This blog was first posted back in 2010. Then as now, it was about a man who ran not because he had to but because he wanted to. Running for his early life was routine. From growing up and holding down what we may today think as menial jobs to him they kept his body conditioned even when at that time in his life he was unaware that he had a physical skeletal condition that being active on his feet helped him to sustain himself without him even knowing it.

So, we thought to bring back this post again, it may just give you the incentive you need if you've given some thought to taking up running as part of your get fit routine.  Even though the month of July is just starting, it's never really too late to get your life on track and get healthy!  Read below if you are committed to improving your life.  Remember, the key to a successful fitness program finding a fitness routine that you can enjoy doing and gets you the results you're looking for. One way you can keep track of just how well you do is by measuring your accomplishments by using an activity watch, or to make sure you're keeping yourself at a good optimum pace a heart rate monitor can also help you out!  One heart rate monitor that we really like is the Garmin Forerunner 935. In this way, you can keep track of the data you wish to measure and use it to build a fitness plan that will coincide with your new running adventures. After all, you're putting all that effort and commitment into sticking with your fitness routine, and after a month or two, you will see the benefits of your persistence. Like someone that is fortunate to enjoy their job, your fitness regimen is never really work, it's FUN!  Read on young grasshopper and learn the wisdom of someone who has walked/run the path before you.

Remember, this was first posted back in 2009, but as of last year according to Allen's Facebook page he is still going strong and enjoys giving back to others. Enjoy!

The story of Allen Leigh, of Old Man Running (http://oldmanrunning.org/), was kind enough to share his story with us and we have to say, it’s quite amazing. You can read more about how running actually saved his life here, but for now, he’s going to share his best running tips and advice.

Allen Leigh of OldManRunning.org

How and when did you start running?
I started running at age 38 due to having pain in my feet when I was on my feet for several hours. I had been raised in a small Utah town in which I walked or rode a bike everywhere. I completed four years of college during which I walked several miles each day just going to and coming from campus twice a day.

After my Sophomore year of college, I worked at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon as a Bell Hop and was on my feet all day. During my off hours, I hiked 90 miles in the canyon, including a rim-rim hike of 26 miles. The upshot of this is that I had very strong legs and feet until…until I bought my first car and started driving everywhere. After a few years, my feet started to hurt. For example, after 6 or 7 hours of doing yard work, my feet would be so sore the next morning that I had to crawl from my bed to the bathroom. On top of all this, I was born with a very stiff skeleton (a bone specialist said I had the opposite of double joints).

I thought my stiff skeleton might be the cause of the pain in my feet, and I went to a bone specialist. He examined me and said the muscles in my feet were weak and that I should do anything I wanted to do to strengthen them. I began running. I had experimented a few times with running, through the influence of a friend at National Guard summer camp, and I thought running would strengthen my feet. It did, and I kept on running.

What’s been your biggest achievement as an athlete so far?
In terms of running, my four marathons at age 46-47. However, I think a bigger achievement is just that I’ve been running for about 38 years.

Do you compete in any running events regularly? If so, which ones?
No, although there is a local 5K that I like to run each June. Later, after I get my long run back to 15 miles, I’d like to do a half-marathon each year. I’m a very competitive person and like to compete with myself. But, I don’t want to race on a regular basis. I prefer to just run for enjoyment.

What are your goals for the future?
Two years ago I had serious blood clots that literally shut me down. I finished a 22-mile week with a 7-mile run on Saturday. On Monday I could only walk about 200 feet. I was in the hospital for 5 days, and when I left my walking was up to 400 feet. My wife and I walked together, and when our walking got up to 1 1/2 miles, I started to mix in small amounts of running. My long run is currently 7 miles, about 60% running and 40% walking. I alternate short runs with short walks, about 1 minute for running and a bit less for walking.

My immediate goals are to get my Monday or Tuesday rest run to 5 miles (I’ve achieved that), my Wednesday or Thursday medium run to 7 miles (I just did that but my body isn’t used to it yet), and my Friday or Saturday long run to 10 miles. After I reach those goals and my body is getting used to those distances, I’ll increase the medium and long runs until my three runs are 5, 10, 15 miles. At that point, I will consider doing a half-marathon once or twice a year.

What is your favorite thing about running?
I run for enjoyment. I enjoy the running. I enjoy being outside. I enjoy the birds and animals that I see. I even enjoy picking up trash along the path I run. I do almost all of my running on the Jordan River Parkway that follows the Jordan River from Utah Lake to the Great Salt Lake. I like to run the Parkway because it gets me away from city streets and the resulting smog. It gets me out in nature. I pass quite a few walkers, runners, cyclists, etc., and I enjoy nodding hello to them. There is an older man, who I see once or twice a week, who rides an electric scooter, and I always stop and talk with him. I enjoy races, too, but they are a secondary interest in my running.

What’s a normal workout routine for you?
I don’t do much in cross training, so I don’t have much of a workout routine. I run three times per week, and I stretch before and after I run.

Do you have a favorite runner or athlete?
George “Doc” Sheehan. Even though I never met him, he was my mentor, and I attribute my 38 years of running with only one minor injury to following his advice: enjoy my running, listen to my body, and modify my running by how my body feels. I grew up in running before the technical gadgets were invented, and I learned to listen to my body and run according to how I feel. In my training site (http://runninginjuryfree.org) I’ve posted an essay by Doc Sheehan which was the first thing I read in the running literature. I’ve dedicated that post to Doc Sheehan.

Do you have any running gear that you love? 
I’m not into running gear very much. My shoes, shorts, long pants, technical T-shirts, nylon windbreaker, a wide-brim hat, and my Fuel Belt are all I have and need. Oh yes, I have an old Garmin GPS that I use to measure distance when I go on a new path. I don’t carry the Garmin on a regular basis. Just when I need to measure distance or check on my pace. I try not to check on my pace very often because I don’t want to become obsessed with running faster. I run for enjoyment and let my speed increase naturally.

What’s the one mistake that you see most new runners making?
Pushing themselves too much. Abnormal soreness, pain, side stitches, a high resting heart rate are not normal. They are statements from our bodies that we’re doing too much. If one feels pain, lack of energy, abnormal soreness, he or she should do the natural thing and walk or stop running. It’s abnormal to push one's self through the pain. If your body tells you it can’t handle the stress of running, do whatever it takes to reduce the stress. Pushing through the pain increases the stress, just the opposite of what your body needs.

If you could give one bit of advice to a new runner, what would it be?
Run because you want to. If you don’t like running, then walk, swim, cycle, or something else. Listen to your body and enjoy whatever you do.

Thanks, Allen!

Be sure to check out Old Man Running for some great running tips, advice, and of course, some insight from Allen!

See you out on the trail, from the "Foot-Pounders" here at HeartRateMonitorsUSA.com!

Ok, you are into fitness, you know getting your heart pumping is a great way to keep your body performing the way it was always meant to be. You try to accomplish those daily 10,000 steps but we all know that may happen a lot less than we would all like.

Well, a study called the “HUNT” study that monitored 45,000 people for 25 years and concluded that people that keep their PAI (Personalized Activity Intelligence) from 100 to above tended to live about 10 years longer than people that did not. PAI is a measurement that monitors and tracks more than just your steps. Its revolutionary algorithm makes sense of your personal heart rate data, giving you a simple number that shows how much activity you need to live a longer, healthier life.

PAI analyzes every movement you make, including activities like spinning, yoga, even gardening.

One Simple Goal – And We Don’t Mean a Daily Goal!
All you need is one number – your PAI score. Keep it above 100 over a 7-day rolling window to know you’re staying healthy. No matter what your fitness level is, PAI shows you what intensity level you need to be in to improve. PAI uses a 7-day rolling goal to ensure you are keeping your score up over a longer period of time.

Heart Rate Based Scores
PAI tracks your heart rate intensity and shows which activities earned the most PAI points in your day so you can make better lifestyle choices.

Simply tracking your number of steps isn't enough to ensure a healthy lifestyle. With this in mind, Mio has developed a whole new way to look at your activity level. This personalized formula takes into account your current fitness level to give you a PAI score that works just for you. Your job is to simply keep your score above 100 to ensure you are always moving in the right direction. Instead of tracking a daily goal, PAI keeps a rolling 7-day goal. This allows you to make up for a less productive day by going harder on another day. Forget tracking steps and steps alone, with PAI you will be tracking everything from yoga to cycling. Now everything counts.

This is all done by using the new Slice from Mio, 
The Slice is the first wearable that provides all-day heart rate tracking and a PAI score - the most meaningful way to track all your activity, motivating you to stay healthy. It measures your heart rate, and your “Resting” heart rate along with your sleep, the calories you’ve burned and also the steps and distance you’ve accomplished.

We all know that information, "QUALITY INFORMATION” is the key to achieving everything meaningful in your life. Now with the Mio Slice, you can make the best use of your fitness data, keeping you informed on what you need to do to keep your weekly performance at 100 percent or better. Taking a term from an old adage, we can now say that a “Fitter Life makes for a Longer Life!

Get your order in now for the Mio Slice today! 

Well it's here! 2017:
A new year symbolizes a fresh start—and the perfect chance to reboot your stale workouts maybe with one of 2017's top fitness trends.

In the upcoming year, wearable tech, body weight training, and high-intensity interval training (HIIT) will be the too go to exercise regimens, according to an annual report published by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). They surveyed 1,801 fitness professionals, including personal trainers, wellness coaches, exercise physiologists, and college professors.

Fitness trackers and smartwatches have been hot holiday gifts for the last few years, and the ACSM says that trend won't be going anywhere in 2017—and in fact, it only got bigger. Recent updates from brands like Garmin, Apple, and Fitbit have sent the trend to number one for the holiday sales fitness picture for the year. Surprisingly, wearable tech products remained at the top of the list. In past years, there were questions about the accuracy of this technology. But the brands have upped their games and the especially accurate wearables have kept this trend around.

Today’s wearables track distance, and also provide heart rate readings, GPS route tracking, move reminders, and so much more. So even though newer smart phones have their own apps to monitor activity up to a point the smart wearables are not going anywhere anytime soon.  

Case in point the Garmin Forerunner 35 GPS Watch, with a Wrist Based HR, that tracks your Activity from HeartRateMonitorsUSA.com is one to keep your eyes on. If you're serious about tracking yourself in 2017, this is the one monitor you want strapped to your wrist.

Body weight training
It's easy to see why no-equipment workouts are so popular: They're relatively easy to learn, they can be modified to suit any ability level, and they can be done just about anywhere. Plus, body weight exercises are an efficient way to get fit for free. Push-ups and pull-ups are classic bodyweight moves, but there are plenty more to choose from, like squats, lunges, and planks, just to name a few.

HIIT
It's been around for a year or two and trainers know this is one exercise that keeps delivering the results your looking for.
HIIT's helps you torch calories fast by alternating quick bursts of high-intensity exercise with short rest periods. It can be found in all types of workouts, from Pilates to CrossFit and boot camp classes. High profile fitness companies are huge proponents of this form of exercise. 

To try a high-intensity interval training workout yourself, spend 20 to 30 minutes total combining repeated shorts bursts of work with short break periods, like 45 seconds of burpees with 15 seconds of rest followed by 45 seconds of squats, can burn around 190 calories per session and will keep your metabolism fired up long after you finish the routine.  And remember, a good Heart Rate Monitor is worth it to make sure your pushing yourself to your utmost and keeping track of your "Cool-Down" times. More importantly, one that also tracks your VO2 max estimate.  A good example of this is the Garmin Forerunner 735. Check it out by clicking on the name

Educated, certified, and experienced fitness professionals
The number of people who want to become personal trainers keeps growing, and they have more options than ever to earn accreditation. “Overall, people who work in the fitness industry are much more accountable and professional.

Not only is there continued growth in college and university programs, but there are more than 250 third-party certification organizations committed to teaching personal trainers best practices. As for the future of personal trainers and fitness professionals, the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts these occupations to only increase in popularity, with employment of fitness professionals to rise 8% between 2014 and 2024.

Strength training
Gone are the days when the biggest fitness buffs out there stuck to cardio. Today, they know they can't miss strength training's science-backed benefits, such as boosting longevity, building muscle mass, and protecting against diabetes, back pain, and more. Plus, a growing number of women, in particular, have come to realize that lifting weights won't necessarily make them bulky, and in fact, will help them burn more fat and boost their metabolism.

Group training
SoulCycle, PureBarre, Orangetheory, CrossFit—they're all forms of group training, a huge fitness trend that will continue to thrive in 2017. The current group training movement kicked off in 2008 in conjunction with the beginning of the Great Recession, when the expense of personal training became a luxury many Americans could no longer afford. With many people using services like ClassPass to replace a gym membership entirely, we don't see the group training trend dying down anytime soon.

Exercise Is Medicine
Regular exercise lowers your risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer, dementia, and other chronic diseases, and serves as a powerful stress-reducer and mood-booster. That's why the ACSM and the American Medical Association co-launched Exercise Is Medicine, a global movement that encourages physicians to refer patients to fitness professionals in their communities, and likewise, encourages fitness professionals to make connections with physicians. With health-care costs on the rise, and with the future of the U.S. health insurance industry uncertain, using exercise as a preventive health tool is perhaps more important than ever.

Yoga
Just maybe your serene yogi friend is onto something: this ancient mind-body practice can be practiced on the go and can boost your mood, improve your life-senses, and strengthen your entire body. Yoga has been around for thousands of years and has been a modern fitness trend for at least a decade, so how does it continue to be so popular? ACSM notes that while traditional Ashtanga, Hatha, and Vinyasa classes are readily available, fitness pros are also constantly finding new ways to reinvent yoga—think aerial yoga, hot yoga, and rope wall yoga. Do yourself a serious favor and check out available yoga classes that may be in your area.  For an incentive to help you commit, why not get yourself your own yoga mat. You can select from a variety of colors and densities from a brand name like Aurorae

Exercise and weight loss
Achieving a healthy weight will never go out of style, and a healthy diet combined with regular exercise is the best way to reach your weight loss goal. Most of the well-publicized diet plans integrate exercise in addition to the daily routine of providing prepared meals to their clients, as a rule.  We will provide some additional information later regarding the recommended diet or as we would rather say, "Life Wellness Meal Plans" as a topic for a future blog.

Fitness programs for older adults
Baby Boomers ushered in an unprecedented fitness revolution back in the '80s, and now, they're reaching retirement age and still enjoying the perks of physical activity, the survey suggests. More businesses are tailoring classes to better serve this aging population. Even the frail elderly can improve their balance and ability to perform activities of daily living when given appropriate functional fitness program activities.

Today's health trainers and doctors are happy to see this group targeted by the industry. Another group that needs to be targeted as well are the overweight and obese children and teens, that seem to become more sedentary as not only video games but everything social is keeping them glued to their electronic devices instead of getting out and being active. The industry seems to be giving up on this population because they aren’t profitable, but now schools and civic-minded groups are now focusing on them as well. Programs for overweight and obese youth ranked in the top 20 of last year's reports but was kicked off the list for 2017, despite the fact the youth obesity rate has yet to decrease in recent years. It is the hope that fitness professionals and businesses reconsider this important segment in future years, as they have with older adults.

Functional fitness
Functional training gives you the type of strength that really matters: the kind that lets you move furniture, lift a suitcase into an overhead bin, or carry your toddler. In other words, it improves your coordination, balance, force, power, and endurance and helps enhance your ability to perform normal daily activities. This trend has moved up and down on the survey ranking since 2007. In addition to being a big part of CrossFit programs, functional fitness is often used in clinical programs to help with rehabilitation and independent living for older adults.

Outdoor activities
Think a  trainer will only have you working out in a gym? Not so much—these days, they're recommending all kinds of outdoor activities to clients as a way to enhance their overall fitness. Serious trainers consider outdoor activities as anything from kayaking to pick-up basketball to high-adventure excursions like camping and rock climbing. Experts say you can burn upward of 530 calories an hour when hiking, and even more if the wind resistance is high. Outdoor excursions have mental benefits too: greenery elicits a mood-boosting response after just five minutes. Plus, doesn’t a breathtaking mountain view sound much more exhilarating than your gym’s television screen?  Sounds again like another great topic to get you outside and enjoying the (your) environment.

Group personal training
This trend mixes the effectiveness of a one-on-one personal trainer with the economic sensibilities of a group class. Between two and four people can elect to use a group personal trainer, who can focus on this small group while not charging the same high prices they would for a purely individual session. In these challenging economic times, personal trainers are being more creative in the way they package personal training sessions and how they market themselves to small groups. That explains why this trend has made the list since 2007 and remained through 2017.

Wellness coaching
As opposed to personal training, health and wellness coaching focuses on "the more" mental aspects of wellness, like goal-setting. These coaches provide support and encouragement for clients who want to meet certain goals in their health, like participating in rehabilitation or disease prevention. Recently, personal trainers have implemented the techniques of wellness coaches into their fitness practices, blending the two trends into one.

Worksite health promotion
Companies are beginning to realize that a healthy employee is a happy, more productive employee—and that creating programs and services that promote positive behaviors like working out, quitting smoking, and losing weight ultimately controls rising health care costs. If your company already offers things on-site yoga, gym reimbursement, or Weight Watchers, they now realize that they will see more of their employees at work in 2017.

If that is not enough of an incentive to get you working to motivate your employees to be healthy and fit. There are a lot of incentives out there. One that we like is the benefit of walking and if your company implements the 10,000 step programs that are available, you can get access to a lot of goal setting guidelines to help you start the program up at your company.  And what better way to start the program off then by providing an accurate pedometer to every employee that steps up (get it? Steps up) and takes the challenge. At HeartRateMonitorsUSA.com we offer pedometers that can be imprinted with your company logo or slogan so that the program becomes one with you and your employees.  To see a variety of imprintable pedometers that you can select from, simply Click Here.

So go ahead and choose the physical activity that best fits you and your lifestyle and lets see just how you do by December 31st. 2017

Please remember, as always, check with your physician before undertaking any new fitness regimens, especially if you were NOT actively exercising your body!

Excerpts about this topic were taken from Fox News