"The Tiny Tiger" by Janette Shipston Chan

Janette is a woman who has endured more than most people on the planet will ever have to face. She's taken her experiences and sculpted something beautiful, a children's book titled "The Tiny Tiger" a picture book about international adoptions for her daughter and anyone else who finds it inspiring. She also has a truly magical blog regarding their experience with international adoption and the blending of cultures titled "ROAR".

Her life and her inner strength is so humbling to me. Every time I see her at the studio I get an attitude adjustment. She shines even brighter after her struggles. And she doesn't lead with them. She's in the present fully and completely.

Here's a link where you can buy her book. She self published and quickly got the attention of many international book sellers and distributors.

What a beautiful gift for anyone who shares Janette's family's experience.

ANNOUNCING COMMIT TO FITT 2011

Time after time we’ve rung in the New Year with a resolution that this year we’re going to finally get fit. We’re finally going to lose that last bit of weight, get a bit stronger, make exercise a regular part of our lives… And so often those commitments are put aside by St Paddy’s Day!

But why? Unrealistic goals, lack of support, accountability, and effective coaching – we need all these things to make a healthy lifestyle work and to make it last.

URBANFITT wants to help you make 2011 the year that you COMMIT TO FITT!

The COMMIT TO FITT program is the 8 week launching pad you need to propel yourself forward, ignite your MOJO and get the tools to succeed in your fitness journey - GROUP GOAL SETTING AND VISIONING, GOAL DOCUMENTATION AND TRACKING, COMMUNITY AND COACH SUPPORT, END OF PROGRAM ACCOUNTABILITY.

Starts Saturday January 15th at 10:15 and runs until Friday, March 11th.

The critical elements of the COMMIT TO FITT program are:


PICTURE IT - This is all about figuring out where you’re at now and where you want to go.

It’s time to flex your dreaming muscles and reach for how you really want to feel and look for the rest of your life. Ruth Tamari, Certified Life Coach, will lead us through a visioning workshop on January 15th after class from 11:30 to 1:30, snacks provided.

In this process we will choose realistic 8 week goals – realistic goals could be a 5lb weight loss, a slimmer waist, stronger arms, simply attendance at three workouts per week, or nutrition goals like limiting sugar intake to 1x per week or increasing fruit and vegetable by two servings a day. The key is to choose goals that are attainable and focused, Rome wasn’t built in a day and a lifestyle overhaul can’t be made in a month! Meeting these measurable goals within the first 8 weeks of the year will give you the confidence and desire to make new ones through the year and continue to grow!


DOCUMENT IT –

Before class on January 15th, strip down to your bra and panties and get your picture taken at the beginning and at the end of your 8-week program. Other benchmarks will include weight and waist and hip measurements and food journaling.

Document your current eating habits and get Urbanfitt’s Golden Rules of fat loss. Jane will look at your regular habits and give you quick and effective tips for tweaking your eating immediately. It’s all about combining the changes that provide the biggest pay off with realistic and progressive small changes that can improve your eating habits forever.

Through the 8 weeks continue to track your workouts and maintain your food journal to monitor your progress.


WORK IT – Attend 3 Urban Warrior group training sessions or other Urbanfitt conditioning classes per week and one other day of the week you get to choose a structured activity that makes you happy and lights up your spirit.

MEASURE IT – Once a week, we check your progress. If you’re trying to lose weight, we will do a weigh in. If you are more focused on changing eating habits, we’ll review your food journal. We will also be keeping class attendance so we can see how you’re sticking to the 3 times a week Urban Warrior commitment.

WRAP IT – Celebrate successes of the last 8 weeks with a wrap party on Saturday March 12th at 11:30am. We’ll review our progress, successes, challenges, and plans moving forward to build and maintain fitness through the year. We also will do final measurements and compare before and after pics.


COST = $85 PER WEEK or $649 in advance


COMMIT TO FITTER:

Same as above but add an additional one on one personal training session to the mix. This option is based on personal trainer availability as well.

COST = $164 PER WEEK or $1250 in advance

Reserve your space today by calling 416.964.3309 or email help@urbanfitt.com

Space is limited to ensure we give you the kind of attention you need to make this stick, for good.

A 91 year old track and field star - Olga Kotelko

I work with the young and the old. But sometimes the 'young' folks are the whiniest of them all. This last month Leslie who just turned 50 was kicking the asses of 25 year olds in Urban Warrior. I won't mention any names. There's a fire and determination in some people to get strong and fight what may seem like the inevitable slide into physical decline and apathy.

I have a 68 year old breast cancer survivor client who kicks ass on pull ups and just doesn't get sore from workouts that easily anymore. She trains a couple times a week, goes to 2 pilates classes a week, walks everywhere and regularly sees an osteopath.

I also have 68 year old clients who have neglected their bodies for years and are basically trying to be able to walk up and down stairs without pain. Good on them for coming in to train. But wouldn't it be great if our efforts didn't come too late so that when our wisdom is ripest we could actually go do whatever our little hearts desire without being limited by what our bodies can do? I know not everyone is lucky and sometimes fate takes over. Sometimes shit happens despite our best efforts to be healthy. But anyone can fight to feel better.

Jaimie sent this link to me today and funnily enough I was talking to someone tonight who mentioned this story as well. Seems Olga Kotelko's story is going viral, at least in my little world.

Here's an excerpt taken from the New York Times article:

On the third floor of the Montreal Chest Institute, at McGill University, Olga Kotelko stood before a treadmill in the center of a stuffy room that was filling up with people who had come just for her. They were there to run physical tests, or to extract blood from her earlobe, or just to observe and take notes. Kotelko removed her glasses. She wore white New Balance sneakers and black running tights, and over her silver hair, a plastic crown that held in place a breathing tube.

Tanja Taivassalo, a 40-year-old muscle physiologist, adjusted the fit of Kotelko’s stretch-vest. It was wired with electrodes to measure changes in cardiac output — a gauge of the power of her heart. Taivassalo first met Kotelko at last year’s world outdoor masters track championships in Lahti, Finland, the pinnacle of the competitive season for older tracksters. Taivassalo went to watch her dad compete in the marathon. But she could hardly fail to notice the 91-year-old Canadian, bespandexed and elfin, who was knocking off world record after world record.

Read the whole story

What if there's a chance that anyone at any age could make fitness gains regardless of injuries, medical conditions or past experience with fitness. I say screw resignation.

Here's another little story. I worked with Vera for a couple months, a 67 year old woman with little exercise experience or at least not the type of exercise that actually made her sweat. Within just a couple months of training, she was going up the dreaded 5 sets of stairs faster and feeling like a fire was lit under her butt. She learned to hustle on her daily walks instead of saunter and is building up the muscles in her lower body to alleviate some of the pain she experiences from osteoarthritis.

Here's some more very interesting stuff from the article about this:

EXERCISE HAS BEEN shown to add between six and seven years to a life span (and improve the quality of life in countless ways). Any doctor who didn’t recommend exercise would be immediately suspect. But for most seniors, that prescription is likely to be something like a daily walk or Aquafit. It’s not quarter-mile timed intervals or lung-busting fartleks. There’s more than a little suffering in the difference.

Here, though, is the radical proposition that’s starting to gain currency among researchers studying masters athletes: what if intense training does something that allows the body to regenerate itself? Two recent studies involving middle-aged runners suggest that the serious mileage they were putting in, over years and years, had protected them at the chromosomal level. It appears that exercise may stimulate the production of telomerase, an enzyme that maintains and repairs the little caps on the ends of chromosomes that keep genetic information intact when cells divide. That may explain why older athletes aren’t just more cardiovascularly fit than their sedentary counterparts — they are more free of age-related illness in general.

Exactly how exercise affects older people is complicated. On one level, exercise is a flat-out insult to the body. Downhill running tears quadriceps muscles as reliably as an injection of snake venom. All kinds of free radicals and other toxins are let loose. But the damage also triggers the production of antioxidants that boost the health of the body generally. So when you see a track athlete who looks as if that last 1,500-meter race damn near killed him, you’re right. It might have made him stronger in the deal.

Exercise training helps stop muscle strength and endurance from slipping away. But it seems to also do something else, maintains Mark Tarnopolsky, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (who also happens to be a top-ranked trail runner). Resistance exercise in particular seems to activate a muscle stem cell called a satellite cell. With the infusion of these squeaky-clean cells into the system, the mitochondria seem to rejuvenate. (The phenomenon has been called “gene shifting.”) If Tarnopolsky is right, exercise in older adults can roll back the odometer. After six months of twice weekly strength exercise training, he has shown, the biochemical, physiological and genetic signature of older muscle is “turned back” nearly 15 or 20 years.

This is all so very hopeful.

Peter Dale - National Aerobics Championship 1989 USA Individual Male

Isabel passed along this link. Holy crap. Now I"m dating myself but I used to think guys who could do this, dressed like this were hot. But then again I was about 16. What did I know?



I used to rock outfits like this. Body suit up the bum, I'd add a little matching belt and leg warmers, maybe even a head band.
Thanks Isabel. This makes me feel freakin' old reminiscing on how I started getting passionate about fitness. How far we've come. I wonder what we're going to look back on twenty years from now and laugh about. Like haha we used to do that didn't we look silly and look at what we were wearing. It's going to happen. Or at the very least the kids twenty years from now are going to laugh at us.

But truth be told, I found hard core aerobics just at the right time. It served a very important purpose. It took the edge off of what were anxious teenage years. High impact aerobics gave me the endorphins I needed to have even a temporary high, helped me escape from what was am angst ridden home life and probably saved me from getting into more trouble than I did.

It was Fitco in Victoria with the owner Marty and his mustache similar to Peter Dale's cranking the tunes, smiling and giving the young girls a little pat on the bum that got me hooked. My hat goes off to you Marty for being a part of what has now been well over a decade of working in the fitness industry and at least 20 years of consistently exercising.

I might have looked silly, but I sure as hell felt good. So for any of you reading this, don't be afraid to risk looking silly in your pursuit of fitness. Whatever lights you up inside will serve a very important purpose in your evolution.

New press from THE KIT plus online video

I'm so lucky to get the kind of press that I do! The wonderful people at a fun and swanky new online magazine used me for their Winter issue. If you follow the link below and go to the Fit Kit section (page 154), you'll see a spread and links to video with me demonstrating my Anywhere Bodyweight Workout and the Crunch Free Core Workout.

Enjoy! And thanks to Erinn Steringa from THE KIT for thinking of me for their publication.

	Look inside >
WORKOUT

The missing piece of advice for Jian Ghomeshi

Jian Ghomeshi is hmmmm...what words could summarize his iconic presence in Canadian culture? Who else could've handled Billy Bob with so much grace? He's just so...special.

I heard he had his fitness/health regime critiqued in the Globe and Mail so of course I had to take a look.

“I work a 12-hour-day and average five hours of sleep. I’m up at 6:30 in the morning, I do my show, then I’m at the network all day, spending much of the day preparing for next day’s show. I don’t eat red meat; I haven’t eaten mammals in years, so I eat mostly vegetables, and fish."

“I was a caffeine addict. I’d do my show and drink a giant, powerful coffee, have another coffee in the afternoon, then do a triple espresso to have energy to go out at night. I was waking up drinking Red Bull, sometimes, to be up for the show.

"I was finding dramatic ups and downs in my energy throughout the day: I’d want to crash in the mid-afternoon; I’d get to a point in the evening I was bleary-eyed; I couldn’t speak, but then my energy would come back. My energy was disconcertingly inconsistent. And in broadcasting it gets pretty sedentary.

"I was feeling stress, headaches, pains, discomfort, and I was getting really tired. Friends said to exercise. I really needed an outlet for my energy. It’s kind of like the stress of the job, anxiety and fatigue comes out when I’m working out. It’s a healthy outlet for me, mentally and physically.”

My challenge

“I have a terrible habit I’ve socialized myself into from years of touring in a band [Moxy Fruvous], and that is eating at 2 in the morning. And it’s not often the healthiest things.”

Seems he's a caffeine addict. Pretty hard core in fact. I'm sure his days living a rock n' roll lifestyle are hard to let go of, the staying out late habit but now he's got more day time work hours, can't sleep in and has to get to work so darn early. Can't really do both as we get older. It catches up with every one.

The advice to him was as follows:

Registered holistic nutritionist Joy McCarthy at 889 Yonge, a yoga and lifestyle spa, says night eating is a hard habit to break, but self-talk is an effective behaviour-changing strategy.

“Jian needs to ask himself, ‘Am I really hungry?’ Because being mindful of what he’s eating and why he’s eating will help break the habit.”

Snack for stamina

For sustainable energy, he should switch to complex carbs such as brown rice, quinoa and millet, and eat between-meal nibbles to prevent energy dips, keeping stamina high.

“Jian should eat a handful of brainy walnuts and four dried apricots, a half-scoop of chocolate protein powder & almond milk, or vegetable sticks and hummus – all blood-sugar-balancing snacks.”

But Jian, really.

She's missing the big picture.

You won't even out your energy levels through your day if you only get 5 hours sleep per night. Sleep deprivation is going to inhibit your ability to build muscle (sleep is when muscles fibres repair and get thicker), fight cravings and kick your caffeine habit. I hate to say it but you're not 20 anymore. You might have to start thinking about sleeping at least 7 hours a night. Your body's cravings for caffeine are telling you something is out of balance big time.

Further, food cravings aren't just psychological. When we're sleep deprived our bodies over produce a hormone telling up to eat more and under produce a hormone telling us we're full. The late night snacking is really just because your body is looking for ways to stay awake. It's not natural to sleep 5 hours a day. We need more for optimal health.

Overall, people sleep at least an hour less per night than we did a couple decades ago. Sleep deprived people are more likely to hang onto belly fat. Plus you aren't ever going to really lose the little belly or keep it off if you don't start getting some shut eye. Sleep deprivation also makes us produce more cortisol, the stress hormone that just isn't a good thing in large doses and can be directly linked to belly fat!

So...

Dear Jian,

Go to bed to lose the caffeine addiction and late night snacking. At least try to get a bit more sleep. Come to think of it, the simplest solution to your late night snacking is shut eye. If you're sleeping at 2am you sure aren't going to be eating.

Jane

Outdoor bodyweight workout for this gorgeous Saturday

Tomorrow's weather in T.O. is supposed to be about 14 degrees and sunny. So thought it might be a great idea for the desk bound inside dwellers to find a way to get outside, sweat a little and soak up some precious Vitamin D.

So here's a workout you can do outside, anywhere tomorrow! Whoever does this workout over the weekend and sends me a picture of their sweaty selves will get a gold star and a prize! You heard it. You can earn yourself a $20 gift certificate for anything at Urbanfitt just for having the discipline to kick your own butt outside. No cheating!

This weekend warrior workout is a quickie! It'll take you about 30 minutes max. Try to find a field or a spacious park to do it.

Here goes:

Warm up with some:
10 Inch worms
10 Dynamic leg and arm swings (each)
16 Reserve lunges

Now the hard part:
1) Sprint at full speed down the length of the field/track/path 3 times (about 30-45 seconds)
2) Lunge back all the way
3) Drop and do 15 muay thai push ups (see video below). If you can't do muay thai push ups then regular ones will do ;)

4) Stay in push up position and do 20 firehydrants/mountain climbers
5) Find a bench or a ledge and do 15-20 tricep dips

Do it all again at least two more times.

Then make sure you stretch your butt, hamstrings, hip flexors and whatever needs it.

Enjoy the sweat! Remember if you do it take a picture of as proof and get a little pressie.

Jane

Visioning your 2011 with Ruth Tamari

I recently connected with a woman, Ruth Tamari, and wanted to share an amazing opportunity to start taking charge of what your 2011 is going to look like. I love fitness. I love helping people feel empowered through improved strength and stamina but we are so much more than our physical selves. We actually need help moving forward in other parts of our lives.

So check this out. Might be a great thing for you to do!

Visioning Your 2011
The Art of Creating a Year You Love

Experience the power of visioning and creating a year of fulfillment for your career, personal development, health, family, relationships and much more! Dream big, breathe into your creativity, and get ready to create your own unique vision board or vision story for 2011.

Come learn more about Vision Boards and Vision Stories, how to create them yourself, how to use yours in 2011 and beyond that will connect you to a year and life you love!

A Vision Board and Vision Story are representations of how a life you love look, feel and sound like. The act of creating, focusing and choosing can powerfully propel you forward and keep you laser-focused on your dreams and goals.

This half-day workshop includes:
A certified coach to facilitate the process of creating and fulfilling your life’s purpose
On-the-spot coaching in self-discovery and personal growth
All the materials you need to create your 2011 vision board or vision story
A FREE copy of the NEW 121-Dreams Starter Kit to ignite your life purpose and have a beautiful structure to keep it stoked
Refreshments and munchies
A fun, inspiring and creative day
All you need to bring is yourself! And you’ll have lots of time left for holiday events or for yourself!

Limited to the first 7 participants.

Date: Sunday, December 5th, 2010
Time: 12:30-4:00pm
Place: The Centre for Social Innovation, 4th Floor, The Sunshine Room
215 Spadina Avenue, north of Queen Street, www.socialinnovation.ca
Cost: Early Bird Price: $50 if paid on or before Wednesday, November 24th
$60 from November 25th onwards
Payment by cheque or email money transfer

Facilitated By: Ruth Tamari, MEd, CPCC, ACC
Certified Professional Coactive Coach, Career & Life Transitions
Website: www.ruthtamari.com
Blog: www.ruthtamari.wordpress.com
Email: info@ruthtamari.com


To register: Email info@ruthtamari.com or call 416-972-6896

U.S. food policy just got cheesier

The majority of people don't like to go down the conspiracy route when it comes to looking at how industry and the government collude to influence what we choose to put in our mouths. But even the New York Times is willing to expose the fact that maybe everyone's expanding waist lines might have something to do with back room deals in high government offices negotiated by conservative lobbyists representing the interests of industry twisting the arms of the powers that be. Perhaps it's the precarious nature of the western economic machine that forces compromises to be made in the interest of artificially extending the profitability of dairy farming. But anyone with their heads buried in the sand should be waking up to the fact that what we eat or what is put in our food is largely dictated by fat white men sitting in cushy offices with their suits bursting at the seams.

This is taken from New York Times Well blog.


Domino’s Pizza was hurting early last year. Domestic sales had fallen, and a survey of big pizza chain customers left the company tied for the worst tasting pies.

Then help arrived from an organization called Dairy Management. It teamed up with Domino’s to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese, and proceeded to devise and pay for a $12 million marketing campaign.

Consumers devoured the cheesier pizza, and sales soared by double digits. “This partnership is clearly working,” Brandon Solano, the Domino’s vice president for brand innovation, said in a statement to The New York Times.

But as healthy as this pizza has been for Domino’s, one slice contains as much as two-thirds of a day’s maximum recommended amount of saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease and is high in calories.

And Dairy Management, which has made cheese its cause, is not a private business consultant. It is a marketing creation of the United States Department of Agriculture — the same agency at the center of a federal anti-obesity drive that discourages over-consumption of some of the very foods Dairy Management is vigorously promoting.

Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat. Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese.

Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese a year, nearly triple the 1970 rate. Cheese has become the largest source of saturated fat; an ounce of many cheeses contains as much saturated fat as a glass of whole milk.

When Michelle Obama implored restaurateurs in September to help fight obesity, she cited the proliferation of cheeseburgers and macaroni and cheese. “I want to challenge every restaurant to offer healthy menu options,” she told the National Restaurant Association’s annual meeting.

But in a series of confidential agreements approved by agriculture secretaries in both the Bush and Obama administrations, Dairy Management has worked with restaurants to expand their menus with cheese-laden products.

Consider the Taco Bell steak quesadilla, with cheddar, pepper jack, mozzarella and a creamy sauce. “The item used an average of eight times more cheese than other items on their menu,” the Agriculture Department said in a report, extolling Dairy Management’s work — without mentioning that the quesadilla has more than three-quarters of the daily recommended level of saturated fat and sodium.

Dairy Management, whose annual budget approaches $140 million, is largely financed by a government-mandated fee on the dairy industry. But it also receives several million dollars a year from the Agriculture Department, which appoints some of its board members, approves its marketing campaigns and major contracts and periodically reports to Congress on its work.

The organization’s activities, revealed through interviews and records, provide a stark example of inherent conflicts in the Agriculture Department’s historical roles as both marketer of agriculture products and America’s nutrition police.

In one instance, Dairy Management spent millions of dollars on research to support a national advertising campaign promoting the notion that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products, records and interviews show. The campaign went on for four years, ending in 2007, even though other researchers — one paid by Dairy Management itself — found no such weight-loss benefits.

When the campaign was challenged as false, government lawyers defended it, saying the Agriculture Department “reviewed, approved and continually oversaw” the effort.

Dr. Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health and a former member of the federal government’s nutrition advisory committee, said: “The U.S.D.A. should not be involved in these programs that are promoting foods that we are consuming too much of already. A small amount of good-flavored cheese can be compatible with a healthy diet, but consumption in the U.S. is enormous and way beyond what is optimally healthy.”

The Agriculture Department declined to make top officials available for interviews for this article, and Dairy Management would not comment. In answering written questions, the department said that dairy promotion was intended to bolster farmers and rural economies, and that its oversight left Dairy Management’s board with “significant independence” in deciding how best to support those interests.

It could be said this is a case of sucking and blowing at the same time. While we are being told that obesity is a crisis that will soon overtake smoking as a killer, the US government is making fast food even greasier . Of course, eating at fast food restaurants like Dominos is kind of a no brainer in terms of health implications. It sure doesn't help the folks that succomb to crap food as primary nourishment.

And by the way smug Canadians, our obesity stats are catching up with the US at an incredible pace, faster than most people want to admit.

The 12 by 4 workout

Sometimes I kind of pull workouts out of my arss, like tonight at Urban Warrior. They always stick my the usual full body conditioning, high intensity thing that gets people fit fast and burns fat.

Tonight I surprised the class with the 12 x 4 workout.

I picked 12 exercises that we did 12 reps of 4 times around from start to finish. And by the way we didn't take any real rest periods. That was half the fun of it...getting the heart rate up high while doing some body weight strength exercises.

This is what we did:

1) reserves lunges
2) push ups
3) burpies
4) plie squat jumps
5) side plank twists
6) leap frogs
7) firehydrants
8) pull ups
9) russian twists
10) forward lunges
11) jumping jacks
12) single leg squats

Give it a go. You can do it anywhere, apart from the pull ups. It challenges you in a different way than workouts you might have been doing.

Fun fun fun.

Jane

American College of Sports Medicine predicts fitness trends for 2011

I'm getting to the point in the year when I start thinking about the fitness trends I see coming for the New Year. I actually never really stop thinking about where the fitness industry is headed but maybe I strain my brain a little bit more near the end of the year.

The American College of Sports Medicine publishes a list of their predicted trends every year based on a massive survey of worldwide fitness professionals. I love taking a look at their survey results because I know I live in a bit of a bubble off to the side of the traditional fitness industry.

The College surveyed more than 19,000 fitness professionals to come up with worldwide fitness trends for 2011, a survey the group has been conducting since 2007.

Their full findings haven't hit mainstream media yet (if you find them let me know!) but USA Today wrote a little piece just a few days ago highlighting the survey findings as follows:


Boot-camp workouts, strength training and core exercises are among this year's top 20 trends. Pilates and balance training, listed in the past, didn't make the cut this time.

1) Boot-camp workouts

These structured, high-intensity workouts, modeled after military-style training, include cardiovascular, strength, endurance and flexibility exercises. The classes often combine sports-type drills and calisthenics.

"These workouts are not for the faint of heart," Thompson says. "Expect the workout to be led by a drill sergeant who has little to no patience for people lagging behind."

The programs are designed for the more experienced exerciser who wants or needs some additional motivation, or to try something different to spice up the workout routine, Thompson says. Class members move from one exercise to the next with little or no rest.

2) Core training

This trend stresses the strength and conditioning of the stabilizing muscles of the abdomen, back and chest, Thompson says. The workout emphasizes everything but your arms, legs and head.

Many fitness experts believe people with a weak core have poor posture, and those with strong core muscles can function better in all aspects of their daily lives.

Core exercises are an element of many popular fitness programs.

Push-ups, sit-ups and curl-ups are examples of basic core exercises, but some fitness professionals now use such novelties as kettlebells and stability balls, he says.

3) Strength training

Most people have a vision of bulky men as being the only people who lift weights, but everyone from teenagers to the elderly should be strength training, Thompson says.

The government's physical activity guidelines recommend that adults do muscle-strengthening activities at a moderate- or high-intensity level for all major muscle groups two or more days a week.

So what do I think about the trends listed above? I think most of us who work out on a regular basis would agree to a certain extent. But I'm going to hit this 2011 predicted fitness trends hard in the next months with more specificity and detail based on what I've seen shift at Urbanfitt in the last few years. Stay posted!

Why we all sweat differently

The New York Times Well blog is always a great place for me to check out. Today I found an article about sweat sweat sweat. Why do men sweat more than women? Why do some women sweat more than other women? Why do fit people sweat more than unfit people? Well this article outlines an study that really touches on all of these questions.

Fit women seem to sweat differently than unfit people of either sex, and quite differently than fit men, a fact that has implications for sports performance. It also may have some bearing on what it has meant, since prehistory, to be female.

What the researchers found was that the fit men, unsurprisingly, perspired the most, significantly more than the fit women, especially during the more intense exercise. But the athletic men weren’t using more sweat glands. The fit women had just as many glands active and pumping; they produced less sweat from each gland. Meanwhile, the unfit women, by a wide margin, perspired the least, especially during the strenuous cycling, and became physiologically hotter — their core temperatures rising notably — before they began to sweat at full capacity. These results, the scientists concluded, “revealed a sex difference in the effects of physical training on the sweating response” and, just as important, “a sex difference” in “the control of sweating rate to an increase in exercise intensity.” In other words, the women, whether fit or not, were less adept of ridding themselves of body heat by drenching themselves in sweat.



But why do some women get all drenched in sweat while they work out and others don't. The sweaty gals out there get rather disturbed by the fact they sweat a lot, even sometimes feel a little unlady like. Well I say, lady schmady. Women sweat.



“We know that fitness changes the sweating response,” said Timothy Cable, Ph.D., a professor of exercise physiology at John Moores University in Liverpool, England, who has extensively studied female athletes and how they perspire. As someone becomes more fit, his or her body begins to sweat at a lower body temperature. This is important, because “the body has a critical core temperature,” Dr. Cable said, which occurs at about 104 degrees, after which the brain simply “shuts down the motor cortex.” Unbidden, your legs stop churning and you curl up on the sidewalk until your core temperature drops (or a kind passerby calls 911). Sweating delays the onset of this critical heat buildup by dissipating the excess heat through evaporation. If you start to sweat at a lower temperature and increase your sweating rate as you get hotter during hard exercise, you’re less likely to reach the critical temperature.

I love it when I get a new unfit client who swears she never sweats, that no women in her family sweat and that don't take her lack of sweat as a sign she isn't working. I just kind of nod and laugh a bit to myself. Everyone needs to sweat when they're working hard. Those self proclaimed no sweaters soon realize they've just been taking it too easy all along.

Personally, the more I sweat during a workout the higher I'm going to feel post workout. It might not be feminine in some people's books, but I heart to sweat. Screw being a demure little lady.

A Headlight Hottie who shines

I got an email today that stopped me in my tracks. Sometimes I wonder if I'm headed in the right direction, if I'm making the right choices about my work/life to ensure I'm aligned with what's most important to me. One of the women who has been a part of Urban Warrior group training for quite a while now sent me this email below. What a gift she sent my way.
It was like a sign post saying "Keep going forward". Her insights are truly valuable and her ability to reflect are so evolved.

Here's what she said.

Hey Jane -

I've been meaning to tell you something. In one of our classes a couples weeks back, you were talking about your Breast Cancer survival client who came to class before her chemo treatment. You were talking about how inspiring and how dedicated they all are, and how they inspire you.

You made me think. I started thinking about how I have felt really crappy about my body over the last few years (actually for majority of my life) and how it is a struggle for me to get to the gym some days, yet I am perfectly healthy individual. Yet, these women are going through one of the most challenging and life altering events in their lifetime - the difference between life and death - and they manage to get themselves to your class. For a few minutes, I kind of felt ashamed of ever uttering one word of complaint. Then, I started thinking about it further.

I felt so strongly about that class, your comments, these women, my mom (even though her's is another form of cancer), women around me and women that I don't even know ... I thought about, for the first time in my life, my body is actually a healthy shell. I've always viewed myself as unhealthy, fat, overweight, etc. For the first time I realized something, I was one of the lucky ones to have a healthy & operating vessel. That struck me to the core ... it was a new way of looking at things.

I went into work the next day and emailed my good friends. We started a team for the Weekend To End Women's Cancer next September 10th and 11th. We are called "The Headlight Hotties". We've just started, but I'm looking forward to the challenge but most importantly, I feel like I've already won. I have a new way of thinking.

For that, I wanted to thank you.

And now my thanks go to you for your generosity in spirit for passing that along. Thanks for shining your hot headlights on my day.

If you want to support The Headlight Hotties you can donate right now!

She says life is sometimes like child birth

She moved back to a small town outside of Montreal last winter to be closer to her large family. If I were to list the challenges, struggles and even the worst kind of tragedy that could touch one person’s life in an extremely short period of time, you wouldn’t believe me. Thing is she’s so much more than just alive, she’s living and fighting and reaching for moments of joy. From the moment she opened to door to welcome us this weekend, I was in awe.

Friday night after the kids went to bed we sat across from each other at her dining table, glass of red wine in our hands and we caught up on the last several years. She told me the story of being in labor with her second child, how the break between contractions gave her just enough time to recharge for the pain. She remembered laboring alone in the dark, meditating between the contractions and knew then that there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The struggle was taking her to a beautiful outcome.

This is how she explained she’s made it through her last year. Every so often she gets a wave of pain and struggles with her circumstance. But she gets enough time between her pain to recharge and find gratitude for the gift of her children and the people she loves. She knows that after this immense struggle she’s going to come out a more compassionate and grateful human being.

We spent hours talking about our experiences and how they’ve molded us, about our fears and struggles and what we’ve learned. She wasn’t afraid to reach out to people she loves and share her pain and ask for help. Her family completely stepped up and has been there for her. She fights for the ability to feel gratitude and she works hard at healing herself. She’s making it through her hardship because she works hard to feel better and wants to genuinely learn and grow from her hardship. She’s also not afraid to look at her pain, let it be in the room with her and she doesn’t put on a face. She’s authentic.

I’m writing this while sitting on the train, my soon to be seven year old beside me. I know life isn’t always going to be easy for her. My weekend away reminds me that one of the most important things we should do as parents is to show our kids, through our own behaviour and language, how to deal with struggle, pain, disappointment and heart ache.

We can either teach them that pain softens us or hardens us, makes us more compassionate or more angry and outwardly focused on others’ shortcomings. Thank you to my beautiful friend. Despite thinking our visit was really about being a good friend to her, I needed to be around her fill my heart and renew my inspiration to fight for beauty in life.

Victoria's Kitchen COCONUT CURRIED PUMPKIN AND APPLE SOUP recipe

Last night, I enjoyed a fantastic Thanksgiving meal at Victoria's and was one of the first people to sample her new Coconut Curried Pumpkin Apple soup. Yum yum. We enjoyed a lively dinner as per usual. No one she knows is boring or pedestrian to say the least. Victoria has been feeding me for years and several years ago she decided to offer her home cooked meals to the general public via victoriaskitchen.ca, a frozen meal delivery service.

She doesn't often share recipes but after last night's soup success she passed this along to post.

This is for you Anette : )

2 onions
5 cloves of garlic
4 " grated ginger
2 cans pumpkin puree (though baking your own would be better, just didn't have time or space in oven)
2-3 tbsp curry powder
1/3 cup of raw cane sugar or brown sugar
1 tbsp garam masala
2-3 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp HOT hungarian paprika
5 northern spy apples ( or any other tart juicy apple
6-8 cups of veg/chicken stock
1 can coconut milk
Saute onions in olive oil/coconut oil, add garlic and ginger and spices ( make sure it doesn't burn), add the puree, stock, apples and sugar. Simmer for about 20 mins or until apples are soft and then puree with a hand blender, and add the coconut milk.

DELICIOUS!

You can always sub any kind of squash or sweet potato and add more or less of the spices depending on how spicy you want it. I didn't measure, but I think that those are close to what I added.
Let me know how it works out!!

Now if any of you want to enjoy this soup but don't want to make it, just visit victoriaskitchen.ca to order now or call 416.894.4498.

Thanksgiving Gratitude - exercising it

I really don't care if you think I'm a big cheeseball for posting this. Personally, I think living life with as much gratitude as possible makes a person more beautiful than a perfectly toned ass or any other superficially beautiful attribute for that matter. The question is are we born with a gratitude gene or is it something like exercising a muscle, something we can build with practice?

What would happen if we extended the tradition of giving thanks, typically celebrated just once a year during the holiday season, throughout the entire year? Such gratitude would be rewarded with better health, say researchers.

No pill? No strict diet or exercise regimen? Can just a positive emotion such as gratitude guarantee better health? It may be a dramatic departure from what we've been taught about how to get healthier, but the connection between gratitude and health actually goes back a long way.

"Thousands of years of literature talk about the benefits of cultivating gratefulness as a virtue," says University of California Davis psychology professor Robert Emmons. Throughout history, philosophers and religious leaders have extolled gratitude as a virtue integral to health and well-being. Now, through a recent movement called positive psychology, mental health professionals are taking a close look at how virtues such as gratitude can benefit our health. And they're reaping some promising results.

Taken from women.webmd.com

Positive psychology emerged in the last ten years or so and has taken a serious look at the impact experiencing gratitude in day to day life has on our health.

Researchers at the University of Connecticut found that gratitude can have a protective effect against heart attacks. Studying people who had experienced one heart attack, the researchers found that those patients who saw benefits and gains from their heart attack, such as becoming more appreciative of life, experienced a lower risk of having another heart attack.

The research on gratitude challenges the idea of a "set point" for happiness, a belief that, just as our body has a set point for weight, each person may have a genetically-determined level of happiness. The set point concept is supported by research that shows that people return to a characteristic level of happiness a short time after both unusually good and unusually bad events. But the research on gratitude suggests that people can move their set point upward to some degree, enough to have a measurable effect on both their outlook and their health.

Taken from Counting your Blessings

I know that my own ability to reach for gratitude has helped me keep my head above water many times in my life. I hope my gratitude muscles get stronger and stronger, not atrophied and lazy. I came across this little silly video on youtube and had to post it mainly because it shows some beautiful footage of my home town, Victoria BC. The 'gratidudes' who shot this clearly believe that there is a mind body connection in the pursuit of gratitude.



Happy Thanksgiving to you all and thanks to Victoria and everyone at her feast for making this thanksgiving so memorable.

Cheran's Play "Not By Our Tears" returns to Toronto

I am so fortunate to be surrounded by human beings who are creating change and communicate humanist ideals through their work.
Cheran is a friend and a client and a renowned Tamil peace activist, writer and a phenomenal human being.

Asylum Theatre Group will present the play Not By Our Tears at the Robert Gill Theatre in Toronto on 13 November 2010 in two shows at 4:30PM and 8:00PM. Written by Toronto based poet and playwright R. Cheran, directed by Dushy Gnanapragasam, and designed by Eugine Vincent, the play was originally produced in November 2009 and had its premiere in Toronto. After spending a year touring various North American cities, the play is returning to its original venue.

Thirty years of war in Sri Lanka had an enormous impact on Tamil literature and theatre. The war came to an end in May 2009. The last phase of the war - described as a "War without Witnesses"- cost more than 40,000 Tamil civilian lives and the internment of more than 300,000 Tamils in various military-run camps in the Northern Sri Lanka. Not By Our Tears is the voice of thousands of voiceless people that were interned. While chronicling the story of internment, loss and trauma, the play skillfully articulates a poetic vision of mourning and hope.

Not by our Tears belongs to a special genre in the tradition of Tamil drama, commonly known as “verse play” (paa naadakam) or “play in poetry”. The objective of such performances is to offer a visual and oral representation of poetry. Traditionally, some of the most important plays in Tamil have been verse plays. In more recent years, this tradition of theatre merged with the practice of performing poetry orally for groups of interested listeners. The confluence of the two has given to this genre a particular resonance. A verse play is both contemporary and ancient; it combines the immediacy of oral poetry with the aesthetic distance of theatrical performance. Based on the English translation of contemporary Tamil resistance poetry by three major Tamil poets, namely, R. Cheran, V.I.S. Jayapalan and Puthuvai Ratnathurai, Not by our Tears skillfully weaves memory, history and narrative to evoke a haunting and heart-wrenching image of internment, loss, nostalgia, and resistance.

Event: R. Cheran’s verse play Not By Our Tears

Date: Saturday 13 November 2010; 4:30PM and 8:00PM

Venue: Robert Gill Theatre (inside University of Toronto’s Koffler Centre, 3rd floor)

214 College Street at St George Street (enter through St. George Street)

Tickets: $20 @ Box office: 416-978-7986

Info: Asylum Theatre Group: www.asylumtheatre.ca

Robert Gill Theatre: http://www.graddrama.utoronto.ca/theatres.html

FROM THE GROUND UP LECTURE & SUNDAY SUPPER (WITH RAJ PATEL & JAMIE KENNEDY) Oct 17th

Anyone been hearing as much about Stop Community Food Centre?

This is what they are about taken right off their website.

The Stop Community Food Centre strives to increase access to healthy food in a manner that maintains dignity, builds community and challenges inequality.

What We Do

The Stop has two locations: at our main office at 1884 Davenport Road we provide frontline services to our community, including a drop-in, food bank, perinatal program, civic engagement, bake ovens and markets, community cooking, community advocacy, sustainable food systems education and urban agriculture. The Stop’s Green Barn, located at 601 Christie Street, is a sustainable food production and education centre which houses a greenhouse, food systems education programs, a sheltered garden, community bake oven and compost demonstration centre.

Philosophy

We believe that healthy food is a basic human right. We recognize that the ability to access healthy food is often related to multiple issues and not just a result of low income. At The Stop, we’ve taken a holistic approach to achieve real change in our community’s access to healthy food.

We strive to meet basic food needs and, at the same time, foster opportunities for community members to build mutual support networks, connect to resources and find their voices on the underlying causes of hunger and poverty.

A key tenet of The Stop's approach is that community members must be involved in making decisions about how our organization operates. When program participants are involved -- as front-line volunteers, program advisory committee members, gardeners or cooks -- the stigma associated with receiving free food is often diminished or erased. While our food access programming helps confront the issue of hunger, it also creates opportunities for community members to forge their own responses to hunger. We believe this approach will end the way charity divides us as a society -- the powerful and the powerless, the self-sufficient and the shamed. At The Stop, we are creating a new model to fight poverty and hunger: a community food centre.

I checked out their events calendar to see if there was a way for me to go get involved and get a first hand taste for what they are all about. In their October calendar they listed this amazing event I would love to check out.

FROM THE GROUND UP LECTURE & SUNDAY SUPPER (WITH RAJ PATEL & JAMIE KENNEDY), OCT 17

The Gardiner Museum's annual lecture features this year the award-winning writer, activist and academic, Raj Patel. Best known for his New York Times bestseller, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Patel has worked for the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the United Nations, and is now an outspoken critic of all three.

Recent arguments suggest that local food, with its reliance on small-truck transport from producer to market, produces more carbon dioxide emissions than much of the food shipped huge distances. For the 2010 From the Ground Up lecture presented by Robert Rose Inc., Mr. Patel will offer a passionate defense that local food is the preferable alternative. Once the true (and often hidden) costs of global food production are accounted for, it becomes clear that local food has far fewer economic, social and environmental negative impacts.

Following the lecture, Raj Patel will welcome guests to Sunday Supper at the Gardiner. Chef Jamie Kennedy will offer a delicious three-course meal that celebrates the fall harvest and pays tribute to the tradition of Sunday supper, the comforting ritual that brings family and friends together to celebrate connections around delicious home-cooked food.

Where: Gardiner Museum, 111 Queen's Park
When: Sunday, October 17, 2:30 pm (lecture); 5 pm (Sunday Supper)
How much: Lecture only $10 ($8.50 for students); Lecture and Sunday Supper $200 (or $150 each for 3 or more). To purchase tickets, please visit the Gardiner Museum website




BTW Raj Patel has a blog you can check out as well. This guy seems like someone really worth listening to.

Health Benefits of Music

Anyone who knows me knows that music is like oxygen to me. I can't live without it. I use it in different ways to deepen my experience of moments in life, both beautiful and painful. I look to it as a way to enrich my life, connect with my body, my spirit and with other people.

Someone posted this on facebook and I had to share it. It is clear that these smaller people are allowing music to move them, take over their consciousness for a few minutes uniting them in a shared experience.



All this brings me to music therapy and the health benefits music might provide all of us.

What is music therapy?

Music therapy is the skillful use of music and musical elements by an accredited music therapist to promote, maintain, and restore mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Music has nonverbal, creative, structural, and emotional qualities. These are used in the therapeutic relationship to facilitate contact, interaction, self-awareness, learning, self-expression, communication, and personal development.

Music therapy is used with individuals of various ages, abilities, and musical backgrounds in institutional, community and private practice settings. This includes but is not limited to:

Acquired Brain Injury
AIDS
Autism and other Pervasive Development Disabilities
Critical Care
Developmental Disabilities
Emotional Traumas
Geriatric Care
Hearing Impairments
Mental Health
Neonatal Care
Obstetrics
Oncology
Pain Control
Palliative Care
Personal Growth
Physical Disabilities
Speech and Language Impairments
Substance Abuse
Teens at Risk
Victims of Abuse
Visual Impairments

(taken from Canadian Association for Music Therapy)

When clients come in for sessions, I'm often concerned with finding the right music to fit with their mood or personality. When I started teaching group fitness in 1991, eek! getting old ;), I would spend loads of time thinking about my music choices. Sometimes music just clicks and really adds to whatever experience people are having while they are moving, sweating, grunting and focusing on their well being.

If you haven't found your personal connection with music yet, I would bet you just haven't explored enough genres or artists. Normally, I can point people in the right direction. Don't be afraid to ask.

I'm booking me a massage

Here's why...not that we actually need a study to convince us that massage is good for us. Kind of one of those no brainers right?

Who doesn't love getting a good rub down and walk away from a great massage feeling like the world is a beautiful place. It might not last but every moment of vitality we can grab is precious!

Does a good massage do more than just relax your muscles? To find out, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles recruited 53 healthy adults and randomly assigned 29 of them to a 45-minute session of deep-tissue Swedish massage and the other 24 to a session of light massage.

Volunteers who received Swedish massage experienced significant decreases in levels of the stress hormone cortisol in blood and saliva, and in arginine vasopressin, a hormone that can lead to increases in cortisol. They also had increases in the number of lymphocytes, white blood cells that are part of the immune system.

Volunteers who had the light massage experienced greater increases in oxytocin, a hormone associated with contentment, than the Swedish massage group, and bigger decreases in adrenal corticotropin hormone, which stimulates the adrenal glands to release cortisol.

Taken from New York Times

I prefer a deep tissue massage personally. I want to kind of have to bite down on something while someone gets the grissle out of my muscles. Can't stand massages I've had by people who don't know what they're doing and just kind of move massage oil around without putting a little elbow grease into it.

Looking forward to a massage ASAP. Thanks New York Times for reminding me to book one. This study just goes to show, yet again, restorative activities should be as important as the sweaty butt kicking workouts.

Polaris Award and Finding Musical Inspiration

Music is a HUGE part of my life. I'm spoiled because I have the time and the need to find new music, explore new genres and find good music fits for my clients. It's part of the experience at Urbanfitt so I can justify the time I spend listening.

It's not unusual for me to forfeit TV or reading in the evening and put head phones on, write for pleasure and let whatever I'm listening to impact me to my deepest core.

One really easy go to source to expand your musical horizons is the Polaris Music Award. Most Canadian music lovers already know about it. But for those music lovers who don't, this is the go to place to find new bands and new sounds that might just be your thing.

Over the past few months, we've been carefully following the fifth instalment of the Polaris Music Prize. First, the jury announced its long list of forty nominees, and then whittled those down to a short list of ten. Last night (September 20), the grand jury revealed its pick for the best Canadian album released between June 1, 2009 and May 31, 2010: Les Chemins De Verre by atmospheric rockers Karkwa.

The Montreal band took home the $20,000 prize as well the as the honour of their LP being deemed the best release of the past year based on artistic merit alone. Karkwa join the ranks of past winners Final Fantasy, Patrick Watson, Cairbou and Fucked Up, becoming the first Francophone band to win the prize.

The winner was announced at a gala at Toronto's Masonic Temple. For the second consecutive year, the evening featured live performances from all ten nominated artists: the Besnard Lakes, Broken Social Scene, Caribou, Karkwa, Dan Mangan, Owen Pallett, Radio Radio, the Sadies, Shad, and Tegan and Sara.

All you have to do is visit the Polaris Music Award website to get a music sample of the short list of nominees. Check it out. Right hand side of the page. Maybe you'll even drop into the West End's favourite music store, Soundscapes and show your support for these folks.

LMFAO

Nuf said.

Depression can break your heart

Last year I visited the Body Worlds Exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre.

"Body Worlds (German title: Körperwelten) is a traveling exhibition of preserved human bodies and body parts that are prepared using a technique called plastination to reveal inner anatomical structures. The exhibition's developer and promoter is German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who invented the plastination technique in the late 1970s at the University of Heidelberg."

Body Worlds is shrouded in controversy but nonetheless I visited it and was moved, disgusted and intrigued. Even learned a few things.

Body Worlds 3 was focused on the heart, a part of us that is so much more than a collection of muscle fibres, valves and tissue. Our hearts explode, ache, skip beats and even seem to stop in certain situations despite our ability to keep breathing.

Gunther von Hagens spread his own wonder with the human heart and presented recent research regarding the impact of heart break and depression on the heart's life span and overall health.

Given I've worked with clients with a particular set of medical conditions or illnesses, I've always wondered if there is a correlation between personality types, propensity towards anxiety and depression and physical illness including heart disease. I've also wondered what those gut wrenching, heart breaking moments in life have had on my heart muscle. What's the physical impact on the heart during times of suffering?

For years cardiologists and mental health experts have known that depression raises risk for heart attack by 50 percent or more.

But what hasn’t been clear is why depressed people have more heart problems. Does depression cause some biological change that increases risk? Does the inflammatory process that leads to heart disease also trigger depression?

The answer may be far simpler. A study done in 2008 suggests that people who are depressed are simply less likely to exercise, a finding that explains their dramatically higher risk for heart problems.

Researchers, led by doctors from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco, recruited 1,017 participants with heart disease to track their health and lifestyle habits. As they expected, those patients who had symptoms of depression fared worse. About 10 percent of depressed heart patients had additional heart problems, during the study, compared with 6.7 percent of the other patients. After controlling for other illnesses and the severity of heart disease, the finding translates to a 31 percent higher risk of heart problems among the depressed people, according to the study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Taken from NYTimes.com

So maybe it's not such a big mystery at all. When we feel like crapola or down in the dumps, we are less likely to take care of ourselves. This is the time we need to try really hard to pull ourselves up and take action. If we let the domino effect of a rough patch in life get the best of our get up and go, we might just end up leaving this wonderful life prematurely.

But I don't think the impact of emotional and spiritual pain on our hearts can be fully understood in such a simplistic way. If you have ever fallen in love, you can literally feel the centre of your chest opening, softening, aching and expanding. And when love fades or is taken away during a break up or death, there is a pain so incredibly real and tangible in the centre of our chest that just can't be measured.

Sure. doing the good things we don't feel like doing can be a true test of our character and resilience. Wallowing for too long is just not good. But how we choose to let pain impact us in the long run is up to us and clearly acts of self love like taking good care of ourselves is what will truly heal our hearts physically and spiritually.

What's with men and a fear of needles

It's called Aichmophobia- Fear of needles or pointed objects.

Don't want to come across of sexist or anything but really, what is up with so many men being squeamish when it comes to needles. I see a lot of clients going through fertility treatment. This process involves a lot of poking. Men like to poke things yes, but not when it comes to poking with needles.

Both of my morning clients told me that their partners have a fear of needles, even if they are the ones doing the poking, not getting poked. IVF treatment involves a whole lot of needles, sometimes in the belly, sometimes in the ass.

Turns out that one of my clients, let's call her Stephanie, has to reach around and poke her own ass injection of progesterone. I said, "I'll take care it if your husband can't handle it". Unfortunately, her injections are a nightly thing so I won't be able to lend a helping hand. Might be out of my scope in terms of being a fitness professional, not out of my scope in terms of what I'd do for a friend.

My other client this morning told me that her partner had to go in for a personal lesson from the nurse at the fertility clinic so that he could get over his fear and know that he was doing it properly. The instructions of inserting needle into butt muscle and pushing the plunger thingy wasn't enough. In the end, he stepped up but only after a little hand holding.

I have known some men that won't go to see a doctor for a problem, just in the off chance they might have to get a needle of some sort. Really? It's just a tiny little prick for a second boys.

While women take it for the team over and over again in terms of child bearing, nursing or even going through the turmoil of fertility treatments, sometimes surgeries to fix the plumbing etc. I think we should stand up and say, "just do the poking when necessary boys and shut it". That's my two bits about it.

And if anyone would like me to do their nightly injections for them, just swing on by. I'll help you out. I'm not afraid to help a sister out in her pursuit of getting knocked up.

I should try to make this post relevant to fitness somehow so here goes...

Given the roller coaster ride involved in fertility treatments and IVF, I have truly been blessed to share this journey with many women. Even if I've just been a place to let the stress out while helping women still feel somewhat in control of their bodies and destinies, we all deserve a soft place to fall when life isn't going to way we had really hoped it would.

Working out while going through fertility treatment is a great way to manage stress, blow off some steam and not let all those crazy hormones get the best of you. Can also help manage the normal weight gain or redistribution of muscle and fat that goes along with all the hormonal shifts.

But really, I'm just poking fun at the boys. I could do more justice to the working out during fertility treatment subject at a later date.

The Limp Shakers Die Younger

Ick. You know that feeling when you shake someone's hand and it just kind of goes limp. What's that all about? Squeeze a little would ya limpy. I often let my mind wander a bit. Limp handshake makes my perverse mind leap into superficial judgements about someone within seconds. You know what I'm talking about. I can't say that I would be compelled to linger for conversation post limp. We all jump to conclusions about the limpy ones don't we even if we aren't truly conscious of these judgements.

I've always wondered what conclusions can be drawn about people who can't grip despite the commonly held belief that a firm handshake is an essential life skill.

When I was trolling the Globe and Mail Health and Fitness section tonight I was gleeful. Finally, someone studied this for me and saved me the trouble!

Study: A firm handshake means longer life

A firm handshake could be a sign of a longer life expectancy, according to British researchers.

Scientists at the Medical Research Council found that elderly people who could still give a firm handshake and walk at a brisk pace were likely to outlive their slower peers.

They found simple measures of physical capability like shaking hands, walking, getting up from a chair and balancing on one leg were related to life span, even after accounting for age, sex and body size.

The death rate over the period of the studies for people with weak handshakes was 67 per cent higher than for people with a firm grip.

Now I will go further with these findings to create my own hypothesis about the limp shakers.

1) People who grip when they shake are more likely to be fighters. When life could beat them down, they have the gumption to keep pushing ahead. Perhaps they just aren't as timid in life overall.

2) Limp shakers don't have a fire alive inside them or at least their fire isn't ablaze to the same extent. Not that this makes them bad people. It just means that they might not possess a certain effervescence that makes them meet people with assertiveness and confidence.

3) Firm grip folks might possess a different gene that makes them want to express their strength in a hand shake. Laws of the jungle. Don't mess with me might be subtly communicated in a split second hand shake. The limp folks might be more likely to fall into a beta category.

4) Last but not least, have you ever noticed that limp hand shakers don't generally make direct eye contact yet firm shakers do? Could it be a fear of intimacy, the non-grip no eye contact thing?

That's that for my sophisticated analysis of the limp shakers and these most recent findings. One question though...should we be worried for the cultures that don't shake hands at all? What does all this mean for them? Will introducing the shaking of hands improve their overall mortality rates?

Emotional frigidity

My personal definition of emotional frigidity is as follows and you're welcome to file this away in "Jane's library of crap".

"The blocking of one's true emotions to the point that our entire beings become a deep freeze with a heart beat."

There I said it. Sometimes I get emotionally frigid clients. Sometimes people plug their internal deep freeze into the wall in the middle of a session. I can feel it. A big chill settles in the room and the person standing with me becomes a shell of who they really are. Or they walk in as a deep freeze and I have to create an opening for them to melt a little. This experience is pretty rare so when it happens it's a bit jolting.

The magic in a coaching relationship is in the dynamic between the two people. It's so much more than paying for a service and getting what you asked for. It's a two way street and a relationship.

Perhaps growing up in a house where I had to be hypervigilant about the climate du jour has now been tranformed into one of the major strengths I bring to what I do, one of those crap into fertilizer situations likely responsible for my ability to tune in and read people. I can tell if someone is hungry before they are hungry, are about to get dizzy before they do or need to get a good cry out of the way to be able to be truly present and keep working on the task at hand. I make it my mission to put people at ease around me. I HATE making people feel ill at ease.

Every time we interact with people we are entering into some type of dynamic whether it be the cashier at a store or a lover in a bed. We have a choice, to a certain extent, about how these interactions are going to go down.

Certainly when we are suffering or stressed, it's harder to give a flying shit how our behaviour affects people around us. How we decide to interact in our community, with our loved ones, with a service provider like me really defines who we are. Despite the shit we are going through, we can connect better with people while we still give a hoot about how we affect people around us. Having a bad day is no excuse to ignore how we are impacting other people.

I'm not saying put a big fake smile on your face and pretend all is good. I just think we can all get really good at letting our emotionally protective moats go up, build a giant barrier between us and other people and turn around one day and find ourselves alone and isolated. Or even worse, we could become so frozen and shut down that we don't even have the ability to notice the emotional disconnect anymore. I call these folks the living dead.

I can deal with almost anything from a client over emotional frigidity. I've always found it more lonely being in a room with someone you don't connect with than being alone in a room. Just remember next time you're with someone who's providing you with a service, packing your groceries or changing your oil, money is only one of the forms of payment that go along with being humans together on this planet. A little eye contact or recognition that maybe they need a little warmth might just make your life better and melt your emotional frigidity.

And by the way, I'm not saying I'm never emotionally frigid or implying by any means that I'm perfect. I'm sure someone could write a blog about something annoying I do too, maybe even a book.

I'm going to end this on a cheesy note inspired by my recent viewing of the Tolstoy film "The Last Station".

"If you want to be happy, be."
Tolstoy.

Life altering conversation

When she entered the studio, she looked like any other person coming to try a class for the first time. Buoyant smile. A healthy post summer glow on her skin. Great urban style and excitement about trying a new class in a new environment.

Within five minutes of meeting her I found out she was terminally ill, had been dealing with cancer in various forms and locations for over five years, has two small kids and was supposed to die a year ago.

Just matter of fact like that.

I nodded. I tried not to ooze the usual, "oh my goodness. I'm so sorry". Instead, I tried to meet her with a nod and a few simple questions.

Last night, I spoke with my friend who volunteers with hospice. He says it normally goes that way. A terminally ill person has come to accept their fate and other people around them haven't quite caught up. He said it's a great relief for people in her shoes to be met with a matter of fact response. Perhaps it limits the feelings of victimization to be looked at as a victim of the big C. Maybe people just get tired of trying to make other people feel better about suffering over their suffering.

She said she had noticed a benign lump years ago that didn't change size or consistency so she never was alarmed by it for several years after. She of course monitored it after her first diagnosis. However, over time it had become cancerous. Here's the tricky part. Nursing changes our breasts and from what I hear, many lumps get missed while lactating. She was diagnosed before her second child turned one. I can't imagine having a new baby and finding out I had breast cancer. The human spirit is truly incredible at times.

She thought all was good after her first round of treatment but two years after she found out the cancer had spread.

As I write this I feel a real fear in my gut liberally doused with a drive to enjoy everything. Remove the blinders. See the big picture. Drop the pettiness and focus on the good and beautiful. Anything can happen to anyone. We all get so caught up with myopic issues like having perfectly clean houses, perfectly decorated homes and working our butts off to get 'enough' money in the bank and let the hustle and bustle or disappointments dim our life force.

Right now, I'm drinking the best cup of Earl Grey tea in my favourite coffee shop on the planet with my kind of music dancing in the air above me.

Thanks to her, she helped me experience this particular moment. Fully. Completely.