Live better and longer with the fitness show hosted by fitness expert author and tv personality Fitz Kohler she'll tell you why diets are dumb supplements or snake oil and the truth about how you can earn a lean hard pain-free and athletic body now for our favorite bossy blonde Fitz Kohler. Music. It's a fitzy mini it's so cute, Well, hi, team. I'm Fitz Kohler, your highly opinionated fitness expert from Fitzness.com. And welcome to the Fitzness show.
Today, I'm going to answer your questions. I meant to do it last night when I was recording the Fitzy Gossip episode, and that just got too long. It just got too long. So I decided to record the questions and answers later. So this will be a Fitzy Mini. And I'm sorry, please accept my apologies for not answering your questions last night. But a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do. And what I decided to do is smush all the questions into today.
And I might keep it short and sweet. It's a mini, so I probably should. But yeah, I'm going to get to work. Hey, folks, if you haven't done so yet, Visit me at Fitzness.com. Click like, click follow on this podcast. Be a sweetie, right? If you like what I'm doing, and if not, then let me know how I'm screwing it up royally.
Let me know why you won't leave a damn review, right? You can say, Fitz Kohler, I am not gonna leave a review for you until you record one on your head or something like that. Also, my apologies. My voice is still a little hoarse from Gasparilla. I did a lot of talking this weekend, and I sound a little macho. I sound a little macho, and again, probably intimidating some of you guys, and I'm, I don't know, I think that's kind of fun, so it is what it is.
Okay, question number one. Can I achieve a six-pack without doing a single sit-up? This is what Trina wants to know, and the answer is hell effing yeah. So number one, in order to have a six-pack, you have to remove all the fat, right? You can't have a layer of fat. Even if you have the strongest abdominal muscles in the world, if they're covered with fat, no one's going to see them. And a six-pack is, by definition, defined abdominal muscles.
So number one, you use the exact formula for weight loss. That's on the cover of fitsness.com. And you shed, shed the fat. And here's the thing, having a six-pack is a really athletic thing, right? So is that an average person, an average fit person experience having a six-pack? Not really. In order to have a six-pack, usually you have to have elite fitness, elite discipline when it comes to what you put in your mouth. So we're aiming high here, Trina.
However, watch what you put in the mouth with that exact formula for weight loss. So you shed the fat. And then, of course, you have to build muscles. You have to develop those muscles. But do you have to do sit-ups? Absolutely not. There are so many other things in the world that work your abdominal muscles, your core in general. So I like to point to those angry ups that people love slash hate me for.
But yeah, if you lie flat on your back with your arms above your head and your legs extended and then you just bring your fingers up towards the ceiling and you hoist your body up to the sky, you are working your abdominals. If you do burpees, you know, it's that jump. You get down into the pushup while you're doing the pushup. Anytime you're in that planking position, you're working your abdominal muscles.
If you take a karate class or you do kickboxing or boxing, every time you torque the torso, that rotational motion is working your obliques. So there's a ton of things you can do that work your abdominal muscles and sit-ups don't have to be one of them. If you don't like sit-ups or let's say you have a weak neck, right? Maybe you have a neck injury or just weakness. Exercises, you'll always feel them first where your weakness. So perhaps you have a fender bender and a little whiplash.
Your head, we learn in Jerry Maguire that the human head weighs about eight pounds. That's actually a pretty heavy dumbbell for your neck to be hoisting up. So it's that motion. If that doesn't feel good for you, yeah, you can work your abs without doing that. You could do the Roman chair, which means you're on your elbows, hoisted up at the gym on the Roman chair machine, and then you just lift your knees towards your chest. there's a whole bunch of ways to skin that cat.
But yeah, sit-ups don't have to be a part of your six-pack endeavor. And I love that you're on a mission for a six-pack. I love it when my abs are super lean. Sometimes they get a little bit away from that. It makes me sad. But when you can see that little groove that goes between my hips, that usher. So groove, I'm very pleased with myself, and I imagine you will be too. Okay, great question. Next up, what's the most time-efficient workout for a busy schedule? That's what Erin wants to know.
Well, time-efficient means we're going to condense it, right? And ideally, we're going to be intense if we want to get a lot of bang for our buck. I would say a plyometric circuit training workout. Circuit training is when you choose maybe 5 to 10 or 15, however many exercises you want to do. And then you do them round robin style. You go from one to the next, to the next, to the next. So it could be three exercises.
You just do the one, two, three, go back to one, two, three, or one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. You can do that loop a second time, but use, do exercises that incorporate many muscle groups. So standing still doing a bicep curl isn't really a high impact exercise other than just for your biceps. But if you did lunges for round one and you did bicep curls holding dumbbells. And that was your first round of the circuit. Great.
And then round two of the circuit, you do some burpees, which works your core and your glutes and your shoulders and your quads, right? It's working a whole bunch of body parts. That's a great round two. Round three could be angry ups. Round four could be. Jumping jacks. I'm just spitting out different exercises that incorporate a bunch of muscles, but ideally each exercise will make you either grunt intensely because you're really taxing your muscles or it will make you huff and puff.
And then anything that you do on one foot is also adding the element of balance training. So those lunges are a really good idea. And then if you're doing something that puts your body through a broad range of motion, you are also impacting your flexibility, right? So people don't think of burpees as a good choice for flexibility, but they are. It's that full extension when you jump back into that pushup position.
And then when you jump forward, bringing your knees into your chest or out to your side, that's actually really good for your glutes, right? You are increasing your mobility by doing those exercises. So that's what I would choose is a high intense, high intensity circuit workout where you do large motion or intense exercises back to back to back. And there, trust me, there is no too short for exercise. Of course, 30 to 60 minutes daily is gold standard.
Doing more is even better for the most part. But if you can only squeeze in five minutes, fine. Do one minute of pushups, one minute of burpees, one minute angry ups, one minute lunges, and one minute of lateral gait, moving side to side, boom, you've targeted a bunch of muscles in your body in an intense way. You could have five really productive minutes. So it's never too little. Well, too little is never stupid. Does that make sense? I'm not saying it right, but you get the gist.
Every minute of exercise counts. There. I will leave it at that. And we will be right back. Do your hips, glutes, quads, and hamstrings need extra support while running? Of course they do. Both soothing and comfortable compression tights by Leo Reve boosts blood and lymphatic circulation while increasing muscle pliability, which helps prevent fatigue and injury. Made for men and women of all speeds. Check out the superior balanced compression tights made right here in America.
Visit leoreve.com. That's L-E-O-R-E-V-E-R dot com. We're back. Next question. Donna Schultz wants to know if I have any nutrition advice for non-cookers that are people that do not like to cook. I'm guessing she means, she doesn't mean she doesn't have any cooking equipment. I'm guessing she really just does not enjoy cooking. doesn't want to cook. And I get that, Donna. It's so funny. I'm the author of the Everything Flat Belly Cookbook, 300 Simple and Easy Recipes
to Slim Your Waistline. I mean, that whole thing was kind of a. A shtick by the publisher. But yeah, weight loss comes in the kitchen. So it's very important for you to know or to choose wisely what you're putting in your mouth. But nutrition doesn't really change too greatly. The good stuff versus the bad stuff. So first of all, even if you're a non-cooker, you should choose the good for you choices versus the bad for you choices.
The bad for you choices would be fried chips and ice cream and candy and highly processed foods, highly processed meats, right? Alcohol, high sugar beverages. Those are the bad things, plus some more. On the good side, we have produce. So all of your fruit, all of your vegetables, they come out of the earth ready to eat. So if you don't like to cook, man, And produce is and should be your first and last stop. I think that's the easiest choice.
You can bite the body off a strawberry. You can even eat the stem of the strawberry if you want. You can peel the banana. You can eat broccoli raw. You can eat watermelon raw. I mean, all the things, all the produce, you can consume raw. So if you're someone who says, well, I don't like to cook, so I can't eat healthy. Boo-hoo. oh, cry me a river, stop it, because you're just making stupid excuses. Go in your backyard and eat some damn leaves, eat some grass, right?
Produce is the thing that is the most readily consumable and healthy for you. So you don't have to cook. You don't have to have a lot of money. Healthy food is just waiting for you, right? It's easy. It's the most easy.
So raw food, we start there and personally I eat I call it counter food this is I can cook mind you I can cook but I'm with you it's just not my passion I don't love it on occasion it's fun for me but I keep produce on the counter and basically that's what I gnaw on throughout the day I keep tomatoes on the counter and oranges and bananas and I keep nuts and seeds on the counter and so that's how I eat. I'm a grazer. I just go by and grab an orange. I peel it in my Jeep.
That's where I'm driving along, stick shift and everything. I feel the orange. I have a little baggie. I put the peel in there and I eat the orange while I go. I've got tomatoes in there. So I'm a person who'll just take a tomato, put it on a paper plate, cut it in little pieces, add some salt and eat it while I'm working at my computer. I take the banana on the dog walks. So I'm constantly grabbing food and going.
It's not like going to fast food, right? It's just grabbing healthy, nutritious food, no cooking required. When I do cook my counterfoods, I always have potatoes out there. I've told you before, my body percentage is My body composition is 67% potato. And I'm very proud of that fact. Potatoes are actually wildly nutritious for you. It bothers me that so many people say, well, they're white and I'm not going to eat white stuff because I want to lose weight. And I think, oh, stop.
They're good. They're a densely nutritious product. And if you have a reason, you can get a reasonable size baking potato or white potato that is full of nutrition and really not too caloric. The calories come when you shove butter and sour cream and cheese and all the stuff on it, right? But the potato itself is really good. So I take the potato. Again, I put it on a paper plate. I'm big time, Donna.
Throw it in the microwave for eight minutes. And as I stab, that's the most important part of baking a potato in the microwave. Stab, stab, stab like a psychopath. And then you stick it in the microwave. And then I eat. I eat the potato and the skin. And that'll fill me up. And a good sized potato is maybe 180 calories. Oh boy, like I couldn't have worked any less to have such an extraordinary meal.
So yeah, if you want to have meat, if you're a meat eater, well, either you have to buy a pre-cooked, find healthy choices, buy a pre-cooked, or cook it up on a Sunday or whatever day you choose, cook a whole bunch of it, chop it up. Individually bag it or package it. And so you don't have to cook every day of the week. And I think that's probably what you mean is you just want to cook all the time.
And I get it, but maybe you can cook sometimes. And if you're motivated to eat nutritiously and you want to have your meat, then you're going to have to put some, I don't know, use on your pots and pans. It's so funny. I have a stove oven combo, stainless steel. It's really cool. It looks great in my kitchen. Well, about a year and a half ago, I locked it to do the self-cleaning of the oven. and it finished. And then I couldn't get it unlocked. It will not unlock. So I can't access my oven.
And I tried so hard and big, strong men have tried so hard. And we've looked on YouTube and tried to get advice from YouTube on how to unlock the damn oven. And it will work. The bad thing is we can't make cookies. We have an air fryer, so we can make maybe three cookies. But yeah, it kind of limits us on what we can make. But that's actually a great excuse for a non-cooker. to say, sorry, can't make your casserole because my oven won't open up. And could I purchase a new stove, a new oven?
I could, but here's the deal. I just put a brand new roof on my house and I've replaced the freaking washer and the dryer and the damn dishwasher. And I just painted the stupid house and I don't want to buy a new oven. That's the least fun thing for me to buy right now. So I am with you on the non-cooking thing. Although I do have an air fryer, looks like a broiler. Actually, it's an air fryer and. A toaster and probably a broiler too, I think. So that makes cooking easy, Donna.
If you don't want to use the oven and the pots and the pans, a little air fryer goes a long way. But yeah, I mean, you can totally eat healthy using the microwave. A can of black beans, highly nutritious. There's nothing wrong with a can of black beans. Put in your bowl and put in the microwave and boom, quick and easy. Even though microwaving is cooking, I don't really consider it cooking. It's more like eating or I don't know. It just has less stress involved in using those cooking products.
And then if you've got a steamer, that of course makes cooking easier too. But yeah, nutrition should not only be more difficult if you don't like to cook, it should be less difficult because you're eating the raw stuff, you're buying the frozen vegetables and that you can steam in the bag in the microwave. I mean, yeah, it probably is easier to be like us than to be like someone who
loves to cook and loves a whole bunch of ingredients. And you want to put the creams and the butter and the sauce and all that stuff. That's really how we screw up good food is by turning it into a casserole or frying it, right? So don't do that, Tawny. You and me, not cooking and looking and feeling fantastic. So I'm going to stop beating that horse, that poor, dead horse. And we will be right back. Are you looking for the perfect gift for a loved one battling cancer?
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We're back. Okay. Judy Reynolds. She's got a great question. She wants to know what my favorite running shoe is. So. And the, well, this is my short answer is I love the free shoes. And it's a terrible, terrible response. But through my job, I show up at an event quite often. They give me a pair of shoes and they're normally fabulous. And so free shoes. I like my free shoes. I just left Publix Gas for the Distance Classic.
And upon arrival, they had this goodie bag with the shirts and a vest with my logo. So great. And then this gorgeous seafoam green pair of A6 gel nimbus. And they're fantastic. And so many of my events, I end up walking away with shoes. Now, that's not a practical answer for you. But I want you to know that I do not look the gift horse in the mouth.
And when I have five, six pairs of brand new running shoes coming into my home that fit my feet every year, I normally have a great respect that running shoes can be expensive. And I'm going to use the ones I got, right? unless they hurt or feel bad. But usually I get something good. And I am also quite flexible. I have been in love with my ASIC shoes, my Brooks, my Mizunos, my On Clouds, my Hoka's, my 361s. I'm very flexible.
As of yet, I have yet to become a slave to one brand. And I think it's really important that you don't do that unless you have fallen in love with something that really, really works for you. It's. Feels better than any shoe has ever felt, okay, then fine. You go buy five of those shoes. So you have them in stock. That's what my noisy counterpart, Rudy Novotny does. He loves the shoes. He buys six of them. And then he just continues wearing them out and he has a new one waiting.
And you don't have to worry about that shoe being discontinued. But my favorite shoe is a free shoe. I also like them to be soft and supportive. My poor little feet got beat up when I was kickboxing. I broke all of my toes except for one of my big toes. And those nine toes were broken often. I've had over 20 toe breaks. So I just feel like I need a little extra TLC. Now, when I ran the Boston Marathon, I actually did purchase shoes.
And the shoe that I did choose to run the Boston Marathon train in and run, I had a couple. I've actually, I bought a couple of these because they felt so good for me. But it was the Asics Dynaflight 2, which is apparently Jurassic era shoe model. It's old. I don't even think they make it anymore, but I really liked it and it worked for me. And I'm kind of lumbering when I run. I think people look at me and because of what I do for work and maybe my physical stature, they think I'm really fast.
I tell you what, sometimes I stand by some of the fastest women in the world. Yeah, we kind of look alike, But no, that's as far as the similarities go, because I am a very medium paced person and I feel good about it. There is no internal pressure for me to get faster. I have no ego correlated to my speed or lack thereof. So, yeah, footwear, footwear. I hope you find a shoe that just feels superb for you and doesn't really matter at this point what brand it is.
It's the shoe that's going to make you perform great and feel really good while doing it and go. I do recommend going to a running specialty store because they have people who are trained. Usually they're trained and they have a little more savvy than a big box retailer when it comes to running shoes. Quite often they have a little track in their store so you can test out the shoe or they have a treadmill so you can show what your running style is. They can check out your gait.
And then also they can recommend shoes and you can test them out. So yeah, I recommend a running shoe specialty store. and then for you to just try on every shoe until you find the one you love. Okay, David Gare has a big question for me. He just finished a half marathon trail race with over 1,800 feet of climbing. Wow. He asked how many days should he typically take off for rest? His coach has him off for two days and then running four miles easy on the third
day. he was thinking of doing a recovery walk and strength training two days after the race. So you know what, after you've gone a really long way, half marathon or full marathon, or even if it's for you going through 5k is a big deal, I think it's totally appropriate to take the next day off. Golly, if you've done a marathon, perhaps taking a few days off. But I wouldn't take all the days off of being active in general. So runners, we tend to act like running is the only activity in the world.
Like, okay, I ran 26 miles today, so I'm not going to do anything tomorrow and I'm not going to do anything on Monday. I'm not, you know, enough, enough. Can you move your body? Ideally you will. And that's a way to get the lactic acid out and get the good feelings back because running far distances can be exhausting and it can make you sore. But. After you've rested for a good 24 hours, getting up and moving about is going to help your recovery time.
So getting in the pool and swimming the next day, great. You don't have to go kill it, boom, boom, boom, for a full hour. You don't have to get on the bike and cycle until you puke. None of that is true. You can just go be active. You can do something else, and that actually is going to help you recover more intensely. No, if you've done something and you've just blown it out and you feel sick and hurt and tired, fine, take a few days off. That's so be it. You do your thing.
But getting active on the second day after or third, I think that's great, too, and actually will enhance your recovery time and the way you feel during your recovery time. So I hope that was helpful to you. Most running coaches are running coaches, right? These are people that are good at running. Maybe they were cross-country athletes. Maybe they have won some races, but they're not fitness experts, right? They're not strength training pros and flexibility gurus and so forth.
So there's often going to be a disconnect between what your running coach will tell you and what I tell you. I'm not a running coach. That's not what I am. I'm a fitness expert. And so I'm looking at the big picture, holistically, your health and all of the other ways you can move your body and get those good feelings coming back in. So yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with your guy. I just have more to share, David. I hope that helps. Okay, this was a very fun question.
Marge wants to know, if I were to eat one meal, one ridiculous meal where calories did not count and I could go all in, what food would I go all in on? Gollies, and I guess we're saying that nutrition doesn't matter either. It's just eating a bunch of things. I would take milk chocolate and I would put it over salty things and strawberries. So I would eat a lot of that milk chocolate covered popcorn, milk chocolate covered potato chips.
And milk chocolate covered Cheetos. That seems like that could be fun. And then milk chocolate covered strawberries. So I'm not only rejecting calories and nutrition there, I would do that. And unfortunately for me, my stomach, I'm not talking about my torso, my abdomen, I'm talking about my actual organ in my stomach is so tiny. So I don't get to shove much food in there, but that's what I would do. Chocolate covered salty things and strawberries.
And then what was my most embarrassing fitness-related injury? Well, I think none of the athletic things I've done have been embarrassing, and boy, have I been injured. I've had a lot, a lot of athletic-based injuries, running for sure, kickboxing, absolutely, soccer, yes. However, I once was in my college boyfriend's fraternity house, so I'm not in an athletic environment, but I'm not going to do an athletic thing and it's going to go awry.
So hanging out with his frat brothers, being silly, there might've been a beer in me, not sure. But I decided to do a handstand up against the door. And so that's athletic, right? That's why I'm including this experience in my fitness-related activity because doing a handstand is a fitness-related activity. So I got up and I have my feet up against the door and I'm holding.
And then all of a sudden the door starts to open. And I did the wobbly whoopsie, came down, and I smashed one of my big toes into the floor and broke it. And that was pretty stupid. That was pretty, pretty dumb. So I went to the doctor, ended up in a boot. Nobody likes those boots. But in a funny stroke of events, my sister, she actually broke her big toe, that same exact big toe, on the same exact day. I don't remember how she broke
her toe. It probably wasn't as foolish as the way I broke mine. But yeah, I thought that was hilarious that we broke the same toe on the same day. And then we were in the same ugly, stupid boot. And those boots, I get it. They're handy dandy, right? However, not cool that they make the rest of your body feel bad because the shoe is like a big Frankenstein shoe and none of our other shoes will match that. And so we're just uneven for a while.
It makes our hips feel bad and so forth. Anyways, wine, wine, wine. Those were great questions. Thank you for asking them. I hope my answers were satisfactory. Again, I'm sorry I didn't record all these questions yesterday. But if you listen to the Fitzy Gossip Show talking about Gasparilla and Donna and my crazy Delta flight and all the other things, you understand why it ran long. So that's it. Keep sending me your questions. You can send them via Instagram, via Facebook, via LinkedIn.
You can probably comment here wherever you listen to the Fitzy Show and I'll probably find the question there. But that's it for today. I love you. Get to work. Bye, team. Hi, this is Rudy Novotny, the voice of America's Marathons. We all love how much running has benefited every aspect of our lives, so much so that most of us only wish we'd started sooner. Wouldn't it be wonderful to give the opportunity to children of today? Well, you can.
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