Month: May 2019

May 02, 2019 at 06:52AM by CWC I’ll try basically anything in order to get stronger (hey, I’m a fitness editor). I’m bold and grab the heavy weights when I’m so inclined, I’ll do plenty of jump squats for the sake of butt sculpting, and, hell—I’m even suffering through a three month challenge with my fitness editor coworkers at SLT to gain a stronger core/legs/everything. But then I heard about a little something called “German volume training.” The gist of it is this: 10 sets of 10 reps of a strength training move. The idea is that it places a ton of (good) stress on your body, resulting in stronger muscles that can then ideally lift more weight. “German volume training has been around since the early 70s and has many variations, but like a fine wine, it’s best not to mess with the main recipe and just stick to the tried and true volume-based method of 10 sets by 10 reps,” says Geoff Tripp, head of fitness at Trainiac. “It’s a pure mass and strength building program that will build  muscle and strength surrounding big lifts, and is based around your multi-joint lifts being trained one time every four to five day cycle with a longer recovery period so training adaptation can take place.” It’s big in the body building world, but regular fitness devotees can incorporate it too if they’re simply looking to work on their weight training regimen—just know that it’s no joke. “One of the underlying

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May 02, 2019 at 06:00AM by CWC The beauty world has long drawn inspiration from the food world: After all, your body needs many of the same nutrients—which is why you’ll find things like oatmeal and strawberries in your breakfast dishes and in your moisturizers. In a growing trend, your skin care is taking cues from the juice bar down the street, where the technology used to produce your fave $12 spinach elixirs is now being tapped for serums, too. Cold-pressed skin care—which draws from the concept of cold-pressed juicing—is taking over our beauty routines, and for good reason (namely: it retains the ingredients vitamins and minerals in the most uncompromised way). Traditionally, heat has been used to extract the core ingredient from plant materials, however, adding heat changes the nature of the ingredient by causing it to oxidize and degrade. By cold pressing a plant, the ingredient at hand remains in its most vitamin-packed form. “Cold-pressed beauty is created by extracting the purest, highest quality nutrients from ingredients without the use of any heat above room temperature,” explains Allison Taylor, founder of skin-care brand Le Prunier, who uses the method in her own line. This method allows the active ingredients to stay their “closest to nature,” says Ian Lirenman, CEO + Founder of emerginC, Rawceuticals and Scientific Organics, which keeps them the most active and bioavailable they can be. But according to dermatologist Adarsh Vijay Mudgil, MD, it may not be worth dropping significant dollars for the sake of

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May 02, 2019 at 04:00AM by CWC There may be lively debates about whether putting butter in your coffee is healthy or not, but virtually everyone is in agreement that sugar in your morning brew isn’t great for you. However, it’s hard to go from being a sweetened coffee lover to “just black, please” just because you know sugar isn’t healthy. Which is where alternative natural sweeteners like honey come in. In theory, putting honey in coffee sounds a heck of a lot better than something artificial. To find out how healthy it actually is, I asked the senior dietitian at UCLA Medical Center, Dana Hunnes, PhD, MPH, RD, to weigh in. Are there any benefits to adding honey in coffee? In general, honey has some major pros in the nutritional density column compared to sugar, like having vitamins B2 and B6, iron, and manganese. B vitamins are crucial for giving the body energy, and combined with the caffeine in coffee, you’re bound to feel a boost. The iron in honey is linked to increased cardiovascular health; the manganese has  antioxidant properties and can support bone health. Honey also has some antibacterial properties, especially manuka honey. In order to reap all of these amazing benefits from honey, Dr. Hunnes says it’s important to make sure you’re buying a good-quality product. “Honey bees are dying off at fairly rapid rates globally and demand is outpacing the supply,” she says. “Many honey products out there are not 100-percent honey because there just

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May 02, 2019 at 02:00AM by CWC In case you didn’t have No Doubt’s Return of Saturn in heavy rotation as a youth, it’s like, the ultimate expression of catharsis when it comes to combatting the effects of that astrological event, largely because it was created during Gwen Stefani’s own first Saturn return. And for the uninitiated, that planetary event happens when Saturn returns to the exact location it was when you were born, says astrologer Stefanie Iris Weiss. “It tends to coincide with the turning-30 transition, which is already such a loaded moment, where you’re supposed to have your ‘adult’ stuff in order.” Basically, get ready for the stress and identity crisis that makes you sit up straight when someone tells you to “act your age.” Furthermore, it all this tracks for the Stefani example: The music video for “Simple Kind of Life” depicts some real existential troubles, including the timeless conflict of, “Do I want to settle down, have babies, and get married? Or do I want to have pink hair and be a rock star? Or do I not have to choose?”I felt those things at 9, I’m living it ’em 28—smack-dab in the midst of my window for experiencing my first Saturn return. Sorry—am I bumming you out? Well, there’s good news: Though Saturn return can bring about some tough love for certain folks, it’s also known for happy adulthood milestones, like moving in together, having babies, buying homes, and more. You know, good stuff that

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