Approximately half a century ago, Cybex International was created in Long Island, New York, founded as “The Cybex Ergometer Company”. Their primary focus was set on developing equipment for people rehabbing muscular strength and endurance.  Close to fifty years later, in 2013, Cybex is most well known for its health club quality elliptical-like trainer dubbed the Cybex Arc Trainer and for CYBI, its American Stock Exchange symbol. Currently, Cybex manufactures a wide array of health club quality fitness equipment, including treadmills, exercise bikes and their world-renowned Arc Trainer. The Arc trainer is widely popular due to its dependable structural integrity, high mechanical capacity and the way it is anthropomorphized to such an extent that the Arc Trainer perfectly mimics the natural stride length of its user.

Are you sitting yourself to death? Sedentary, seated lifestyles, are terrible for our well being. Many of us have desk jobs and sit for close to 50 hours per week. We have to counter this fully developed and unhealthy pattern of sitting way too much. Making sure you spend at least 30 minutes a day on cardiovascular fitness is a good start, however, you must still remind yourself throughout your day of work that you must get up and walk around for a few minutes. Put a small sticker on your computer screen or phone to serve as a reminder that you must not fall victim to the sedentary lifestyle that is slowly killing millions of American’s. If your job really prohibits you from taking a 5 minute break every hour, at least stand at your desk for a few minutes every hour. Once again, sitting all day is no bueno and can lead to severe health problems.

Sedentary Death Syndrome was a term that was created in 2002 by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. Although our intuition should be enough to tell us that sitting for long period of time each day is detrimental towards our health, labeling it Sedentary Death Syndrome Back is great for shock value, which is needed to get peoples attention. Upper and lower chronic back pain, high cholesterol and diabetes have all been linked with sitting in a chair all the time. Additionally, maintaining good posture all day does not negate the effects from sitting all day, every day. To simplify it, no matter how you position yourself, sitting all day is pretty bad for you. You only get one body so take care of it. Walk, don’t sit.

What’s the secret formula for living life to the fullest? It’s quite simple actually. The answer is to get out of bed and move forward. Stop procrastinating and day dreaming about how awesome it would be to live an active life full of exhilarating excursions. Just do it!

Once you acknowledge that you can accomplish far more than you realize, you will build confidence and an increasing desire to do new and fun activities. I know, it’s hard to believe, after letting your guard down for the past decade eating chips on the sofa in your home, that you still have the ability to blow up your your sedentary lifestyle and create a new reality in which you don’t sit on your ass 24/7. But you can change, and it’s easier than you think. Whenever you truly consider beginning a new workout plan, you are terrified and excited at the same time. However, your fear will subside as your confidence builds and you will quickly notice yourself transitioning into a more athletic and driven person.

Getting out of bed and moving forward is vital towards maintaining a vibrant life. After all, shouldn’t your life be vibrant? Of course it should, and it’s terribly sad if it’s not. Don’t let life pass you by and enjoy each day.  So simple, profoundly cliche and one of the most meaningful sentences you will ever hear. One of the most difficult aspects of actually living each day to the fullest, is that your body and mind must have the energy to carry you through. This is where having a daily workout comprised of cardio and strength training becomes supremely important. Performing at work for hours on is much easier for people who are in good health, than obese, out of shape people. This holds true even for static, desk jobs.

One step that needs to be taken before we work out, is going to the gym, or wherever we work out. Just the traveling to get there really is a hurdle for some of us. Get out of bed and move forward towards the gym and getting to the gym is more than half the battle, I don’t care what they say! Just getting to the gym itself is virtually the hardest part of the workout! Once you are actually in the gym, you are having a decent time as your adrenaline rushes while you workout and look at attractive people. The tough part is making up your mind that you are going to get to the gym. It is so easy to make excuses and not go put in cardio and strength work.

The paleolithic diet, regularly referred to as the paleo diet, or caveman diet, is a set of nutritional guidelines, founded upon what we believe Stone-Age cavemen ate, during the paleolithic era. Vegetables, fruits, fish, meats from grass-fed animals, nuts and eggs are all part of the Stone-Age diet. Foods that are banned by the caveman diet are refined sugars, all dairy products, grains, potatoes and legumes. The Paleolithic era began over 2.5 million years ago and ended approximately 10,000 years ago and that is when agricultural and grain based diets developed. Since then, humans have evolved and tried to optimize their health through all sorts of nutritional and exercise plans. Relatively recently, our continuing quest to find the superhuman diet, has lead many to believe that the paleo diet is supreme and it’s popularity has grown exponentially.

Is the key to longevity to abandon our modern agricultural diets are revert back to the diets of pre-historic man? Is the adorned primal blue print the Bible for nutritional science? Should we religiously follow the primal diet? Not so fast. Eating more animals and eliminating grains and dairy might not be your best bet. Paleo advocates claim that today’s agricultural diets make us chronically ill, so we change and eat more like our ancestors did over 10,000 years ago. Paleo fans say our forefathers had a diet containing  plenty of meat, supplemented with some veggies and fruits, nuts, oils.  This diet was free of  any grain, legumes or dairy.

The fact is, there is no truly optimal paleo diet as it is impossible to create one. Sorry to break hearts, but there isn’t a magical diet that if followed correctly, will make you a super human. Want to be a real neanderthal? OK, then you need to eat wild broccoli, blueberries and bananas. Don’t eat chicken injected with steroids or cows raised with growth. Broccoli in the supermarket is far different from wild broccoli. Many vegetables and fruits are vastly different today than they were 10,000 years ago. Just Google wild broccoli or wild banana. How does that broccoli flower look? Does that wild banana filled with a zillion seeds look appetizing? Didn’t think so.

Programming your mind to eat solely X, Y and Z is not bright. Diversity and variety are the spices of life and trying to stick to one form of what you or your book claims the paleo diet to be, is not as beneficial as you think it is and in fact it may be detrimental. Maintaining a highly diverse diet is of the utmost importance. That is the crucial ideology that one should remain loyal to. Fresh foods, ripe in the season, are optimal. Some foods preserve well like seeds and nuts. It is also really important to eat whole foods. Not just the vitamins we need from the food, but the entire food itself. The globalized processing of foods leads to us not having the fiber and pectin in fruit juice because it gets filtered out. Eat more fresh and whole foods in order to get more vitamins, minerals, fibers, proteins, fats, carbohydrates and antioxidants from your food.

The mass proliferation of the limitless, adventurous activities that Mother Earth bestows upon us during Summer every year, is on the horizon. Optimize your exercise routine for Summer and you will be a step ahead of the curve. Longer and hotter days are just some of the variables we have to juggle throughout summer. Hydration becomes crucial factor and as intuitively obvious as the necessity for water is, still many people actually neglect their body’s thirst for water. Even when you are not thirsty, make sure you replenish yourself with fluids.  Here are some fitness tips for the Summer so you can beat the heat!

1.) Be An Early Riser: The saying that says if you can’t beat it, then join it, does not work here. Extreme summer heat is can make exercising outside miserable. You can’t just say, “**** IT!” and go run in 100 degree heat daily for 3 months. You’ll fry. Instead, do your best to avoid the sun. Wake up early and get your routine in before 9am. The coolness from the night before will still linger and prevent your body from becoming exhausted. Your energy will not be zapped if you get outside early enough. Beat the heat by avoiding the sun during its peak hours. If you can’t beat it, avoid it!

2.) Dress Cool: Sporty clothing such as mesh and nylon is good to wear while you work out in the summer. Light weight and light colored clothing will serve you well and keep you cooler than dark colored, cotton heavy shirts and shorts. Lightweight fabrics are instrumental towards optimizing your summer workout experience.

3.) Build a Home Gym: If you have a treadmill, an exercise bike, an adjustable flat, incline, decline bench and a dumbbell set at your home (garage and basement stay cool), then you can train indoors and stay cool that way. People with home gym equipment workout far more frequently than those who don’t. Having fitness equipment around you allows you to act on your impulses and workout whenever you feel the urge. Conversely, if you do not have fitness equipment at home, you will have to go to a gym to exercise and by the time you get there, you may not even feel like working out anymore. Additionally, having gym equipment in your home makes you feel guilt if you don’t use it and let’s face it, none of us feel too guilty about not going to the gym.

4.) Go Swimming: Swimming kills 2 birds with 1 stone. You cool off your body while giving it an amazingly effective cardiovascular workout. Swimming is a fantastic summer activity and a must for fitness enthusiasts.

5.) Small Ball: Throughout the Summer, you should be frequently charging your battery through eating small meals throughout the day. Eating small meals keeps us energized, while also feeling light, which is the goal and keeps our body and mind working well. Your metabolism increases through eating small meals frequently and the higher your metabolic rate is, the more calories that you’ll burn each hour.

6.) Be Adventurous: Exploring your wild side certainly has its perks. Monotonous drilldowns of the same workouts can lead to complacency and boredom. Through fascinating your brain with new and exciting activities, you will remain motivated to keep pushing the envelope and trying new routes of fitness. After all, you can always go back to your ordinary routine if you try an excursion that you don’t like. The point is, trying out fun activities during the Summer should be a goal for each and every one of you!

Close the door to your past and do not let your past rob your future. We all know old habits die hard, but that is just some catchy BS and you have the will power to kill those habits and dead them in their tracks. People settle into a groove and then never snap out of it. We seem to feel hopeless after a while and basically give up and embrace our defects rather than patching up our leaks. If you want to look good and be a part of the mass proliferation of people dancing through their lovely lives, you can’t be obese, you just can’t. The first step to feeling and looking better, is breaking old habits ASAP. Once you got on a roll, it is so much easier to keep moving in the right direction. The toughest part of  having a disciplined fitness routine is getting started. Weekly improvements in your health will make your workouts easier, but the first few weeks will be very tough, there is no denying that. However, they will be by no means, even close to as difficult as it is to live life as a lethargic, self-loathing fatty. Being a creature of habit is good, but you have to have good habits to abide by, such as focusing on building successful patterns.

People love statistics, especially about themselves. There’s just something neat about being able to track linear progressions of our own ability. Well, hopefully it’s a linear progression. There is a strong correlation between being physically fit and keeping meticulous records of your results. For one, people who analyze their workout routine with regularity are more prone to understanding why their particular exercise program is working, or vice versa. In direct contrast, people who workout with a plan and people who do not track their results in some sort of database or note-keeping-system, are far more likely to prematurely discontinue their routine, than people who keep a running journal. Just think about it; if person A records their progress and person B does not, person A is going to be a substantial favorite over B, for who is expected to religiously adhere to an effective fitness training regimen.

Diligent record keeping will help you analyze your entire workout routine and find leaks that you may have. Leaks are small holes in your strategy or tactics that are slowing down your progression levels. For instance, after you build up a sample size of a few months worth of workouts, you may notice that you have or have not been achieving the goals you set out to. If you had set a goal of doing X amount of reps on the squat rack with Y amount of weight, ideally you should be writing (typing on Excel obviously) your daily results. You can always try and just keep mental records, but once you try and keep track of all of your exercise patterns through relying on memory alone, your results will become disorganized and it will be much more difficult for you to decipher precisely what level you are performing at.

Keep a journal. Try and do more reps. Lift more weight. Run faster. You can do these things by being results oriented are careful analysis of your training program. Just winging it is for the birds. Maintain a scientific approach towards your fitness training and your goals will be realized.

Tired of not being fit? Frustrated seeing skinny people have all the fun? Well, you may feel like you have no chance to run a marathon or swim across the San Francisco Bay, but you need to focus on the smaller things. There are so may choices each day that we can make that will help optimize our health. Every healthy choice counts, no matter how superfluous it may seem, it’s not. Drink less coffee, take the stairs more, try and make green leafy foods a part of your diet, walk around the block, do some yoga and hiking. These are all simple, yet effective tactics for getting rid of that gut.  You must use good tactics if you want to feel and look clean. We all have some sort of strategy of how to workout, but if we do not implement our strategy through effective tactics, we will fail miserably. Don’t give up just because you can’t compete on the main stage yet. Your workout routine may be in its infancy, but if you have a workout routine, you are on the right path. Every day we get better, or we get worse, there is no in-between.

Elliptical sales have increased with regularity over the past several years. Manufacturers, retailers and consumers have focused on the terrific health benefits provided by the elliptical machine, more so than other cardiovascular training machines such as exercise bikes, treadmills, stair climbers and rowing machines. Elliptical machines provide users a way to really push themselves without creating pressure on their knees and other joints. Treadmills are great for shedding weight and building endurance, but they do a number on our knees too and you don’t want to suffering from the painful  pressure on your lower body that constant  running on a treadmill potentially causes.  Elliptical machines, also referred to as cross-trainers, line the floors of health clubs and many of us either have an elliptical at home, have had one at home, or are considering getting one. Here are the top-of-the-line cross-trainers in 2013.

1.) Precor 885® AMT: Yes. This is the 5th year in a row that we have put the AMT in our top 5. The difference this time, is that it;s the 885, instead of the 100i. You’ve heard it all before. Its bio-mechanics and structural integrity are unparalleled. So let’s just say that we still think it is a very sweet machine. There are not too many ellipticals that adapt to the unique bio-mechanics of each individual user like the AMT does. The only cons about this unit remain the same. It is very big, heavy and expensive.

2.) Life Fitness 95X Engage: A brand new Life Fitness black design and user-friendly (easy-to-operate) integrated TV/Entertainment console make the 95X Engage sit atop our list. Similar to Precor, Life Fitness has had considerable success designing, manufacturing, marketing and sales of top notch elliptical machines.  With a 400 lb user weight capacity, 20″ stride length and pre-programmed as well as custom workout programs, the 95X Engage can hold its own in any gym in the world.

3.) Cybex Arc Trainer: Highlights of the Arc Trainer include its extra long 24″ stride length, independent floating pedals and front-drive system. Its breakthrough design, ease of use and variety of training programs, make the Arc Trainer a must have in any training environment. With its unique workout features and advanced mechanical design, anyone can be comfortable training on the Arc due to its ability to duplicate the natural stride length of its users.

4.) Precor EFX 576i Experience Series: Through combining their patented adjustable ramp and swaying arms, users are treated to a total body workout and using all four limbs is tremendously important for getting your figure in mint condition. Whereas the EFX 556 has an adjustable ramp and no moving arms and the EFX 546 has moving arms and inflexible ramp, the EFX 576i has both as it provides upper and lower body resistance. Precor’s distinct moving arms and ramp create a level of resistance sure to tighten up your hips and butt!  Additionally, the 576i has up to 720 Watts of resistance and while that is less than the Arc Trainer’s 900 Watts, the vast majority of 576i users will have more than enough resistance levels (20).

5.) Diamondback 1260 Ef: This is the 1st  elliptical in our top 5 that is not approved for commercial use in gyms and health clubs. Although the 1260 EF is not going to hold up for people up to 400 pounds using it 16 hours a day, its structural integrity is durable enough to provide longevity for users less than 300 pounds, using it for less than an average of 4 hours a day. Diamondback has awesome customer service and toll-free technical support for their fitness products.  If their service techs can’t fix your problem over the phone, Diamondback’s warranty is undisputed as the best there is and their 500+ service techs will have no problem coming to your home. By purchasing the 1260 EF, users get a limited lifetime warranty on the frame and a 5 year warranty on moving parts and electronics. You could browse the internet for the next 3 days and you aren’t expected to find a piece of fitness equipment of any sort that is legitimately covered for 5 years on the electronics, unless it is a Diamondback.

Preventive medicine is the key to a healthy life. Maintaining a balanced diet of healthy, nutritional food and abiding by a disciplined fitness routine, are the cornerstones of preventive healthcare. Undisciplined eating habits will turn your lifestyle upside down. Procrastinating instead of participating in physical fitness will turn you into an obesity stat. Concentrate on staying fit and you will be less vulnerable to sickness. Preventive healthcare is eating real food and exercise. People tend to wait until they are legitimately sick before they change their eating habits and begin to exercise on a regular basis. Do your best to control your future through staying away from junk food and staying true to an effective fitness program.