May 30, 2008 at 03:31 PM
· Tagged with feature
We just updated the site with a new forums feature. We hope this will improve interaction in the Gyminee community and be a valuable resource to share tips and advice.
So, what about group messages?
We view the current group messages as "in-group" communication. So, feel free to continue to use the group messaging features. They aren't going away. But, for most communication it probably makes sense to use the forums. Your comments/questions will receive attention from a greater audience.
Visit the Gyminee Forums.
Comments Off
May 28, 2008 at 11:37 AM
· Tagged with exercise, muscle, tips
Overtraining is a mysterious and delicate topic, yet most of us have experienced it in some form. Rigorous training without overtraining is extremely difficult to achieve. You’re trying to intentionally and frequently cause short-term damage to your muscles without causing any long-term damage. What a balancing act!
The balancing act is even tougher when viewed as a cost/benefit relationship. Train and you’ll improve. Train rigorously and you’ll improve even more. Train too rigorously and not only will you not improve (you’ll injure yourself), but you will lose your ability to fully train while the injury heals, causing you a net decrease in performance.
Injuries due to overtraining usually result from one of two things: a single catastrophic event or chronic overuse. Here are some ways that I personally mitigate these injuries.
Try It Before You Buy It
When trying new exercises for the first time, which is something you should do often, never go full speed or with a full load your first time. This is something we all “know” but I’m not sure how religiously we practice it. Practice the motion unweighted for a few reps. Try to anticipate where you will feel the most stress and pay attention to those joints/muscles during the actual exercise. If the exercise involves a barbell then do a few reps with only the bar until you’re confident with the motion. This is especially important with complex motions like the clean. It’s OK to fool around with just the bar before you dive in head first. You don’t have to count the reps toward your workout, and you’ll benefit in the long-term.
Know Whether You Are Hurt or Injured
More specifically, know the difference as it is happening. At The Basic School in Quantico, Virginia, I once saw a captain approach one of my fellow lieutenants who was rubbing his lower leg during a break in physical training. “Are you hurt or injured?” he asked. “If you’re injured then stop and go see the doc. If you’re hurt then suck it up and let’s go.” Pain is a normal part of exercise. You should expect and even seek a certain amount of pain in your training in order to improve. However, you must be able to tell when pain is giving way to injury, and sometimes it changes in an instant. My perception of the normal muscular stress of exercise: widespread burning, tightness, soreness to the touch. The onset of injury is more acute: sharp “cutting” pain, intense cramping, immediate and severe loss of strength. When an injury is about to occur you will feel the normal pain transition to injury. Sometimes it happens so quickly you can’t prevent it during the moment. In that case you were simply doing too much too soon. However, sometimes you can feel it happening and stop it in time. Building this perception and being willing to preserve yourself can save you from some injuries.
Take a Dump in Front of Everyone
…or at least be willing to. When you feel a catastrophic injury approaching you must unload the muscle to prevent it. You essentially have two options: shift the load to a different muscle group, sometimes one that the exercise position can’t easily support, or dump the weight. Make preparations in advance and be willing to dump the weight if you need to. Admittedly, I rarely do this. A corollary to this tenet is to anticipate your performance on future sets/reps and adjust load/reps accordingly before you start. Rubber bumper plates are excellent for exercises that involve large loads and high probability of failure if pushed to the limit. A spotter can also mitigate this risk. However, if all else fails and your knee/shoulder/insert important body part here is on the line, be willing to create a scene and suddenly let the weights clang to the floor. Your embarrassment will buy you out of a lot of pain and frustration.
Give Yourself a Break
I’ve given a lot of attention to catastrophic injury thus far, but overuse has plagued me far more often. A fitness enthusiast learns and eventually expects to work through pain. This is both a virtue and a vice, because it’s this ability that causes us to substantiate working through injuring pain. This most often happens in endurance training such as running. In 2003 I developed shin splints so badly that a month of rest was necessary to regain my long-term running ability. The fact that I was limping into the gym should have been a clue that all was not well. Because the pain subsided after my first 1000m I was determined to work through it. That was a mistake. Whenever any soreness doesn’t subside after 4-5 days then you have reason for caution. You don’t always have to wait until every muscle in a group has healed completely to work the muscle again, but if the muscle hasn’t felt fully healed in weeks then you’ve got a problem. Unfortunately, there’s only one cure: rest. Resting a week at the onset of injury is preferable to resting a month after greatly aggravating the injury. If you’ve been training for months then a week or even two weeks of rest isn’t going to hinder your long-term goals.
Crying Wolf or Pleading for Help?
I hope that some of the tips can help you avoid overtraining and the injuries it brings. The advice I’ve written is the advice that I give myself every day and seek to follow in my training. The sum of all the parts is this: know your body and listen to it, but listen to it as a concerned parent -- not a whimsical friend. In order to effectively train and develop total fitness you must push your body outside its comfort zone. It’s always going to be a little upset about this, and you often must tell it to shut up and keep moving. However, from time to time it will genuinely cry out for help, and in order to effectively respond you must know how to tell the difference and be willing to listen.
About the Author: Jeff Barnett is a fitness enthusiast from Huntsville, Alabama. For the past ten years he has pursued strength and health in numerous ways including serving as a Marine Corps officer. He occasionally writes about fitness on his blog, The Midnight Hour and posts his daily workouts on his facebook group, Crossfit Huntsville.
Comments Off
May 22, 2008 at 01:10 PM
The Gyminee website experienced some unscheduled downtime from approximately 12:10PM till 1:00PM Central time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused Gyminee users. We were able to discover and fix the problem that caused this downtime, and we will now be able to avoid having similar problems in the future. To the best of our knowledge no data was lost during this downtime, but feel free to
contact us if you have any further questions.
Comments Off
May 21, 2008 at 03:05 PM
· Tagged with links, tips
If you have ever worked in an office environment then you know that, in most cases, it can be detrimental to your health. Everything from the birthday cakes, lack of movement, and high stress all leads to a less-than-healthy lifestyle.
Ali Hale from The Office Diet wrote a great post at the Ririan Project blog giving some helpful tips for those of us who spend most of our time cooped up in an office. Here are my 3 favorite tips (although be sure to check out all 7):
1. Take your own lunch. This is something that I have always been an advocate of. Depending on where you live, it can be almost impossible to find a healthy restaurant. Making a simple sandwich or salad for lunch will almost certainly be more healthy than anything you can find at a restaurant. Plus, you'll save a decent amount of money in the long run.
2. Get outside during your lunch break. A smart employer will allow their employees the freedom to go for a walk or a jog on their lunch break (and maybe even on a separate break). For one, healthy employees save the company money by reduced healthcare costs and less sick days spent. Second, taking short breaks and getting outside will result in happier and more productive employees. Hopefully you can convince your employer that by working less hours you can actually get more done!
3. Avoid the “free food” trap. This is by far my biggest weakness. No matter how many times I tell myself I won't partake of the free doughnuts, the next thing I know I have eaten 3 of them. Becoming a healthy office worker definitely requires self control. Another great way to think about this is that saving a few bucks right now isn't worth the tens of thousands it could cost you on healthcare costs down the road.
Comments Off
May 16, 2008 at 11:20 AM
· Tagged with diet, links, nutrition
The folks over at the SmarterFitter Blog have put together a very nice grocery shopping template. I really like this list for two reasons:
- It saves time preparing your grocery list because it contains most of the things people concerned with a healthy diet would want to eat. Plus, the PDF allows you to add your own items.
- It saves time while shopping by organizing foods well.
Here is a
direct link to the grocery list PDF template and the
article explaining the template.
Comments Off (1)
May 14, 2008 at 01:15 PM
· Tagged with feature, news, other, Other
As you might have noticed, we rolled out the new Gyminee site last night. Over the last few months, many users provided us with feedback and comments on how to make the site better, and we have integrated many of those ideas into the new look and feature set.
After you have had a chance to look around and see the new features, please write us and let us know what you think! As always, our user feedback is important to us. Keep the suggestions coming!
Comments Off (16)
May 08, 2008 at 01:01 PM
· Tagged with feature, other, Other
This will be the last sneak peek we give before taking the new website design live. Currently, a handful of lucky users are testing out the new interface and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
We have already taken a look at improvements to the Workouts section and various other social improvements. This time we will look at some of the changes being made to the Nutrition section of Gyminee.
One of the biggest changes being made to the Nutrition section is open editing. Many users send error reports about foods being inaccurate, and we want them to be able to quickly and easily fix any errors they find. One of our favorite things about Gyminee is the great community of people that use it, and we want to give the community the ability to make Gyminee better. (If anyone is worried about other users miss-editing foods you have created, then don't worry. We allow you to turn off open editing for your foods.)
The new Nutrition Log is quite different from the current one. The biggest change in functionality is that you can now view other users' logs. This makes it much easier to keep an eye on your GymBuddies and see whether they are just eating ice cream for every meal. Another new feature is the Calorie Breakdown chart. It's great to be able to see at a glance where your calories are coming from.
The new Food Search is much different also. It is no longer integrated into the nutrition log, but is now it's own full-featured page. The new Advanced Options allow you to search just USDA foods, just foods created by other users, just foods you have created, or any combination of the three. Also, many of the changes to the Nutrition section are behind the scene. For example, the new food search returns much more accurate results, the meal planner has received usability improvements, you can upload pictures for foods, and so on.
Just hang in there a little bit longer. It's coming soon!
Comments Off (7)
May 02, 2008 at 03:45 PM
We are looking for a handful of loyal Gyminee users to help us test the new site before it goes live in a few weeks. If you are interested, post a comment with your Gyminee username or email (if you give username, make sure your email is set properly in your Gyminee profile). Or, you can send us an email directly.
Comments Off (39)
