Fitness Review Guru

Lots of people struggle with dehydration. If you feel at all thirsty, then you aren’t drinking enough water. Drinking water is especially important when you exercise, whether your are running on your treadmill or swimming. All that moving makes you sweat, making your body lose water even faster than normal. So how much water are you supposed to drink?

A good indicator of dehydration is weight. Weigh yourself before and after your workout. If you weight less, it was probably through fluid loss and you need to drink more water.

However if you weight more than before your workout, then you drank a little too much water. The goal is to weigh the same. Weight loss won’t occur immediately, so you should give yourself time to cool off and get a good night’s sleep, weighing yourself for weight loss in the morning. The morning (before you eat breakfast and after you’ve used the restroom) is the best time to weight yourself because you don’t have any food in your stomach, providing you with a more accurate weight measurement.

Anyways, you should drink water before, during and after your workout. If you exercise for more than 90 minutes, it’s recommend that you have some sports drinks too. You want to keep your water AND electrolyte levels balanced. Otherwise your dehydration can escalate to a variety of heat sicknesses.

A fun new idea that’s recently surfaced is replacing your electrolyte balance with chocolate milk after exercising. It provides calcium and carbs, making it a tasty way to finish off your workout. This isn’t necessary unless you’ve exercised for at least 90 minutes or 2 hours, like running a marathon. Water is the best drink for most workouts, especially if they are only for 30 minutes. Have you ever spent that much time on your treadmill?

If you have any questions, about.com has a lot of great suggestions for hydrating during your workout. Thanks!

By now you have probably heard that the creator of the modern home treadmill died on Thursday of last week. Now is a great time to reflect on how his work has changed so much about modern exercise as we know it today. When William Staub learned that some medical offices were using treadmill-like devices, he was very intrigued. At the time, in the 1960’s, these machines were only available to use when you visited the doctor. Staub saw past this predicament and decided that the public needed easy access to these machines so that they could be taken advantage of on a daily basis. Thus the idea of the home treadmill was born.

As a mechanical engineer, Staub had no problem working out the kinks, and creating a low cost machine available to almost anyone. These first treadmills were created under his new brand, called Pacemaster. Unfortunately the Pacemaster brand folded in 2010. While Pacemaster may not be considered one of the best treadmills, they had a good run, and without the foundation that it set for the fitness industry, some of the amazing brands that we have around today just wouldn’t be the same.

Imagine a world without treadmills. What would everyone use for cardio at the gym? I suppose you could say that they would use ellipticals, but the elliptical was invented later and has it’s roots buried in the treadmill. Obviously fitness as we know it would be quite different. Without treadmills, the occurrence of running would take a nose-dive every time the weather got cold or wet. I’d wager that as a nation, the United States would have even more fitness problems and obesity in America would be higher than ever. I think that whether or not you use a treadmill, we all owe a big thank you to William Staub for giving us the power to run indoors. His invention is sure to remain popular for years to come!

William Staub, center, with his 2 sons in 1988

Sole does a great job at building a machine that moves like your body does so that you feel comfortable using it. It’s called, ergonomics, and it’s a very important factor with every exercise machine.

Here are some of Sole’s greatest Ellipticals to date:

• E25 Sole Elliptical
• E35 Sole Elliptical
• E95 Sole Elliptical
• E98 Sole Elliptical Light Commercial

The ellipticals listed above range from 1,000 dollars to 2,000 dollars.