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This week’s Total Gym workout focuses on the hamstrings and abdominals. Watch the progression from ab crunches, to unilateral and bilateral hamstring curls, and finally to challenging compound ab crunch + hamstring movements. Incorporate these exercise into your Total Gym or GRAVITY workouts today!
Hello Total Gym Friends and my Fellow Golfers!
To me, the best feature about Total Gym is the ability to do plyometric strength training. What other piece of equipment allows you to do plyometric pull-ups or tricep dips?
The Latin roots of the word “plyometric” are plio meaning “more” and metric meaning “measure.” So think of this as measurable increases in strength, power, bone density, body awareness and control, and much more! Most importantly, it’s a different and FUN way to train your body!
Here are some great plyometric exercises to try on your Total Gym and catch my Golf Fitness tip at the end:
One thing I forgot to mention in the video, you can try almost all of these plyometric exercises uni-laterally – or one arm or leg at a time. Fun for the whole family!
Enjoy and stay tuned for future Total Gym Training Tips!
Don’t have the accessories that JayDee used in his video? Check out the NEW TotalGym.com and click on the Product Accessories page to accessorize your Total Gym!
JayDee Cutting is a GRAVITY Master Trainer, certified personal trainer, Pilates instructor and creator of the “Core Golf Fitness” program. JayDee’s Core Golf Fitness DVD offers on-course and warm-up exercises proven to help advance your golf game and is available for purchase at http://coregolffitness.com.
Total Gym congratulates JayDee and his wife, Elba, on 10 blissful years of marriage! They recently renewed their wedding vows and JayDee says, “Thanks to Total Gym, we still fit in the same clothes we wore 10 years ago! ”
OK, let’s get serious. After all, it’s your life I’m talking about here. How much weight do you say you need to lose, and how much weight do you really need to lose? Often these two are a good ten pounds, or more, apart.
Not sure? Click here to calculate your body mass index. It’s one of a number of reliable indicators to screen for weight categories related to life threatening illnesses.
America is getting heavier and heavier. One conservative estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention points to one-third of us being obese—not overweight—but obese. More troubling, they tell us that nearly 20% of children and teens are also more than just overweight—they are obese.
We are eating ourselves to death.
So if you are more than 20% over your “ideal weight,” or a man carrying more than 25% body fat or a women carrying more than 32% body fat, you are obese. OK we got past that. Now let’s do something about it.
Remember, healthy nutrition is king and exercise is queen. Want a healthy kingdom? You need both. That’s where full-body, functional workouts come in. You see, literally ANY diet will help you lose weight. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is keeping it off with genuine, healthy, lifestyle changes. Socrates had it correct when he said, “The rest of the world lives to eat, while I eat to live.”
Diet propaganda screaming about losing weight always reminds me of the magician who gets you to watch one hand when the other is hiding the card. Sure you can lose weight with any diet. The trouble is, at least as I have taught it to my patients over the years, diet=gaining weight, unless you have a post-diet plan. Even 20% of those who have bariatric bypass surgery regain their weight!
A Total Gym exercise plan can be an essential centerpiece of your post-diet healthy living plan, along with healthy nutrition and changing the way you think about yourself, your health and food intake. It’s important to manage your expectations and have a total-body game plan to increase a sense of being “able” to exercise, to avoid the feeling of “having to” exercise, and to erase the feeling of “learned helplessness” that comes from previous failed attempts at exercising. The setting is all-important for comfort and self-esteem among those who may also face body-image issues.
A word about your readiness to get beyond just dieting. Mark Twain wasn’t necessarily attempting to motivate people to adopt a healthy life plan when he said, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started,” though he may well have been. If you are reading this, you’ve identified yourself as contemplating, preparing or at the place where you are acting on establishing exercise as a habit.
You were designed for movement and activity and therefore it is essential in a post-diet healthy living plan to incorporate physical activity into your daily life. Still, half of those who begin exercise programming drop out within one year, and that means serious weight gain. Cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular strength and endurance, flexibility and mobility are all valuable for weight loss and maintaining health and wellbeing. Working on stability and mobility before you move to more dynamic forms of functional exercise, which the Total Gym allows, helps prevent injuries.
When it comes to a Total Gym workout, keep in mind that the more muscles you recruit in any given exercise, the more calories you will burn during that workout session. A properly designed and followed Total Gym workout regimen will maximize your calorie expenditure in less time when compared to those machines that isolate only a single body part. You are able to fluidly move multiple body parts in different directions (side to side, rotating, front and back) on the Total Gym and therefore increase your calorie expenditure. Add to the fact that this type of workout involves your entire body, and you see why you burn calories at an even higher intensity.
Get moving on your Total Gym and get healthy. After all, as someone once said, “Your body is the baggage you must carry through life. The more excess the baggage, the shorter the trip.”
Here’s to a long trip!
Michael R. Mantell earned his Ph.D. degree at the University of Pennsylvania after completing his M.S. degree in clinical psychology at the Hahnemann Medical College, where he wrote his thesis on the psychology of obesity. He has served as Chief Psychologist of Children’s Hospital and Health Center of San Diego, and created and led the nationally recognized Psychological Services and Employee Assistance/Wellness program for the San Diego Police Department. He is a member of the Sports Medicine Team at The Sporting Club in La Jolla, California, maintains a private clinical practice in La Mesa, California, and writes and speaks for the American Council on Exercise.
Continuing on with our Fit for Summer series, with just two weeks left we can’t go without hitting the hips and glutes! If you don’t know this little nugget of an exercise, you’ll certainly remember it!
GRAVITY Master Trainer Nicole Decker shows you a hip abductor exercise that requires little resistance to really feel the burn!
Click here to watch the video on YouTube.
Total Gym GRAVITY Master Trainers Rob Glick and Nicole Decker give a brief demonstration of the new Total Gym incline bodyweight trainers – Total Gym Sport, Total Gym GTS and Total Gym PowerTower.
Learn the various exercises that you can perform on a Total Gym, whether you are looking to improve your own health, a personal trainer working with clients of all fitness levels, a physical therapist or athletic trainer utilizing Total Gym for rehabilitation, conditioning or sports performance training.
Click here to watch the video on YouTube.
Total Gym can accommodate individuals and clients of every fitness level and athletic ability. For more information, visit http://totalgym.com/products/ or call 800-541-4900 to speak with a representative for additional details. 
Total Gym … moving YOU since 1974!
Today’s post comes from guest contributor Dr. Michael Mantell, a clinical and fitness psychologist in San Diego. Dr. Mantell regularly writes for San Diego Magazine and has appeared on “Oprah,” “Nightline,” “Larry King,” and “Good Morning America.” Dr. Mantell is a Total Gym user and sits on the Sports Medicine staff at The Sporting Club – a Total Gym GRAVITY facility in San Diego.
A couple of years ago, a series of studies came out that showed that couples who work out together increase their chances of sticking to their exercise program more than 90%! This can’t be ignored and it got me thinking about couples I treat for relationship problems. Maybe they ought to go from a therapy session to their gym, and they’ll not only stick to their exercise program, but also stick together.
The friendliest total body workout that offers couples a chance to exercise together in the privacy of their own home is certainly the Total Gym. It offers couples the opportunity to spend quality time with each other, the chance to discuss mutual goals and fitness levels, build a shared commitment to well-being and health, create mutual motivation, develop a deeper bond with each other, and when done right, it provides couples with opportunities to celebrate each other’s successes in a non-competitive way.
For many couples that do belong to a gym, he goes his way and she goes her way. The Total Gym is an up-close, even intimate, work out in which instead of exercising apart, husbands and wives are right next to each other doing the same exercises at different bodyweight levels, each achieving the same type of gains.
Matters of the heart beyond fitness benefits are only some of the rewards you can look forward to with a Total Gym couple’s exercise date. Remember, there are studies that show that men and women who exercise regularly report better and more frequent sex with their partners—so how much more enjoyable can exercising with each other be on a machine that promotes the right kind of movement for all activities of daily living, personal and otherwise?
It’s been well known that FUNctional exercise is good for the body, soul and mind. Now, we can add, it’s also good for our relationships. Why not use the Total Gym to fuel and fortify not only your physical fitness, but your physical and emotional relationship as well?
Here are five Total Gym “workout date” ideas:
1. Learn how to stretch each other. Gently helping each other with a pull or push can ease each other’s muscles before and after your workout.
2. Build total trust with each other simply by serving as each other’s spotter. And there’s nothing like saying “thanks” to help a relationship.
3. Eye contact and communicating while exercising offer chances for intimacy building that can extend to other activities that are, well, a bit more intimate.
4. Celebrate each other’s achievements and successes. Working out on Total Gym is not about competing, but succeeding. You’ll both work at your own level and speed, and of course, bodyweight, so you both win!
5. Want to give each other a real gift of love? Create 20-30 minutes several times a week to help each other lose weight, burn calories, build muscle and core stability, tone up, build body strength and change body composition.
There is nothing like this love-building, home-based, full-body exercise machine that I can recommend with such confidence for couples who want to build their bodies and their relationships.
Michael Mantell earned his Ph.D. degree at the University of Pennsylvania after completing his M.S. degree in clinical psychology at the Hahnemann Medical College, where he wrote his thesis on the psychology of obesity. He has served as Chief Psychologist of Children’s Hospital and Health Center of San Diego, and created and led the nationally recognized Psychological Services and Employee Assistance/Wellness program for the San Diego Police Department.
Lunges on the Total Gym can be a little tricky if you are new to the sliding glideboard. GRAVITY Master Trainer Rob Glick gives us some pointers to help with balance while lunging. If you are more advanced, test your posture to target different muscles. For more challenges, watch Rob and Nicole:
Resolutions ’11 – Helping You Lunge
Q111_Resolutions11 – (TT) Helping You Lunge
