cup of jojo

oh, I will so miss my homemade kombucha this summer. sad face. My mom has promised to babysit it though :)

(Source: fito-befit, via traversingyogini)

Happy Friday, fitness friends!! Wanted to do a post today on something that I’ve been receiving lots of requests in yoga classes for lately: AB WORK! Hm, summer must be around the corner…(wouldn’t know it by the weather in DC). Instead of giving you a list of “The best ab exercises!”, I’m gonna tell it to you straight and save you a whole lot of unnecessary crunches: a flat stomach is made in the kitchen. (Sidenote, if you want a STRONG core, crunches still don’t win…but the exercise in the video above does!) And I’m also not going to give you a list of “Foods to eat (or not eat) to get a flat stomach!” I’m guessing you probably know that doughnuts, starchy carbs, pastries, alcohol, and Chipotle burritos will not get you there. Get on the “eat clean” wagon: make organic veggies and healthy protein the primary foods for every meal and snack, and supplement with fruit and whole grains. Most important tip as you work on cleaning up that diet: PLAN AHEAD to avoid being starving at any one point in the day. That’s the fastest way to fall right back off the clean eating wagon.

Who’s with me?? And ps, if you’re going to try the Turkish Get Up, start with 5lbs, not 53 :)

Cup of JoJo will be a little quiet this summer, cuz my husband and I started a new tumblr for a 3 month adventure we are taking. Hope you follow along!!

We didn’t dye easter eggs this year…but we did do this!

Homemade seafood soup! Clams, bluefish from the market, homemade stock from the boiled fish bones, lots of veggies (bonus = baby bok choy), spices. With fresh rye bread from Whole Foods, I’m in HEAVEN.

Food labels that show you how far you have to walk to burn off the calories. Nice. There’s incentive to cook your own food!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=labels-that-translate-calories-into-walking-distance&WT.mc_id=SA_syn_HuffPo

Just posted a GIF (Taken with GifBoom)

power #protein breakfast! tell me THAT won’t get you through til lunch.

Lift Weights? No, I Do Yoga.   

As a yoga teacher AND a personal trainer, I have to say I take issue with some points in this article from MindBodyGreen. Number one, good strength training should not “isolate each muscle”, that is old school weight lifting and you don’t see a lot of that anymore (unless someone is literally training to be a bodybuilder.) A good strength program consists of compound, multi-joint movements like variations of squats, lunges, push-ups, and pull-ups. The addition of basic equipment like weights and medicine balls is important for challenging the body in order to see improvements in strength, physique, and especially important for women, bone density. And you will NOT “build the bulk of a serious lifter” by adding in a couple days of strength training, this is a complete myth—if you are challenging yourself with heavy enough weights, I hope you would see some great muscle tone start to emerge, but unless you are lifting hard 4+ days/week, “bulky” is not going to happen. And the fact that this woman saw more “[muscular] definition and a chiseled, leaner, longer physique” from only doing yoga is great for her, but that is attributable to her having a genetic predisposition to that “lean” body type. 

I love me some yoga and wholeheartedly believe in its benefits, physical and mental. I also agree that your workout should be “something you look forward to”, but strength training does not equal brushing elbows with sweaty ogling men in the weight room—for me, there is nothing as fun and empowering as rocking out some tabata sets of burpees and maybe some pull-ups at the park. Followed of course by a nice long savasana on a beach towel in the sunshine.

Love to hear your thoughts on the matter!!