Fiber-particularly soluble fiber plays a vital role in food synergy and the delayed absorption of sugar. A high fiber diet is a pillar to a healthy diet. Beans, pure bran, oatmeal, prunes, avocado,  raisins, and most green vegetables, for example, are high fiber foods that cause less of a rise in blood sugar than foods like potatoes or any wheat based food. And eating a high fiber diet will aid in weight loss. High fiber foods generally require more chewing time, giving your body more time to register the fact that your no longer hungry,so your less likely to overeat. A high fiber diet also tend to keep you full longer because they have more volume with fewer calories. This slows stomach emptying. While this can give the body more time to absorb nutrients, it can also “trap” minerals like calcium or zinc, binding them up in such a way that they don’t have the opportunity to be absorbed. Insoluble fiber (like whole grains, seeds and fruit skins) increases the mass of the stool, which actually moves the stool more quickly through the intestines. Insoluble fibers pass through the digestive system relatively intact.

Glycemic Index

The glycemic index is a measure of how much given food (like fruit) raises your blood sugar. High sugar foods-or foods that convert to sugar in the body-are considered “high glycemic.” Why do we care. Because raising blood sugar raises levels of a hormone called insulin, which, if raised high and long enough and frequently enough, contributes to diabetes, obesity, heart disease and aging. Eating “Low glycemically” is a strategy that is virtually guaranteed to contribute to health.
Unfortunately, the glycemic index is a very misleading measure much like BMI (body mass index) because it doesn’t take into account portion size. The glycemic load is the number that’s more important. For now, the take home point is this: Eat less sugar. And eat fewer foods that convert quickly to sugar in the body (almost all processed carbohydrates). If you are more interested in learning more about this-something I highly recommend that you do is check out www.fatfreekitchen.com/glycemic-index.html

Antioxidants

You hear and read them on packaging daily. So what are they? Oxidation- or oxidative stress- is much like rust you would find on an old saw. When that happens in your body- as it happens every day- it can cause significant damage to your cells and organs. Keeping your saw rust free will not only help it last longer but keep it’s structure functioning for everyday use. Oxidation is a factor in virtually every degenerative disease. Antioxidants help fight this process. Deficiencies of antioxidants are implicated in the early stages of heart disease, cancer, eye degeneration, and decline in memory. When I tell you that food is good because it has antioxidants, now you know why.

Cholesterol

I make no secret my love for eggs. I eat them almost every day and think they are one of nature’s perfect foods. And you will never see me throw away the yolk. I often beg my vegetarian clients to at least integrate eggs into their diet. The question inevitably comes, “What about the cholesterol?”
Cholesterol just might be the most misunderstood molecule in the world. Dr. John Abramson, professor of medicine at Harvard University, says this: “It is important to keep in mind that cholesterol is not a health risk in and of itself. In fact, cholesterol is vital to many of the body’s essential functions.” Cholesterol is the “parent” molecule of some of the body’s most important compounds, including many sex hormones and vitamin D. It’s also an integral part of the cell membrane.
What slot of people don’t realize is the vast majority of cholesterol is made in your body, by the liver. If you take in less, the liver makes more. You need cholesterol. Without it, you’d die.
Doing justice to the whole cholesterol question in an introduction as short as this is a real challenge, but I’d like you to have a few basic take home points. The first is that cholesterol -like the ones you find in egg yolks-has minimal impact on serum cholesterol (the kind that your doctor measures). Minimal. Not only that, but the effects of eggs on heart disease can’t be predicted by looking only at the cholesterol content. Eggs contain many other nutrients that are good for you-protein, some polyunsaturated fats, colic acid, and B vitamins. If quotes help here is another- As Dr. Walter Willet, chairman of nutrition and professor of medicine at Harvard, has said, “No research has ever shown that people who eat more eggs have more heart attacks than people who eat few eggs.”
The second point has to do with the dogma of saturated fats in general. Yes, saturated fat raises cholesterol, but it raise both good (HDL) and bad (LDL) cholesterol. And though there may be a relationship between saturated fat and cholesterol, the relationship between saturated fats and heart disease is far less clear. How about this. Check out www.thincs.org or www.ravnskov.nu/myth1.htm.
Lowering cholesterol is big business. The top two top selling drugs on Forbes magazine of pharmaceutical juggernauts were Lipitor and Zocor, both cholesterol statin drugs. Together, they did a combined business of more than $13 billion. More importantly the research done on these drugs proves that it’s not the cholesterol lowering effects tthis make them effective, but their ability to lower inflammation, which indeed is a definate risk for heart disease, as well as a component of Alzeimer’s, diabetes, and obesity. Supplementing foods like blueberries, which are filled with natural flavanoids like quercetin, or spices like turmeric, that are so incredibly healthy largely because they are anti-inflammatory. Maybe we wouldn’t need a $13 billion dollar drug industry if we would just eat foods that do the same thing plus more.

Rogue Cabarete is a collective of trainers brought together by the belief in the foundations of fitness. The approach and program is always varied and the results are dramatic. We are proud to provide cutting edge programs designed by Master Kinesioligists and deep practitioners of Yoga, Capoera, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. But most importantly our atmosphere is one of support and camaraderie to anyone willing to put in the work.

We believe in teaching better movements that increase range of motion and strength are the cornerstones of fitness and that quality coaching is a pivotal part of your experience.

Rogue Cabarete includes a community of diverse athletes. We have engineers, teachers, professional athletes, and doctors. Including moms, dads, NAVY Seals, and injured kiters. Working out or in class with you will be clients who are old, young, and everywhere in between. The things we share are motivation, hard work and honesty. Those are the characteristics that we have built our business and our gym family upon.

What We Do
Crossfit is an empirically driven, clinically tested and community developed strength and conditioning program. We are an assembly of dedicated trainers who want our clients to become stronger, leaner, faster, and more coordinated. Evolving our clients into better functioning beings. We mix gymnastics (body control), weightlifting (control of external objects), and cardiovascular training in every way possible.

Yoga

Capeira

BJJ

Surfing, biking etc

What You Get

Private Training — There is no substitute for personal attention. In a private session is you and a guru developing your athletic ability or practice. Special attention is paid to your individual goals and programming needs. Private sessions are a great way to practice a specific skill or hone in on some technique once a week in addition to group training.

Group Training/Classes — Always at Rogue Cabarete you get individual coaching in a group setting. Every group session includes a warm up, instruction, and a workout. There is a ton of variety and positive vibrations. You get personal trainers in a group setting with camaraderie to push you along. Each group session is different from the one before and every group session is structured so that no matter your fitness level you can participate. We scale repetitions and weights but we do not change the program. Intensity is relative to each athlete.

Here are the 10 commandments towards living a healthier life:

1. Eat right!  Eating healthy means a diet that’s right for you, your body type and your lifestyle.  If you are not sure about what to eat, then consult a nutritionist or put some effort into learning about your body type and lifestyle, and cater your fuel (food intake ) towards that.  This is the most important step in healthy living, as the age old saying says – you are what you eat!
2. Drink plenty of pure water.  A liter and a half is a good start.  If you want to change it up, put some lemon or lime in it
3. Manage your stress levels.  Stress is the root of 90% of all sickness – so manage your stress either with meditation, exercise or whatever your outlet it.  Also manage the amount you take on, but making the relevant life choices.
4. Exercise regularly.  Exercise is like a drug, as in it need to be properly prescribed with the correct dosage.  Correct exercise can  readily substituted  for many of the most common drugs used today for like diabetes, heart disease and depression.  Your body naturally releases endorphins when you work out that heal many things.  High energy, burst exercises are exceptional for wight control, muscle strength, and encourages human growth hormones (HGH) – all key to a healthy life.  If you’re not sure how to work out correctly, get a personal trainer to set you on the right track – or come visit us at one of our fitness camps!
5. Get some sun!  Sun is Vitamin D, and necessary for proper health and happiness.  If you can’t get the sun, then get a vitamin D supplement – or come and visit us here in the Dominican Republic for a fitness vacation!
6. Reduce your exposure to toxins – dust, smog, pesticides, chemicals – all bad!
7. Don’t forget about the good fats! omega 3′s, coconut oil and pure butter are necessary for healthy cells. 
8. Eat lots of raw food.  Not sure what that is?  Get a juicer, or even better, just eat raw produce.
9. Optimize your insulin levels – eat regular meals, not in binges and avoid sugar mood swings caused by sugar lows
10. Get proper sleep.  Sleep deprivation leads to high stress levels.  It’s amazing what a nap can do.

Leading a common sense, healthy lifestyle is your best bet to produce a healthy body and mind, and increase your longevity.  These guidelines for a healthy life are what many of our fitness vacation clients come to us looking for – a lifestyle change – and this is what we teach them.

Enjoy life!

Any walk can be turned into a toning tool, with one little trick.  During your morning or evening beach walk, start to take really long strides and concentrate on squeezing the gluteal muscles as you walk.  At first it will feel funny, but don’t worry, no one can see you.  It takes a little work, but you can start flexing muscles and making use of the workout time to get some good results.  Another option  to take exercise to whole new level is by walking backwards.  Walking backwards forces the hamstrings and glutes to be directly involved in the movement, and aside from looking a little funny, is another great workout.

People watching is a addede benefit, as many people do morning beach walks here in Cabarete.  Many start from Cabarete bay and end up at our beach, as it’s a good breakfast and turn around point.   Because we are on kite beach, it’s about 30 min walk to Cabarete bay, and we can do it backwards.  There are multiple places to stop and take a photo, or just admire the scenery.  Best of all, it’s not cold, it exfoliates your feet, and makes for a beautifull start to your day.

During the evenings it’s also fun to watch all the kitesurfers end their day of kiteboarding during your walk, just be sure to watch out for their kite lines, as they can be hard to see.  The horse back riders also like to use the afternoons as a time to walk the beach towards the sunset for the ideal end to a romantic day!

Today for example I practiced my backflip… By no means am I an expert but I have executed the feat before.  It’s not something to try right off the bat, but it something that you can build your fitness up to, and a great goal to achieve

About 2 months ago during the early stages of my life as a beach trainer here in Cabarete, I began training Jui jisu with Papo the Dominican Champion.  During this training, it became apparent thatt I felt the need to tap into a weakness of mine ( it involves being upside down and jumping). To me a great test of mobility, power and balance.

After debating in my head for about 4 hours I grabbed the guys from Kaicitos Circus, the circus school here on the beach and bit the bullet. Mind you before I was spotted by the master acrobat David. This time I had to step it up to the next level. Eyes forward. Check. Hands down. Check. Hips Back. Check. Jump, look back, tuck the knees, release, hands up, feet down, eyes forward. Check pending. When you look at any dynamic movement ( Like I cant help but do) the nueromuscular feat of them all is quite staggering. With the right synegry of balance, coordination, strength etc most all of these things can be accomplished with enough mindfull practice.

Now back to what is fitness, ? Get moving and educate yourself on how your body moves, or if you want a kick start, come on down and visit us here at eXtreme Cabarete, as we have all different kinds of fitness in one place.  When you discover these two it will become apperent that you never know until you find proper programming and try it out!

Think about a backflip and what it takes physically and just as importnatly mentally to nail it. What is fitness? I don’t know? But tomorrow I have day 2 of poi spinning.

Abdominal strength is misunderstood.  Most people believe that that is a 6 pack, and the path to the famous 6 pack is via crunches.  That could not be further from the truth.  To start on a path to a 6 pack does not start or involve crunches – ever as far as Zach the crossfit trainer is concerned.

First of all, crunches are an isolation exercise, and abdominals themselves is a relatively small muscle group, so your time invested in your traditional ab crunching routines is very minimal for choleric output, and developing what most knowledgeable trainers would consider core strength.

Core strength starts with preventing a movement, that’s what rectus abdominius and transvers absominis are essentially there for.  Now to come back to crunches and – a small contraction typically done until failure – is lactic acid telling your body that that muscle group is failing.  That is not core strength.

Instead, a great foundation and step forward is developing your plank.  What is your plank?

“The plank, also called a prone hold, is an isometric exercise for the core. It is performed by lying on your stomach and lifting your body by keeping your toes or knees and forearms on the ground. The objective of the exercise is to hold this position without movement for as long as possible.” – wikipedia

The plank strengthens the abdominal, back and shoulders. It develops stabilizers that are crucial for many sports.

From developing core strength, you can learn and be more efficient in great foundation exercises like a pull up and squats.

How does a solid core help your pull up exercises?

Because you have to keep your body rigid, and all movement burns energy – so when you swing during pull ups, you are actually making it more difficult to do – not to be confused with a kick movement

Not only does proper strong core look good, but it can prevent one of the most common injuries, lower back injuries. Proper core exercises like plank integrate lower back workouts.

Like any dynamic movement, no one muscle group is isolated

Another little good piece of fitness knowledge from Zach – understand the difference between lower back pain, and lower back muscle soreness.  Often people are so paranoid of lower back pain that they totally ignore working out their lower back muscles – which makes it more prone to injury

For those not in the know, trans fat is made by partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.  This is done by adding hydrogen to liquid vegetable oil at very high temperatures so that the oil changes into a semi soild fat.  Trans fats was introduced into processsed foods in the 1970′s  to help perserve them longer.

The problem with trans fat is that your body doesn’t need it and doesn’t know what to do with it so it stores it creating that fat that is very difficult to get rid of, as well as being harmful to your health.  It is also harmful to your cholesterol level, and is is a cause for heart disease.

So the goals here is to minimize the amounts of trans fats from our diet.  The food and drug admnistration has done an ok job of removing them from a lot of our foods, but the bad news is that you may still find trans fat in:

• deep fried foods, spring rolls, chicken nuggets and frozen potato products
• margarines and shortenings
• commercially baked goods like donuts, danishes, cakes, pies
• toaster pastries, waffels, pop tarts
• oriental noodles
• snack puddings
• microwave popcorn, chips, cheesies, crackers, cookies, and here’s one – granola bars

What do to:

Realistically, it’s very difficult to completely eliminate trans fat from your diet, but you can try to eat as little trans fat as possible.

Some general guidelines to help you reduce trans fats:

• Read food labels and avoid the words “partially hydrogenated” or “vegetable oil shortening” on the ingredient list.  These are tricky ways to say  trans fat.
• Load up on vegetables, fruit, and unprocessed whole grains. These are good for you, fill you up and are trans fat free.
• Avoid deep fried foods
• Cook from scratch as often as you can.   You will see what goes into your meals and avoid anything bad.
• Bake your own cakes muffins, and pancakes instead of relying on prepackaged mixes.   It’s cheap and easy.
• Avoid hard (stick) margarine, butter or partially hydrogenated shortening.

The good news is many food manufacturers have now reformulated their cookies, crackers and french fries to contain no trans fat, but again read  the label to ensure that the trans fat has not been replaced with saturated fat.

Today on our daily beach walk, Zach told me about wind sprints.  Apparently it’s the basis from which Cross fit training came up from.

What’s a wind sprints?

It would be better to call wind springs get winded springs, because the goal is to push the intensity of your exercise to the point of being  momentarily winded.   The benefits are huge, because at that point you burn a huge amount of calories in a very short period of time, while adding intensity and challenge to your workout with little risk of getting injured.

How Do I Do Wind Sprints?

Some people think wind sprints only involve running, but the reality is you can add wind springs to any  of your aerobic exercises.  During the middle of your workout, just add several short bursts of intensity.  You can achieve this by either by going faster or increasing the resistance.  It’s not necessary to go as fast or as hard as you can, you only need to  go hard enough for 20-40 seconds that you increase your breathing rate .

Now the secret to increasing fitness with wind sprints is what you do AFTER the sprint.  In order to maximise the benefits, you need to return to the pre sprint intensity, not slower, do not stop, just return to previous intensity level, until you recover.  Once you’ve recovered, repeat the cycle of sprint and recovery 5 to 10 times.

By following this pattern, you increase your burn rate, and can shorten your total exercise time – Ideal for people pressed for time.

What is Intensity?

There are many ways to add intensity and going faster is one of them, but not the only one.  All you need to do to increase intensity is work a bit harder than usual, for a short burst.  This means different things to people at different fitness levels.  An athelete will have to run full tilt to achieve this, but someone who is overweight can add sprints just by upping the pace in the middle of their walk, say for example by going up a short hill.  It’s not enough to totally exhaust you, but it’s enough of a strain that you are glad when you’ve made it.

That little hill represents the level of intensity I’m talking about. Sprinting madly up the hill as if it were running from a bear is too much intensity, and will only exhaust you.  That might be necessary for an olympian, but for the every day person that’s too much.

The beauty of wind springs is that they can be added to any workout.  Just be sure to force your body to recover while  you are still under stress – It’s not the intensity of the sprint that’s the bonus, it’s the intensity of the recovery where the gains are made.

Thanks zach for a great walk and some good info

I’ve been down here for 3 days, and Zach has been on me to start training with him.  It’s been raining for the last few days, and working out is one of the few things that can be done in Cabarete in the rain.  It’s actually a great time to start on a new fitness program, because the rain makes it a big cooler and you can work out harder.

So as it goes, I began my new fitness regime to a big smile on Zach.

For those not in the know, Zach is the keen fitness instructor here at the gym.  Zach is 22, in fantastic shape, and using his time down here to train huge and learn Ju Jitsu.  Zach loves to eat the spnich, moringa and other fruits and vegetables we have here at the hotel, and talk about nutrition and why these plants are great for you.

Zach is all about cross fit.  It’s the latest craze in the get fit industry.  I was not sure what cross fit is about, but basically today it was 5 exercises in high reps and intensity, as you quicky rotate through them until you finish your 3 sets.

By the 3rd set, you are meant to increase the number of reps, even though you are exhausted and ‘it’s in your head’.  I’m pretty sure it was my body telling me that but anyway.  To be honest I didn’t complete all the reps but of course I have an excuse for that today.  It was my first day and Zach had me partenered with someone younger and I didn’t want to appear slow.

At the end I did feel great, and I had not been pushed too far to come back tomorrow.  There is more to come, as I see Zach every day, all day, and all i needs is 20-40 min (plus a warm out and warm down if you are so inclined)

Maybe tomorrow I’ll do yoga instead.

Ashtanga Yoga

Ashtanga Yoga: meaning 8 limbs

( ASHT=8, ANGA= Limbs)

Ashtanga yoga is a sequentially-paced, powerful practice that energizes your body from the inside out. This total-body workout is designed to burn off toxins.

Ashtanga Yoga : The 8 aspects of Patajali’s Yoga

 Yama and Nivama: Decipts of moral and social conduct

 Asanas: Adjust the body in various postures

 Pranayama: Regulation of breath

 Pratyahara: Internalization of the senses of perception

 Dharana: Concentration

 Samadhi: The ultimate state of self realization

Ashtanga yoga is also known as power , flow or vinyasha yoga. The postures flow and have emphasis on strength and agility, while focusing on breathing techniques. Ashtanga yoga is designed to cleanse the body of pollutants and detox by intensifying internal heat. This is ideal for fit individuals, or those desiring to become fit quickly as it usually involves physically challenging routines. Poses can be altered to more suitably fit a students skill level, despite it’s reputation of being a demanding discipline.

Vinyasha Yoga

Vinyasha Yoga is derived from ashtanga yoga. Instructors often create their own flow of movements and postures which can challenge their students with combinations of beginner and advanced poses, to best suit the ability level of their class.

Flow Yoga

Flow yoga is about connecting the pose with the breath. Flow yoga moves from one pose to another in a smooth, controlled motion. Meditation in motion. You flow in the present moment.