Fitness center- The Mecca for Good Body and Health

Maintaining a physically fit body is vital to being healthy. Fitness centers can help us to keep in shape. In a fitness center, one would find a lot of equipment in which he can physically exercise.
Below is a listing of the equipment and programs commonly found in fitness studios:
* Treadmill
This is a piece of sporting equipment that allows the user to run without actually moving a distance. The word treadmill is used to refer to a kind of mill which is run to grind grain.
The treadmill operates by the principle called belt system in which the top side of the belt runs to the rear so that the runner could run the same distance. Therefore, the speed of the mill can be measured or set since the rate of the belt equals the rate of the runner.
* Weight training
Weight training is under the strength training program designed to develop the size of skeletal muscles and physical strength. It uses the principle of gravity; the trainee's force would be used to oppose the pull of the earth. This weight training makes use of different kinds of equipment to develop specific groups of muscles. Dumbbells, weighted bars or weight stacks are the most commonly used.
* Cycling
Cycling is commonly done by people who want to improve their cardiovascular health and fitness. In this view, cycling is particularly beneficial for those suffering from arthritis and for those who are not fitted to play rigid sports like running which require strength of the joints.
* Swimming
Swimming is a very good exercise. Swimming is also usually recommended for those who with disabilities or who want to rehabilitate after injuries.                                                                                                           * Racquetball
Racquetball is a sport game where racquets are used along with a hollow rubber ball. This can be played either in indoor or outdoor courts. Unlike other racquet sports like badminton and tennis, the usage of the floor, ceiling, and walls of the court is legal instead of out-of-bounds. Two players are involved in the game, although some variations of this game have three and four players.
* Aerobics
Aerobic classes usually include stepping patterns, done with music and signals directed by an instructor. Researches show that aerobic is one of the healthiest exercises. Aerobics, literally meaning "with oxygen", helps the body to use consume the oxygen more efficiently by training the lungs and heart. This helps to reduce stress and to control weight.
* Basketball
While this very common sport is an indoor game, other variations have been popular as this sport can also be played outdoors.
* Yoga
Yoga focuses on meditation. It is considered as a way to both spiritual and physiological mastery.
* Martial arts
Martial arts are structures of arranged traditions and practices of combat training. Martial arts today are not just being learned for combat purposes, but also for fitness, self-defense, mental discipline, self-cultivation, and character development.
* Physical therapy
Physical therapy deals in maximizing and identifying movement potential in promotion, treatment, prevention and rehabilitation. This includes services that are concerned with circumstances where function and movement are threatened by injury, disease, or ageing.

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Your Ideal Weight: An Arm-Chair Concoction?

“The fact is that the tables of ‘ideal’ or ‘desirable’ weight are arm-chair concoctions…,” said Professor Emeritus Ancel Keys back in 1980. Not much has changed since then, except new light has been shed on our understanding about a person’s set weight.
A set weight suits one person perfectly and not another. A set weight is one where you can be considered healthy, yet it does not necessarily appear on any height-weight charts.
In view of how height-weight charts were created, they make no sense.
They were initially created by actuary firms and used by life insurance companies to determine the relationship of weight upon a person’s likelihood of living long.
What is the harm, though, in the height-weight charts, since do serve as a much-needed reminder to many of us that we are eating too much of the wrong foods and exercising too little?
Well, height-weight charts unjustly penalize and cause unnecessary anguish in men and women who have natural body weights outside the recommended range. This causes people to engage in unhealthy dieting, seeking to attain and maintain a weight that doesn’t fit them, one that is not on the chart.
Furthermore, reliance on the charts may cause folks who are within the guidelines to continue to engage in unhealthy behaviors, feeling a false security.
None of this is to suggest that there is no such thing as an ideal weight.
For each person there is such a weight, it just may not be found on the charts. So, how will you know if you’re there? The absolutely honest answer to this question is that you may never know for certain.
You can rely upon your own sense of how much effort you are extending to control your weight. You are probably at your ideal weight when you are not trying to do anything to control your weight, but are eating a relatively low-fat, fiber-rich diet abundant in fruits, vegetable, and whole grains, and being physically active.
Trying to say anything beyond that about an ideal weight is impossible, because the ideal for each person is unique to him or her, thanks to the genetic makeup of each person’s body. One critical aspect of that uniqueness is their set point, that body weight that each person tends to maintain over long periods of time, regardless of whether that weight is a good or bad weight.
Though a “set” point is not fully understood, we do know that it exists and operates with precision. Some mechanism within each of us functions to keep our weight fairly constant over time.
This is the crux of the problem with height-weight charts.
Their guidelines do not consider the individual variations in a person’s set point. They can put an “overweight” label on you who happens to be at a healthy size, or they can give you a false sense of security to those who have a different make up of fat cells in their body.
Perhaps the height-weight charts do not measure anything meaningful. The height-weight charts are not a reliable indicator of your personal story of the fat stored in your body’s cells.