
Dynamic stretching can help prepare you for a workout. Make continuous motions to stretch your muscles and prepare them for a workout. Some suggested exercises include: moving your arms in circles, toe touches, and kicking your legs forward. You should avoid static stretches, as these stretches are detrimental to exercise performance.
Try a Few Lunges
Rotating lunges are great warm-up activities because they help to build balance and stability. To perform a rotating lunge, stand with your feet spread hip-width apart. Hold an object at chest level, and then take a big step forward with your left leg.
Bend your left knee and move downward until your thigh is more or less parallel to the floor. Next, hold and turn your torso to the right for a few seconds while keeping the object you’re holding in front of your chest. Then rotate back to the center and stand up again. Next, repeat this exercise with your right foot.
For Squat Enthusiasts
Pre-squat warm-up – Squats have become incredibly popular in recent years as they are great for building muscle and burning fat. However, there is a risk of injury involved that a proper warm-up can mitigate. If you’re planning to do squats, perform a kneeling glute mobilization warm-up. This movement helps to increase mobility in your hips.
To perform the kneeling glute mobilization:
- Get on your hands and knees, and keep your hands beneath your shoulders and your knees under your hips.
- Cross one ankle behind the opposite knee, pushing the knee of the crossed ankle/leg into the ground.
- Gradually ease your rear back to your heels. While doing this, keep your arms straight and your abs tight.
- Sit back until you feel that the glute on your crossed ankle side has been stretched. Once it has, return to the starting position.
By getting a good warm-up in before you exercise, you maximize your potential gains from your workout and reduce your chance of injury. It’s well worth the investment of 5-15 minutes.
Promax Nutrition provides exercise enthusiasts with healthy fuel to build bigger, stronger muscles. Promax Nutrition’s wide range of protein bars and snacks provide targeted nutritional support to men and women building better bodies.
When you were a kid, did your mom ever scold you for eating between meals? Her heart may have been in the right place, but it turns out she was wrong: Not only will snacking not spoil your meal, it’s also an important part of staying healthy and losing weight.
Snacking Keeps Blood Sugar Balanced
Maintaining a consistent blood sugar level is an incredibly important part of staying healthy. Three to five hours after eating, blood sugar levels take a dive, slowing down our metabolism. When our blood sugar undergoes constant dips and spikes, it increases our chances of developing serious health problems like insulin resistance, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and obesity.
One of the best ways to keep your blood sugar steady? Snacking, especially if you eat a consistent amount of carbs.
Snacking Prevents Overeating
We all sometimes get hungry between meals. When we don’t slake our hunger with a little snack before mealtime, those hunger pangs are more likely to make us overeat. If you’re feeling bad about grabbing a snack a couple of hours before lunch or dinner, don’t – instead, grab something rich in carbs like fruit or whole grains, and combine it with nuts, dairy, or other protein-rich foods. Not only do these food contain important nutrients, but they’re also the most filling.
Snacking Helps Us Lose Weight
It may sound counterintuitive, but snacking is one of the best ways to start losing weight. Specifically, moving from a schedule of a couple of big meals to one with smaller, more frequent meals throughout the day helps us keep our intake and output consistent, and makes it less likely that we’ll overeat. The trick is to keep your meals small and space them out consistently throughout the day.
Snacking Improves Mood and Helps Us Focus
Remember what we said earlier about blood sugar drops and slowed down metabolisms? After your body burns through the food you’ve ingested, the body reacts by slowing down, which leads to crankiness, tiredness, and an inability to concentrate. Grabbing a snack between meals will keep your energy levels up and prevent the onset of foul moods that affect productivity and make the day seem longer.
A Few Tips for Snacking
Snacking may be good for us, but that doesn’t mean that every type of snack is healthy. Candy bars and other sugary snacks should be avoided as much as possible; not only do they pack on the pounds, they also burn up quickly, leaving you more hungry and cranky than you were before you grabbed a snack.
The best in-between meal snacks are ones that are rich in protein and amino acids (cheese, meat, tofu), carbohydrates (fruit, honey, whole grains, vegetables), and/or omega-3 fatty acids (fish, yogurt).
If you’re looking for the perfect, healthy snack to keep your energy up and help you lose weight, Promax Nutrition bars are the perfect choice available in many different flavors and varieties, including lower sugar. Learn more by looking through our website today.
Sticking to your plan to regularly hit the gym can be tough. It’s even tougher if you hate the gym where you work out.
Consciously choosing to endure the sweat and labor involved with getting into shape already takes enough willpower. Don’t make it even harder by having to steel yourself to make your daily trip to a place that blasts crappy music, smells like socks, or has jerks for fellow members.
Working out is a lot easier if you look forward to visiting your gym. Follow these tips for picking the right place to get your fitness on:
- Visit first – Take the time to visit a gym a few times before becoming a member. See if the trainer will give you a complimentary session so you can get a feel for everything the gym has to offer. If you have a friend who’s a member, see if they can take you there as a guest a few times so you can get a feel for the facility.
- The right spot – Pick a gym that’s convenient to your home or work. Getting to the gym on a regular basis is a lot easier if it’s not in an out-of-the-way spot. Make sure that the parking is convenient. Also, if you plan to work out in the evening hours, be sure that the gym is in a safe neighborhood.
- Explore options – What fitness options does the gym offer? Does it have yoga or MMA-style classes? How often can you work with a trainer? What type of exercise equipment does it have? Are childcare options available? Find a gym with options that appeal to you and your fitness goals.
- Check reviews – Take a look at the online reviews for the gym you’re considering. A few bad reviews are to be expected anywhere, but if a location has consistently bad reviews, it may be a red flag.
- Check the amenities – See if the gym you’re considering has convenient access to sports drinks and water, as well as healthy snacks like energy bars. Being able to refuel your body after a strenuous workout really helps.
- Check prices – Make sure you understand the pricing structure of your gym. Many gyms have low monthly fees, but then stick it to their members with a variety of annual or quarterly fees. To avoid any unpleasant surprises, be sure to get a clear picture of how gym membership will impact your finances.
- Understand the plan – Many a gym member has been burned by unreasonable gym membership contracts. You’re joining a gym, not selling your soul. Avoid gyms that lock you into long-term commitments, and be sure to understand how you can break your contract in case of a medical emergency or in the event you have to move to another city.
Signing up for a gym is just one step in your path to better fitness. Eating right is another important step. Promax Nutrition provides healthy energy bars and other snacks to help fitness enthusiasts get all-natural protein from vegetarian sources. Check out Promax Nutrition today to see all of the delicious protein bars and other natural, gluten-free snacks that will help fuel your body after a workout.
How we view our bodies has a huge impact on our health and wellbeing. Men and women with a positive body image often enjoy better health, self-confidence, and emotional wellbeing than people who feel shame and disgust about their bodies.
Developing a positive body image doesn’t mean complacently accepting being out of shape, however. To develop a healthy body image, you must develop a healthy and realistic ideal of what a healthy body means for you and take steps to attain that goal. A healthy diet including fruits and veggies and protein bar supplements combined to a good fitness routine can help you accept the body you have by improving it.
- Practice positive affirmation – Find things that you like about yourself and focus on these things. Make a list of 10 positive attributes and recite them when you’re feeling down.
- Commit to healthy eating – Adopt a healthy diet and stick to it. This doesn’t mean adopting a ridiculous diet supermodel use to starve themselves. It means taking up a diet that provides the nutrition you need without going overboard on calories. Working with a trainer or nutritionist can help.
- Set an exercise plan – There’s nothing that succeeds like success. By setting and reaching realistic fitness milestones, you bolster your self-confidence by demonstrating your competence at achieving goals. While you may never have the body of an Olympic athlete, there are improvements and changes you can make to be healthier and fitter.
- Get rid of negative influences – Distance yourself from people who give you grief about your body. This doesn’t mean to take offense at everyone who invites you to the gym; it means weeding out toxic people who constantly and maliciously criticize your weight and appearance. Find positive individuals who encourage you to reach your fitness goals without snarky or hateful comments.
- Accept that bodies come in different shapes and sizes – Beauty is found in a variety of packages. Some of us are tall, some are short, and some are rail thin, while others have more ample bodies. The size or shape of a body doesn’t matter – the health of that body and the emotional wellbeing of its owner are what matters.
Today’s society promotes an unrealistic standard of attractiveness for both men and women, and this standard is harmful to all genders. A recent TODAY/AOL Body Image survey found that the only thing men worry about more than their appearance is their financial situation. The poll found that 53 percent of men are so concerned about their looks they don’t like to have their picture taken. Glamour found that 54 percent of women are unhappy with their bodies, and 80 percent say just taking a look in the mirror makes them unhappy.
Taking affirmative steps to embrace the body you’re in and improve it will drastically improve your life. Take action today to shed your old negative body image and replace it with a positive one.
Promax Nutrition helps men and women achieve their fitness goals with quality nutritional products. Promax offers healthy, vegetarian energy bars and other nutritious snacks that help people eat healthfully in order to build better bodies.
The amount of time you should rest in between weightlifting sets is different for everyone. The time you should wait is based upon your goals and objectives. It is important to identify what your goal is and use that goal to determine appropriate resting periods. Some of the more common goals people have to include:
Strength Training – This type of weightlifting is to help you get stronger faster. The ideal rest period for strength training is between three and five minutes. This is due to the body’s ability to produce phosphagen, which it only has a small amount of and quickly burns through. Phosphagen makes it possible to lift heavy weights and perform one to six reps in quick succession without the use of oxygen.
Muscle Building (Hypertrophy) Training – This training helps increase muscle mass, so you can get bigger quicker. With muscle building training you should be using moderate to heavyweights, and be able to perform between six and twelve reps at a time. Muscle growth is stimulated by the release of anabolic hormones by the body. Resting one to two minutes between sets causes the body to release a greater amount of this hormone and results in bigger muscles.
Endurance Training – This weightlifting training helps to increase muscular endurance rapidly. The objective is to help the muscles become more resistant to fatigue. One of the more common causes of muscle fatigue is the build-up of lactic acid in the muscle tissues. In order to remove the lactic acid, and at the same time increase endurance, you want to use light to moderate weights and complete between fifteen and twenty reps in about a minute or less. Rest periods should be approximately 45 seconds to 2 minutes, in between sets.
With each type of weight training, as you can see, there are different rest periods in between sets. Therefore, you should focus on only one of the above goals/objectives for your entire weightlifting session. It is perfectly acceptable to mix it up and concentrate on muscle building during one session, endurance in another, and so on.
Weightlifting and Weight Loss
In addition, there are people who use weightlifting as a means to burn calories and lose fat. In this situation, it is best to use a combination of strength, muscle building, and endurance training, along with cardio training. Just remember to concentrate on only one type of training at each workout session.
It is equally important to remember that muscle tissue weighs more than fat. As you work out and your endurance, muscle mass, and strength increase, so can your weight. By no means does this mean you are overweight. Rather, your body is becoming a lean, calorie-burning machine. As a result, your dietary needs will also change, and your caloric intake could be more than before.
It is easy to supplement your meals and ensure your body is getting the right balance of nutrition with energy and protein bars from Promax Nutrition. For more information about our products or assistance with ordering, contact us today at (888) 728-8962.
There is much debate as to whether learning proper breathing techniques while doing weightlifting workouts is beneficial for your overall health and fitness. Even though there are variations on what are the best techniques to use, one common theme is there is much to be gained by developing the right breathing patterns.
The purpose of learning to breathe correctly is to create the right stability to help you get the most out of your workouts while reducing your risks for injury, and being able to burn more calories and move more weight. Not to mention, to help you achieve a more physically fit appearance faster.
The generalized technique recommended for weightlifting workouts is to exhale during eccentric movements and inhale during concentric movements. If you are new to weightlifting workouts, you may not be familiar with these terms. That is okay, and we will look at an example to illustrate the two different movements.
For example, you are bench pressing weights while lying on your back with the weights being pulled down toward your chest and pushed up, away from your body. The eccentric movement is when you are pushing the weights away from your body and upward. The concentric movement occurs as you lower the weights toward your chest. Raising the weights requires more exertion, so this is a good time to exhale while lowering the weights uses less exertion, and this makes it an ideal time to inhale.
Another way to remember this is to look at the particular weightlifting exercise. You should breathe out (exhale) whenever you are exerting effort into the exercise. In other words, anything that requires you to push, lift, or pull is almost always the eccentric part of the exercise and is the perfect time to exhale. The second part of the exercise movement is the concentric part, and it is the best time to take a breath and inhale.
However, if you find yourself short on breath, do not hesitate to exhale and inhale, even if you are in the middle of either an eccentric or concentric movement. You should never attempt to hold your breath, which is referred to as the Valsalva Maneuver. Some weightlifters do this, as they think it will give them even more stability and greater control during pushes, pulls, or lifts.
Yet, there are risks with this maneuver, since it increases the blood pressure, and can cause fainting and heart attacks. Even though you might encounter “professional” powerlifters who highly recommend this breathing technique, it is not worth the risks it poses to your safety and well-being.
Other beginner tips you can use to work on developing the right breathing patterns is to practice breathing in and out deeply before you start working out and to use light weights during your workouts until your breathing patterns become second nature. Don’t forget to refuel the energy you burned during your workout with protein bars available from Promax Nutrition.
