Truth be told, no amount of abdominal crunches will get rid of your love handles. Spending 30mins on a treadmill will do more for that spare tyre than 30mins of crunches. If you want to lose the annoying flab around your middle, first determine is it fat or muscle. If you bear down and grab the loose skin around your belly button, that is not muscle, it is fat (and skin). Dig deep with your fingers and you will feel the muscle. Does that feel firm or flabby? In fact most of us have a pretty good six pack, it’s sometimes just hidden under a doona of body fat!

The core abdominal muscles underneath our body fat are extremely important for stabilizing our entire body and protecting our backs from injury. They can certainly affect the shape of our torso even if there is excess body fat around them. So just because you can’t spot

reduce fat, doesn’t mean you skip your abs session, you still should be doing some strengthening of your core. Your internal and external oblique muscles (see diagram) are responsible for any twisting movement your torso makes. They stabilize the trunk and help protect the back. Well defined obliques help to narrow the waist giving men the V shape they want and women their sexy hour glass figure. Follow these five effective oblique exercises and your sides will be aching tomorrow!

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Tagged As: abdominals, abs, core stability, exercise, fitness, Weight loss

Editors Note: This post is written by contributer Andrew Verdon. Andrew has completed a Diploma in Exercise Science, Certificate IV in Fitness, Level 1 Strength Coaching Qualifications with ASCA. He is currently completing a Post Grad Diploma in Applied Science (Elite Sports Training) and will go on to do a Masters in Recovery.

This month we are looking into sleep and its importance to your physical and mental performance. Sleep is an important activity and crucial in the restorative process. Good sleep is vital for high performance; be it in business sport or life. As the levels of physical and mental stress increase so does the amount of sleep we need. However, sleep seems to be the first thing to suffer with many of us “burning the candle at both ends” with late nights followed by poor quality sleep and early starts.

We go through 4-5 stages when we sleep. The deepest of these is called the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. We cycle through the stages up to 6 times per night and each cycle takes 90 to 120 minutes. This is important to maintain your natural sleep cycles and help you wake rested and refreshed.

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Tagged As: exercise, mental, performance, physical, sleep

If someone asked you ‘what exactly is cholesterol? Could you confidently answer them? More than 1 in 3 Australians and Americans suffer from high cholesterol but many of us don’t really know what is it and how it works. This post will explain in layman’s terms what cholesterol is and how it directly affects your health.

What is cholesterol?

Think of cholesterol as the repair kit for our arteries. The inner lining of our arties needs to be super smooth so that blood can easily flow through it, but sometimes we get little nicks from wear and tear such as nicotine, high blood pressure, stress or too much fat in the diet. Think of it like a few tiles coming off the bottom of a swimming pool. Cholesterol acts as the grout to fill these holes and prevent further damage. The problem is one type of cholesterol fixes these nicks beautifully whilst the other does such a patchy job that it makes the arteries even more rough and congested.

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Tagged As: cholesterol, diet, Health, heart attack, nutrition, Weight loss