Don't wish to lose weight. Don't hope you can drop some pants sizes. Set a goal to lose weight and be healthier. There is a big difference between making a wish and setting a goal. Some people who take our class do so to help stay in good shape and this is great. Some people join our program with specific goals of wanting to lose weight and be healthier. To these people I ask have you set an actual goal or are you making a wish. A goal is a complex thing. You must have a plan and a deadline of when you want to achieve your goal. If you do not have that, it is not a goal. A goal with a poor plan will give you poor results. An easy example is if you are taking a trip to the beach and you don't plan at all how will that trip work out for you? Will you have enough gas to get their? Do you have clothes? Do you have a place to stay? Did you bring sun block??????? hahah. We plan great for things like this. So lets use those same skills and plan our weight loss like that. Figure out how many pants sizes you want to drop by a specific date. How are you going to do it? How will you change your diet? How many days a week will you work out? How much soda will you cut out? When you make a plan like this with a deadline, then you have set a goal. I hope this is helpful :) Have a marvelous monday.

Calories are the energy that food has in it. Our bodies run on calories. So we often hear people talking about burning calories to lose weight. This is an important part to losing weight. Its not everything, but it is a part or it. So in our kickboxing class our goal is to keep our heart rate up so we can burn as many calories as we can. What this means is you want to minimize the number of breaks you take. Now that might sound mean, but what I mean is you should be working on pacing yourself so you can stay in constant motion the entire class. So when you start to feel like you are pushing to hard you have to back off just a little so you can keep going. This is tricky tho because you do not want to take it to easy because then your heart rate doesn't get up high enough to make a big difference. Finding your pace is tricky and takes time. Its like a runner, runners work on finding their pace and keeping it and knowing when to push it and when to ease off a bit. This is just another fun part of our kickboxing class. I mean if you find this stuff fun... I know I do :)

Your core is very important. As we get older our core must stay strong to help us keep moving. Im going to jump right to muscles I think most people over look, the upper and lower back. I would like to share a personal experience. I train every day, and at one point I was getting very bad headaches and my upper back was really hurting. A physical therapist told me to think about what I was doing all the time. Everything I did was pushing forward, all my kicks, punches, punching the bag, push ups....... But I never worked on the opposite muscle groups which were my upper back. So my upper back was weak and it was trying to compete against my chest and abs and it was getting fatigued and knotting up. So I strengthened my upper back and over time my headaches went away and the pain did to. Think about sitting up straight in your chair, I don't know about you but after a while my back starts to get tired. That is because your muscles are weak. Think about this, how do you stand up straight? What muscles make you stand up straight? Your back. So for that reason I like to incorporate lower and upper back exercises into my kickboxing class. We are not lifting a ton a weight, we mainly just use resistances bands, but it is just to get the point across that this is important to   focus on.

 Tonights class was rockin! We had another new student tonight and she picked everything up fast ! Afterwards I explained to her that this is how every class is. She said GREAT, this is exactly what I was looking for. We do a cardio warm up, we do some exercises for your arms, legs, back, and abs, then we stretch , and then we hit the bags for the rest of class. My goal is to keep you moving for the entire 60 minutes. There is no stopping to hold pads for someone, there is no jumping spinning karate kicks... It is a super fun workout that anyone, and I mean anyone, can do. Its just punching and kicking, you get to decide how hard your punch and kick. This will determine how great your workout is. Well I encourage you a little throughout the class. haha.