Cycling and PACE

If you enjoy Al Sear’s PACE exercise, cycling in the Stillwater, Minnesota area has to be one of the best ways to do PACE. If you aren’t going down hill you are going uphill and every change in topography is a change of heart rate and exertion.
If you happen to be in the area and want to PACE yourself Stillwater proper has plenty of challenge and fantastic river city scenery. When you want to just cycle with no particular exertion or rest hit the Gateway Regional Trail and enjoy the ride through forest and open prairie or even in to the city of St. Paul and beyond.

Keep up with the T-Tapp PACE

Yes, you read that right PACE, I am commenting on PACE again but some may not like what I have to say.

I was T-Tapping (the coined phrase for exercising with Teresa Tapp) to Total Workout Slow the other day and I finally heard Teresa say what I had been thinking. The idea behind the Progressively Accelerating Cardiopulmonary Exertion (PACE) is not a new idea at all it has just been well promoted by Al Sears and I will give him credit for that as not all of us are clever enough to advertise well. I have felt for sometime that several people actually do the PACE program including, as many have noticed on this blog, Kathy Smith and now Teresa Tapp. This adds a lot of variety to your exercise program and variety is after all the spice of life.

Teresa at one point in her morning long seminar (that she recorded for people like me to exercise to) said that she designed T-Tapp exercise 10 years ago (with the help of Dr. Ken Cooper) with the idea that you elevate the heart rate for a minute or two and then let it come down (she called it sprinting), elevate, let it come down. What does that sound like to you? To me that is PACE in a nutshell and in addition to the cardio workout you will work muscles you didn’t know existed and sweat like you have never perspired when working out. Your posture improves, bone density increases and you just feel perkier. Doing lunges the T-Tapp way I have been able to lunge with none of the knee pain that I always experienced in years past. The Total Workout even includes a T-Tapp chiropractic adjustment called T-Tapp Twist. When you do it with the precision she requires (rather like the discipline involved with traditional Qi Gong) you can actually feel your vertebrae fall in to position, you sleep better at night and you don’t have stiffness.

I’m not really promoting any one of the T-Tapp exercise programs in this article but I did want to address PACE because I think there are many different ways to do PACE and some are better than others. T-Tapping is a common sense approach to PACE that I can vouch for its effectiveness and recommend it. Al Sear’s program is useful and promotes good health it is just not a new idea and also not the only progressively accelerating cardiopulmonary exertion program out there.

Vital Choice Salmon Rocks

I wanted to shout out to everyone who checks this blog about my latest find. I have been looking for a good fish oil with no flavor and not in a gelatin capsule (gelatin always contains MSG) and I found one at last at Vital Choice. Or perhaps I should say I found it some time ago but it was out-of-stock.

This fish oil is almost red in color it is so rich in astaxanthan from the krill they eat on a daily basis and it contains natural Vitamin D, A and the necessary Omega 3’s. Wild Alaska Salmon are among the purest of all ocean fish, so the oil is free from hazardous levels of contaminants.

I actually don’t know why I want anyone else to know because they will sell out again and I won’t have a source of this perfect fish oil but I just can’t contain my excitement and had to share it.

Flossing Your Way to a Healthy Heart

Dental health is in the news again and being a dental professional I am always interested. This article came from Jenny Thompson of Health Science Institute (http://www.hsibaltimore.com) and has to do with periodontal disease and its apparent relationship to metabolic syndrome, a group of symptoms that put a person at greater risk of developing heart disease and type 2 diabetes. The article struck a chord with me because my spousal unit (SU) asked me to discuss flossing alternatives on my blog as he felt it was useful information. Flossing is only one component of good dental health and ridding your body of inflammation is the first thing a person needs to do to avoid heart disease and type 2 diabetes BUT if you are having trouble getting in to the floss “habit” read on.

As you can imagine it can be difficult to be espoused to a Nazi hygienist (or so my daughter called me one day) and for 25 years my SU really didn’t floss which resulted in the normal helpful advice that hygienists give anyone willing to listen. Apparently he never tired of my whining, bitching, cajoling, whatever adjective you want to use because he really did not attempt to develop “the” habit until he says I finally  mentioned alternative methods to floss his teeth. I don’t quite buy that in 25 years I never mentioned alternatives to the white finger method but that is another story. For the purpose of this article I will mention a couple of really successful methods that have worked for my family.

If you are a Target shopper they sell a product by DenTek called Floss Pik. These little wonders come in bags of 75 at a price that is affordable and probably varies by region. I like the Silk flossed ones with an “easy angle” my SU prefers the regular Floss-Piks. They each come with a toothpick end and a floss end and both ends serve a means. Toothpicks are useful for pushing food through when it is impacted, say, in an area where your teeth don’t meet perfectly thus forming an open contact. The floss cleans the spot where normally aligned teeth touch each other (contact area) and the subgingival (under the gums) area not attached to tooth or bone called the sulcus. No longer do you have to feel that lovely numb and tingling feeling brought on by floss wrapped ridiculously tight around your middle finger, you just grab a Floss-Pik and Bobs your uncle (as they say only in Britain so I am told).

But wait there is another adjunct that works wonders when flossing is recommended but you value your fingers too much to follow your hygienist’s advice. It is called the Reach Access flosser and it is the one I prefer and my daughter swears is the only reason she flosses. You can buy it at any retail store that sells dental products but I know Target sells it with the other floss. It has a long handle with a U-shaped end that holds a U-shaped device that has a piece of floss tightly stretched from end to end. This flossing U-shaped end snaps on the handle and away you go. You can read a book and floss, drive a car and floss (I did not say that) why you could even……..and floss.

I hope you all find this helpful advice and if nothing else you will know some key words to use the next time your hygienist brings up the oft discussed topic of flossing.

PACE with Kathy Smith

I have had Kathy Smith’s DVD called Functionally Fit Peak Fat Burning (FFPFB) for sometime and enjoy working out to it immensely. It had occurred to me sometime ago that it fit very nicely in to the Progressively Accelerated exercise program that Al Sears devised and I thought it was worth a mention to those who like PACE.

Kathy Smith does it with a bit of humor as she does occasionally make mistakes that are not edited out but I enjoy a smile when I am exercising, so that is alright with me. She takes you through a stretch and warm up and then in to the exercise itself quite effortlessly. The exercises are accelerated for 2 minutes at a time for 6 different segments and following each accelleration there is a cool down that she uses to work your lower body. The total workout is 45 minutes ( longer than Al Sears suggests you need) but it flies by and you feel energized when you are done.  At the very end you can do her stretch or your own stretch. I happen to like the stretch she does on her DVD titled Power Walk for Weight Loss, so I choose to do that when I am done.

I do FFPFB every other day and mix it up with the Power Walk because she works your upper body in that program and it is shorter for those days when you don’t want to spend lots of time getting fit. It also does have you work out at different levels but it is not a PACE type of exercise.

If you  mix this exercise with 5 minutes in front of your Vitamin D sunlamp three times a week and 20 minutes in your Sunlight FIR sauna almost every day you have done everything a body needs to be healthy and you will feel fighting fit.

The Pace Continues

I would like to briefly touch on my PACE again. I am still using the general principle and I don’t think I will ever go back to long, back breaking, exercises. They just don’t make sense to me anymore. I seem to have more endurance now than ever should I want a long hike up the mountain side in Idaho or just around my hometown of Stillwater, Minnesota which is full of stairways and hills to climb. I can run when I want to and not find myself struggling, biking is a breeze and jumping rope is finally not a horrible way to get my heart beating.

I like to work out to a simple exercise program by Kathy Smith called Power Walking. It is done inside with weights and a television, simple as simple can be. You primarily march in place and then add weights for your abdominals and upper body. She has two big push interludes and I pick up my jump rope and jump as fast as I can for the time allotted which does increase my heart rate and make me breath deeply. it is not strenuous but when I am done I am sweating and my heart is pumping.

It is criticized on Amazon.com for Kathy Smith’s blunders and for being too easy but I find the blunders entertaining and easy is as easy does, if you don’t put any effort in you will get back just what you put in to the workout. I suspect that Al Sears would not give this DVD the PACE seal of approval but I would like to share with my readers that it is a good workout for those times when you are in a hurry and it does generally follow the principles of PACE.