Tag Archives: Cardiovascular Health

21-Day Koko Booster Exercise & Nutrition Challenge Update: Week 2

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Karin has taken the 21 day Koko Booster exercise and nutrition challenge

Karin of Koko FitClub Herndon and all her Koko lanyards!

Josie and Karin in Northern Virginia are into week two of their 21 day Koko Booster program and they have been fantastic in keeping up with the Booster workout schedule. They also have been successfully incorporating their Booster meal plans into their busy lives.

Just to recap, two of our Northern Virginia clubs, Koko FitClub Herndon and Koko FitClub Ashburn each challenged a member to do a 21-Day Koko Booster Program, and to share their experiences and results with all of us. The 21-Day Koko Boosters are new with the launch of Koko Fuel and include customized, fully integrated strength, cardio and nutrition plans.

Heading into week two, here’s where they stand:

Josie, our 44-year-old mobile DJ from Koko FitClub Ashburn, has lost four pounds, her “Q” score is up to 18 and she’s lowered her eBMI to 46.6. (Remember, the eBMI number aligns with the traditional BMI scale but, unlike BMI, takes into account the amount of lean muscle in your body, a key medical indicator of your health.) Way to go, Josie!

“The strength work outs have been tough, but I am loving the results and the way that I feel,” she said. “The Fuel plan has given me a better understanding of how to plan meals that incorporate more fruits, vegetables, lean meats and healthy grains.”

Josie currently has a lean muscle level of 168.5 pounds.  The more lean muscle you have, the more calories your body burns during exercise AND at rest.  Lean muscle determines your metabolism and energy levels and affects your strength, agility and even your ability to fight disease.  As she continues on her fitness path, Josie may see her lean muscle level drop along with her total weight, but that’s to be expected. It’s impossible to lose only body fat when your goal is to lose a significant amount of weight. What her Koko Smartraining strength program will do is minimize muscle loss. We will see her lean muscle level make up an increasing percentage of her total body weight, and that will be reflected as a lower eBMI number!

Karin, our 53-year-old school bus driver from Koko FitClub Herndon has kept her weight in check and slightly reduced her eBMI to 25.6.  Her goal is to get stronger and increase her lean muscle level, which is currently 102 pounds. Love your consistency, Karin!

“I have tried the Koko Fuel recipes and especially love the turkey chili and all of the quinoa options,” she said.  “My family and I have been really focusing on making more healthy choices and are experimenting with different Greek yogurts to find one we like.”

Check in weekly to watch Josie’s and Karin’s progress as they incorporate workouts and meal planning into their daily routines and cheer them on as they start seeing results!

Keep up the great work ladies. Koko Nation is rooting you on!

Michael Wood, CSCS
Chief Fitness Officer
Koko FitClub
Customized Exercise. Customized Nutrition. Amazing Results.

Try a complimentary Koko FitClub workout near you!

Change lives with us! Find out about becoming a Koko FitClub franchisee here!

21-Day Koko Booster Exercise & Nutrition Challenge: Day 1

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Josie from Koko FitClub Ashburn

Josie from Koko FitClub Ashburn has taken us up on the 21-Day Koko Booster Challenge!

With the launch of Koko Fuel, there is no one else in the world that can offer anything comparable to Koko FitClub’s holistic, simple path to fitness. I’m really excited to see members benefiting from it out in the “real world.” I want you to see it too!

So, two of our Northern Virginia clubs, Koko FitClub Herndon and Koko FitClub Ashburn have each challenged a member to do a 21-Day Koko Booster Program, and share their experience and results with all of us. The 21-Day Koko Boosters are new with the launch of Koko Fuel and include customized, fully integrated strength, cardio and nutrition plans.

Josie, from Koko FitClub Ashburn, is a 44-year-old mobile DJ who once lost more than 100 pounds but then gained it back. Her current fitness goal is not just to lose weight, but to change the way that she and her husband approach their overall health and fitness.

“I love the fact that Koko FitClub offers a no pressure, no mirror environment with specific fitness and nutrition plans designed just for me,” she said. “Losing weight only to gain it back is so discouraging, so I am looking forward to making real lifestyle changes with this challenge.”

Her starting “Q” Score (a score that represents each Koko member’s relative strength) is 15 – the average among the women of Koko Nation in their 40s is 48. Josie’s current Koko eBMI is 46.8 – 17.9 points away from a healthy fit zone. (Remember, eBMI number aligns with the traditional BMI scale but, unlike BMI, takes into account the amount of lean muscle in your body, a key medical indicator of your health.)

Karin, from Koko FitClub Herndon, is a 53-year-old former paralegal who is now safely transporting school kids as a bus driver.  Her fitness goals include losing a few pesky pounds and improving her lean muscle level.

“I have been a member of Koko FitClub since April of 2012 and love that it offers me an affordable substitute to a pricey personal trainer.  I have had memberships at so many gyms I’ve lost count and I’ve hired expensive trainers, but I have never found a program as easy to follow as Koko Smartraining.”

Her starting “Q” Score is 60 – the average for a woman in her 50s is 43 and her current eBMI is 25.7.  With her current fitness levels in the healthy range, her goal now is to increase her lean muscle level, lose a few pounds and lower her eBMI.

Stop by weekly as I chronicle Josie’s and Karin’s progress as they incorporate workouts and meal planning into their daily routines and help me cheer them on as they start seeing results!

Best of luck to you, Josie and Karin! You have a big cheering section!

Michael Wood, CSCS
Chief Fitness Officer
Koko FitClub
Customized Exercise. Customized Nutrition. Amazing Results.

Try a complimentary Koko FitClub workout near you!

Change lives with us! Find out about becoming a Koko FitClub franchisee here!

Returning to Your Workout Routine After Illness or Injury

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You’re finally on a roll with regular exercise, thanks to Koko. You feel great and your workout has become part of your daily routine. Then it happens: you get sick, you sustain an injury or you need a medical procedure. You are told by your doctor (who is always telling you to get active) to stop exercising for awhile. Sometimes a long while. Don’t worry. I know firsthand you can come back from it better than ever. You just need to have the right expectations.

Last month, for the second time in three years, I had emergency eye surgery and could not exercise. After one week I was told I could start back with cardio. Great! But, I was still not able to do any strength training. It was two weeks before I was told I could slowly ease back into my strength training sessions.

What happens if you cannot get in your weekly Koko Smartraining workout, or worse, you become sick or have to go on bed rest for a few weeks or more? When your body receives no exercise stimulus, detraining will occur.

detraining | dē-ˈtrān- iŋ: the partial or complete loss of training-induced adaptations in response to cessation of training or a substantial decrease in training load. 

This loss in both strength and aerobic capacity is followed by a decrease in your lean muscle level (LML) and can occur in as quickly as two weeks!

Don’t worry. Life happens. You body is amazingly adaptable and you can get it back to where it was – and then some!

If you’re faced with returning to your Smartraining workouts after a period of two weeks or more of inactivity, just plan to slowly progress back to the level you left off.

Koko Cardio – To start, try and complete a full 15 minute workout, but at a lower intensity than what you could do before your break. Slowly increase the intensity of your exercise over subsequent weeks. If you find that next higher intensity program is too much, back off on my audio suggestions for the incline, speed or resistance (for the elliptical.) You know how to do it!  Also, it may be that 15 minutes is too much to handle at first. It’s ok. Be patient with yourself and your body. It will come back.

Koko Strength – Rarely do I suggest it, but do not try to lift the weight that the Smartrainer initially suggests. It remembers the “you” from before your time off. Instead, you can help it calibrate to your current strength level even if a strength test isn’t scheduled. What I did was to cut my weight in half (or less) for the all my exercises through the first few sessions. The Smartrainer remembers your adjustments for the next time it gives you those exercises. After a week or so, I started to increase my volume of work by doing three extra reps on the sets that felt easy. The Smartrainer understood this to mean, “Michael needs more weight on this exercise” and it automatically adjusted the next time.

It may be frustrating to feel like you’re starting over and difficult to convince yourself to “take it easy.” (You just want to get back to where you were, already!)  Be patient. By slowly letting your body adjust to the specific demands placed on it by both strength training and cardio sessions, you will avoid injury and be back in peak form before you know it and stronger than ever!

Michael Wood, CSCS
Chief Fitness Officer
Koko FitClub

Koko FitClub Franchising

Does your workout take advantage of the best learning about exercise?

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Best learning about exercise built into Koko FitClub workoutsI’m an exercise physiologist by training with a keen interest in keeping up with the very best research. I use it to design your Smartraining workouts! There’s solid science behind the Koko FitClub workouts planned for you each and every visit – so you don’t have to think about it. That’s why you’re here, right?

So, while I generally keep this stuff “behind the curtain,” I spotted a couple studies recently that not only reinforce the Koko Smartraining methodology BUT they have awesome motivational value. (You know my ultimate goal – successfully convince you to keep up with your workout prescription of 3 strength and 4 cardio a week!)

The first study, from the Journal of Obesity1 looked at the effect of high intensity cardiovascular exercise on male body composition. These men did interval training workouts that looked like this: 8 seconds of hard work followed by 12 seconds of light work. This workout was done for 20 minutes, three times a week for 12 weeks. The men in the study showed excellent improvements in aerobic capacity (15% increase,) a reduction in visceral fat (17% decrease) and significant increases in lean muscle level.

Once again, proof that it’s not the quantity of  exercise you do when you’re at Koko FitClub, but the quality of exercise that matters.  And, there’s no reason you won’t see the same type of results by just sticking to your Koko Smartraining exercise prescription.

The second study appeared Archives of Internal Medicine2 using research from the renowned Cooper Clinic and the University of Texas’ Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. The research involved men and women who were tested for fitness at age 50 and then again surveyed about general health a decade later.

What did they learn? “Physical fitness at midlife made healthy aging — long considered a contradiction in terms –a distinct possibility.” The fittest 1/5th in their 50′s had far fewer chronic conditions in their 60′s, ( by more than half,) than the folks in the lowest fitness category.

What does that mean for you? When your Q-score and lean muscle level goes up, or your eBMI goes down, the immediate payout is that you look and feel better right now. Turns out, you are also banking that fitness so you look and feel great for years to come. It’s an investment in healthy aging so you can enjoy your entire life!

All this by meeting your Smartraining exercise prescription of 3 strength and 4 cardio a week. Could it be any easier to take advantage of the best learning about exercise? No way. Now go hit the club!

Michael Wood, CSCS
Chief Fitness Officer
Koko FitClub

Koko FitClub Franchising

1Journal of Obesity link – http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobes/2012/480467/

2 Archives of Internal Medicine link – http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1352789

New Koko Cardio Workouts for the Fall Coming Soon!

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Your favorite NFL teams are on the field. Kids are heading back to school. You know what that means at Koko FitClub? It’s time for new Fall Cardio Programs!

This Fall’s theme is “Take the Koko Challenge.”

Whether you are exercising on the elliptical or treadmill, there are plenty of new interval training cardio challenges this season  including hiking adventures, speed walking, Boot Camp, Tabata and Stadium Stairs workouts inspired by my days of running private clients up and down the stairs at Harvard Stadium in Cambridge, MA.

The hiking adventures are a blast this time around. Inspired by your suggestions, some were even recorded on location, including  Bear Creek Trail, a hike I took while visiting Koko FitClubs near Keller, Texas. A Koko owner from Arizona recently hiked the famous Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon so we’ve included that, too. These are fun and challenging across both moderate and high intensity.

There are some great workouts to try, but I believe the true cardio challenge for Koko FitClub members this season will be the Traditional Tabata (moderate-intensity) and the Double Tabata. (Do I even have to mention that its high-intensity?) If you can handle that fitness challenge, then I want you to try Boot Camp and Wind Sprint sessions on the elliptical. That’ll get your heart rate up!

The new Fall Cardio programs will be available in clubs next Wednesday, August 29th. Enjoy and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on taking the Koko Challenge!

Michael Wood, CSCS
Chief Fitness Officer
Koko FitClub

Koko FitClub Franchising