When it comes to all things fitness and nutrition related there is often a lot of noise in the data that can lead to conflicting opinions based on the same evidence. While so many topics are interrelated, this one will simply focus on one intervention, namely light aerobic exercise timing around meals and the benefits for blood sugar control, insulin levels, and body fat. While this certainly relates to and raises questions about different exercise interventions with higher intensities, intervals, and fasted exercise, those topics will unnecessarily bloat this article and are therefore topics for further discussion elsewhere. Read on to learn how to best time low intensity continuous exercise for blood sugar control, reducing insulin secretion, improving insulin sensitivity, and shedding body fat.Of all the confounding factors around whether or not an exercise program will be effective or not, the topic of when exercise is performed relative to eating is not likely the first to come to mind – and that’s a shame because it can make a significant difference in the outcomes realized. In fact, this single factor may be the difference between success and failure if weight loss is the primary goal of the exercise intervention (there are still all kinds of other benefits from consistent exercise that won’t be altered by this).Key Action Items

Last Christmas I was asked to give a Christmas talk. I was a little concerned at first, but with some study and prayer I was blessed to make the following connections to share with my ward. I felt they might also help others to reflect on the wonders of this event we celebrate and help strengthen relationships with the Lord.

Whether it’s simply maintaining a functional range of motion for ease of daily activities or getting into advanced ranges of motion for activities such as gymnastics or martial arts, there is no doubt that flexibility training is an important part of a training system. Here I plan to discuss what appears to work the best based on a combination of evidence in the literature on the topic as well as personal and professional experience observing what works for clients.

As a fitness professional, I was trained to look at an individual's goals and help them build a plan to progress toward that goal. Every time a client came into a session there was an expectation that they would have adaptations from the previous experience and would be able to do more. In order to continue to progress,  the workload would need to continue to adjust so that it would cause them to stretch just a little more leading to further improvements. Sometimes, a plateau would be hit where a certain performance metric just didn't seem to be adapting as expected, so we would look at ways to kick-start new progress. Progress can't always continue in a linear fashion and sometimes cycling though different variables of frequency, volume, intensity, balance with other factors (i.e. muscle balance, aerobic recovery capacity, and so on) needed to be addressed to continue improving in the desired area, but my purpose here is not to get too deep into that.

It’s very common to hear things like weight training (resistance training) is critical as part of a weight-loss plan because muscle burns more calories at rest and you get the afterburn effect and so on. How true is this? Are these the best reasons? Let’s take a look.