VeganAthleteGuide

Tag: High Intensity Interval Training

Tooth Pain After Exercise is nothing to worry about

After I do a very demanding exercise I usually get tooth pain after that. Often the tooth pain starts sometime during the exercise and lasts for a while. But this is nothing you and I have to worry about and go to the doc so he can sell you some medication. Let’s see the reasons for this phenomenon.

Oxygen demand in muscles causes tooth pain
Exercising leads to a higher oxygen (O2) demand in your muscles. This oxygen is delivered by your blood cells to your muscles. If you put your muscles under high intensity exercise, the oxygen demand is rising and the body adapts to the demand to make your muscles go further.
This is done by releasing the short term stress hormone adrenaline also known as epinephrine. What is does is regulating your blood flow by narrowing down the blood vessels of your organs so those get less blood and go in standby mode. This process is called vasoconstriction. You can read more about it on Wikipedia if you like.
The muscles blood vessels on the other side do the opposite and widen what is called vasodilation. This way the muscles can receive more blood and thus more oxygen what makes them more durable and recover faster. This way exercising muscle groups can have up to 20 times more blood flow.
Sounds fancy but what does that have to do with tooth pain?
Well, like mentioned before your body focuses on delivering oxygen to your muscles and therefore closes up blood wherever it isn’t needed at the moment. That goes for your mouth and teeth as well. The blood vessels in your teeth are close to its nerves. When the vessels narrow they affect the nerves and thus you get the tooth pain.

Heavy breathing causes tooth pain as well
Another reason you get tooth pain is through heavy breathing with an open mouth when you exercise. What happens is actually the same as before: vasoconstriction, blood vessels narrowing in your teeth.
Vasoconstriction isn’t only triggered through heavy exercise and the demand of your muscles for oxygen but just through cold as well. Your body needs to maintain 37 degrees Celsius at all time.
When breathing heavily the air is passing your teeth fast and thus has a cooling effect on them. This leads your body to narrow the blood vessels so they are closer to the core where it is warmer. This way the body can maintain its temperature. The fast breathing is a similar effect like biting into ice cream just not as sudden.
If you do a High Intensity Interval Training where you do several sprints your chances for tooth pain are highest (at least for me).
So the short answer for tooth pain after exercise is because of vasoconstriction.
Hope that was helpful and relieving for you
See ya
Alex

December 5, 2016
High Intensity Interval Training – Melt fats like Ice on Fire
When working out at the stadium in my place, I often see a lot of people jogging in slow or sometimes a bit more moderate speed. Doing this 30 minutes or up to one hour. I admire them and tell myself that those people must have a lot of time and willpower. I don’t have time to jog for one hour and am not willing to jog for months without seeing almost no results in fat loss or endurance gain. So I go for the lazy approach and do some High Intensity Interval Training.
Are you planning to be lazy too? Then keep reading.

What is High Intensity Interval Training
High Intensity Interval Training is when you feel like dying but don’t accept it. That is the short description you have to keep in mind when you practice HIIT. You will read more about that below in how to do High Intensity Interval Training.
HIIT is basically a cardio exercise. That means you should bring your ass out in the sun and run. You could do it on a treadmill in the gym, but I’m all about being in nature. And it will be difficult to do it efficiently on a treadmill.
A HIIT is usually no longer than 15 minutes and is based on sprints with short recovery times. So no excuse here with no time to workout.

Why do High Intensity Interval Training
There are several reasons to do a High Intensity Interval Training. The most popular would probably be the increased weight loss through a more efficient and lasting calorie burn.
Another one is the increased endurance through the production of more mitochondria in your cells, that are known as the powerhouse of your cells. The increase of mitochondria leads to several health benefits and helps to sustain weight loss as well.
Here are the benefits of HIIT in a nutshell:
Fast fat burn
More mitochondria in your cells
Increased endurance
Better hormone production
Nice shot of serotonin (Gives you a wide smile)
You really FEEL you worked out (Makes you smile even more)
You save time
15 minutes HIIT is up to 9 times more efficient in fat burning than 60 minutes jogging.
The benefits are worth dying for. So don’t be afraid to die a little when you go for a HIIT.

How to do High Intensity Interval Training
The classic way is to go for a run.
After warming up you start jogging and accelerate into a sprint. That means you run as fast as you can. When your GOAL is reached you stop running and change back into slow jogging to recover. You repeat this process 8 times and can do it more as you progress.
The important thing here is not to recover for too long or too short to get the maximum benefit. You should aim for 60-65% of your maximum heart rate. When sprinting, you want to reach 90-95% of your maximum heart rate before you slow down. (That’s a GOAL)
There are three ways to determine your GOAL. They are by distance, time or heart rate. The last one is the best choice because it tells you, depending on your individual heart frequency, when to slow down and when to run.
The amount of time or distance will be hard for you to determine because you have no solid experience on your heart rates yet. If you have used a heart rate monitor for a while, then you will have enough experience to know when it is time to go.
But it will change as you get better and so the heart rate monitor will always be the best choice to do an efficient HIIT.

Your maximum heart rate can be calculated with the formula “220 – your age” or a bit more precise with the formula “208 – (your age * 0.7).” All you have to do next is to determine your two heart rates.
60% and 90% should do. Let’s make a little example with the 30 year old Tarzan, so it is really clear:
For 90% heart rate: (220 - 30) x 0.9 = 171 For 60% heart rate: (220 - 30) x 0.6 = 114
The intensity of the training leads to increased metabolic and hormone regulating processes in your body throughout the day.
The best time to do a HIIT would be before noon to benefit most of it. Doing it in the evening a few hours before sleep would be less productive, because it could inhibit your sleep.
If your goal is to increase your endurance, then you can control your progress by checking your heart rate directly after you wake up (it should get lower as you improve) and by checking how much time you need to recover from high heart rates (should take less time as you improve).
An alternative to running would be rope jumping, swimming or cycling. I would say that running is the most effective one but should be altered from time to time to increase the results.

How to survive a High Intensity Interval Training

HIIT is done succesfully with a good mindset. Think of your goal, not of your pain.

During round three or four you feel like dying. But it is only the lazy pig inside your mind telling you that you do.
Your body can go on. Fight that pig and silent it and the following rounds will get easier. Half done, only 3 left, only 2 left only 1 left, Done! That is all you have to see. And equip yourself with motivational music to get your ass on fire.
If you have high blood pressure or a cardiovascular disease you better not do HIIT. Once running with my cousin, who had high blood pressure, I was running alone from round 3 onwards. He started to see fat birds flying around his head and was dizzy for quite some time.
One other thing to look for is that you run on a soft ground or with good running shoes (Ideally both).
Don’t take that too easy and risk damaging your joints. Unlike muscles they repair and adapt really slow and can become a lasting problem, if you don’t take care in advance.
Some running shoes I would highly recommend you
Well that’s it. Would be nice to hear about your experience. Happy dying 😉
See ya
Alex
October 18, 2016
How to lose the fat on your thighs
One thing you women often ask is how to lose the fat on your thighs. So you are looking for the same answer it seems. I will make it easy for you and give you all the important facts you need to know so you don’t have to struggle anymore. It is most likely that not all of your questions are covered because every one has different ones and I would need to write a book to answer all, so just use the comment section and I will try to help.

Why your thighs are not firm
Below the skin of your thigh lays the connective tissue. Your body stores nutrients like fats in it. These fats can come from too high calorie consumption which is consumed through sugar especially.
What’s also important to know is that fat acts as an insulator for toxins as well. So when your body is getting too many toxins without having the time to get rid of them, it just isolates and stores them in your connective tissue until it has time to get rid of them.
Having too much fat in your connective tissue is causing to form cellulite (orange skin). So your main goal is to get rid of those and firming your connective tissue to have firm thighs. Having this in mind, you do the following.

Exercises to trigger fat loss and firmness
If you already have started to exercise, you have made a good step. The next step would be to optimize your workouts.
What you want to do is a High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) for fast results. That means that you have to step up the speed of your running to sprints. Maybe easy jogging gives you a nice feeling of doing something but it doesn’t trigger fat burning effectively.
HIIT on the other hand is giving your body a kick in the ass to burn fat even hours after the exercise. A short 15 minutes HIIT will increase your fat burn up to 9 times more efficiently than 60 minutes of jogging. Check out how to do a HIIT.
To tighten your legs you want to include weight training. Your body as weight is all you need for that. Try to include exercises that are demanding.
For example, if you can do over 20 squads before your legs can’t do anymore, then you should consider a harder exercise. To make a squad more difficult, you don’t need more weights. There are 3 options how to simulate more weight:
Execute the exercise slower. Especially when squatting down
Execute it very slow downwards and make an explosive jump
Do harder exercises like front or back steps and remember to include number 1. and 2., if necessary
Do the HIIT and the weight training for legs every 3-4 days.
What is also important is to train your upper body on days your legs need a rest, so your body keeps burning fat. It doesn’t matter which parts of your body you train for fat loss.
If you do push and pull exercises with your upper body, your body will burn the fat from your legs as well. Don’t do only push up exercises but especially pull up exercises.
Why?
Pull up exercises will include your back muscles which have more muscles than your chest that you train with push ups. The bigger the muscles that are involved in the exercises the more fat you will burn.
Vary the training with exercises you would like try out and that you enjoy, and make them a bit similar to an HIIT in terms of resting times.
Include the upper body training in between the days of HIIT and weight training for legs.
On every other day you could do some easy static exercises or moderate jogging for 15 minutes. It is important to be active every day and not to exercise late if possible, to boost your hormones earlier in the day. Well balanced hormones will coordinate the fat burn more efficiently.

Better metabolism for efficient fat loss
Your metabolism will be already triggered through your exercises. But working out is not everything. You have to watch for some other things to ensure a proper fat burn in your thighs. And remember that there is not only fat but toxins as well.
Things you have to look for to ensure a good metabolism in a nutshell:
Don’t sleep later than 11pm ideally, to ensure that your hormones don’t go out of balance.
Have a healthy organic diet with raw vegetables and fruits. Stay away from sugars. Eat high fiber foods.
Avoid stress and bad emotions.
Test your blood for nutritional deficiencies. Keep an eye on T3 Levels.
Don’t use Anti Baby pills and other drugs that influence your hormones. Skin products can be an issue as well
For the toxin part; you have to give your body time to detox. There are several ways to do that:
Intermittent fasting once or twice a week
or/and eat not too early and not too late in the day
Do a full detox program once to twice a year
You will see good results after 8 weeks of implementing the exercises and the suggestions for better metabolism.
I am very sure that you will have an interest in my eBook that is covering more than just your thighs.
If something is unclear, leave a comment. Or bookmark this page to report your progress after your 8 weeks.

See ya
Alex
October 17, 2016