Change your lifestyle now to lose excess weight!

Fitness Trainer Singapore

If you are reading this, you most probably want to lose that extra layer of fat. Congrats! you are at the right place! If you do not suffer from a thyroid glands dysfunction but still have an issue with increasing waistline, all you need is to change your lifestyle. If you are honest to yourself, you probably have one or more of the following habits:

  • Your last meal of the day is after 8 pm and it’s mostly rice, bread, noodles or pasta.
  • You sleep late and wake up late in the morning.
  • You find yourself munching on potato chips, fries or other fast foods.
  • You just love carbs! Bread, rice, noodles, pasta etc.
  • You do not drink eight glasses of water a day.
  • You drink canned beverages or fruit juices.
  • You skip meals.
  • You do not have a healthy and nutritious diet.
  • You have a desk job and you are physically less active.
weight loss StringsSG
Extreme weight loss

9 lifestyle changes for healthier version of you

1. Have an early Dinner

You should be done with your dinner no later than 8 pm. No need to change what you eat, but yes, do change the quantity. Reduce the portion of carbs like rice, pasta or bread by 75% and replace it with vegetables, chicken breast, turkey or fish. If you badly need red meat, feeding on them once or twice a week is not a problem.

2. Sleep early and wake up early in the morning

Sleeping late is perhaps the worst habit one can have. When you are awake late at night, your body releases a hormone called cortisol which is responsible for many health problems like high blood pressure, hypertension etc. Sleeping late means, you call for more bad skin, dark circles and obesity.
Yes, sometimes due to work and other mundane stuffs, we do get late but if you try and make this small change, eventually you will place yourself in a win-win situation. Remember, here, you are opting for a better body, giving yourself an opportunity and as the saying goes “opportunities are like sunrises” so don’t miss that sunrise! Wake up… wake up and go for a walk to start your day right.

3. Munching can be fun with healthier choices as well

You probably have had a bad day, fatigued and starved; all you want is to throw up in your comfy couch and a bag of chips or fried delicacies. Stop! This is where all those extra calories come from. Instead try to snack on nuts, protein bars, Greek yogurt, fruits… the options are plenty!

Healthy Diet StringsSG
Healthy Diet

4. Don’t let Carbs be your best friend

I know carbohydrates are a big time stress buster. It is perhaps the best reward food that anyone easily falls for. But what is alarming is the increasing rate of ‘obese carbohydrate craver’ and I am sure you would not like to be the one. So the question is “Can’t I eat cabs at all”? Off course you can indulge yourself into complex carbs like green vegetables, wholegrain foods etc instead of simple or processed ones. Unlike simple carbs which instantly converts to glucose, complex carbs break down at a much slower rate and thereby maintains a steady flow of energy to your body. They are rich in fiber and also reduces the level of bad cholesterol (LDL). Hence try to eat more complex carbs like Oats, Yogurt, Kidney beans, Brown rice, Broccoli, Spinach, and Grapefruits etc.

5. Drink plenty of water

‘Water is life’… yes it absolutely is! However, we tend to drink lot of other drinks the whole day but not water. Water has zero calories and so many health benefits like it boosts metabolism, flushes out toxins, boosts the immune system etc. If your goal is to lose weight, have a healthy looking skin and a good health; then you must drink at least 8 glasses of water a day… the more the better.

6. Avoid those canned Beverages

Yes, when you are thirsty and tired, you do crave for that bottled drink which gives you immense satisfaction. But have you ever thought how does that 300ml drink satisfy your cravings? The truth is these pre-packed bottles are loaded with sugar which instantly raises your sugar level and thus boosts your calorie intake. However, if you think wisely all you needed was a glass of water and not these empty calories which just added on to your carbs intake for the day with no nutrition added.

7. Skipping meal is not an option

If you think that by not eating a meal you will be able to reach your goal… then my friend you are wrong. Losing on your scale has to be done in a healthy manner and not by starving yourself. Skipping meal means lowering your metabolism and thereby helping your body to gain fat. On the contrary the idea is to control your portions and eating healthy.

8. You must have a healthy and nutritious diet

Your diet is like your bank account and hence good food choices are like good investments! So next time you plate yourself, ensure that you have incorporated 40% vegetables, 30% protein,15% healthy fat and 15% complex carbs. Your diet should be simple and real food. Remember, the key to a good body is 80% good eating habit and 20% exercise.

9. Be more active

Try to give yourself that extra push needed to achieve your desirable waistline. Yes, it is tiring to hit the gym after day’s work and sometimes time is a constrain too. However an hour of walk or run will work wonders for you. You might not get involved into hard core weight training but can always engage into some other forms of exercises like swimming or a sport of your choice. All you need is to burn out those extra calories of the day that your body doesn’t need.

What StringsSG has to offer

All being said, I do agree that in todays’ fast pace life, it is difficult to follow these little dos and don’ts. All you need is a proper guidance from someone who is thinking on your behalf and guiding you through your journey. StringsSG brings you closer to that guidance… that fitness professional who would understand your goals, your lifestyle and accordingly plan a well fitted workout and the best diet for you.

Personal Trainer Singapore
Personal Trainer

All you need is to:

  • Submit your request with your goals, budget, availability etc. at StringsSG.
  • View responses from fitness trainers with higher match percentage to your criteria.
  • You may choose to initiate conversation with fitness trainers using the integrated chat system.
  • Before finalizing on the trainer, make sure to view their profile ratings and reviews.

Best Core Training Exercise to Get Six Pack Abs

Plank

What is Core?

Core refers to the muscles around our trunk and pelvis i.e. the abs, chest, back and down to the pelvic floor. Our functional movements are highly dependent on this part of the body. Lack of strength in these areas, affects our stability. Core stability is very important to protect our spine and surrounding musculature from injury.

Which muscles form the Core?

You must have noticed that fitness trainers at the gym, always reminds us to engage the core when doing exercises. Core exercises train the muscles in our pelvis, lower back, hips and abdomen to work in harmony which in turn gives us a better balance and stability.

Why is Core training important?

Core muscles are important as they serve as a base for strength, power, endurance and coordination. Attaining core strength means acquiring proper posture and saving the back from injuries while doing rapid movements or while lifting weights.

In order to evaluate our core strength, we must check our static core strength, dynamic core strength and posterior core strength. Exercises like plank, side plank helps to understand the static core strength while the knees to chest and toes to bar, hanging leg raises analyses the dynamic core strength. The dead lifts are for the posterior core stability.

Common Exercises for Core Strength

1. Planks

Plank helps to develop strength in the core, shoulders and arms.

Plank
Man in plank position

2. Side Planks

Start doing Side Planks – to achieve a strong core and abs of steel

Side Plank
Girl doing side planks

3. Hanging Leg Raises

One of the best exercises for developing abdominal and core strength.

Hanging Leg Raises
Woman leg raises

4. Deadlifts

The key core strength building exercise.

Deadlifts
Dead lift with barbells

However, it is very important to correct our postures while training ourselves with the above mentioned core exercises. There are many professional personal trainers in Singapore who can train the correct form and guide us to attain the stronger self.

So without any more delay, let’s focus on building core stability first and then, proceed to build our core strength! Get a personal trainer.

Elderly Functional Fitness | Everything you need to know

Wall push-ups

As per various studies, significant health benefits are seen in adults aged 65 years and older who participate in regular physical activity. Even people with some existing illness can exercise which will definitely improve the condition.

Some of the many benefits of Functional Fitness:

  • Proper exercising also slows the ageing of the brain.
  • Exercising at this age helps to improve your strength and thus stay independent.
  • Exercising adds up to one’s energy level too.
  • Diseases like as diabetes, osteoporosis or diseases related to heart can be to avoided by regular exercising too.
  • It also improves your balance thereby preventing accidental falls.
  • Moreover emotional fatigue, depression or anxiety can also be checked.

Common Function Fitness Exercises

The types of exercises you can do are many to choose from. However, it is always better to understand your body and accordingly select them where personal trainers play a very important part.

  • Just as the other name of Aerobic activity i.e. ‘endurance activity’ suggests, older adults should aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity each week in order to stay fit for longer time. You can choose to go for brisk walking, jogging, water aerobics, dancing, cycling, swimming or play tennis – there are ample options of aerobic activities.
  • Many such exercises that older adults should do every day to improve strength, flexibility, and balance are Abdominal Contractions which will help to increase strength in the abdominal muscles.
Abdominal contraction exercise
Abdominal Contraction Exercise – improves strength, flexibility, and balance
  • It is very important for all age groups to strengthen your muscles like of the hips, back, legs, chest, shoulders, arms and abdomen and particularly older adults must do some Muscle-strengthening activities at least 2 days a week. You should continue to carry the grocery bags home or go for some yoga classes, do some body weight exercises. You can also get personal trainers to guide you with weight training exercises using exercise bands or weight machines.
  • You can do Wall push ups to increase the strength in the chest and shoulders
Wall push-ups
Make your chest and shoulder stronger with wall push-ups
  • Toe taps are good for strengthening the lower legs and Heel raises are important to strengthen the upper calves. On the other hand, knee lifts strengthens the thighs and the Ankle rotations strengthens the calves.
  • Another very important thing for older adults is Balance Boosters. It is very common that accidental falls leads to injury for many elderly people. To avoid such situations, you should incorporate balance exercises in your exercise regimen. Doing balance exercises, such as Shifting Weights or Single leg balance or Tai chi orYoga will make it easier to walk on uneven surfaces without losing balance.

However, it is always advisable to talk to your doctor if you have any chronic health condition or even any symptoms before starting a physical activity program.

So cheers to long and healthy living with functional exercising! Get a personal trainer to help you with your functional fitness.

Top 3 exercises with UGI ball for best results!

UGI Ball plank mountai climbers

One of the hot favorites in the world of fitness is the UGI Ball. It is a great buddy for workout as it does not restrict us to exercise only in the gym. We can work out with it at home or carry to a hotel or beach while on vacation!

Since it is a hybrid of a medicine ball and stability ball, we can kneel on it, stand on it, and do our planks or crunches. However the trick is, the softness of the ball makes the surface unstable and thus our body has to work harder. In the process it helps to lose more!

It is a 30-minute full body workout routine but it makes workouts fun. Using UGI is awesome to work on our body balance, to build our core strength and also helps to strengthen and stabilize our muscles. It is recommended by various fitness trainers or personal trainers as well to their clients who look forward to achieve that dream body but in a fun way.

This UGI Ball can be used variously for various exercises like –

1. Dips

Dips with UGI Ball
Dips are great to get our upper body toned!

Dips are a very good workout if our target is to tone Upper Body. We should start in a bridge position, keeping our hands on the ball and feet should be flat on the floor. One thing very important here is that we should keep our lower back close to the UGI Ball. Now all we need to do is to bend our elbows in order to lower our butt without touching the floor. After this we need to extend our elbows to return to the starting position. Now repeat.

2. Right & Left Leg Lifts

Right & Left Leg Lifts
UGI Balls – Great for Right & Left Leg Lifts.

This Right and Left leg lifts are good when we target to lose fat and tone our Lower Body. It is quite easy too. All we need to do is to balance our right/left knee on the UGI ball. Now we need to extend our other leg straight out with toes pointed to the side. We must remember to keep our leg straight and toes pointed and then raise our extended leg up and down. Throughout the workout we must focus to keep our Abs tight and maintain a flat back. Now we have switch sides and repeat the same on the other leg.

3. Plank Mountain Climbers

UGI Ball plank mountai climbers
Plank Mountain Climbers using the UGI Ball

Another great way to use this ball is to do Plank Mountain Climbers. This is a great Cardio workout that helps to get our heart rate up. We should always begin in a plank position keeping our forearms resting on the ball. We need to keep our legs straight and feet on floor. After this position is set all we have to do is to alternately drive our knees towards chest. Our back should be flat throughout the exercise.

The UGI Ball enables us with so many various forms of exercises UGI Caterpillar, Toss and catch UGI, UGI Swing, Side Lunge Jumps with UGI, V-Ups, Reverse Lunges with Shoulder lifts, UGI Push ups to Jump Squats etc.

This great exercise ball helps us to workout with versatility and thereby enables us with cardio, strength training and core training. UGI Ball thus helps us with a full-body workout.

So without any further delay, let’s get our own UGI Ball and start working out today with a personal trainer to guide us with the correct postures!!

Hurry! Get more fit with a personal trainer

Personal trainer

Exercising alone itself is quite demotivating. After a tiring day, it gets quite challenging to find the motivation to stay physically active and fit. This is why a certified or qualified personal trainer can help us achieve our goals while keeping us motivated too.

  • Having a personal trainer means we have someone for long-term guidance and motivation.
  • Personal trainer provides structure to our workout as needed and does the thinking for us so that we can focus more on ‘the doing rather than the planning’.
  • A sincere trainer usually does not only help us to workout but also helps us with proper nutritional diet keeping in mind our body type and our goal. 
Personal Trainer helping her client with the required diet.
Fitness trainer guiding her client with proper nutritional diet
  • We become more accountable when we have our own Personal trainer. We soon stop finding lame excuses for not to go to the gym as we realize that somebody is waiting for our session.
  • Most trainers charges around $60-$80 for each session. Sometimes we even get discounts when we purchase multiple numbers of sessions from them. Considering on what we are spending i.e. our own health, this amount is not much indeed!
  • It is very common that we get bored with our gym routines very easily. Certified Personal trainers with their vast knowledge of exercises, trains us to do wide variety of creative exercises which keeps us going.
  • Personal trainer teaches us it’s all about doing what is more effective for us. Spending many hours at the gym but doing inefficient workouts would not help us to achieve the body we desire. Our trainer trains us how to maximize our efforts and our results.
  • Hiring a qualified personal trainer, means we are investing for a healthier and functionally active future!

Yes, sometimes it does get a little confusing to understand whom to hire as our own trainer as we get into dilemma that what if he is not good or it doesn’t work for us.

Not to worry!
StringsSG has come up with answers to all your worries and concerns!
Personal trainer
Certified Personal trainer during a session with his client.
STRINGSSG provides you a platform WHERE YOU CAN FIND THE BEST personal trainers as per your criterias and choices!

Click here StringsSG to get your personal trainer in just 2 mins!

Tags : Fitness trainer Singapore, Weight loss program, Personal trainer Singapore,  Female personal trainer Singapore

The 7 best types of Yoga and their benefits!

Ashtanga Yoga

The origin of the discipline “Yoga” is in India. It is not only a physical but also a spiritual practice that helps us to reduce our body weight and also stabilize our mind. Modern forms of yoga encourage exercising, focusing on our strength, physical and mental well-being and flexibility.

There are so many variations of Yoga like – Hatha yoga, Iyengar yoga, Yin yoga, Yogalates, Power yoga, Yogasthenics etc. Our fitness level determines the type of yoga class is best suited for us. So it is best to consult a doctor and have a personal yoga instructor to guide us with the right techniques.

1. Ashtanga Yoga

It is based on ancient yoga teachings. It synchronizes our breathing and movement in the asanas. Amongst many other benefits this asana helps to improve our blood circulation, removes toxins from our body and betters the joint pains.

Ashtanga Yoga
Ashtanga Yoga – An asana for improving our blood circulation

2. Bikram Yoga

This yoga is held in an artificially heated room of 105 degrees! This form of yoga helps to stretch our body, relieve stress, tone and detoxify our body. It also helps to heal pains like arthritis, knee pains or even back problems.

Bikram Yoga
Bikram Yoga – The hot yoga style to detoxify our body

3. Iyengar Yoga

This form tries to find correct alignment in each posture by using different props like blocks, straps, blankets etc.

4. Kundalini Yoga

It is a form of yoga where we meditate to release kundalini energy. Kundalini yoga class starts with chanting and ends with singing along with meditation and pranayama.

5. Hatha Yoga

Traditionally, Hatha yoga brings peace to the mind and body thereby preparing it for deeper spiritual practices. This style is more gentle and slow. It is great for beginners.

Hatha Yoga
Practice Hatha Yoga for peace of body and mind

6. Jivamukti Yoga

It traditionally means “liberation while living”. According to David and Sharon, ‘there are too many positive physical benefits to list but the main thing is “you build up a body of light” and feel more comfortable with who you are’. Jivamukti yoga, includes, meditation, chanting, pranayama etc.

7. Prenatal yoga

These are yoga for the pregnant people. This yoga is designed to help pregnant woman in all stages of her pregnancy. Moreover, it also helps to get back to shape post pregnancy faster.

The above mentioned forms are only a few of the varied typologies of Yoga. The list is really a never ending one!

Major Benefits of doing Yoga

  • Increases our physical strength, balance and flexibility – From ages Yoga has been a major inspiration for many across the globe. It is a safe and very effective workout style which helps to increase our physical strength, balance and flexibility.
  • Prevents the elderly from sudden falls and injuries – Injuries due to accidental falls amongst older people are very common and a global health concern. Yoga helps to improve our body balance and thus prevents the elderly from sudden falls.
  • Yoga is very good during and post pregnancy – It is even advised to pregnant women to go for yoga classes as it helps to experience fewer problems in pregnancy and labor.
  • Anxiety and depression – Yoga is a powerful treatment for depression and anxiety.
  • Gastroesophageal reflux disease – This disease also called as GERD is greatly benefited with Yoga practice. Regular practice of Yoga like Kapalbhati and Agnisar kriya improves GERD to a great level.
  • Yoga is like a treatment Doing yoga is good for people suffering from Arthritis and Asthma. It is also beneficial for people with bipolar disorder. It also works significantly for patients suffering with Migraine.
  • It reduces cancer related fatigue and breast cancer cognitive problems – Survivors of cancer often report cognitive problems, yoga can effectively reduce cognitive problems in survivors of breast cancer.
  • Yoga improves chronic neck pain and chronic heart failure – Studies revealed that regular yoga practice improves chronic neck pain or any neck-related disabilities or problems. Yoga has also significant positive effects on cardiac function. People under cardiac rehabilitation Yoga programs have had markedly stable health impacts.
  • Flexibility- Yogacan make our body more flexible. Yoga has positions that act upon the whole body which in turn stretches the muscles as well as the joints.

However it also true that Yoga is challenging for beginners. Moreover if the postures are incorrect it will not help on the contrary we might injure ourselves. Therefore it is always suggested that we should take the help of a Yoga master or Yoga trainer to learn it properly to yield maximum benefits from it.