HIIT!!!

Everyone in the fitness world is banging on about HIIT (High intensity interval training) at the moment and ACE is totally on board with this craze. So what is it all about and why is it such a fat burning, fitness-building winner?
Basically HIIT sends your body into fat burning overdrive!

WARNING: here comes the science!!!

The trick to HIIT training is to push yourself as hard as you possibly can through the high intensity intervals to really get your heart racing and then slow your heart rate down during the low-intensity intervals. This method produces excess post-oxygen consumption (EPOC). This means that the fat burning isn’t over once you finish your workout - your body continues to burn fat for up to 24 hours afterwards! EPOC is influenced by the intensity and not by the duration! So you can burn loads of calories in less than 30 minutes… for once time is not the problem.

It may seem counterintuitive to think a shorter HIIT session could be more effective than a slower cardio session – a 45 minute run on the treadmill could burn 400 calories whilst a short 15 minute HIIT burns 250 calories.  BUT it’s the ‘after-burn’ where the magic happens – you can be sat on your couch watching TV long after your HIIT is over with and yet the EPOC means the calories continue to burn and your fitness continues to improve.

It’s a great idea to incorporate a HIIT workout into your weekly schedule. ACE is offering 2 HIIT sessions a week – Tuesday & Saturday evenings (although it’s the basic theory behind all our classes). Check out website www.ace-london.com and our facebook group www.facebook.com/acelondonuk for full details & schedule.

Whilst we take a well deserved break over the holidays, why not try out our HIIT home workout to keep your fitness levels up!? Check out facebook for details....

Snack Attack: a trilogy

Our third installment of snack related chat, are a couple of recipes that will inspire you to snack more healthily.

One sweet, one savoury – they are both extremely satisfying and delicious boosts for your mid morning or mid afternoon munching moment. Remember snacks are not two extra meals, so keep an eye on portions!

Both of these will be served at our healthy Chana Tea-Cember on 17^th December so make sure you come along to sample all our goodies and gain lots of happy snacking ideas!

Please send us any great snack ideas you have so we can share with our ace ladies.

Chocolate orange raw brownies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ingredients:

• 300g almonds (230g pulsed into a coarse flour, 70g chopped to add at the end)

• 7 tablespoons of raw cacao

• 200g soft dates (medjool works best)

• 75g honey/maple syrup/agave nectar

• zest of 2 oranges

Pulse 230g of almonds into a coarse flour in the food processor. Throw in all the remaining ingredients.

Add 70g of chopped almonds to the food processor and pulse a few times.

Spread the mixture into your brownie pan and leave in the fridge for 2-3 hours. Cut up and enjoy!

 

Egg white muffins

 

These are easy and nutritious – high in protein and low in calories (less than 20 per muffin) and extremely adaptable with whatever veg you have available.  Suitable for freezing and take hardly any time to defrost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ingredients:

• One teaspoon coconut oil

• 1.5 cups of egg whites

• 2 cups raw spinach

• 1 cup of raw chopped cherry tomatoes (or sun dried tomatoes)

• 1 cup of raw chopped asparagus

• 1 cup chopped pepper

• Salt & pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 180 degrees (160 fan)

Sautée chopped onions in a teaspoon of coconut oil until soft and transparent. Add chopped peppers and cook until soft.

Add spinach, tomatoes and asparagus for a couple of minutes until vegetables begin to soften.

Separate eggs and stir in sautéed vegetables to the whites.

Fill each muffin tin with the mixture and cook at 180. Don't fill containers to the top as they will rise.

Bake for 20-25 minutes. To check if they are fully cooked stick a tooth pick in the centre and make sure it comes out clean.

 

We would love you to join us for our healthy Chana Tea-cember - please email info@ace-london.com for more infomation

For loads more recipe ideas visit www.ace-london.com/recipes

Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/acelondonuk

Instagram: ace.lifestyle

 

 

Snack Attack - part deux!

SNACK ATTACK - part deux!

 

Following on from our Ace lifestyle blog last week looking at some top snack tips (http://www.acelondonfitness.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/snack-attack-snack-conundrum-is.html) we found this great article about snack swaps - there are some brill ideas in here worth a read!!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-3334814/The-healthy-snacks-secretly-making-fat-eat-instead-including-FRIED-EGG-sandwiches.html

Some of these are no brainers but couple of things to be conscience of… 

Be a bit careful with dried fruit. Clearly they are a better alternative to a mince pie (or a doughnut for that matter) at this time of year, BUT they are full of sugar and it’s really easy to rack up the calories without realising it! A kids size box of raisins isn’t bad but fresh fruit is a much better alternative. An apple takes a satisfying amount of time to eat (which is important - don’t want your snack done in a few seconds) and is packed with fibre. Its much easier to count calories and control portions with fresh fruit than dried. 

Peanut butter on wholemeal or oat and rice cakes are a great snack. Make sure that you chose the right peanut butter. Got to be natural with no added sugar - Meridian is delicious! The fad for peanut butter is growing into other nut butters - almond, hazelnut and cashew - which can help keep things varied and interesting. They are all pretty yum and increasingly more available in supermarkets. Go on, push the nut butter boat out!

As an alternatives to crisps, roasted root vegetable crisps are a good choice. if you can make them yourself even better and then you can control the oil content. A great tip for root vegetable crisps is to use a peeler - for super thin strips which cook very quickly and don’t need much oil. Make them in batches and bag up as air tight as possible. 

 

Super Salads

 

Super salads.. 

 

This salad pic has created quite a lot of interest as salads go. When people think of eating healthily or dieting salads are the first thing that pop into your mind but without some creativity can get all rather standard and miserable. Alternatively they can require so many ingredients they hardly seems worth the trouble. These are pretty simple, varied enough to taste good without hours of chopping or prep. Eat with a slab of protein and get involved!

Salads are not a science so measurements are lax, and you can pretty much supplement every ingredient for something else… but here is the basic gist.

Quinoa and roasted red pepper salad

Ingredients

1 cup quinoa

2 red peppers

radish (sliced thinly)

3 spring onions (Sliced as thin as possible)

parsley

coriander 

toasted pine nuts

Dressing

1tbsp sesame oil

2 tbsp mirin

juice of half a lemon

2 tbsp soy sauce

Squeeze of agave or honey

tsp mustard (dijon or wholegrain or whatever you have in)

pepper juice

Something quite wonderful happens to a pepper when you shove it in a very hot oven with grill on for about half an hour (turning a couple of times to make sure all is even and good in the world). 

Once the peppers are black all over, take out the oven, leave to cool and pull off the charred skin. What you are left with is a very sweet, soft pepper flesh which is delicious with quinoa, buckwheat or any other healthy grain. When you’re slicing it make sure you scrape away pepper seeds but keep hold of the pepper juice that it makes and add it to your dressing. 

Mix everything together. Pour the dressing on fairly last minute so that the radishes stay nice and crunchy - they add an important texture to the salad. Taste and make sure seasoned well (the soy in the dressing may not be enough so add salt). 

Roasted veg and tahini dressing

this salad works well with quite a wide range of vegetables. Done it before with squash and beetroot and have thrown in broccoli and red pepper when its lying around, so think of this recipe as a guide which you can adapt according to taste and what you need to use up in your fridge

ingredients

2x cauliflower head

2 x aubergine

2 x red onion

1 tbsp. ground coriander

1 tbsp. ground cumin

roughly chopped parsley and/or coriander 

toasted chopped nut of choice - I usually use almonds, pine nuts or hazelnuts. 

dressing

tahini paste

lemon juice

water

salt & pepper

Cut veg into relatively equal size so they cook evenly. spray oil. evenly coat with spices and season. roast for about half an hour, check on them half way through and spoon around if some bits are going brown.

cool

scatter herbs

pour over dressing

chuck on the nuts

job done

 

Green salad

A green salad is a green salad is a green salad. Except when its slightly better that your average green salad which this one is!

Mix up your leaves - this one is baby gem (cut lengthways) Chicory and a dolce verde romain lettuce (which is my current lettuce squeeze!). Variety is important to get a good sweet (romain, gem, iceberg) and bitter (watercress, rocket, chicory) mix and different textures. 

Add a large ripe avocado, pumpkin seeds and cress. 

Cress is massively underused, it is super cheap, tasty and can massively elevate salads so get some in, or hanker back to school days and grow your own. 

To keep in the realms of super duper healthy, dress with lemon juice (just before serving) and season.

or make a simple lemon vinaigrette with extra virgin love oil, white wine vinegar, whole grain mustard and a lot of lemon juice. 

 

Snack Attack

 Snack Attack!

The snack conundrum is something that we come up against time and time again. We all love to snack and we all find that there are various non meal times in the day when a little energy boost is needed. Classic snack times are mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and are usually the times when chocolate or some other handy, sugary filled convenience sends your healthy eating off into the wrong direction. The problem is that snacking on something sugary with no nutritional value, releases insulin into your blood stream, which then processes the sugars from your food and helps store it as excess fat.

There is actually nothing wrong with snacking. Having 3 nutritious meals and 2 nutritious snacks is a great way to keep your blood sugar levels steady and to avoid overeating at mealtimes. The trick is not to let snack times creep up on you. Plan for them. Decide you’re going to have them twice a day, what they are going to be, and make sure you have what you need at the time you need it and… Enjoy (with a nice cup of tea).  

Snack facts:

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•  A healthy snack made up of complex carbohydrates, protein and healthy fats               increases your energy levels for a longer period of time than sugary snacks do.
• Choose nutrient dense snacks, such as fresh vegetables and humus, a boiled egg, a handful of nuts, an apple or some melon chunks, greek yoghurt and berries, rice cakes with cottage cheese, rice cakes with peanut butter (personal fav and sometimes easier to organise than a boiled egg!).
• Snacks have to be small and not too calorific. Snacks are there to keep you going, but not to add 2 more meals to your day. Around 150 calories per snack is a good guide.
• Timing is everything, your first snack should be consumed around 2 hours after breakfast, and your second snack about 2 hours after lunch. This will help keep your blood sugar levels constant, and hopefully stop you from raiding the work vending machine.

Snacking wisely can really help you to lose weight and can add many essential nutrients and vitamins to your diet to help your body remain in a fat burning state!

Happy snacking…

Snack the ace way! We’re doing a bit of a snack deep dive over the next few weeks – look out for our blogs, recipes and some tasters at our classes. Make sure you put December 17^th in your diary for our healthy Chana TeaCember – we will have loads of snacks on offer, with recipe cards and endless advice!

For any more information on snacking or other nutritional matters do not hesitate to get in touch info@ace-london.com.

Ace's post workout snacks

It is even more important to eat a snack post workout then pre workout, this is because you need to make sure that you feed your body to help repair muscle tissues and replenish glycogen stores which are depleted after a tough workout. (The body breaks down most carbohydrates from the foods we eat and converts them to a type of sugar called glucose. Glucose is then stored as glycogen in the muscles and liver to fuel our bodies when we need the energy.)

Post workout your body needs plenty of protein combined with carbohydrates. Your muscles will be like sponges ready to soak up the glycogen to store as energy for your next workout, and now is the best possible time to consume carbs. Try and eat something within an hour to hour and a half after your workout. You can either have a full meal, or a small snack if you are not planning to eat a meal for a few hours. Here are some post-workout snack ideas:

A Protein Shake Made from a protein powder of your choice, water and a banana, is a great choice as your body quickly converts it to energy.

Banana and peanut butter sandwich This a favourite of Charlotte’s! Just slice a banana in half, length ways and spread a tablespoon of crunchy peanut butter (preferably Meridian with no added sugars, salts or palm oil), then slice across into small pieces and enjoy!

Protein pancakes These are a proper treat, and you will look forward to these throughout your workout. They are more of a meal then a snack, so make these for your post workout breakfast. See our website for recipe.

Tuna on whole wheat toast You could swap the toast for a couple of whole wheat crackers or rice cakes.

Scrambled eggs on toast Scramble 2 eggs on some whole wheat or dark rye bread.

Peanut butter, banana and chocolate shake All you need is one medium banana, a tablespoon of peanut butter and 1 cup of low fat chocolate milk blended with some ice.

0% fat Greek Yoghurt with berries Non-fat Greek yoghurt (Fage Total is the most delicious) and a cup of berries is a lovely post workout snack and the yoghurt is so thick and creamy it feels very indulgent. Add a squeeze of honey, as that will be converted straight into glycogen.

What are your favourite pre/post workout snacks? We’d love to hear your ideas!

Ace's top pre-workout snacks

  So when it comes to fitness, weight loss and feeling good we can't really get very far without discussing food. Everyone wants to know what they should be eating and when and no one wants to miss out on eating things that are delicious and satisfying. So is there a way?? Look if you want to loose weight and stay healthy you have to watch what you eat and common sense plus a wealth of science won't tell you any different. But you can eat and you can eat well, we can help you with ideas and recipes.

A great time to snack is an hour or so before you work out – getting in good energy to help maximise your workout, but leaving enough time so you're not bloated whilst training. Here are some great fueling ideas that combine simple carbohydrates (for a quick energy hit), complex carbohydrates (for longer lasting, slow release fuel), and protein (to encourage a gradual release of energy by lowering the snack’s GI, and also to help repair muscle tissue). They are delicious, healthy, nutritious and full of all the good fats we need to make our bodies temples. So take a look, have a think and make a plan (essential to any healthy lifestyle, you gotta plan and shop in advance or you’ll end up eating rubbish!) and ENJOY!

Slices of apple with peanut butter The apple provides you with carbs in the form of natural sugar, which is easy to digest, while the healthy fat and protein in the peanut butter slow down the release of those sugars to ensure a steady stream of energy.

Greek yoghurt with berries and a sprinkle of nuts Again this will provide you with a good mix of carbs, protein and healthy fats from the nuts.

Rice cakes/a slice of whole wheat toast with cottage cheese or peanut butter Or other whole wheat crackers will do.

Houmous and sliced vegetables A good savoury snack if you're not so keen on fruit. We're loving the ‘Me Too” humous or make your own with a tin of chickpeas, olive oil, cumin, garlic and lemon juice… blitz.

Fresh fruit smoothie Blend up your favourite fruits, such as berries and bananas, which will provide your body with plenty of nutrients to energise your body. Add some low-fat yoghurt or a milk of your choice for a dose of protein.

No bake energy balls These are so quick and easy to make! You need oats, peanut butter, agave nectar, chia seeds, flax seeds, coconut oil, and chopped dates. See our website for full recipe! Remember these should be eaten in moderation, although they are very healthy they are quite calorific.

              

Don’t forget to keep hydrated It’s vital to stay hydrated during exercise to keep your body functioning at its best. Try to drink half a litre in the 2 hours leading up to your workout, then top up during your workout according to your body size, the temperature, the intensity of your workout and how much you sweat.

Now you are ready to smash our classes, check out our next blog post to find our favourite post workout snacks.

Press Release - 8th September 2015

 An ACE start for Exercise Classes at Kinloss shul           

ACE, the health and fitness company, has launched a full schedule of weekly exercise classes at Finchley United Synagogue (Kinloss).

More than 35 people attended the launch night at Kinloss on Monday 7th September which kicked off the weekly schedule of services aimed at women of all physical abilities.

Created by experienced and fully qualified Personal Trainers; Anna Schuchman and Charlotte Wikler, ACE is a newly launched fitness service providing scheduled exercise classes to the North London communities.

ACE offers a Pay-As-You-Train service or a discounted loyalty card entitling the user to attend any 10 classes.

Charlotte Wikler – Co-founder of ACE and Qualified Personal Trainer commented:

“We are delighted to offer these classes to the Kinloss community although we stress that anyone is welcome. We felt it would be especially beneficial to launch at this time of year because new resolutions are made and all the Yom-Tov meals catch up with you if you don’t have a good plan to exercise regularly”

Charlotte continued…”As Kinloss is growing from strength to strength we were encouraged by the community to provide a schedule of regular exercise classes on the shul premises. Last night’s successful launch is testament to the eagerness of our clients and we were delighted by the high turnout.”

Anna Schuchman – Co-founder of ACE and Qualified Personal Trainer added:

“We wanted to make these classes as simple and accessible as possible but still make sure that you can see real results. Our clients have a wide range of fitness and strengths so we offer HIIT classes, Circuit Classes and our ‘ACE special’ which was designed especially for the Kinloss community.”

Regarding the schedule itself, Anna continued…”We are currently offering 6 classes per week on the shul premises but  are happy to listen to our clients and arrange different classes or change the timings if it suits them better – we are here for their benefit!”

The full schedule is available on the website: www.ace-london.com

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Charlotte Wikler:                   info@ace-london.com

Co-Founder & Trainer           07968 484 501

Anna Schuchman                   info@ace-london.com

Co-Founder & Trainer           07815 209 112

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/acelondonuk