Why Gyms With Childcare Are a Game-Changer for Parents

You’re not likely to find new parents at the gym. Between the sleep deprivation and the diaper changes and the nonstop feedings, there isn’t much time or energy left to make get a work out in. That doesn’t mean as a new parent you have to give up your gym membership. In fact, a baby could land you an upgrade.

Four months after the birth of our first child—a glorious time where my husband and I went from exhausted and overwhelmed to slightly less exhausted and just a little overwhelmed—we discovered an ingenious life hack: gym childcare. Equinox was the luxury brand gym we drooled over but could never justify spending the money on when we were a “Dual Income No Kids” family. When we had a our child, we did the math again.

5 Easy Hacks to Fix Post-Workout Pain

Working out feels best immediately after you’ve finished — when you’ve got that ‘just accomplished something’ fatigue and you no longer feel like you’re gonna hurl.

Those effects start to feel worse as soon as mere hours after you’ve finished, when you experience that can’t-walk soreness and begin to question if you’ll ever make it to a gym again. That pain can last for days, causes muscle tension, and if you exercise through it, can cause real muscle damage.

So what are you supposed to do when you’re always sore, but want to keep up with your gym routine? Try incorporating some combination of the five tips below to sooth damaged muscles, repair tissue, and boost relaxation and blood flow. They’ll speed up your recovery and ease your muscle soreness, and get you back into the gym sooner.

These 3 Winter Sports Will Help You Burn Calories in the Cold

For most people, dropping temperatures and falling snow are a signal to start the winter hibernation. But if you're looking to stay in shape all year 'round — and avoid developing a rotund, bear-like shape during the colder months — you should try to get outside to sweat in the snow.

Since the white stuff makes it tougher to do all your favorite summer activities, you're going to have to find some new seasonally appropriate workouts. You wouldn't walk outside in shorts in 20 degree weather, so it doesn't make sense to try to exercise the same way you did when the thermostat was pushing higher temps. That takes (most) water-centric sports out of the running — now, the key is to find ways to make the most out of all that snow on the ground.

7 Horrifying Consequences of Taking Steroids

If you’re a regular lifter, the idea of juicing has probably crossed your mind. After all, you've been putting in the work, so why not reap the rewards?

In fact, most steroid users are just regular guys who just want to bulk up, according to findings published in Endocrine Reviews. Specific numbers are hard to come by, though estimates suggest that up to 20 percent of men who do recreational strength training have taken anabolic steroids at some point in their lifting history.

“The number one reason I see people choose to use anabolic steroids is in hopes of more rapid muscle gains from their workout program,” says Vijay Jotwani, M.D., primary care sports medicine physician at Houston Methodist Hospital. And the temptation can be big, especially if you see other guys at the gym taking them with huge results.

CAN YOU THINK YOURSELF STRONGER?

Slept through this morning’s weights session? Go to your room now and think about what you’ve done. No really, we mean it: new research shows that simply visualising a past workout will make you stronger.

While the interplay between mind and muscle is well established, scientists at Germany’s University of Giessen claim you can replace some of your sweat sessions with imaginary ones, “without any considerable reduction of strength gains.”

What Happens To Your Body When You Always Lift the Same Amount Of Weight

Much like our breakfast of choice or what we wear, most of us tend to gravitate to routine when it comes to our lifting workouts: We often use the same amount of weight, over and over. No shame—it’s particularly comforting to select a weight size you know you can handle when you’re at the gym, and when you’re sweating at home, you may not have a variety of weights to work with. But experts say not changing your weight size means you’ll be missing out on some pretty hefty benefits.

“When you train with the same weight week to week, over time, your body will adapt to the resistance, and you won’t see gains in muscular strength or hypertrophy [size],” says Jacque Crockford, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and exercise physiologist with the American Council on Exercise. Compare it to running the same distance every time you hop on the treadmill—at some point, you’re not going to see your body improve, since you’re no longer challenging it.

This Drink Helps You Burn an Extra 490 Calories Per Week

You know that guzzling water can help take the edge off your hunger and nix the urge to snack in between meals. But guess what? That's not the only way that having plenty of water can help you reach your weight loss goals.

You shouldn't just be sipping the stuff when your stomach starts to rumble an hour before dinner. You should be drinking water all the time. (Okay, that's a little bit of an exaggeration. You don't literally need to gulp water 24/7. And your individual hydration depends on your size, activity level, and the climate where you live.)

But regardless: If you're trying to lose your spare tire, you probably should be sipping more often. Here are 3 surprising facts that'll make you reach for your reusable bottle.

Why You Should Work Your Abs First

Your core—the dozens of muscles between your shoulders and your hips—contracts first in every exercise, he explains. All the energy you exert starts in your midsection, and is then transferred to your limbs.

A strong core allows you to apply more force to a barbell, whereas a weak core decreases the amount you can apply.

But in order to prime your core muscles so they fire better during your workout, you need to train your core right after your warmup, he says.

Antibiotics Can Cause Workout Injuries, FDA Warns

Your sickness might sideline your workout in a surprising way: Taking a certain class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones can raise your risk for harmful side effects like tendonitis or even a full-blown tendon rupture, according to a new update from the Federal Drug Administration (FDA).

In fact, people who take these meds—such as Cipro or Levaquin—have about triple the risk of tendon rupture as those not on the drug, researchers from the University of Toronto found.

How Popular Allergy Medicines Can Affect Your Muscle Gains

The same meds that staunch your allergy symptoms or heartburn might also diminish your gains at the gym: Over-the-counter antihistamines may hamper your muscle recovery after exercise, a new study from the University of Oregon suggests.

One hour before a 60-minute strength training workout, the participants took strong doses of two antihistamines, fexofenadine (Allegra, which treats hay fever symptoms) and ranitidine (Zantac, which treats heartburn).

After they completed their workout, the researchers tested their muscles to gauge their recovery.

Normally after vigorous exercise, 3,000 genes work to aid recovery by boosting the blood flow to the tiny tears in your muscle fibers that occur when you light weights. This increases muscle-protein synthesis, which repairs and reinforces the fibers so that they’re more resistant the next time you lift weights.

5 Things Losing Weight Will Never Fix

Think losing weight will make you happier, more confident, and kick-ass at work? Well, it doesn't really work like that...

That's something Kelsey Miller, author of Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting And Got A Life, learned the hard way. “I used to tell myself, 'You can do this when you’ve lost X pounds.' That feeling was holding me back in my career and my friendships—it even stopped me from leaving the house," she says.

“The message that weight loss will fix our problems surrounds us,” says clinical psychologist Terese Weinstein Katz, Ph.D., author of the ebook Eat Sanely: Get Off The Diet Roller Coaster For Good. “There’s a fantasy that thin people are ultimately happier.”

While losing weight might make you feel unstoppable at first (and possibly improve your overall health), there are a few issues that dropping pounds definitely won't resolve. So before you set a goal weight, make it your mission to work out the kinks now—not post weight-loss success.

Is Cardio Necessary For Super-Low Body Fat?

You’ve probably heard a fitness guru declare, with biblical certainty, that “abs are made in the kitchen.”

It’s one of the more absurd clichés. The guys you see in Men’s Health, or in supplement ads, or posing down in a bodybuilding contest, built those bodies in the weight room, and then employed superhuman discipline to stay out of the kitchen while dieting down to photo-ready shape.

But there’s one more part of their program, and it involves something the average meathead doesn’t like to think about: cardio. We know anecdotally that bodybuilders do a lot of it. But is it absolutely necessary?

4 Ways to Burn More Fat

Strength training is the gift that keeps giving. You burn calories during your workout. You also burn them for hours afterwards. The harder you work, all else being equal, the more you should burn both during and after.

But there’s a catch: The most advanced lifters don’t get much of a post-workout metabolic boost, which scientists call EPOC, short for excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. A recent study at Florida State University recruited a group of experienced lifters and had them do two different workouts. (All the lifters did both workouts, with at least one week in between.) Both workouts included the same four exercises using fairly heavy weights—85 percent of their one-rep max. But one workout included twice as many sets as the other.

4 ways to get back on the fitness track

Now that you want to get back on the fitness track in order to get rid of the holiday pounds, where do you start?

The answer for weight loss will always and forever be cardio. While not all cardio is created equal, there IS a cardio routine for everyone.

Here are a few fun ways to shed the pounds:

5 shocking secrets the fitness industry doesn’t want you to know

Personal trainers might not be qualified

When you pay a personal trainer to guide you through your workouts, you naturally assume that they know what they’re talking about. Sadly that might not be the case. The number of personal trainers is expected to have risen by 24% between 2010 and 2020, and a large amount of that growth is down to the loose regulations it takes to become one. According to fitness firm CEO Gregory Florez, many personal trainers win potential clients over with their smiles and sales-talk, rather than knowledge of fitness. In fact, some personal trainer qualifications are so easy to achieve that they simply require paying a one off fee and completing an online test. Before you take a single session with a personal trainer, have a long chat with them to get a feel for their level of knowledge and experience.