Summer is a great time to amp up your fitness routine. The warmer weather makes it easier to exercise and play sports outside. Although it is a season to focus on fitness and enjoy the outdoors, you need to be thoughtful about your approach. The extra pressure to look great on the beach may create an “all or nothing”, “go hard or go home” attitude at the gym or on the court. Enthusiasm is great, but overdoing it the first week back can just leave you injured.

Overuse injuries result from repetitive micro-damage to the body from sporting activity or fitness training that exceeds the body's ability to repair such damage. Common complaints from overuse injuries include stress fractures, shoulder pains and shin splints. Many injuries are caused by weak muscles, which simply are not ready to handle the specific demands of your sport or training.

I always emphasis the importance of starting slowly if someone has not been exercising regularly. It is at times frustrating to see how some popular weight loss reality TV programs show a person running sprints on their first day working out without realistic warnings of the toll this can take. This type of over-training can create foot or ankle problems, hamstring strains, low back pain or even stress fractures. Yes, our bodies need to be challenged, but the goal is to create long-term fitness habits, muscle balance and to remain injury free. In order to increase your fitness levels make sure a strong fitness foundation is in place.

Summer is often the time when we are looking for the next big thing in fitness and health. If you want to change things up in your fitness and diet routine you may be interested in the 21-Day Vegan Kick Start. I know the term “Vegan” can be divisive and can even conjure up images of extreme animal activism, there are moral or ethical reasons for living a vegan lifestyle, but I’m going to focus on the health and fitness aspects of the vegan lifestyle. Since athletes look at nutrition as a critical part of their performance, it's clear that some top athletes have adopted vegan diets to help them achieve their goals.

Vegan ultra-marathoner ("ultra-marathon" is any running event longer than a normal marathon, 26.3 miles) Scott Jerek proves that being a vegan does not hinder athletic performance. He has won the Western States Endurance Run seven times and won the Badwater Ultra-marathon twice (Badwater Ultra-marathon is considered the toughest extreme-sport marathon on earth. 115-degree heat, 135 nonstop miles from Death Valley to Mount Whitney. That’s equivalent to running about five regular marathons in a row!!).

This months Women’s Heath Magazine features Biggest Loser' trainer Jillian Michaels on the cover. After reading the interview with Michaels I am not surprised that her comments have created a backlash. She reveals that she is unwilling to become pregnant because of the way it would change her body. "I'm going to adopt. I can't handle doing that to my body," she told the magazine. "Also, when you rescue something, it's like rescuing a part of yourself."

The first thing I thought of was all of the moms I have had the pleasure of training over the years, these women worked out and ate healthy to regain their pre-pregnancy physique. As a personal trainer, I have witnessed first-hand women who have become even more fit after pregnancy. There are multiple celebrities who have transformed their bodies post-pregnancy, think: Madonna, Reese Witherspoon, Keri Russell, Kelly Ripa, Gwen Stefani, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Halle Berry, Kate Hudson, Jennifer Garner, Katie Holmes, Jennifer Lopez, Pam Anderson, Brooke Burke and 12-pack Olympian Dara Torres. Yes, these women work out and eat right to lose the baby weight, but the idea that pregnancy ruins your body is wrong. It’s unfortunate that someone who is looked to by millions of people for health and fitness advice has such a negative view of childbirth. 

Spring is here, a perfect time to freshen up our fitness routines. The notion of "spring cleaning" also offers the opportunity to cleanse our bodies and recommit to our fitness goals. Spring has also brought attention to some new exercise research. A new study published in the March 2010 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association shows women need 60 minutes of moderate exercise a day to prevent weight gain as they age if they consume a normal diet. The study looked at 34,079 healthy U.S. women who consumed a usual diet from 1992 to 2007. The women were age 45 or older; each was given a questionnaire about the amount of exercise or activity they engaged in per week at the start of the study and then at three-year intervals. The average weight gain was 5.7 pounds, but the women who were normal weight maintained their weight if they exercised for 60 minutes a day. Women who exercised less generally gained weight.  

Seven hours per week of exercise may seem like a tremendous amount of time to set aside for physical activity, but average Americans watch three hours of television per day. Adding entertainment to your workouts is a great way to stay motivated and get the recommended 60 minutes per day.