Impressive Weight Loss

I went to the Douglas County Chamber of Commerce Coffee Card Exchange this morning and Preston Barnes was there looking fit and trim.  Several people who know him commented on his positive changes and that the Personal Training he is doing at Gold’s Gym is really making a difference.  He looks healthy and is feeling different, more energized.  He has kept up with his schedule so far.  Not at his goals yet, but determined to get there, his weight loss numbers continue to creep up above 20 lbs.

Commit To Fitness

Most people who make a commitment to fitness discover that having a Personal Trainer to teach them how to perform the strength training and cardio routines helps them to be confident in their success.  The results they are looking for become a reality and not just hopeful dreams.  Personal Training equals success.

We are all looking forward to the day in a few weeks when Preston reaches his goals and firmly establishes a healthy lifestyle for himself.  Plus he will be able to keep up with his wife Beth much better (she has lost over 90 lbs. here at Gold’s Gym and helped to inspire Preston’s initial motivation to start fitness.)

So far, with a month into Preston’s 12 week fitness journey he is right on target for meeting his goals.  He has lost over 10 pounds and is feeling the excitement and energy that everyone experiences as weight begins to melt away.  Working with Terry, his Personal Trainer at Gold’s Gym in Douglasville, he feels a strong sense of accomplishment as he is pushed to his maximum effort for results.  He is handling the exercise regimen yet conceded that making the right nutritional choices has been difficult, but getting easier as each day passes.

Preston said he realized that he was not in as good condition as he thought at the beginning when he remembered his fitness level back in 1996 (he ran the Peachtree Road Race). He is making progress with his strength and his cardiovascular fitness and is elated by the steady increase in his stamina.  He was sick with a cold for a week and had some scheduling issues but he is now back on track and going strong.

Preston said he feels the pressure of everybody knowing and that is good for his motivation.  Friends are noticing the difference and making comments. At the Douglas County Chamber of Commerce Annual Banquet several people asked him what he was eating, and took pride by being in full control.

Like everyone else Preston struggles with balancing family responsibilities and time at Gold’s Gym.  Preston said that he thanks God that he has the opportunity now to do this for he fears that had he waited a few more years he may not have been around to see his kids go to college.  He is excited about the changes taking place with his mind and body.  He loves the feeling of being able to make the right choices when they come.  He is positive about the coming weeks and is very encouraged by the results.

Congratulations!

You have followed through on that promise to yourself and joined the gym.  You are now one step closer to achieving  healthy lifestyle goals that you set for yourself.

That second step is a big one…using the gym. We are often asked the question “how do I get started?”  Well, here are a few suggestions we pulled together:

1. Wear something comfortable and appropriate for the gym.  Don’t wear jeans or street clothes. They aren’t comfortable to work out in and the studs and belt buckles will tear the leather on the equipment.  Pajamas should be worn only in the privacy of your home; too loose and baggy and a safety hazard for the gym. Wear a shirt with sleeves especially if you sweat a lot. Put on a comfortable pair of gym pants or shorts, t-shirt with sleeves, and athletic shoes and head on over.

2. Take advantage of the free classes offered and learn how to use the equipment. The sign up sheet is in the lobby of the gym.  The staff is really nice, they enjoy what they do and will be glad to answer your questions.

New Member Orientation

Keep It Clean

3. Carry a sweat towel and use it.  If you forget to bring one with you, you can purchase one at the front desk for $1. After you use each machine, wipe it down. If you get the machine real sweaty grab the spray bottle of cleaner and blue towel and wipe your machine. If you don’t sweat, wipe it down anyway.  It makes you look like you are working hard and people appreciate that you are considerate. If you don’t have a sweat towel with you, we will ask you to purchase one at the front desk.  We take cleanliness seriously.

4. Oh yeah, don’t come in all dirty and sweaty because you plan to take a shower after you workout.  That is not pleasant for the other members who are working out with you.

5. If you shower after your workout, make sure you have everything you need before you get all wet.

6.  If your membership includes the sauna and whirlpool, get the access code from the front desk before you get into your bathing suit. If you are modest it can seem like a long walk to the front desk. The access code changes monthly.

Respect Yourself, The Gym & Other Members

7.  Don’t lift so much weight that you feel compelled to drop the weights on the floor. That actually damages the equipment and it makes other people stare. Loud grunting and groaning is strongly discouraged.  Foul language and disrespectful behavior is also unwelcome.

8.  Look around you; there are people of all ages, sizes and shapes.  Everyone is here for the same reason … the pursuit of good health.

9. Enjoy yourself while you are here.  You will have a chance to meet some really nice people.

10.  Keep showing up and don’t take yourself too seriously.  The more you come, the more comfortable you will begin to feel.

Personal Trainers and Nutrition Help Available

The Gold’s Gym team in Douglasville and Austell want you to enjoy your time with us.  Your good health and healthy lifestyle goals are important to us. Certified personal trainers are available to help you with your weight loss or personal training goals.

Gold’s Gym Weight Loss

So Gold’s Gym has this member named Tom who is faced with a dilemma.  He is approximately 40 pounds overweight and is having terrible knee problems, so much so that he may have to have his knees replaced.  He also has back problems and constantly goes to the doctor for issues with his feet, his knees, back, and general health.  He has spent an untold amount of money on treatments. 

Doctor recommends weight loss

 Tom lives in Villa Rica and exercises with us three days a week here at Gold’s Gym.  Like all of us he loves to eat,  has given some effort to controlling his calorie intake and weight loss, but it has only a token commitment.  The doctor has told him he has the spector of  surgery down the road if he doesn’t change.  The doc also told him that many of his knee, back and foot problems might disappear if he will drop the weight. 

What would your decision be?  Would you have enough discipline to change your habits and drop the weight to avoid surgery and many other problems, or do you go on with your present lifestyle and suffer the consequences? 

Personal Trainer, Group Fitness or Else? 

If Tom got involved with a Personal Trainer, started Group Fitness Classes, and focused on his nutrition, he would be well on his way to changing his health, changing his quality of life, and feeling so much better very soon. 

 So what would you do? Would you do it?  Can you change your body and then change your life in the process, or is something else in charge of your life besides you?

Scott Johnson of Gold’s Gym in Douglasville is shown here with Juanita Clay of A Gift of Love. Gold’s donated proceeds from it’s annual Douglas County Benefit tennis tournament to the charity and also  to the local chapter of The Boys and Girls Club. The tournament, in it’s 25th year, has now raised over $200,000 for deserving non-profits in the community. Commented Gold’s Gym General Partner Gordon Johnson, “One of the great pleasures of being in this business is the opportunity we have to contribute to worthy cuases  in Douglas County. Gold’s Gym will continue to help wherever we can, and we are also grateful for all the support that the community has given, and continues to give Gold’s Gym”.

Good Friend.  Better Results

Preston Barnes has been a friend of mine, and an “off and on” member at Gold’s Gym since 1991. Like every one of us he struggles with the issues of life, stress, weight loss, and general health and fitness. He has been searching for the right time to make the right move.

His wife (Beth) has recently gone through a program here at Gold’s where she successfully accomplished her personal goals of weight loss and body sculpting.

Laced with reasonable self-discipline, the powerful exercise programs of strength training, group exercise, and cardiovascular sessions have totally changed her life in good ways.

Inspired To Succeed

Preston has been inspired by his beautiful wife and is ready to seriously change his body and his life with Gold’s Gym Personal Training and Group Exercise.

Preston is the owner of Provident Office Environments, Inc. and is on the Board of Directors of the Douglas County Chamber of Commerce. This past month when we hosted The Douglas County Chamber of Commerce Coffee Card Exchange, Preston graciously volunteered to go through our Gold’s Visual Fitness Program where he got to see a virtual image of how he looks now, and then how he will look when he reaches his fitness goals. This program also displayed the incredible health-risk reductions made when a person gets in shape again. That made a powerful impression on Preston, as well as all of our Chamber of Commerce Members who were watching the demonstration.

Weight Loss Goals Set

The Weight Loss Journey Begins

Preston is 44 years old and weighs in now at 253 lbs. His percentage of body fat is 32.5%. He has a goal of dropping 50 – 75 lbs., and reducing his body fat into the mid-teens. For 12 weeks he will work with one of our personal trainers and utilize our outstanding fitness equipment and total fitness environment to see what differences he can make.

He just started a full program working with one of our elite Personal Trainers, Terry Maxwell, going through a solid cardiovascular and strength program several times a week. Preston said he already feels the difference.

Personal Training Support

Terry has given nutritional advice and guidelines to Preston. Although he says he feels hungry at various times, that will begin to change as he starts to eat more often (6 x a day), and wean his body from the bad to the better nutritional foods. The body fights any change tooth and nail but will adapt relatively quickly.

Preston has taken his “before” pictures and is putting them in strategic locations (refrigerator, bathroom mirror, car visor, etc.) where he can see them when he is in need of motivational gunfire during each day. Thinking right, staying on schedule, and working the plan will help make this dream become reality. Those of us here at Gold’s Gym are pulling for him and have all the confidence in Preston successfully reaching his goals and discovering his youthful body (and mind) once again. We will be following his progress while sending our own positive energies to help him succeed. Give Preston a high five when you see him.

Tom Butler, GM Gold’s Gym Hospital Drive, Douglasville, Georgia

Lunges are an exceptional exercise for conditioning a mom’s lower body. They stress the muscles from a perfect angle to develop beautiful shape and symmetry in your legs, thighs and butt.

Because they require balance, lunges also build nueromuscular and functional capacity – helping your body go through it’s daily motions and let you pick up your children with ease.

Whether you’re caring for a child, trying to lose weight, want to look sleeker in shorts or improve your athletic performance, lunges should be part of your training program.

The Ultimate Lunge is the Reverse Lunge
There are many types of lunges. In my opinion, the best is the reverse lunge. here’s why:

- Because you have more balance and support, it’s easy to learn and perform. Plus you have less momentum to contend with during the exercise which provides more effective stress to the muscles and yields better results.

- It’s safer and softer on your knees because your back foot absorbs the ballistic shock of the lunge step. (Contrasted to the front lunge where impact shock can transfer to the knee even if you land heel to toe.)

- It creates muscular balance by initiating the movement backward as opposed to most other exercise movement patterns that take you forward and bias your musculature toward forward motion.

How To Do A Reverse Lunge Correctly
- Start facing forward feet shoulder width apart arms at your side.

- Step back with one leg far enough to allow your knees to bend at 90 degree angles. You can simultaneously bring your arms up to act as a slight counter balance. If you want a greater challenge, hold light weights in your hands.

Reverse Lunge – You’re in correct position at the bottom of your lunge when your front knee is directly over the ankle. (See picture)

IMPORTANT – To go back to the start position, start dropping your arms and lift from the heel of your front leg. DO NOT PUSH OFF YOUR BACK LEG. This simple advice will dramatically improve the effectiveness of your reverse lunge, give you a butt I can bounce a quarter off of and get you much better results in half the time.

Try doing reverse lunges 3 times-a-week on non-consecutive days. Work up to 2 sets of 10 repetitions on each leg. After a month I think you’ll be amazed at the impact the reverse lunge will have on your physique.

Exercise boosts brainpower by building new brain cells in a brain region linked with memory and memory loss, U.S. researchers reported Monday.Tests on mice showed they grew new brain cells in a brain region called the dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus that is known to be affected in the age-related memory decline that begins around age 30 for most humans.

The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging scans to help document the process in mice — and then used MRIs to look at the brains of people before and after exercise.

They found the same patterns, which suggests that people also grow new brain cells when they exercise.

“No previous research has systematically examined the different regions of the hippocampus and identified which region is most affected by exercise,” Dr. Scott Small, a neurologist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York who led the study, said in a statement.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said they first tested mice.

Brain expert Fred Gage, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, had shown that exercise can cause the development of new brain cells in the mouse equivalent of the dentate gyrus.

The teams worked together to find a way to measure this using MRI, by tracking cerebral blood volume.

“Once these findings were established in mice, we were interested in determining how exercise affects the hippocampal cerebral blood volume maps of humans,” they wrote.

They of course could not dissect the brains of people to see if new neurons grew, but they could use MRI to have a peek.

They recruited 11 healthy adults and made them undergo a three-month aerobic exercise regimen.

They did MRIs of their brains before and after. They also measured the fitness of each volunteer by measuring oxygen volume before and after the training program.

Exercise generated blood flow to the dentate gyrus of the people, and the more fit a person got, the more blood flow the MRI detected, the researchers found.

“The remarkable similarities between the exercise-induced cerebral blood volume changes in the hippocampal formation of mice and humans suggest that the effect is mediated by similar mechanisms,” they wrote.

“Our next step is to identify the exercise regimen that is most beneficial to improve cognition and reduce normal memory loss, so that physicians may be able to prescribe specific types of exercise to improve memory,” Small said.