Anyone interested in boosting dietary fiber intake will have to take a serious look at food labels.  Picking up a loaf of bread because it says “whole wheat” is not enough.  And just because it’s brown does not mean it is healthy.  What you should do instead is look at the nutrition facts label to see how many grams of fiber per serving the food actually contains.  Your goal is more along the lines of  35-40 grams of fiber per day, split between five meals, that would allow for 6-8 grams of fiber per meal.

Most fruits and vegetables contain around 3-7 grams of fiber per serving.  Again, this is a simple as adding an apple to your mid-afternoon snack or some berries to your morning oatmeal.  Try incorporating more fiber into your diet for four weeks.  If you don’t feel any healthier or notice any changes, by all means got back to your old ways.  But eating more, in my opinion, is never a bad thing.

5 Quick Tips:

1. Go with whole fruit instead of juice
2. Add fruit to your oatmeal
3. Read labels for total fiber per serving
4. Eat more beans
5. Create your own recipes

1.Fibrous carbs (which are mostly made of cellulose) have an atomic structure that our digestive system has difficulty breaking down. Therefore the majority of fibrous carbs we eat just pass through our digestive system. Although they aren’t digested, they do provide intestinal bulk, and they have the added benefit of not only speeding up the digestive process but they take a considerable amount of water with them.

2.By eating fibrous carbs every two hours, your body realizes that it’s getting food frequently and speeds up your metabolism. Since fibrous carbs aren’t easily digested, it requires more calories to burn them than they give up, so in effect giving you a net loss of caloric efficiency.

3.By eating like this for 3 days and then switching to starchy carbs keeps you just shy of ketosis, and prevent your body from entering a catabolic state. Catabolism is where the body begins cannibalizing muscle tissue to get energy from the protein in the muscles.

4.By doing cardio on the first 3 days (your fibrous carb days), you burn more body fat and consume more muscle glycogen. During the last 3 days (your starchy carb days), you’ll be replenishing that muscle glycogen, giving your muscles a fuller, harder look, but with less body fat covering them
Eggs should be the staple food for breakfast on low carb days.
The only thing different will be for the first week there will be absolutely no breads or anything containing dough. Lunches and dinners should be 1 whole meal such as Tuna Salad, Chicken Salad, Veggie Salad, soups, etc. there should be no additives or extras such as bread, crackers, wraps, dressings, etc.
All snacks will be fibrous carbs, cottage cheese and the only fruit allowed is grapefruit.

For the first 3 days, you’ll eat mostly fibrous carbohydrates, then for the next 3 days you’ll eat mostly starchy carbohydrates. These include:

Fibrous Carbohydrates
Asparagus
Green beans
Broccoli
Brussels sprouts
Cabbage
Carrots
Cauliflower
Celery
Cucumbers
Eggplants
Lettuce
Mushrooms
Green peppers
Red peppers
Spinach
Squash
Zucchini

Starchy Carbohydrates
Barley
Lima beans
Red beans
Black-eyed peas
Corn
Whole-meal flour
Lentils
Oatmeal
Pasta
Peas
Popcorn
Potatoes
Rice
Sweet potatoes
Tomatoes
Shredded Wheat
Yams

We now offer Organized Team Training for ALL Sports.

Price is $150 per session for a minimum of 8 sessions.

Please Contact Michele Cardwell at director@cardwellfitness.com for more information.

Running mile after mile at a low intensity is a common method people use to increase their aerobic capacity in efforts of losing weight and getting in better shape. You can see people every day running on autopilot and in a comfort zone going mile after mile. It doesn’t take long for your body to adapt to this and results are cut to a minimum. Not to mention endless running can get quite boring and it puts a lot stress on the knees if used as the only form of working out.

Scientific studies show that distance running eats away at lean muscle tissue, ultimately making you weaker. Did you know that if you did eight 20 second sprints with only 10 seconds rest in between sprints you would experience a greater aerobic capacity than if you ran for a full hour. Yelp! A four minute workout has the same aerobic capacity improvements as a 60-minute workout. So if time is an issue for you, then running sprints is surely your answer.

The benefit of running sprints doesn’t end there. The body’s entire aerobic system gets a boost, improving power, strength and speed. Sprinting trains the body to push harder and faster for short periods, giving your metabolism a shock and the body the opportunity to pull from its body fat reserves. While running sprints does pick up the intensity of the activity it also lessens the strain you may feel on your joints compared to long distance running.

To turn your body in to a fat burning machine, keep rest periods between sprints very short. Keep sprints in the 10-25 second range and try to keep the rest times down to a minimum. This will be hard to do at first but gets easier as you start to lose weight and continue to train more. The goal is to increase the number of sprints and decrease the amount of rest times. If you feel like you are in a training rut or the weight loss has stopped, toss in sprints twice a week and see how your body reacts to it.

Eating a carbohydrate-rich snack within an hour before their training will fuel us up.That way we don’t find ourselves falling flat during a workout.I personally love oatmeal and peanut butter or scrambled eggs and toast.These are perfect combinations of protein and carbs with probably the least amount of calories that you will find in a breakfast. A piece of fruit, an energy bar, or even some crackers should be easy to digest. Some can tolerate anything they eat. Others find that drinking a carbohydrate drink such as juice is easier than eating. All of this depends wholly on the individual. Whatever you choose as your pre training meal is as long as it is anything but nothing.You guys cant continue to come to training after going all night with no nutrition.Some of us probably even still have a little wine in our system after some nights,but that’s another story.

What you eat within the first few minutes after a workout  is our “recovery meal.” This small meal is the most important and underrated part of training. It sets the stage for how we feels for the rest of the day and affects the next day’s training.

Recovery eating is essentially reloading the muscles with glycogen. Fifteen to 30 minutes after exercising, the muscles are like sponges, waiting to refill the glycogen stores that have just been exhausted. If we refill within this time range, they’ll be revved to go. If they miss their window of opportunity, they’ll feel sluggish and lazy for the day and following day to come..

Carbohydrate plus protein is in my opinion the most effective combination for restoring glycogen.A carb before and a combination of a carb and protein after is ideal. Eating a snack (such as a banana with yogurt) within 15 minutes of the end of a workout and then eating a regular meal 2 hours later maximizes muscle receptivity.

Many of us just can’t or don’t want to eat before or directly after exercise. In such cases, drinking a sports drink or diluted fruit juice is a good first step to refueling.For those of us who want to lose weight,we often choose not to eat right after exercising; we rationalize that we just burned a bunch of calories and shouldn’t replace them right away. In fact, recovery eating will help you refrain from bingeing later in the day. Remember that the recovery meal is just a small eating episode—-it’s not breakfast, lunch, or dinner.So if getting leaner is our goal we ultimately have no choice.

Preparation as always is the key to nutrition!

I have seen kid’s sports transform to level of competitiveness that I never thought I would see in my lifetime.  Athletes are now stronger and faster than they were a decade ago, consequently this makes achieving higher levels of success less likely for today’s competitor.  It is very common now a day to see an abundance of players with the ability and potential to be successful on a higher level but lacking in my opinion the key ingredient, performance.

Speed, strength, agility, and endurance are keys to every athlete’s success.  Believe it or not an athlete does not need to settle for “this is as fast or as strong as I will ever be.”  Most parents or kids don’t realize that kids at a younger age are held back because of their under developed motor skills and lack of strength in the stabilizing muscles which hinders their balance.  It is only through balance the movements of speed, agility, and coordination is developed and enhanced.

We must understand that sports performance training needs to be a part of our routine and must be continuous throughout an athlete’s career.  We wouldn’t set out to lose 40 pounds only to work out for 1 month take a break for the summer and come back and expect to see results would we? I encourage all parents to give your child the opportunity to be involved with some form of structured performance training.  I encourage athletes to stay focused, maintain a disciplined work ethic, and above all a year round consistency with training.

Cardwell Fitness is proud to be a part of Anna’s rigorous  training program .  She has been a long term member of Team Cardwell Fitness.  Anna has been a huge inspiration to Ty Cardwell and is the epitome of an athlete who is willing to do what it takes to get to the next level.

Does your child’s sport involve…. Running, Acceleration, Explosive power off the mark, Speed between 10-100 yards, or Changing Directions? If so then chances are they will one day have to become involved in a structured performance training program in order to be competitive.

Speed is NOT just about genetics. With the right training methods using techniques that top sports scientists have discovered and confirmed even “slow” athletes can become quick. Modern day sports are becoming more and more about speed. Right or wrong, if you’re quick and powerful you can often compensate for a lower skill level. Whatever your talent, nothing will impact your game (or that of your athletes) like a noticeable gain in speed and fitness. I created my own speed, agility and fitness program 13 years ago and I’m proud of the impact it’s had on my Athletes games.

I don’t think parents, players or coaches realize the importance and impact that a proper sport specific speed and fitness program can have. It will literally transform a player’s game. It can take a nervous, inconsistent and mediocre player and turn them into a confident, game-changing leader.

It’s controversial to say fitness is more important than skill but remember that a player’s talent can only be expressed within the limits of their fitness. No amount of natural ability can overcome fatigue. Athletes can lack skill, but their pace and strength can still tear the opposition apart. The only con to training is…. it’s not cheap. But if you’re serious about your athlete’s sport, then it’s worth every single penny.

By: Melanie, Prosper

I hear my husband Ryan talk about this Ty guy that trained my daughters soccer girls for speed and agility. It was in September 2010 after one evening after my daughter Haley soccer practice I met Ty. First impression of Ty, professional athlete and somebody with super human strength. I watched the soccer girls become stronger, faster, tougher mentally and physically with each practice I went to. In the middle of one practice my husband said, “Why don’t you get a group of women together and train with Ty”? It never crossed my mind before because I was already kind of doing my own thing working out and changing my diet. I had no idea what I was about to get myself into going to Ty’s Boot Camp classes. So I went to the first class and I realized how out of shape I was. I couldn’t walk without hurting, even after the 3rd or 4th time going to the class. I slowly saw some results but nothing really noticeable. Ty recommended morning classes and I had every excuse not to go to morning classes. I work 40 hours a week on my feet, I have two kids 8yrs old and 9 months old, Haley’s soccer practice, games and the list goes on. OK! I went to the morning classes! Wow what a different atmosphere…the women in the class showed up at 5:30AM and busted their butts. I was completely convinced this was where I needed to be. So then at this point I was going twice a week and seeing some real results. My physical and metal state began to change in a real positive way. I felt great and regained my self confidence again. I became stronger, faster, tougher mentally and physically just the same way I saw the soccer girls. Wow within a few weeks I made huge advances in my athletic abilities and my attitude completely changed. I started to believe that I could do anything I set mind to. I stopped making accuses and started making things happen. I have started making more goals for myself. Most importantly I started becoming a better wife and mom. I used to be so tired and make excuses for myself for why I wasn’t where I wanted to be in life. Now I have no excuses and the possibilities are endless. Ty has helped bring out the best in me and I can’t thank him enough for believing in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Thank you Ty for living what you preach and being a fantastic role model. 

Next Program Starts Friday December 14th. This is a 4 week class to = 12 sessions
Classes will be held Monday, Wednesday, and Friday Mornings from 5:30am-6:30am inside the Stonebridge United Methodist Church in McKinney.
Price for the class $160 for 12 sessions
Register Now before classes fill up!!

Want to start NOW before the new sessions start? That is fine too, we will just prorate your classes if you start in the middle of a 4 week session.

** Registration and Payment is required in FULL by 12/12/12**  

The following items are Required to be brought to each class:
- 1 Pair of Dumbbells (3lb or 5lb)
- 1 Aerobic Mat
- 1 Jump Rope
Please contact Michele at 469-247-2684 or director@cardwellfitness.com for questions.
Click Here to download a Mail In Registration Form.  Or Click Here to register and pay online.