I’ve got another iPod app for you today.  It’s called “Gym Buddy“.

It helps me keep track of my strength training and aerobic training that I do at the gym. Lately the weather has been so cold and discouraging that I can’t bring myself to walk outside, so we’re doing most of our fitness stuff indoors ar the gym.

My husband and I are doing the program called “ The Slow Burn Fitness Revolution: The Slow Motion Exercise That Will Change Your Body in 30 Minutes a Week and really enjoying it.

My husband does his set while I time it, and then I do my set while he times. It’s fun doing it together, and it takes next to no time, but when you’re done – whew! – you know you’ve worked out.

I also have knee issues, so I follow that up with about 30 minutes on the stepper. I’m finding that the combination of the strength training and the stepper is really helping to improve my knees.

If you’re the kind who likes to work out in the gym, this is a great little app for you. You can create a a workout (or 20), and it will keep track of that workout for you – your history, and results. You can call your exercises whatever you want, or use the suggested exercises already programmed in there. It will also time your reps for you, if you want. It keeps track of your body progress, your exercise history, and a whole host of other things.  It’s VERY easy to use as you workout, and is very intuitive.

This is the kind of app you download first, play with, set up (give yourself about an hour to get everything lined up the way you want it) and THEN go to the gym. Don’t try to set it up while you’re working out. It will make you mad

You can get more information on what’s included by checking out their iTunes page.

Here’s wishing you physical, mental, and spiritual wellness, simply through walking!

Darlene

We’ve been dealing with breathing this week, and we’ve looked at it from a few different angles.

Today I want to introduce you to a very cool book that deals with breathing and weight loss, called “Jumpstart Your Metabolism: How To Lose Weight By Changing The Way You Breathe”

First of all, the book is hilarious. Pam Grout has a great sense of fun and humour, and her book is a very easy read. She brings in some pretty amazing case studies and facts, like this one:

People discovered if they would bounce, jump, twist, and run until they were panting like a lap dog they could lose weight. But what they failed to realize was that it was the extra oxygen that really did the work. Sure, the extra muscles helped. Lean muscle burns through fat a whole lot faster than flab. But the bottom line to their success was they transformed their bodies from being fat producers to being energy producers. And it was the extra air – not the exercise – that did it” (page 67)

Cool, eh?

Here’s what she says on her website about the book:

Oxygen is the big kahuna!

Breathing is the key to warming and waking up your metabolism.
When you don’t give your body enough oxygen (and 90 percent of us don’t), your cells have no choice but to store fat.

It’s ironic that we count calories, tally fat grams and then completely ignore the amount of oxygen we consume. Yet, scientists have proved that by increasing the amount of oxygen per breath, the body can better burn hydrogen, the chief culprit of excess fat.

Oxygen is the key–will always be the key–that unlocks your metabolic rate.

Shedding unwanted pounds is as simple as learning to breathe differently

Permanent weight loss is not about counting calories or fat grams. It’s about changing the way your body burns fat. It’s about altering your cellular chemistry. If you follow the breathing exercises in this book, you can change your cellular structure at a very deep level. Which means you won’t ever have to worry about fat grams again.

So, there you have it. Go back to my earlier post on how to breathe, and get started. Better yet, get Pam’s book because she has 13 “energy cocktails” in there that will help you breathe better, and feel better all around.

Darlene

Don’t forget to pick up your FREE COPY of the PraiseWalker Primer! And also, please check out my Christmas challenge here!

One of the main purposes of “PraiseWalking” is to bring your spirit, soul, and body together in a place of growing. One way to do this is to practice spiritual exercises while walking, and one of the easiest exercises to do is a “Gratitude Walk”.  If you think of the 4 definitions of a noun “Person, Place, Thing or Idea” and use them as your guide, you can spend your whole walk thinking of things you’re thankful for. First you think of all the people, but instead of just listing names, be specific. For example, I might pray: I’m thankful for my husband who is, to me, an incarnation of Christ; He loves me unconditionally and shows me through that, the heart of God.

I am thankful for my son who has a serving, compassionate heart and a dry wit that makes me laugh out loud.

I am thankful for my daughter, the muse, who always brings a deep question to a light conversation, and makes us think. Then you move on to places, and in those places, experiences. Then things you’re thankful for, and why. Finally, think of things like love, joy, beauty, sorrow, pain, and anything else that is a part of your life. You might want to write yours down and share them below.  Or put them on your own blog, and link to it here. I’d love to create a HUGE collection of these, and start a gratitude revolution.  Wanna join me?

Darlene

Don’t forget to pick up your FREE COPY of the PraiseWalker Primer! And also, please check out my Christmas challenge here!

I’m going to sneak in an extra post today:

Christmas is coming.  I always have mixed feelings about Christmas.  I absolutely love the carols, the traditions, the lights, the decorations, the stories, the food, the family stuff – all of it.  I struggle with the materialism – I’m sure most of us do.

Lately I’ve been challenged by sites like The Advent Conspiracy, and similar causes that encourage us to look beyond ourselves and help those in need.  I’m wanting to find something that helps all year long, though, not just at Christmas time.

One thing I’ve done is I’ve signed up with Compassion Canada as an advocate, and when I did workshops and such as the Mom-Defrazzler I always had a table set up and gave a quick introduction to their work.  Now that I’m no longer doing the Mom-Defrazzler I am looking for other ways to promote their work. I have widgets here on my blog and on my Facebook page that enables you to find out more and/or sponsor a child, and we as a family also sponsor 3 kids through them.

However, I also have three siblings that are living in poverty right here, close to home.  Not because they’re lazy – they are, in fact, extremely hard-working.  Life has just dealt them a bad hand.  For about 5 years now I’ve been searching online for something that would help get them out of the pits and into some financial stability, but it’s always been either too expensive, too time consuming, or needed too many computer skills.

Over the past month I’ve been working through these issues altogether.  How can I bring all of this need together and create something special that helps those close to home as well as those far away?  What if there were a way to give my siblings financial stability, and the ability to pursue their dreams this Christmas, and was also able to help those far away?

I hope I’ve come up with a solution.  After a lot of (rather expensive) research I’ve discovered a few internet programs that actually work, and, if you put them together properly, these programs can create a very solid, long-term financial foundation for people like my siblings.   The program takes next to no time to set up, costs just $14 one time (everything else comes from profits) and if done properly can be bringing in money by Christmas (though I recommend in the course that you don’t touch it for 90 days so that you can create long-term residual income with it, and I’ll show you how).  You need to spend an afternoon setting up the marketing (which becomes pretty much hands free) and you only need about 5 people working with you to make a success of it.

In order for me to be able to keep tabs on how my family is doing with this, I need to be involved as well, but I don’t need to be making a whole lot of extra money, as God has already blessed us abundantly.  So I decided I would donate 50% of all my earnings to Compassion’s Global Food Crisis Fund with the goal of raising $100,000 this year for that cause.

So now, I’d love to invite you to join me in this. Want a little extra Christmas money? Want to raise money for your favourite charity? Want to help me help my family and my favourite cause?

If you’re interested in checking it out, go to www.PersonalPotOfGold.com and get the free e-book which will give you all the details.  I’m not asking for any of your information – the book comes with no strings attached. If you like what you see, share it with friends.  If you don’t like what you see, there are no hard feelings – though I certainly welcome comments and critique.

Anyway, thanks for your time and consideration. Have a wonderful day!

Darlene

Don’t forget to pick up your FREE COPY of the PraiseWalker Primer!

On Monday I told you about a sore heart. Today I need to confess sore muscles! Last night I went to the gym for the first time in about 3 months. Ouch.

When I realized I had been overtraining for my marathon, I dropped my weight training, and just walked. Now I’m well-recovered, having taken a full month off (yes, today is my 1-month anniversary of walking the marathon!) and yesterday I started back in at the gym.

I decided that this time around, I’d practice slow-cadence training that I first read about in the book In Praise of Slow I was intrigued by it then, but not enough to actually exert myself physically. Then I stumbled upon the “My Pod Bod” podcasts by Stin where she shows you exactly how to do the exercises either at home with your own body weight, or at the gym with machines.

But first, a little background to the method itself:

Here’s what Adam Zickerman, author of Power of 10: The Once-A-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution
has to say about it:

Power of 10 is based on the premise that eliminating momentum from an exercise forces the muscle to do all the work. Because the muscle is never able to rest, fatigue comes faster. When muscles are brought to failure during strength training, tiny tears occur, creating blood flow to the site, which helps build the muscle.

The protocol is to lift the weight with a 10-second cadence — 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down — “until you hit that wall,” says Zickerman. At this slow pace, muscles will “fail” somewhere between five and eight repetitions. When you cannot complete another repetition with perfect form, you’re finished.

A Power of 10 workout lasts 20-25 minutes; includes five to seven exercises hitting all the major muscle groups; and can be done using free weights or machines. . .

Wayne L. Westcott, PhD, fitness research director at the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Mass., was intrigued. He studied two of Hutchins’ groups. In each, 75 people tackled the SuperSlow program for eight weeks (in 1993) and 10 weeks (in 1999). Westcott compared the SuperSlow group with a group that did traditional weight training, lifting for two seconds and lowering for two. The SuperSlow group did only five repetitions, while the comparison group did 10. In both studies, the SuperSlow groups saw strength gains at least 50% greater than the group doing traditional weight training.

(From Lift Slow to Get Fit Fast? Can you get results in 20 minutes a week? Here’s what the experts say. By Barbara Russi Sarnataro)

Ok, so yesterday, off to the gym. I did three reps each, 20 seconds in total. That, my friends, is a workout. I promise you.

Ouch.

Darlene

Don’t forget to pick up your FREE COPY of the PraiseWalker Primer!

The truth is, I absolutely hate Halloween. Except for adorable little children in fluffy costumes, I don’t see that the holiday has a single redeeming feature. Blood, guts, decomposing bodies, horrifying monsters all decorating our kids and our streets, nasty kids out there wanting to create damage and havoc, and then weeks of sugar crashes. No siree. Not for me. I wish someone would ban it.

However, I don’t want to be a humbug, so to make up for my bad feelings about Halloween, I’m giving anyone and everyone a gift.

It’s taken a lot of hours of writing and research, not to mention years of trial and error, but it’s finally done! The PraiseWalker Primer is ready and available for anyone who wants to have a simple, stress-free, pain-free way to get physically, mentally, and spiritually fit.

Here’s what it is:

• It’s a 126- page, nicely illustrated, step-by-step program for people who neither have the time nor the energy to work on wellness
• The program starts from total couch potato and eases you into a regular walking program over a period of 8 weeks
• You get small steps, working on only one area at a time for a two week period so there’s no overwhelm
• You get a specially designed journal that uses the latest research in accelerated learning to actually program your mind for success
• You learn creative prayer techniques that you can eventually apply to your walking program
• You master each of the pieces of PraiseWalking so you’re ready for level one which will train you to walk 5k
• and there’s are some simple nutritional tricks and suggestions that will help you lose weight without being hungry.

Better than that, I giving it away. For Free. No strings attached.

For those of you wanting to join me in Florida in January 2010, this is your first step, and it starts on Monday, Nov 1 if you want to keep up with the whole program.

Get the e-book here:

Happy Halloween!

Darlene

I’ve got some stuff “on the burner” I wanted to share with you today.

As many of you know, it’s impossible for me to not teach. That’s why I blog! Anyway, I’ve talked with a lot of people about walking since I did my marathon – and even during my training – and as we talked about fitness and training and the “how to fit it into my life” or “how to do it in spite of small kids” stuff, other things also came up. Things like “I wish I had more time to myself”, or “I wish I had time for things like prayer and meditation, and study”, and “I wish it weren’t so hard to lose weight!”. Then of course, there’s the standard “I’m just so stressed!” Seems like we’re chronically short of the time we need to care for and nurture ourselves.

As I did my training, I realized that the time I spent on the road could be used to multi-task some of the nurturing I needed myself. I began to add different elements to my walking, and found that it was possible to go for a good walk and connect with God, do strength training as well as aerobic training, sort out my day, gain focus, get deeply relaxed, and come home totally centered and ready for whatever the day had to bring.

I’ve been working over the past few weeks to pull something together that shares these things I’ve discovered in my own walking, that’s also really comprehensive, non-stress, step-by-step, and totally doable for even busy people with small kids, that would bring this same sense of centeredness and well being on a mental, physical and spiritual level that I experienced in my training. This will be a course with four levels. The first one will be ready in about a week (I’m hoping to launch it November 1).

This first program will be a foundational one. It’s a program that teaches some of the fundamental things I’ve learned and been able to incorporate into my walking, like proper breathing, meditation, aerobic foundation, strength-training-on-the-go, and simple nutritional tricks that help with weight loss. This isn’t a program that will create huge change to start with, but it will put all the “building blocks” together so that the next course can help you acheive goals very quickly.

The first level will be 8 weeks long, and is so simple and easy to do that you will be able to do each step in spite of the fact that we’re coming into the most chaotic time of the year. You won’t be making huge changes to your schedule or your diet. Then, when January 1 comes and you look at your list of resolutions, like “lose weight, get fit, grow spiritually, get better organized” etc., you’ll have everything in place – including the right motivation – to achieve every one of those.

Don’t believe me? Well, part one will be offered for free so you can try it out.

Watch this page for news!

Darlene

I am a driven, type-A, hyper-focused sort of person – you probably hadn’t guessed that yet!

As I prepared for the last marathon I was so focused on the goals of each individual session, that I forgot to savour the journey.  I didn’t hear birds sing, or spend much time admiring the scenery.  I usually listened to a morning devotional on my iPod, but often found that I had tuned out, to focus more on my walking form or speed.

Dumb.

I live life that way, too.  I end up spending so much time focused on where I’m heading, that I miss much of what’s along the way, living most of my life in the future.

Really dumb.

But I do learn (thankfully) and so as I embark on this next phase, I’m going to be spending a good deal of my time learning to live mindfully, to train mindfully, to spend time focused on the here and now, and what God is doing in, through, and around me.

I’m also learning – again and again – that God doesn’t speak in “sound bites” as much has he speaks in slow communion. If I’m going to hear God’ voice, I have to take time – good time – to listen, be with Him, read His word, ponder my life’s messages, and so on. Life with God doesn’t work well in the fast lane. I need to pull over and take time to breathe, listen with my heart, snuggle into His presence.

Jesus, slow me down!

Darlene

My Marathon Countdown – 6 days! (gulp!)

It’s amazing what you learn about the human body when you start to do more intense training.

Like the fact that you can go too far, too fast. I’m thinking this is where I am.

I’ve learned that there are wise ways and foolish ways to train for a big event like a marathon. I’ve managed to incorporate both – foolish at the beginning, and wiser now. Much wiser, I hope.

But here’s the problem. My marathon is in 6 days, and while I’m not suffering any pain or injury, I find I’m exhausted. I can hardly get through the day.

I know that I started the training with too much enthusiasm and not enough knowledge (so what else is new?) I have corrected my training along the way as I’ve done my research, but alas, I find myself less and less able to get through what have been easy, invigorating walks for me. This seems to be due to the phenomenon of overtraining.

I guess you can have too much of a good thing.

So, the plan of attack now is rest, water, good nutrition, while still keeping myself limber with easy walking instead of Bionic Woman stuff. Things any good ADD A-type personality is really great at. Sigh.

But I have found a great resource for the next time around: The Maffetone Method: The Holistic, Low-Stress, No-Pain Way to Exceptional Fitness

Happy walking!

Darlene

My Marathon Countdown – 9 days!

Hello all!

Today we’re going to start moving into some weight loss moves! I was stunned to see that I could go from a total couch potato, allergic to all exercise, to walking 300k a month, and not lose weight. Talk about depressing.

So I did some research, and discovered the joys of interval training, and the weight started coming off. I’ll share those secrets in these next few weeks.

So, here’s the line up for the coming week:

1. Equipment Needs: Download Prevention’s interval walking podcasts and have them ready. Also download “Pray-as-You-Go” for this week. We’ll only use three of them. I would also like to challenge you to spend the next forty days working through the book “The Purpose Driven® Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?*“. If you’ve already done it before, it’s a good idea to work through it again!

2. The Spiritual Challenge: We’ll continue to use “Pray-as-You-Go” on alternate walking days, and you will be working through “The Purpose Driven® Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?*“.

3. Nutritional Focus: Keeping up with your water, this week we are going to work on breakfast. There are just a few rules to remember for each breakfast, and they are:

1. Start with 1 oz of almonds
2. Eat 2-3 pieces of fruit or a fruit smoothie
3. Follow this with some oatmeal
4. Wait 5 hours before eating your lunch unless you have a blood sugar problem. Make sure your breakfast is sufficient to carry you that far.

4. The Exercise Program: Now that you are walking 10-15 minutes on a regular basis, we’re going to start adding some interval training. Because we are going to be increasing our speed, you need to focus a bit on walking posture so that you are walking as efficiently as possible. Don’t worry, it’s really not complicated. I’ve put a suggested walking plan below:

So that’s next week’s training plan. Try and find a friend to walk with – even if you walk at different times. Share your struggles, encourage each other, keep track of and celebrate your successes.

Post your results, struggles, triumphs and questions below!

Happy Walking!

Darlene