Active rest means that you are active while you rest. You do something while you are resting from the something else – as simple as that.
Active rest is a well known concept meaning you are active during your rest days, the one you have between your workout days.
When we talk about active rest we do not mean the rest we mentioned above, we talk about the rest time between exercise sets. Like this: if you are doing 10 repetitions of an exercise, rest, 10 reps, rest, and 10 reps again, we want the small rest you have, 10-40 seconds between your 10 reps, should be active.
WEIGHT TRAINING ACTIVE REST
In weight training you want to get maximum of muscle strength and muscle growth. To achieve that, personal trainers usually recommend 8-12 repetitions of an exercise, three times, with a short rest in between. The rest time between exercises tend to be between 10-40 seconds. Typically, 10 reps, waiting 10-40 sec, the muscle gets a brief rest, and then another 10 reps.
We instead advocate an active rest.
Active rest means that you do something between your exercises, instead of resting. Active rest can for example be that you skip or jog on the spot. The purpose of active rest is that you maintain a higher heart rate between exercises, making sure you get a more high-intensity exercise with increased calorie burn and fat burn as a result.
BODYWEIGHT TRAINING AND ACTIVE REST
When we workout we always do the active rest. This allows us to workout with relatively high heart rate all the time, whether we work out a smaller muscle group such as biceps or else.
How we do it:
Let's say that we should run a bicep workout and will do three exercises (Curl, Hug and Reverse Curl), every exercise in three sets with 12 repetitions in each set. If I (Anna-Maria) begin with 12 Biceps Curl in the Bodyweightbands, Kennet is jogging / jumping on the spot, as soon as I have finished in the bands we change - I jog and Kennet curl and so on.
A workout like this will take about 12-15 minutes. Although the workout is done in a short amount of time, it's intense, fitness-enhancing, fat-burning and increases muscle mass.
We have a channel on Youtube where we upload new material, both short movies and single exercises on a regular basis. You are more than welcome to take a look, get inspired and get started! Click here to get there >>
Super food is food that has extraordinary and broad spectrum of nutrients and or medical properties. Super foods add more to your body and soul than just the sense of satiety and it may be vegetables, fruit, roots, seeds and other plants. Common to super foods is that it is clean food, that is, organically grown and unprocessed. Super foods should be treated with care and not be heated to more than 40 degrees to as much nutrients as possible should be intact.
Super foods are actually seen as food and medicine in one. By eating foods that stimulate regeneration and repair, our bodies become more balanced. Many people eat super foods as a kind of supplements, it is not about eating lots of everything but little of as much as possible .
Below I list a whole lot of different super food, but the products may also be bought in ”common form" too. As cocoa powder for example. Regular cocoa powder is processed and heated several times, while raw cacao is not heated, and therefore includes a variety of healthy antioxidants, vitamins and minerals.
In order to stay as healthy as possible, I try to use different super foods in our diet, as often as I can. Much depends of course on what I have bought before and is available in the kitchen, so for me it was all about changing my purchasing habits in the grocery store. To buy the new stuff instead of the old. I have also started to buy a lot online, from iherb.com for example. Iherb.com is an American web shop that has really good products and better prices than here in Sweden anyway. (If you want to shop at iHerb , enter the code LRL574 to get 10% off your first purchase).
Below I have listed of some of the super food available, often in a regular grocery store. If you want to know what each product is good for and affects, please contact me, or search the information on reliable sources online.
Raw cocoa
Goji berries
Coconuts
Physalis
Mangosteen
Wheatgrass
Barley Grass
Bee pollen
Sprouts of any kind
Hemp seeds
Chia seeds
Coconut Oil
Flaxseed oil
Aloe Vera
Chili
Garlic
Ginger
Turmeric
Maca Powder
Shitake
Chlorella
Spirulina
Spinach
Nori
I find it so interesting and exciting that the food we eat actual affects how we feel. It no news and its obvious, but never the less, many people see food not as nutrition but as a way to stay out of their worst feeling – HUNGER. Its time to wake up and start treating your body the way it deserves. Remember You are what you eat. So don´t be: Fast, Cheap, Easy or Fake.
It's easy to attach the Bodyweight@ training system in a door and getting started with the training. We have produced a small booklet that shows how to do!
Functional training is a popular form of exercise that has the intention of making your body more functional. Functional training involves exercising your flexibility, balance and coordination skills by activating many different muscles simultaneously.
Functional training is different from other workouts in different ways. An example of how functional strength training differs from traditional weight training, bodybuilding, is that in traditional strength training you train one muscle at a time. The traditional way isolates one or two muscle groups and train them in one specific exercise. In functional training the goal is to achieve a functional body using natural movements that involves many muscle groups simultaneously.
BALANCE AND IMBALANCE
By not working in fixed machines but instead train with a Bodyweight® training system your training becomes more functional. When you use the bands you activate so many muscles in your body to perform, without even thinking about it. Your balance and your posture is trained automatically while you focus on doing strength exercises.
STAY YOUNG WITH FUNCTIONAL TRAINING
With age comes not only wisdom and experience, but also undesirable things like stiffness and decreased strength. But - it need not be so. Using functional training can help people maintain both balance, strength and agility, well into old age.
FUNCTIONAL TRAINING AND BODYWEIGHT®
Using Bodyweight®, you can easily perform functional training, where ever you want. There are a variety of exercises that builds up your body in a way that you empower yourself that benefits you not only aesthetic but also functional. The exercises can be downloaded from the App store, or watch them on our YouTube Channel.
Whether you are young or old, fit or unfit, you can use Bodyweight® effectively and safely.
I've never been much for breakfast, so I often skip what we in Sweden call "the most important meal of the day." I'm quite inconsistent, so some days it becomes porridge for breakfast, but other days just a coffee and fruit - but one thing is always the same: our morning juice! It's filled with good stuff, and tastes absolutely fabulous. I have to admit that the amount of ginger only increases, so anyone who does not like ginger, you might not take as much as we do...
What it contains in addition to ginger? When I make a pot that lasts 4-5 days for both of us, I use:
4 oranges
4 green apples
4 celery stalks
4 carrots
(quite a lot of) ginger
I run everything in my vegetable centrifuge, and it works great for me.
The juice is both tasty and nutritious, and really gives a kick start to the day. I recently bought the book " Superfoods - healing food from the heart of nature " by John Opsahl , and found the following fun information about some of the ingredients :
Orange (vitamin C) : " ... Increases the body's iron absorption .. necessary for the formation of collagen .... important for fat metabolism and the immune system .. "
Ginger : " .. anti-inflammatory and analgesic ... stimulates digestion .. increases blood circulation .. "
Celery is good for the liver and is detoxifying, carrots adds vitamin A , green apple adds potassium, and flavonoids (antioxidants) .
If you want to give yourself a real health treat you can also mix in some wheat grass and why not a few grains of bee pollen ? If you have your own recipe for the greatest morning juice – I would be happy to try it out!
All the best!
Anna-Maria