Ph Balance Is An Important Consideration For Active Poeple

Active people who cycle, run, hike, play tennis, golf, build muscle up, or do anything physical and want to perform at peak levels of fitness, have a choice to make. It's a choice many never consider, but one of the most important choices for overall health and fitness. It stares you right in the face every time you eat or drink anything. The choice to consider is whether or not a food or beverage is going to help you maintain proper Ph balance, or is it going to throw that delicate balance off and leave you vulnerable to health challenges.

In order to maintain suitable Ph balance, nutrition experts suggest 80% of dietary intake should be alkaline and 20% acidic. The alkalinity or acidic properties of a food or beverage come into play when your body burns them for fuel. Consuming too many acidic foods, drugs, tobacco, sodas, cocktails, or coffee cause the Ph level of the blood to become overly acidic, therefore, out of balance. Too much alkaline food can also throw the body out of balance, but not many people have that problem.

Most people have this alkaline/acid ratio upside down, which means the body has to find something with enough alkalinity to correct the acid/alkaline imbalance. A human being's blood Ph level is meant to stay at 7.4, so the body is constantly working to maintain that level, no matter what you consume. If you are forcing your body to work harder in order to preserve that Ph level, how hard can it work for you when you are in the middle of physical activities? If the body has to neutralize more acid than it is designed for, where do you think it always finds a readily available supply of something with enough alkalinity to do that? The answer is, your bones. When the consumption of alkaline food and drinks is insufficient to do the job, then the body has to pull calcium from bones in order to neutralize excess acid in the bloodstream.

It is a nutrition fact that over indulgence in acid forming foods and beverages such as meat, coffee, alcohol, sugar, dairy, and refined flour products can cause a body's Ph balance to be overly acidic. This can lead to all sorts of health problems, not the least of which is bone weakness. A calcium supplement may help. However, if the calcium is not from a whole food source, the body does not absorb it as efficiently due to the lack of live enzymes, but more about that in a future article. The best whole food sources for calcium are broccoli, green leafy vegetables, and other alkaline foods.

Here is a short list of foods that are acidic when the body burns them for fuel:
·White flour, refined sugars
·Dairy products
·Meat, fish
·Peanut butter
·Chocolate
·Nuts (not all of them, but most).
·Plums, prunes and cranberries (surprising, but true, even some healthy fruits and vegetables can form an acid ash, especially over- cooked vegetables)

Here are some good choices for alkaline food to help maintain proper Ph balance:
·Almonds, Apples, Avocados
·Bananas, Beans, Brazil nuts
·Broccoli, Cantaloupe, Carrots

Ph balance is just one of many considerations when choosing a healthy balanced diet. Search the Internet for more alkaline food options and other choices for improving and maintaining overall health and fitness.

Stretch for Fitness Success

When you think of developing a strong, muscular physique what type of exercises do you think of doing? To improve and develop strength most individuals focus on lifting weights exercises such as bench press, push ups and flies that focus on powerful pushing and pulling movements. Cardiovascular activity usually takes the passenger seat, when it comes to developing strength - unless youre involved in a sport that requires a lot of endurance training, or if you want to loose excess body fat on top of improving your strength.

Stretching unfortunately isnt even put in the strength development category, because most of us figure that since its a low intensity movement its purely for cooling down after our workouts. However stretching isn't merely a great way to cool down trust me it can actually help make you stronger. Thats why I feature a great stretching diagram on my website, FitnessGear101.com.

The benefits of stretching have numerous effects on your weightlifting progress. Just remember when you stretch you should feel slight tension in your muscles, but no pain!

Stretching is your key to the following fitness pluses:

Increased Strength - Stretching actually helps to increase your muscular strength because it expands your range of motion, and range of motion literally applies to weightlifting. For example when you lift in a wider range of motion compared to a smaller range, youre enlisting the help of more fibers, making your muscles stronger.

Reduced Stress We all know that stretching helps reduce the stress and tension in our exercised muscles, but did you know that a quick 20-mintue session of stretching can also release most of the tension that built up throughout an entire workday?

Improved Posture Flexible muscles are your key to good posture, because stretching promotes balanced muscle tone in all the major joints in the body. This affects your strength training because good posture reduces stress and soreness in the muscles and joints, letting you get back to the gym faster.

Improved Speed & Reaction Time if youre an athlete youre aware of how important agility is to top performance. Flexible muscles make you quicker on your feet. This allows for you to run faster in sports like soccer; react quicker by making saves in hockey and by maneuvering around opponents in football.

Decreased Muscle Soreness - This means less time off from the gym and your game, and more time to devote to developing those muscles.

Ease of Movement If youre not an athlete, never fear, stretching does more than improve sports performance. It makes simple daily tasks easier as well, by lessening the general stiffness in joints so you can bend down, reach up and lift things easily. Stretching will also affect the future of your joints by making you less likely to develop joint pain later in life.

Reduces Chances of Injury More flexible muscles translate to less chance of injuring tight muscles during exercise. Take for example your hamstrings, the muscles that run down the back of your upper legs. I like to compare the hamstrings to an elastic band the flexible hamstring has a lot of stretch; whereas the inflexible hamstring is that dried out elastic that breaks when its stretch too far.


Anna Fleet is a certified personal trainer. When she is not working out or helping others achieve optimal health, she is the face and voice behind www.fitnessgear101.com an excellent online resource for information about