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.
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.
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.