I have noticed a lot of action on the Storm Wellness Site these past few months – I am curious to hear more from some of you out there who have tried ediets, weight watchers, Diet To Go, NutriSystems etc., based off my informational articles.  There truly is nothing like a personal trainer’s opinion on these weight loss programs but I also love incorporating your feedback - that’s how I am able to come up in a fair and objective way the advantages and disadvantages of each program.  So keep write in with your stories – successful or not, I would love to hear them!

Wow, I have noticed that weight watchers is really pushing there food these days.  Looks like they are trying to get into the NutriSystem niche of things.  Although they are not delivering they offer most of their products in grocery stores which is super convenient for people.  I was thumbing through a few magazines this past weekend and counted 7 advertisements for weight watchers food products.  Although, the disappointment was that it was all for sweet stuff - ice cream and desserts.  In my opinion it’s best to eliminate this junk from your diet no matter how low cal it might be.  Have some frozen fruit for dessert on a hot summer day or a warm cup of tea on a cold winter night - there are healthier more preservative free ways to calm your sweet tooth.

Hey Everyone, I was recently featured on Kaiser Serajuddin’s very popular Super Trainer Site.  You can check it out by following this link:  http://super-trainer.com/jessica-storm/ Although the article is mostly for aspiring personal trainers I still give some good tid bits away about my Personal Training company Storm Fitness and why it’s been so successful in helping clients not only locally but around the world with fitness and nutrition programs.  Enjoy!

My clients are often asking me what type of protein they should be drinking and what brand I recommend. I always recommend that my clients supplement their nutritional program with Whey protein. It gets absorbed into the muscle quickly and has all the essential amino acids (BCAA’s) to help you build quality muscle tissue - especially post workouts. Don’t worry ladies, you’re not going to get bulky - it’s majorly difficult for woman to put on muscle mass compared to our male counterparts who carry much more testosterone in their bodies.

The truth is, you really should be consuming about 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight if you are looking to put on quality muscle mass. Whey protein is the perfect thing to help you attain that amount of protein in your diet. The brands that I recommend are designer whey - (which most people can find conveniently in stores near their home) and I also recommend Whey from Optimum Nutrition - they have many great flavors and it mixes well in drinks. Some of my clients like to take the time to blend the whey and make great drinks out of it by adding things like fruit, peanut butter or yogurt. Personally, I don’t have the time for that so I just stir and go and that’s why I like Optimum Nutrition Whey because it stirs easily and doesn’t clump and I use the rocky road flavor which is quite yummy. Also, check out these sites for purchase info: vitaminshoppe.com, webvitamins.com, and evitamins.com

If you haven’t heard of the blood type diet (which has been around for several years now), then I highly recommend checking it out. I am not usually too into all of these fad diets that come out i.e. south beach, atkins, zone. I think they all have interesting points to them but do not necessarily encompass a completely healthy or manageable way of eating and living. None the less, I like to know what my clients are up to so I read them.

Being in the industry for a while now I have begun to notice how these diet books cycle through the years - different versions of different books with the same concept being brought to the NY times best seller list and then they become a “fad” - it’s almost laughable to me at times. As Americans we are so obsessed with these diet books. Many people are diet gurus - they know every single book out there and can claim that they have tried every diet as well - it’s just crazy! There is one however that I do believe has some truly scientific worthiness to it and that is the blood type diet.

The blood type diet is based upon the concept that we should at certain foods according to our blood type. For example, blood group O is believed by D’Adamo to be the hunter and is the earliest human blood group. He recommends this type eat a meat rich diet. Where as blood group A, D’Adamo believes it to be a more recently evolved blood type, dating back from the dawn of agriculture. The diet recommends that individuals of blood group A eat a diet emphasizing vegetables and free of red meat, a more vegetarian food intake.

Of course, this book is not without it’s criticisms as they all have them - but I find this book to have some real value to it. I also have found for myself that many of the recommendations hold true. I am blood type A and have always wondered why I was not drawn to meat and found myself choking it down just to get the protein in. Turns out, my body was instinctually trying to steer me towards a more vegetarian lifestyle. I am not strictly vegetarian but I do eat very little meat and comprise most of my meals of fish, tofu, beans as protein sources with turkey and chicken every now and then. Eating this way I have noticed a remarkable difference in how I look and feel. It’s certainly an interesting concept and one I believe is worth checking out if you haven’t already as it may just be part of the answer you were looking for!

In order to see true change in your body you need to get out of your comfort zone and SHOCK your body! This means changing your exercise program around completely OR eating entirely different - in some cases it requires doing both! First and foremost you need to decide what your goals are - if you are looking to put more muscle mass on but you are an avid running and enjoy marathons - then this is going to be a difficult task. You need to decide what you want - more muscle mass or marathons because it’s too difficult to have both. I have never known a figure competitor in tip top shape who also was training for a marathon - it just doesn’t happen. The two counter each other by the running eating away at too much muscle tissue from all that long slow distance training.

So, if your not happy with your body then first decide what you want it to look like and second get help from a personal trainer to design a program to get you the body you want! One that you are happy with and that suits your everyday needs. If you enjoy lots of sports and want to be active with your family but don’t have a massive amount of time to dedicate to training then functional training and circuit training are going to be the best modes of training for you. But, the only true way to tell is to consult with a trainer about your body and your needs and have them get you on the right path so that you are making the most of your time in the gym!

The spring weather is here and with that comes fun road races - many in your local neighborhood! If you are an avid road racer or even an occasional road racer then now is a good time to ramp up your training and start training to break last years race record! The first thing you need to know…if you are looking to break your old time then you need to practice running faster. If you’re not running intervals then you are missing out on getting faster and instead, as you get older your race results will continue to decline. We don’t want that now do we?

The first thing you need to do is add in 1 speed interval session a week. You can either find a local track or keep tabs of the time on your sports watch to track your intervals. Depending on what type of race you are running is how you will determine the length of the intervals you should be running. Here is an example of what one of your interval running days will look like if you were training for a 10k Race:

You will want to warm up for 1 mile nice and easy. Next you will want to find a long hill that takes you about 2-3 minutes to climb. You are going to run up it 5-8 times and jog back down nice and easy in between. When you are finished cool down for 1 mile. The hills will increase your stamina and pain tolerance - not to mention when you are running downhill or flat in the race it will seem like a breeze if you have done some hill training.

Another example interval would be warming up for 1 mile and then running 1/2 mile intervals - 6 times. If you have a track nearby then this would be 2 laps around the track and you would do this a total of 6 times. In between each interval you can jog lightly to catch your breath or rest for a few minutes before repeating your next interval. If you don’t have a track and want to do these on the road then just use your sports watch and approximate about how long it takes you to do a 1/2 mile at 10k pace and then run that amount of time for each interval. Running 1/2 mile intervals will teach you speed and consistency.

Intervals will train your mind to keep running even when it becomes painfully difficult on that 6th interval - and, if it’s too painful and you are burnt out then you know you went out too fast in the other intervals. This will give you more knowledge over your body and teach you how to run a more strategized and mental race so that you don’t putter out before you reach the finish line - like you see so many poor souls do. If you do intervals and train your mind and body - then you won’t be one of those poor souls! Instead you will be finishing feeling strong and with a new Personal Record! Get to know your body and what it’s truly capable of - push your speed limits with intervals!

I have seen it happen all too many times! People want instant results from their fitness and nutrition programs and when they don’t get them they abandon the program all together - never to experience what they could have achieved -they stop just weeks short of seeing spectaular results! Why is it that we don’t have patience to sculpt a beautiful body anyway? I can tell you the secret of the pro’s is that they are willing to work for it and I mean work hard! They know that they might not see all the weeks of suffering through hard workouts and eating cleaning until at least 6 weeks out and even then they will have 6 more weeks to fine tune and tweak before they hit the figure competition stage with their beautifully sculpted bodies. Look, patience is a hard thing - we all want to see the results NOW, not 6 or 8 weeks from now. But a funny thing happens if you hang in there for 6 + weeks - the 6th week rolls around and Kapoooow! It’s like all that hard work shows up in just one day and suddenly you are getting compliments left and right. It’s really sad when most people drop off around the 3rd or 4th week just right before their results hit. They throw their hands up and say - “see, another thing that didn’t work - nothing works for me”. Well of course it won’t! You need to stick with something longer than a month - get your heart in it and really DO IT! Yeah, it sucks not being able to eat cake and yummy treats - but if you really really really want a great healthy body both inside and out then you need to be willing to put in the time and get some patience! Work on it and you will see the difference and LOVE IT!

Okay, so I am a bit behind in terms of jumping on the band wagon with the newest video craze! It seems everyone has a video out on youtube these days. Well, I plan to do the same as well as posting some video on stormwellness. These videos will demonstrate technique of various exercises as well as talk about hot nutrition/fitness topics that you have always wanted to know the answers to. So, to get started I want you to email me what body parts you would like to learn exercises for or if there are any exercises you have ever wondered how to do correctly. I would be happy to demonstrate form and talk about fine tuning your technique so that you can have the body you have always desired but have not yet been able to achieve. Remember, proper form, clean eating and consistency with your program are the only things that will get you PROVEN results time and time again! So email me what you want to hear and learn about now and let’s get this thing rolling!!

Last week Oprah Winfrey did a show on people that live different kinds of lifestyles.  One of the ladies featured on her show was a Mom who worked as a stripper in order to support her family.  One of the main points of the show was not to judge other people for the lives they choose to live.  This mom was able to feed her family, take good care of them, spend time with them and support her kids - so, who are we to judge?  There was so much talk around this Mom though (who was very down to earth and quite a nice lady) because she had a super hot body! Well, of course I suppose if your job is to be a stripper one of the requirements would be that you should have a pretty good body.  This lady ate right and worked hard and in fact aspired to be a personal trainer since her passion was in fitness.  Again proof, nothing comes easy.  Oprah Winfrey asked her how she got such great abs and she emphatically replied Bowflex!!! This lady swore by the bowflex machine to get her rocking hot abs.  Now of course, this does not simply mean that all you have to do is buy the bowflex and your abs will be sculpted and defined - no way, we know better than that! You acutally have to use it 3-4 times a week and combine it with a sensible diet and you to can have the rocking hot body that this lady had - pretty incredible for a woman in her mid 40’s which proves once again, no excuses! You can get the body you desire at any age - age, is no excuse!  For more information on the bowflex products go here:  bowflexshop