sleep!

The majority of people need 7 to 8 good hours of sleep per night, on a regular sleep pattern, for the body to function it’s best. If your workouts and competitions aren’t going quite as well as you’d planned, carefully consider whether or not you’re getting enough sleep.

don’t overtrain!

Many people plateau in their weight loss or muscle building goals and never think that they might be over-training. It’s very typical and also very unhealthy. A tangible way to check if you might be overtraining is to check your pulse when you wake up in the morning. If your pulse is more than 10 beats greater than usual, you are most likely over-trained. At that point, try taking a week or two off. Your body and mind will thank you tremendously.

drink soda – not!

Drinking soda has many harmful side effects, such as decreased bone density, and has absolutely no nutritional value. It is a known diuretic which depletes your body of its number one resource–water! If soda is currently a staple of your sports nutrition diet, please, do yourself a favor and cut it out completely.

always do a cool down!

Always, always, always do a cool down after working out vigorously. A normal cool down period should be for about 5-10 minutes, and can be as simple as taking a brisk walk. By doing this, you’re allowing the blood that has accumulated in your extremities and various parts of you body to redistribute. Your cool down will prevent that inevitable muscle stiffness and alleviate soreness the next day. Adding a cool down to your workout will pay for itself many times over. Get in the habit.

replenish those fluids!

If you’re exercising for less than an hour, water will suffice for replenishing your much needed fluids. However, if your workouts are an hour or longer, it’s necessary and extremely beneficial for you to incorporate a good sports drink. A good sports drink will not be carbonated, will contain 15-19 gms of carbohydrates for every 8 ounces and have a good amount of potassium, sodium, and possibly protein. Sports drinks taste better and do a much better job of replacing your body’s nutrients during a extended or vigorous exercise.

By: Christopher Heffron

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When it comes to many things in life, prevention is most certainly better than a cure. Nowhere is this more important than when it comes to your health. How many times have you thought to yourself, “I should probably schedule a regular appointment with my physician..”? How many of you even have a physician? This is one of the things that I found myself wondering after I completed my master’s degree in college. I was fresh out of college and flung into the working world without a clue as to what was going on.

While in college, I (as did all of my friends) had our yearly physical with the school medical staff though not by choice. But where was the guidance that was so lacking once college was complete and we were now young, brazen adults who were looking for jobs and an apartment on our own? When looking for a doctor, the way that most people find physicians is through friends of friends or a family member. However, there is an increasing number of people out there (me being one of them) who are finding doctors based on their websites. The Internet truly is a fascinating place to find people and discover all sorts of bits of information that you never even knew had existed prior to the click of your mouse.

When it comes to your health, you shouldn’t make any excuses. If you are unsure of how to go about finding a doctor, ask a friend or jump on the Internet in order to look at a particular doctor’s website. In some cases, if location is an absolute must for you and you are trying to find someone who is a bit more local, then you may want to drive by a few of the place to check them out for yourself. This is especially true if the doctor in your area does not have a website. Just because there is no website, does not necessarily indicate the level of professionalism that you might receive if you were to eventually become a patient.

The importance of making sure that you schedule regular appointments with your physician is extremely important because this is where most of the pre-screening will be done to make sure that you don’t have anything majorly wrong with you. For instance, it is often at pre-screenings where doctors will discover that a patient has cancer. Cancer, though sometimes unpleasant, is not a death wish. Rather, there are many cures for cancer that linger out there and some of which doctors are discovering every day. No one cancer patient is the same; therefore various methods for attacking this disease are probably. But one thing remains that makes all of the difference: early detection.

If you haven’t done so already, make your next appointment with your physician. After all, wouldn’t you rather know if something is wrong with you ahead of time so that you could then more effectively deal with it? I know that I would.

By: Brenda Williams

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Healthy soul food recipes continue to grow in popularity and demand. With this nations rising health problems, especially among African Americans, the need for healthy alternatives continue increase. As tasty and filling as the traditional down-home meals our great grandma used to make were, we now know some of the ingredients and methods of cooking were bad for us. Many of the traditional recipes contained high levels of cholesterol, fat and sodium. These ingredients in-turn ignited high cases of high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity as well as other health ailments.

To offset the negative results, traditional soul food recipes continue to go through a transformation. As a result it’s making a strong comeback among today’s health conscious adults and seniors. To help you make the transformation in your own home and family here’s a short list on how to cook healthier soul food meals. This list will help you to adjust your cooking methods easier, if you haven’t started already. If you’ve started cooking healthier, these tips will act as your inspiration to continue using healthier alternatives in preparing soul food. These healthy changes allow you to eat healthier without sacrificing taste. It may surprise you how little the original taste is sacrificed. Of course it may not taste as good as your grandmas, but you’ll find your taste buds applauding.

Here’s a short list of healthier alternatives for cooking soul food.


1. Instead of using whole milk:

Use reduced 1 or 2% milk when a recipe requires milk. For example, use in cornbread, custard, macaroni and cheese, sweet potato pie, etc.

2. Instead of using table salt:

Use Kosher salt. It has less sodium than regular table salt. But the healthiest alternative is using lime juice, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar and other various herbs and spices instead of salt.


3. Instead of deep fat frying:

Fry, bake, broil or roast your meats.

4. Instead of flavoring vegetables or beans with fat back, bacon or ham hocks:

Flavor them with smoked turkey necks, turkey ham or turkey bacon.


5. Instead of frying your chicken or fish in lard or vegetable oil:

Use peanut oil or at least canola oil.

6. Instead of pan frying in oil:

Use cooking spray.

7. Instead of cooking chicken with the skin:

Consider removing the skin from chicken before cooking and marinate to add flavor and moistness. By removing the skin you eliminate artery clogging cholesterol.

These are a few examples of using healthier ingredients in your soul food recipes. As you use them you’ll discover how little taste you’re sacrificing. In addition, your health won’t have to suffer like our ancestors may have had to. Because of these healthier cooking tips now you can have your soul food … at eat it too!

By: Roy Primm

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