Besides countless fun for your kids (& FREE time for you) what are the benefits of playing with play dough in VIVA KIDSCARE?

1. It develops fine motor skills

While your kids are molding play dough into different shapes, they are actually building up strength in their tiny hands. The acts of squishing, rolling, flattening, and more help your children develop muscles used in their hands for fine motor movements useful in the future, such as holding a pencil or using scissors.

2. It’s calming for children

Much like the squishy stress ball you pull out from time to time, squeezing play dough is great for helping calm down your kids. Playing with the clay can help ease tension, release excess energy, improve focus, and express emotions. If your child is feeling stressed, sit them down with a container of play dough and watch their worries fade away.

3. It encourages creativity

No matter how many colors you have, there is an unlimited number of creations your kids can make from play dough. Creating objects from scratch encourages your kids to stretch their imaginations and think in new and innovative ways.

4. It enhances hand-eye coordination

Along with play dough, you probably picked up different materials and tools, such as rolling pins and cookie cutters. These tools, which come in a variety of sizes, develop your child’s hand-eye coordination by forcing them to manipulate the materials to fit their ideas.

5. It improves social skills

When your child works with other kids or even adults while playing with play dough, it’s great practice for social settings. Between sharing various colors, tools, and materials, as well as spending ample time together discussing and collaborating, your children will get great practice with their social skills. Ask your children to describe their process while they play to help them out of their comfort zone and to engage with others.

6. It supports literacy and numeracy

It’s difficult to get kids interested in learning, especially about tricky subjects like reading or math. play dough is an awesome tool for teaching your children about counting, shapes, descriptions, and more.

 7. It promotes playtime

In today’s technology-driven world, kids are constantly drawn to the next gadget. Instead of letting your kids sit in front of the TV all day, give them play dough and encourage time spent disconnected. Play dough helps kids slow down and focus on playing while using a number of senses and skills in the process.

So there are 7 sensational reasons for you to bring your kids into our Kidscare – knowing that they are developing some wonderful skills – while you work on yourself in the gym!

Why?

We labor over our bodies in the gym, flexing and lifting and tensing to muscles to keep them firm and strong.
Should our faces be any different? Believers in facial exercise—sometimes referred to as face yoga—believe that stimulating and building the muscles in the face can help maintain contours and elasticity, and even make us look years younger.

Does it work?

A 2018 study conducted at Northwestern University showed that 20 weeks of daily facial exercise did indeed yield measurably firmer skin, and fuller upper and lower cheeks. The protocol involved 30 minutes a day for the first 8 weeks of the study, then every other day thereafter. Participants—sixteen women aged between 40 and 65—deemed themselves to look up to three years younger at the study’s completion, while impartial dermatologists gauged a slight but significant increase in cheek fullness. Since this was the first, and so far only, credible academic study to measure the effects of facial exercise, consider it a cautiously optimistic indication that there probably is a benefit to facial exercise—provided you dedicate a significant amount of time to it, and stick with a regimen.

How?

Essentially, it’s exactly what it sounds like: making repetitive motions and exaggerated expressions in order to activate and build muscles. Consider it resistance training for the face—by strengthening the matrix that holds everything up, sagging around the jaw and eyes might be less likely over time. Facial ageing is caused by a loss of elasticity, as well as by the gradual displacement of fat pads between muscle and skin, which tend to slide downward over time. The idea behind doing exercises is that by building up the muscle, the fat pads will be more prone to stay in place, making the face appear fuller and more youthful.

Check out Dion doing his facial yoga!!!

Banana Protein Pancakes

Cajun Breakfast Bake

• 280 Cal per serve
• 4serves

Prosciutto Wrapped Chicken Rissoles with Fresh Salad

• 400 Cal per serve
• 2serves

This delicious and easy meal is one from our Ultimate Body Blitz online coaching site!

Chargrilled Salmon and Mango Salsa

• 400 Cal per serve
• 4serves

How to want to train

We all WANT to want to train, but can often find it hard to actually want to train. It is easy to say “yep, tomorrow is the day I am going to turn my life around for the better” but it is very much harder to put those words into action. The reason some of us are more motivated to train while others are not can be difficult to deduce. Some people believe that it is purely a character trait; those that are more dedicated by character will be more likely to participate in physical activity. Others believe that there are physiological differences between the way individuals respond to training that increases or decreases the likelihood that said person will continue to train in the future. Both of those explanations actually do hold some degree of truth. People higher in trait conscientiousness are more likely to act with respect to the future and thus consider training more valuable in the present than someone low in conscientiousness. It is also true that we do respond differently to exercise, some people release far more dopamine after a hard training session than others. But, the degree to which we release dopamine through training is not determined through our hard wiring but, largely through how we have oriented ourselves in the world. I believe what makes us want to train is our calibration within the world and the degree to which we associate training with our broader goals. I will justify this by explaining the way in which our body monitors our actions and emotions and thus regulates our behaviour. This understanding will grant you the ability to hijack these systems and use them to your advantage.

All of our actions and culminated behaviours are moderated by our incentive reward systems – our dopaminergic reward systems. These systems work in the background, where we have no conscious control over them. One cannot demand their body to release dopamine. It takes physical action to release dopamine. More specifically, physical action measured with respect to a valued goal.
The process in which they operate is; (1) they recognise a valued goal – a more desirable future – that can be used as a target to aim at; (2) they carefully monitor each of your actions with respect to said goal; (3) they reward, with dopamine, those actions that are seen to take you closer to that goal and punish those actions that take you further from that goal.

The goals to which they orient you towards are ranked hierarchically, with finer immediate motivations nested inside broader long-term goals. Generally speaking, all of your immediate motivations have some direct relation to your longer-term goals. For example, one’s immediate motivation to wake up at 6am might be nested inside of the motivation to go to work, which is nested inside of the motivation to make money, which is nested inside of the motivation to provide for ones family, which is nested inside of the goal to be a good person. Thus, your broader goals largely determine your immediate motivations. In this sense, it is extremely important to work out what it means for you “to be a good person”, and to then workout the micro-routines, or sub-habits that constitute that state of being.

If you want your body to respond positively to training, you need it to associate that training with forward progression towards a meaningful goal. You must articulate your goal and determine that training is an essential element of said goal.  No goal means no positive emotion. Do not get this goal – the goal of say, “being a better person” – messed up with a poorly formulated, superficial idea of what would be nice: “I want to lose 5kg”. What does that even mean? Your body has no idea. The idea of losing 5kg does not formulate a strong enough vision in your mind for your reward systems to align themselves with – unless you are super conscientious. The goal need not even be a “SMART” goal: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic & Time bound. The goal needs to, more or less, be a vision of what you want your future to be. The more detailed and more nuanced the vision/goal is, the greater your reward systems will be able to align with that future thus, the more positive emotion you feel as you progress towards that goal and the more negative emotion you feel when move away from that goal.

The way I recommend most of my clients to apply this is as follows:

1. List 5 to 10 positive attributes or behaviours that make you stronger and/or your life better.
2. Set a timer for 15-20 minutes and start to write about how your life could look in 3-5 years from now if you were to capitalize on those positive behaviours.
3. Repeat steps 1 & 2 but for negative attributes and behaviours.

Note: Try to allow your thoughts to flow freely and notice how each positive improvement in one domain can simultaneously roll over to positive improvement in another domain. Try not to limit yourself to just writing about training, but how your training affects your relationships and how your relationships affect your work, etc. Do not consider grammar to heavily at this point, allow your writing to be as natural and uninhibited as possible.

Using this framework, you will create for yourself two potential and highly possible futures that you are inexorably heading towards. These futures will represent a realistic heaven and a just as realistic hell that you must orient yourself with respect to. When you formulate your own ideas of your own potential heaven and hell in a sophisticated manner, you present your motivational systems with the greater knowledge it requires to monitor your behaviour in an appropriate fashion. In this sense, every time you act, your actions will be rewarded on the basis of how closely they align with taking you towards heaven and away from hell. Over time, all those things you found difficult to do will become more bearable, they will be rewarded positively and you might even find them enjoyable.

~ Coach Salvaterra

As you may be aware .. we have a very good friend of ours who is also a most fantastic chef…
And this most fabulous friend, after listening to me complain about how the flu has gone through my house and both my boys TWICE .. gave me a recipe that will clear your nose better than any vicks vapour drop and cleanse your gut with fresh omegas and wholesome vegetables.

So I said Thank You and sent my husband fishing!!

Cut slits in the sides of the fish, salt and pepper and nestle on a bed of Cabbage, with 1 lime cut into wedges, a stick of lemongrass (bruised), 2 cloves of garlic, a knob of ginger and some coriander and basil..

Wrap up and seal tight and pop in a preheated oven for 25-35 minutes on 120degrees.
Now get ready to make your red curry broth.

You’ll need;

1 x small white onion diced
1 red capsicum diced
packet of Ma Ploy Red curry paste
400ml of coconut milk
2 kaffir lime leaves
1 lemongrass bruised
1 TBS of fish sauce
1TBS coconut sugar
1 TBS lime juice

Fry onions and capsicum till soft, add paste and fry for a further 30 seconds.
Add remaining ingredients bring to boil and simmer until at desired thickness.

Before serving chuck in some lovely fresh veggies, including carrots, green beans, sugar snap peas and cherry tomatoes.

Sprinkle with basil and serve with the steamed fish & some sticky rice.

If you don’t know what to do, do this

The gym can be a scary place. You walk in there, you don’t really know what you’re doing, you see all these other people walking around in all their confidence and competence and you wonder just what the heck you have gotten yourself into. You see a treadmill and thank the gym lords for blessing you with a piece of equipment that you might be able to figure out! You decide you’ll go on there as you carefully observe the weights room for common behaviour patterns and gradually build up your courage to getting out into it yourself. Don’t worry if this sounds familiar, for this template will give you the confidence to know you are doing the right thing, in the right order, the right amount of times, to give you the results that you want AND make you look like an expert in the process – don’t blame us if people start requesting personalized advice from you after they see you work your way through this program.

It is quite simple to follow and applicable to 90% of gym goers. Here is how you are going to use it.

1. Start with preparation and work through each row consecutively; first, release each of the three areas; second, mobilize using the three movements; third, activate with the three exercises.
2. Move onto the content phase of your training session. Exercises of the same number are done in a superset. A super set is where two exercises are done in an alternating pattern, for example: 1A is done for 10 reps, then 1B is done for 5 reps before the sequence is repeated.
3. For your first superset (1A/B) choose to do either both of column 1 or both of column 2. Therefore, if you choose to squat you should also choose to hamstring curl, rather than plank)
4. For your second (2A/B) and third (3A/B) supersets, choose one of the exercises in each row and perform in an alternating pattern as described in step 2.
5. For the cardio section, choose a cardio machine you are most comfortable with and work under the recommend time frame 10:20. This style of training is called interval training and the numbers represent your work:rest This would mean you work hard for 10 seconds, “rest” by working at a lower effort for 20 seconds and then repeat, in this case 6 to 10 times.