WIGGLE OFF THE JIGGLE

Wiggle Off That Jiggle Ok so… we all know that not many calories are burned when you are vegging out on the couch, so get up, get moving and wiggle off the jiggle! Now, I am not saying you have to run off and join a gym or pay an insane amount of money for a personal trainer (unless you want to, then call me) or commute to the nearest studio for dance lessons. But get up, get off the couch and move your ass! As a mom of four, I understand busy. There are sports, games, homework, diapers, meals to fix and sooo much more right? Well, at those practices, walk around the field instead of watching from the sidelines. Sling the kids in a stroller, carrier or whatever you have to do to walk around the block. Hell, get them involved and let them have fun with it also, help them learn a healthy lifestyle from you so they don’t have to struggle later in life like you may be doing. Stretch. Follow along to yoga or Pilates on cable. As you want to incorporate more, you can buy little pieces of exercise equipment to keep in a plastic tote to use in your home, such as bands, medicine balls, tubing, kettlebells, dumbbells, hanging handles, stability balls, balance disks, ply-boxes and so on. You can’t expect to lose the jiggle you have unless you start wiggling your tushie! (Ok, if you are a guy reading this, I meant a more masculine word, like “butt”) Do your kids have a trampoline? Go jump on it and swing your arms around. Seriously – you are having fun with the kids AND wiggling! Think about it… most Americans have a sedentary job – clerks, analysts and receptionists sit at desks all day. Cops, truckers, delivery drivers and machine operators… they are on their butts all day too. You can’t just go home and sit on your keester expecting to change your life. From the office geeks, I often heard the lame excuse “I have a desk job, I sit all day” ok, so this trainer says it is greatly beneficial for metabolism boost, energy bumping and weight loss to get away once an hour for 5 minutes or at bathroom breaks even, to stretch and do a few squats, even little things at your desk. While sitting at your desk, you can try a mini-desk workout like lifting your feet and holding your legs out straight for ten seconds at a time, placing your hands on your desk and doing tricep dips, side stretches, neck rolls, standing up to do calf raises while you are on the phone… there are lots of ways to keep blood flowing all day long. Now, if you are driving, I wouldn’t suggest standing up to stretch, so you will need to pull over once in a while to handle this kind of thing. But the benefits are tremendous, including postural improvement, increased circulation, reduced muscle tension, heightened mental alertness and a decreased risk of injury. You will just feel better. While on the subject of wiggling off the jiggle, now is a good time to introduce you to something called your Basal Metabolic Rate, referred to as BMR in the fitness world and how individual results vary due to this factor. Your BMR is the minimum calorific requirement needed just to sustain life and maintain composition (muscle weight, fat weight, water weight, etc) in a resting individual. It can be looked at as being the amount of energy (measured in calories) expended by the body to remain in bed asleep all day! BMR is the largest factor in determining overall metabolic rate and how many calories you need to maintain, lose or gain weight. Too much detail is not necessary but here is the gist of how BMR is determined (by a combination of genetic and environmental factors, as follows): genetics, gender, age, weight, body surface area, body fat percentage, diet, body temperature, the climate temperature, productivity of your glands and finally, exercise intensity. Basically, the more active you are, the better your nutrition and the leaner you are, the faster your metabolism runs. The faster your metabolism runs, the more fat you burn even at rest. See where all this hubbub is going? It is a cycle and once you get it rolling, you will be caught in the whirlwind of health and fitness and you won’t ever look back.