3 Random Fitness and Nutrition Tips

...About onions, watermelons, and 5 minute workouts?

by Mike Geary, Certified Personal Trainer, Certified Nutrition Specialist
Author - The Truth About Six Pack Abs & The Top 101 Foods that FIGHT Aging

I just had a few sort of "random" workout and nutrition tips for you on my mind today, in no particular order...so here they are:

Tip #1. Onions = Amazing Superfood... Eat onions daily if possible.

Not only do I love onions, but I recently read a longevity study that surveyed a large amount of people who had lived over 100 years of age. One of the common threads they noticed from the survey of these amazing people that lived to ages exceeding 100 was that they ate a lot of onions.

Kind of weird huh... but not a surprise to me. In fact, onions are definitely an important super-food as they contain unique organosulphur compounds and potent antioxidants that are rare in other foods.

I've also read dozens of studies that correlated onions (and garlic too) with pretty impressive reductions in cancer risk.

I like to add onions to almost any meals I can think of... added to salads, in my morning eggs, in veggie mixtures with lunch or dinner, and more.

"An onion a day keeps the doctor away."
 

Tip #2. Mix up your workouts with "5-minute bodyweight exercise challenges"

This is a unique way to add some variety to your workouts and maybe even get a friend in a little competition with you.

You can throw one of these in at the end of a workout as a high intensity finish, or even just do at home on non-gym days.

Basically, all you do is choose 1 specific bodyweight exercise such as bodyweight squats, pushups, lunges, etc and try to do as many reps of that exercise as you can in exactly 5 minutes (timed).  I've also used dumbbell swings or kettlebell swings for these 5-minute drills and they work great.

This works best by trying to do 20 or 25 reps at a time and then taking short breathers of about 10 seconds before continuing on your next round of reps.

We've even made this a little competition between a couple people at my gym in the past where we all line up and get timed for 5 minutes and see who can do the most bodyweight squats or pushups or whatever it may be in that 5 minute time period.

From what I've seen, if you can do 100 or more pushups in 5 minutes, or 200 or more bodyweight squats in 5 minutes, those are pretty impressive numbers. I think my record was somewhere around 225 bodyweight squats in 5 minutes (which was an improvement on the 160 bw squats I got the first time I tried this 5-min challenge)

If you try dumbbell or kettlebell swings for 5-minutes, I've found that anything over about 130 swings is pretty good for 5-minutes.

Whatever exercise you choose, keep track of your numbers that you get, and try to improve on them each week.  By the way, if you're new to kettlebells, read this article.

Tip #3. Example of the Glycemic Index (GI) being fairly useless

In several of my newsletters in the past, I've given examples of how choosing your foods based on the glycemic index can be misleading and even useless in many cases.

Case in point...

Watermelon has one of the highest measured GI's of all foods (much higher than even cake and ice cream).  However, a normal serving of cake and ice cream may give you a whopping 600 to 800 calories, whereas a typical serving of watermelon may give you 50 to 70 calories max!  You'd have to eat a massive quantity of watermelon to rack up any significant grams of carbs.

Trust me... watermelon isn't making anyone fat... But cake and ice cream are!

The lesson... GI is almost useless when you're not considering "Glycemic Load", which also factors in the quantity of carbohydrates ingested in a typical serving.  Enjoy your juicy watermelon! It's a great source of the health protecting antioxidant lycopene too!