When you hire a personal trainer, whether it’s for a couple of sessions or a long-term commitment, you want to get the most out of your time and money. Most of this depends on the trainer, who should know what to say and do to get you the results you want. But by asking the right questions, you can bring out your trainer’s best with topics they may not know are of concern for you. Check out the questions these top trainers would love to hear from their own clients and examples of how they’d respond.

An afternoon barbecue is the symbol of summer: Firing up the grill and filling your yard with the smell of delicious food, fun games and the feeling that there's nowhere else you need to be.
Of course, a barbecue also means hours of drinking and eating high-calorie beverages and not-so-healthy foods. The combination of the summer sun and long afternoons make it easy to consume more than you mean to. But with a few swaps, you can save some calories — and your waistline:

Circuit training is an exercise that combines strength training and aerobic conditioning in one full-body workout.

Circuit training improves your muscle strength, as well as cardiovascular endurance, while burning hundreds of calories. According to “Fitness" magazine, circuit training burns 30 percent more calories than typical weight training workouts.

Many fitness clubs and gyms offer circuit training classes, but you can easily do circuit training workouts at home or at the gym on your own. Such workouts last 30 to 45 minutes each and use either dumbbells, resistance bands or just your own body weight as a resistance.

What can a personal trainer do for me?

Quite a number of things actually. Working with a certified personal trainer has the following advantages-

• Customized programming- No cookie cutting here. A knowledgeable personal trainer will create a customized exercise program for you, designed to help you reach your unique health and fitness goals. A trainer will also take into account special considerations (e.g. existing medical condition, pregnancy, post-rehabilitation, medications taken, etc) when creating a program exclusively for you.
  

Sweet potatoes are all the rage right now but getting everyone in the family to eat them can sometimes be challenging.  Answer ... A FUN recipe that the whole family will enjoy (kiddos too!).  Try this one out, makes a great side to just about any main dish!

Ingredients:

• 3 cups sweet potatoes
• 1 cup grated raw Parmesan cheese, plus more for rolling tots in
• salt and pepper to taste

How’s your fitness journey going for you? If you aren’t measuring your progress, how do you know that your workouts are really working for you? “The point of taking measurements is to come up with meaningful data that you can act on and know whether or not the steps you’ve taken are helping you reach your goals,” says Mark Nutting, CSCS, fitness director and master trainer with Saco Sport & Fitness, in Saco, Maine. “The assessments you choose should relate directly to your goals.” Here are 11 ways to track your progress. Some work better than others, so find one or two that work for you and get started.

The long wait is almost over!  Summer is about to arrive and with it the heat and humidity that can sometimes make it uncomfortable to spend time outside - let alone exercise!

While exercising in the heat is generally safe for most people, taking a few extra precautions will help you stay cool and prevent problems associated with the heat.

No one understands the full extent of stress better than soldiers. Studies performed at the U.S. military’s Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) school found that trainees who perform the best under the stress of interrogation have the highest levels of stress hormones after being interrogated. The higher stress hormones act as a buffer, protecting the soldier from the effects of stress and supporting better performance despite the stressful circumstances. Interestingly, the soldiers who performed best were members of Special Operations, commonly known to perform better physically than many of their conventional counterparts.

But you don’t have to be a Navy SEAL to harness your brain’s stress response system and translate it to better results in the gym. What determines whether or not you reach your fitness goals is how well your body adapts to the stress you place on it during training. This kind of adaptation requires:

• Sufficient exercise-induced stress to provoke a response. Not doing enough work or doing the same thing all the time will halt your gains.
• The right type of stimuli required for the adaptation you want to create. You get better at exactly what you do and how you do it. If your goal is to look like a sprinter, don’t run slow, long distances and expect to achieve your goal.
• The metabolic resources your body needs to create an effective stress response that results in adaptation.
• Your autonomic nervous system (ANS) to adequately control the stress and adaptation response.

Hi, my name is Rachel Allonby! When I was younger I always wanted to be outside, even if it was raining I wanted to go out and play, run and just engage in activity. When I was 8 years old I fell in love with the sport of cheerleading. I continued my athletic life style with cheerleading through my college years.

However, no matter what age I was always the “heavier” cheerleader. I began to think I was prone to this body type until I began to research the fitness industry.

With this being said I decided to major in Exercise Science and began to learn everything I could about the human body, the movement, physiology and nutritional values. I graduated in December 2015 with a B.S in Exercise Science and have not looked back since.

Recipes don’t get much simpler than this! 

All you need to do is whisk together a mashed banana with a couple of eggs and a pinch of salt to balance taste.

That’s it!  Just make sure your banana is fully ripened so it’ll be at its sweetest.

You’ll ladle and cook these in a skillet just like regular pancakes, but these are protein-rich and naturally gluten free, so they’ll fit into many more diets than regular ol’ starchy pancakes.