NEW YORK (Reuters) - Battle ropes, the thick and heavy ropes that look as if they could tether a ship to shore, have become go-to fitness tools in gyms for people seeking a tough workout that is also engaging and fun.

Whipping, slamming, dragging and drumming the long, anchored ropes have long been used in training for sports like football, but fitness experts said they have now gone mainstream in gyms as an efficient workout routine.

“It’s a little like running with the upper body,” said Jonathan Ross, spokesperson for the American Council on Exercise. “It’s not just using different muscles but training muscles in different ways.”

The Washington, D.C. area-based trainer and author of the book “Abs Revealed,” said a ropes workout engages the mind as well as the body with what he calls the grace of the wave.

“The ropes show you how you’re moving,” he explained. “You see the physical manifestation of the body movement as you watch the ropes. If you do them well, your body is moving well.”

Posture and coordination are inherent elements of the workout, Ross said.

Battle rope workouts also pack a calorie-burning cardio punch.

A study published in the April 2015 Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research showed that a 10-minute bout of rope training resulted in high heart rates and enough energy expenditure to increase cardio respiratory fitness.

Crunch, the national chain of fitness centers, has built a group fitness class around battle ropes.

“It’s great core training. The abs, back, and glutes (muscles of the buttocks) are all engaged,” said Donna Cyrus, senior vice president of programming at Crunch. “Obviously there’s toning to the upper body and it burns a lot of calories.”

Rope classes typically include a warm-up segment followed by teams competing to see who can keep the wave, or movement of the rope, going the longest time.

Ross said battle ropes, which come in various diameters and lengths, require shoulder mobility and stability, so people dealing with shoulder issues should use them with caution.

“The longer the rope, the more challenging because you have to generate more force,” he said. “You want to see that move travel all the way down to that anchor point."

Another mistake, he added, is pulling the ropes too tight.

“You can’t make a wave if the rope is tight,” he said.

(Editing by Patricia Reaney and Marguerita Choy)

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America's collective waistline just expanded again.

The national obesity rate rose to nearly 28% last year, up from about 27% in 2013 and again from the roughly 26% recorded in 2008, according to a new survey released Wednesday by the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index.

It's the highest rate that Gallup and Healthways have measured since they started tracking obesity.

Still, a few states stood out.

Mississippi, for example, had the highest obesity rate in the nation — the second year in a row the state has achieved that title — at over 35%. On the opposite end of the scale, Hawaii had the lowest obesity rate at just 19%.

Hawaii, in other words, was the only US state where less than 1 in 5 residents was obese last year.

The two states on the list with the highest obesity rates in the country — Mississippi and West Virginia — have ranked consistently in the number 1 and 2 positions on the list since 2011. And four other top contenders — West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Kentucky — have been among the 10 states with the highest obesity rates each year since Gallup and Healthways began tracking obesity in 2008.

On the other hand, Colorado has continued to have one of the lowest obesity rates in the nation since 2008. Similarly since 2008, California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut have consistently ranked among the 10 states with the lowest obesity rates.

Here's a map of the obesity rates by state, with grey representing the states with the highest rates and light green representing the lowest rates:

High obesity rates tend to coincide with higher-than-normal rates of other weight-related health problems.

A 2013 Gallup poll, for example, found that people who live in states with high obesity rates also tend to be less likely to eat healthy and get enough exercise compared with their peers in states with lower obesity rates. Residents of high-obesity ranked states are also more likely to suffer from chronic diseases like high blood pressure, depression, high cholesterol, diabetes, cancer, and heart attacks compared with residents in low-obesity ranked states.

UP NEXT: The disturbing truth behind why most diets fail

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NOW WATCH: This one ingredient is making a lot of Americans fat

These people might look like underwear models, but they're not. And 30 days before this photo was taken, they didn't look like this.

In fact, they were just regular people who worked for an advertising agency and, while they worked out a fair amount, they ate pretty much what they pleased.

But in just a few weeks, the women slimmed down to have as little as 12% to 14% body fat and the man had just 5% to 6% body fat.

And that woman on the left? She was pregnant just five months before the photo was taken.

The key to their success: A low-fat, high-protein diet and intense, professionally guided exercise. They also had some good motivation from their employer: They were asked to be models in an upcoming photo shoot for their agency's rebranding, posing buck naked.

Why they chose to pose buck naked 

The three extreme dieters work for Viceroy Creative, an advertising agency that wanted to rebrand itself in a powerful way last March. As part of the rebranding, they asked some of their key executives to be part of a buzzy photo shoot that would present them totally nude.

The participants were the firm's creative director Gabrielle Rein, account manager Raegan Gillette, and president David Moritz — the naked man in the photos. Mortiz tells AdWeek they agreed to the shoot for the good of the company and their clients.

Getting model-thin in a hurry took a great deal of mental and physical endurance, and it's that kind of diligent dedication that Viceroy wanted to communicate in their new campaign, Moritz tells Business Insider.

How they got rock-hard abs in such a short time

Before they started preparing for the shoot, Viceroy's executives were in decent shape. Still, each worked hard those final weeks to get ready for the big nude day. Here's a picture of a topless Moritz two years before the training began:

Gabrielle Rein, Viceroy's creative director, had a baby just a few months earlier, so the preparation was especially challenging and rewarding.

When they agreed to the nude photo shoot last year, they gave themselves five months to get fit.

For the first four months, they completed a series of trainings designed to strengthen their muscles, bolster their cardiovascular strength, and increase their metabolism. Here's the company's account manager, Raegan Gillette, doing one of the exercises:

But those four months of exercises weren't what ultimately got them the sculpted bodies in the photos.

Diet was the key to their success

"No matter how much exercise you do, that will only get you part of the way. In terms of seeing abs and muscle definition, it's all about diet and reducing your body fat percentage. That's essential," Moritz says.

For the last four weeks, the Viceroy executives committed to a grueling diet. The goal, said Moritz, was to cut body fat so that the muscles they'd been toning for the previous four months would shine through.

Each executive ate six meals a day, catered specifically to their needs by a nutritionist. Although each diet was unique, the meals mostly consisted of the same types of food, Moritz says, and included a lot of protein.

"You need [protein] to continue to build muscle," Moritz explains. "Which is a little bit more than one gram of protein per every pound that you weigh."

For Moritz — who was still able to recite the diet by heart months after the shoot — the meals consisted of:

• Meal 1: 1/2 cup oatmeal, 1/2 cup almond milk, 1/2 cup blueberries, one scoop carb-free protein shake
• Meal 2: 3 egg whites, 1/4 cup plain potatoes
• Meal 3: 3 oz. ground turkey, low-carb wrap with a cup of romaine lettuce
• Meal 4: 3 oz. grilled chicken and 1/4 of an avocado
• Meal 5: 6 oz. fish with a 1/4 cup steamed jasmine rice and six pieces of asparagus
• Meal 6: 6 oz. of 99% lean ground beef with 1/4 avocado and 1 cup romaine lettuce
• No alcohol was allowed and most condiments were banned (with the exception of hot sauce, since it added a negligible amount of extra sugar or fat)

That's it, each and every day, for an entire month! At first they had the meals prepared for them by a chef but that quickly became too expensive to maintain. They began preparing the meals themselves, which required a scale and measuring cups to make sure they consumed exactly what the nutritionist ordered.

Despite consuming significantly fewer calories than he was used to, Moritz said he didn't feel too many negative effects from the strict plan, aside from boredom from the food.

"You don't feel tired because your body is getting what it needs," said Moritz.

Moritz pointed out that he was at about 5% body fat on the day of the photo shoot, which is close to the lowest a man his age and height should be. Body builders have between 3.5% and 5% body fat on competition day.

The number of calories they burned versus how many they ate

If you add it up, Moritz consumed roughly 1,700 calories per day, far fewer than the 2,400 to 2,500 calories he was burning throughout the day, he tells Business Insider.

According to the Mayo Clinic, a man his age and height should be consuming at least 1,600 calories a day even if they're trying to lose weight. So he was pushing the bare minimum.

The women were eating about 1,300 calories and burning 2,000 calories each day. For them, the Mayo Clinic estimates that women in their age and height ranges should eat at least 1,200 calories a day even if they're trying to lose weight.

"The plan puts you in a relatively significant caloric deficit every day," Moritz says. "And it forces your body to burn stored fat."

In addition to the diet, the executives stuck to a grueling fitness routine. All of them worked out every day for an hour and a half, seven days a week with the help of professional trainers at their local Equinox gym.

The exercises included intense weight lifting and low-impact cardiovascular activities — like walking on a treadmill set with the highest incline — that burned most of the large amount calories they were losing each day. The rest were lost through regular daily activities like walking.

Here's Gillette doing one of the weight-lifting exercises:

The regimen wasn't cheap. The nutritionist Viceroy used charges $700 a person for a month-long program. And an average Equinox Tier 3+ trainer — the most intense trainer you can get at Equinox — costs $135 per session, and each exec was completing a few sessions a week during the entire training process.

Moritz says anyone can get into this kind of shape given the time and motivation, however.

"While we did it with a lot of extensive help, a person can do this on their own given just a little more time," Moritz says. "Follow the same basic principles and find a way to get really motivated. It's just all mental."

For Moritz and the rest of the team, the motivator that kept them dedicated was a pretty strong one:

"Knowing that you're going to send naked pictures of yourself to as many people as you can makes you stay with it," he says.

After the shoot, Moritz, Rein, and Bearce slowly regained some of their body fat to a more reasonable amount, but they continued to stick with a modified version of the diet.

For Moritz, the five-month regimen was only a beginning. Since the photo shoot, he's stuck with it. (He now uses a food-delivery service to stick with his diet.) By the end of the summer, he says, that he suspects he'll even be in better shape than he was in March. Rein also kept her beautiful post-baby physique, getting into increasingly better shape even after the training was over, Moritz said.

Here's what she looks like months later and after feasting on ribs, BBQ, and hamburgers over Memorial Day weekend of this year. She's 31 years old.

CHECK OUT: Science proves that the trendy 'dad bod' girls are going crazy over is for real

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NOW WATCH: Scientists Discovered What Makes Men Attractive

You may have had leg cramps before, but it's unlikely you've had one this bad. Check out this guy's unbelievable, skin-crawling cramp.

His leg muscle undergoes some extreme contraction, and makes his calf look like a deflated football. As he stretches his foot, his skin appears to bubble. Take a look:

The viral video's title suggests this could be "a bunch of worms under this dude's skin," but fortunately for this guy, it's most likely a painful run-of-the-mill cramp, which so commonly occurs in the leg muscles that its got a name — the charley horse.

When a muscle cramps, it contracts similar to how it would normally, usually stronger than it would and without your control over it. It can occur while sleeping, resting, or during exercise.

But, "there are no worms here," Mark D. Miller, head of University of Virginia's Sports Medicine division, told Business Insider in an email. "The muscles violently contract and spasm giving the impression of bubbling. The skin itself just reflects the action of the underlying muscle."

According to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, "a cramping muscle may feel hard to the touch and/or appear visibly distorted or twitch beneath the skin"— which is what makes it look like a parasitic worm burrowing under the skin. Cramps can last anywhere for a few seconds to 15 minutes, or even longer.

Cramps aren't just unsightly, they can be quite painful, too. The muscle stiffens and shortens, which causes an extreme, tight pain. They can happen more than once in a short period of time and some people can experience pain and soreness in the muscle days after the cramp.

Almost everyone has experienced a cramp. They can happen in any part of your body, even in your hand. Most medical websites cite muscle fatigue, dehydration, and electrolyte deficiencies to more serious ailments like kidney failure as causes, but experts still can't come to a consensus on what causes muscle cramps when they occur in otherwise healthy adults.

"The problem with muscle cramps is that it is difficult to find the cause, and sometimes difficult to treat," Miller said.

Some suggestions for prevention include stretching before exercise, drinking water or taking electrolyte supplements like calcium and magnesium. In the midst of a cramp, try stretching until the cramp subsides, massaging the affected muscle, or applying heat.

Watch the whole video on Vid.me.

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Pure Gym just bought LA Fitness.

That may seem like a normal industry acquisition, but there's something more interesting going on here. Upmarket and mid-market gyms in the UK such as LA Fitness, which is not related to the American chain of the same name, are being destroyed by budget rivals.

In the same way budget airlines revolutionised air travel 20 years ago, budget gyms have changed the fitness market in the UK since the recession.

New players like Pure, PayasUgym, and TheGym have flipped the traditional business model on its head, forcing the incumbent players to fight their corner.

UK operators such as Fitness First, David Lloyd, LA Fitness, and Virgin Active typically lock you in to a long-term contract at a pretty high monthly rate — about £40 ($61) as a basic — but promise premium service in return. There are pools and saunas, as well as top-of-the-line equipment and plenty of TV screens.

On the other hand the new breed of gym lets you cancel your contract at any time and offers membership typically costing about £20 ($30) a month. The gyms keep small staffs and include only basic equipment.

Full disclosure, I'm a member of the Pure Gym near my house. It's in a warehouse that looks like an air hanger and is about as no-frills as you could get — I feel lucky there's a shower. But it's just so cheap. I would never have signed up to a deal amounting to £40 ($61) a month, but at this price point I think why not.

Pure Gym and its rivals are having huge success pitching to consumers like me whose needs had been unmet. Most started life around the time of the 2008 recession, when money was tight. The first Pure Gym opened in 2009, but the brand is already the UK's biggest gym operator, with 130 outlets across the country.

By contrast LA Fitness, which has been around since 1990, has only 43 clubs and at its height had about 80 gyms. Pure Gym says it plans to open another 30 gyms next year — nearly reaching LA Fitness' entire footprint in just one year.

These budget gyms are cheap to set up and cheap to run. Pure's founder, Peter Roberts, told The Telegraph in January that each gym typically employed just two full-time staff members, with self-employed personal trainers also on site. Most of the administrative work is done online and automated.

The popularity of budget gyms shows no signs of slowing. Pure Gym CEO Humphrey Cobbold said Friday in a statement: "Overall demand for affordable, high-quality, and no-contract fitness centres is continuing to grow, served by a range of providers in a highly competitive marketplace."

LA Fitness and gyms like it, meanwhile, look to be on the way out. The company was valued at £90.3 million ($138.22 million) in a private-equity deal in 2005, but last year its lenders took control of the loss-making chain and had to pull off a major restructure. At the time it blamed competition from the likes of Pure Gym. Terms of Friday's sale were not disclosed.

Pure is set to turn all LA Fitness branches into its own brand budget offering as part of plans to expand in London and the South East. That makes one upmarket gym chain that has fallen at the sword of its budget rival. Others could follow.

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Lunges are great because they improve balance, hip mobility, and coordination. Reverse lunges take a lot of stress off of your front knee by stepping backward instead of forward. 

Video courtesy of CJ Koegel 

Visit Koegel Fitness for more customized meal plans and workouts 

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Sitting all day is terrible for you. So terrible, recent studies have found, that regular exercise isn't enough to counteract its many harms.

So what's someone with an office job to do?

As it turns out, you may not have to do much. Even a standing desk is likely not required.

Instead, simply make sure you're moving for at least a couple of minutes every hour.

Walking is best, but just getting up to stand and stretch is better than staying put, at least according to two newstudies. If you work the standard 9-to-5 schedule, one study suggests that all it takes is a total of roughly 16 minutes of extra movement (in addition, of course, to the walking you already do) each day.

Not so bad, right?

For the first study, researchers looked at data on 3,626 US adults who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and had agreed to wear health monitors to track their movement throughout the day.

Three years after the survey ended, the researchers checked records to see which participants had died. They used those numbers to figure out what the participants' overall risk of dying prematurely was and whether time spent sitting had played any part in contributing to that risk. They also looked at what people did with their time when they weren't seated.

They found that standing instead of sitting didn't do much to protect people from dying earlier than they should have (sorry, standing-desk fans). But the occasional light stroll did. In fact, people who ambled around for about two minutes every hour had about a 33% lower risk of dying prematurely than the people who just stayed seated the whole time.

Because the study was observational, meaning the researchers had no control over participants' behavior, they can't say for sure that walking for a couple of minutes each hour actually reduces someone's risk of dying, only that the two things are somehow related. Other variables could also be contributing to what the researchers observed. For example, people who are already healthier to begin with might also be more likely to get up and move around than their less healthy peers.

Another study published Monday recommends spending a total of two hours out of your seat — that includes time spent standing — each day. It also suggests that people should break up time spent sitting with a few minutes of walking or standing.

If you're using public transit, walking to and from lunch or an appointment at least once a day, and adding in those extra 16 minutes of walking (the ones recommended in the first study), meeting this goal shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

SEE ALSO: Here's the best time of day to work out to lose weight

DON'T MISS: Here are the fattest states in America

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NOW WATCH: Trainers love this simple exercise that improves your balance

Marine veteran George Hood held a record-breaking abdominal plank for more than five hours on Saturday while also raising money for a veterans’ charity, NBC San Diego reports.

The 57-year-old held the plank position for five hours, 15 minutes, and 15 seconds to break the Guinness World Record previously set by Mao Weidong of Beijing, China, in September 2014 at four hours and 26 minutes.

Hood, who is also a fitness instructor, dubbed his achievement “The People’s Plank,” which doubled as a fundraiser for the Semper Fi Fund for injured service members, according to CBS News.

“There are injured Marines that come back from the fight, who have suffered life-altering injuries and the discomfort that I feel right now pales in comparison to that which they feel,” Hood told NBC while in mid-plank position. “They’re my heroes, they really are, every one of them.”

Watch Hood’s interview while breaking the world plank record:

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NOW WATCH: The Weirdest Thing You'll See Today Is This New Guinness World Record

So many of us fall in and out of exercise routines on a regular basis. For many, it's a daily psychological battle whether to go to the gym or skip it altogether.

But once you do achieve your fitness goals and get to what you consider to be "in shape," what happens if you start slacking? How long does it take for negative results to start creeping in.

The answer: much sooner than you think.

We spoke recently to Shawn Arent, an exercise scientist at Rutgers University, and asked him to tell us how long it actually takes to get out of shape.

Here's what he told us:

"Within a week. If you stop training, you actually do get noticeable deconditioning, or the beginnings of deconditioning, with as little as 7 days of complete rest. It very much is an issue of use it or lose it.

"Now that being said, we often build active rest periods into someone's training cycle. So for periodizing their training, if you've been going hard hard hard, you have to back off at some point so that the body fully recovers, so you don't overtrain.

"Those are planned cycles, though, and any deconditioning would be minimal at best, and in many cases you often rebound a little bit because you push the body so much. But what starts to happen is, you have somebody who's been continuously working out and all the sudden they miss a day, then they miss another day, another day, then they miss another day, and next time you know it's two weeks later, then it's three weeks later.

"The problem is it keeps getting harder and harder to go back to it, and you do start to notice deconditioning in as little as that period of time. You know, with muscle mass, if you're not stimulating it, there's no reason for it to maintain it's hypertrophy state, there's no reason to keep the same size because you're not stressing it anymore.

"Cardiovascularly, you notice a drop in plasma volume if you stop exercising, so now your heart won't circulate as much blood. Well, you don't have as many red blood cells then so really it very much is an issue and I guess this is why in our field, one of the things we really need to promote is lifestyle.

"It can't be that 'it's an exercise program so it can't be that it's a fitness program,' it's part of who you are it's part of what you do, it's part of your life. And so when you make it a priority, you don't have to worry about those deconditioning effects. But yeah, you start taking a couple weeks off here and there, and you miss a few weeks, do you decondition? Yes you do ... Depending on what your level of fitness was, within a month to two months you can see complete loss of all gains."

SEE ALSO: 7 easy ways to get more out of your workout

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LeBron James has led his Cleveland Cavaliers to the 2015 NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors. We took a look at the science behind the low-carb diet that got him into fighting shape.

This video was originally posted on October 10, 2014. 

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People on Kickstarter are going crazy for a smart water bottle that glows when you need to take a sip.

Spotted on TechCrunch and officially launched on Monday with 38 days left to go, the HidrateMe water bottle has already surpassed it’s $35,000 funding goal and reached over $130,000 at the time of this post.

HidrateMe GLOWS. If you e forgotten to drink water your bottle will glow to remind you to stay hydrated. #glow #glowingwaterbottle #Hidrate #HidrateMe #smartwaterbottle #drinkwater #stayhydrated #drinkwater #tech #KICKSTARTER #fitspo #new #stylish #fashionable #fitness #workout #getfit #drinkup #run #cycle #triathlete #yoga

A video posted by HidrateMe (@hidrate_me) on Jun 1, 2015 at 10:33am PDT

The 72 ounce bottle has a lot of really cool features. It works by syncing the water bottle to your phone through an app using Bluetooth. The app will ask your age, gender, preferred metric (ounces or millileters), height, weight, and how active you usually are.

All that data will go into the free app and it will then calculate how much water you should be drinking and work with a sensor within the water bottle itself to track how much water you’ve consumed.

The coolest part is that the app will sync with fitness wearables and apps, so if you go for a long hike or a bike ride, your HidrateMe water bottle will adjust the amount of water you need to drink.

It also takes into account your location and can adjust your daily water goals depending on the temperature, humidity, and elevation of your surroundings.

And if you’re bad about remembering to drink water, the watebottle will glow whenever you’ve gone long periods of time without drinking anything.

The idea for HidrateMe came when CEO and cofounder Nayda Nguyen realized she wasn’t drinking enough water and wanted to develop an elegant solution.

“We are tracking everything about our body right now — our exercise, our sleep, our diet,“ Nguyen explained in the Kickstarter video. “But there’s no easy way to track the most essential thing to our body: water. It’s the next piece of the puzzle.”

She teamed up with four other engineers, designers, developers, and marketers from the University of Minnesota and within 54 hours, they had created the first prototype.

After that, they knew they were onto something. They quit their jobs and were selected to join the Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator sponsorship that took them to Kansas City, MO and let them work for three months developing the bottle.

“We did 80% of the work for the campaign before it even started,” Nguyen told TechCrunch. “Thanks to that, we rallied a large group of influencers in the fitness world to help us spread the word and had a big sign-up list with potential backers long before our Kickstarter launch.”

There’s no word yet on if the app can work with multiple HidrateMe bottles or if you need to stick with just one bottle. Another issue could be if you prefer drinking water out of the bottle without the cap on since the HidrateMe sensor will stop tracking water intake if the cap is removed.

According to the team, the battery will also last a year, but after that, you’ll need to replace it to keep your water bottle functioning with the app and Bluetooth.

The HidrateMe bottles will be made with BPA-free Tritan plastic and are dishwasher safe. The early bird price for the water bottle will be $39 with the regular price at $45 and it comes in five colors, including white, green, teal, pink, and black. The team is aiming for a late 2015 or early 2016 release date.

Check out the full Kickstarter page here.

SEE ALSO: Former employees from 3 media juggernauts have launched a Kickstarter to bring public access TV online

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We all have them — habits we think are healthy because we heard them somewhere on the news or from a health-conscious friend. And no matter how much we hate them, we just keep doing them because we think they're good for us.

Take avoiding gluten, for example. Is it really healthy?

Or taking a daily multivitamin. Healthy habit or a little bit of nonsense?

The answers to these questions might surprise you.

Have some we missed? Send them along to science(at)businessinsider.com.

Using a standing desk

A recent long-term study looking at data on nearly 4,000 US adults found no benefit in terms of overall risk of dying from standing as opposed to sitting.

In the short-term, however, standing does burn more calories per minute; so if losing weight is all you're worried about, stand on!

Using toilet seat liners

Viruses like HIV and herpes are fragile, meaning they don't survive very well outside of a nice, warm human body. By the time you sit down on a public toilet seat — even if it was recently shared by someone else — most harmful pathogens likely wouldn't be able to infect you.

Plus, your skin is an effective block against any microbes. (Unless, of course, you have a cut or open wound there, which could allow the bacteria to get in.)

Avoiding gluten

Unless you're one of the 1% of Americans who suffer from celiac disease, gluten probably won't have a negative effect on you. In fact, studies show that most people suffer from slight bloating and gas when they eat, whether they consume wheat or not. So go ahead and eat that bagel.

Fitness classes are becoming a luxury product.

The fashion website Racked recently chronicled several women who were willing to fork over lots of dollars to work out at boutique fitness centers.

"It prompted me to reassess my financial situation," one woman, Sarah (whose name was changed) told the website.

She said she had cut down going to boutique fitness classes to once a week and had signed up for Equinox — which costs $225 a month and is a fancier alternative to a no-frills gym.

One woman told Racked she spent about $850 a month on fitness, or a startling $10,200 a year.

AKT founder Anna Kaiser told Racked why she thought people spent this much money on fitness. "You could lease a car or go really deep into a transformation program and change your life [...] I'll see clients that pay $450 for a T-shirt, but have an issue with $37 for an intimate experience with another human being. It always shocks me when someone shows me a $3,500 dress and then tries to bargain out of a class. Most of these people wouldn't think twice about a $40 blowout."

In an interview with Racked from earlier this year, Soul Cycle founder Elizabeth Cutler said the price tag could enhance the experience. "There is a luxury component to it," she said. "When people pay for something, there's a certain commitment and a certain energy that they bring to it, and that elevates the whole [concept]. That's where you start to feel the commitment."

Soul Cycle is known for its cult following. Women who visit the cycling studio regularly pay $34 for a single class in New York City. A 30-class pack is $850. Soul Cycle's competitor, Flywheel, is also $34 a ride, with prices that decrease when you buy them in packs, but not by much.

But because it is healthy, Racked notes, women argue it is worth it.

SEE ALSO: Why people pay $34 for Soul Cycle

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NOW WATCH: We tried all the burgers on the McDonald's 'secret menu'

How much should you exercise? Many of us have certain ideas in our heads about what works best to keep us "in shape" and what does not.

Five days a week, four days a week? Is two enough?

Luckily, science has come to the rescue with a surprising conclusion — and a somewhat tough one to swallow if you have trouble motivating yourself to work out.

We spoke recently to Shawn Arent, an exercise scientist at Rutgers University, and asked him about this. He said there was a huge difference between working out two and three days a week. While any amount of exercise is an improvement over none at all, if you're already in decent shape, exercising for just two days a week will not get you much additional benefit.

Here's what he told us when we asked him how often you should exercise:

"A minimum of three days per week, for a structured exercise program. Technically, you should do something every day, and by something I mean physical activity — just move. Because we're finding more and more that the act of sitting counteracts any of the activity you do.

"So let's say you go work out for an hour a day and then you sit for the rest of the day — the health consequences are awful from the sitting standpoint. There's a recent study that just came out on that. So, you need to be active at other points in the day as well besides just the exercise.

"But there's an interesting split between exercising two days per week and three days per week, and it has to do with the frequency you stimulate the system. So with three days per week — you get significant gains early on, and you're going to want to progress beyond that three, ideally. Two days per week, you don't get much change— you just don't do it frequently enough to have some of the other positive health outcomes that come along with it.

"In terms of resistance training — [you should do it] two to five days per week, it depends on the level you're at, in terms of how advanced you are and how you train your body. Early on we can get pretty good gains in kids and older adults with two days per week, but we still want to progress them pretty quickly to three or four days per week.

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Trying to do multiple things at once can have mixed results; you may accomplish more, or you may not get anything done.

When it comes to exercising, though, multitasking may be a good idea, a new study suggests.

In the study of older adults, researchers found that, when people completed easy cognitive tasks while they were cycling on a stationary bike, their cycling speed increased.

The investigators said the results surprised them. "Every dual-task study that I'm aware of shows that, when people are doing two things at once, they get worse" at those tasks, study author Lori Altmann, an associate professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at the University of Florida, said in a statement. "Everybody has experienced walking somewhere in a hurry when the person in front of them pulls out a phone, and that person just slows to a crawl."

In the study, the researchers looked at 20 healthy adults whose average age was 73, and 28 people with Parkinson's disease, whose average age was 66.

The participants completed 12 cognitive tasks while they were sitting in a quiet room, and then they did the tasks again as they were cycling. The easiest tasks included saying the word "go" whenever a blue star appeared on a projection screen, and the most difficult tasks involved repeating long lists of numbers in the reverse order in which they were given.

The researchers recorded the people's cycling speed using a video motion-capture system.

In the healthy group, the participants sped up by about 25 percent on average when they were doing the easiest tasks. "Some of the people in that group actually doubled their speed during that task," Altmann told Live Science.

The people with Parkinson's disease also sped up while performing the easiest tasks, but not as much as the people in the healthy group, the study found. [10 Ways to Keep Your Mind Sharp]

However, all of the participants decreased their speed as the tasks became more difficult. Still, the speeds at which the people cycled while doing the most difficult cognitive tasks were about the same as the speeds at which they cycled before they began the tasks, the researchers said.

It is not exactly clear why doing an easy task appeared to help people cycle faster, but the explanation may have something to with the release of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, the researchers said. During exercise, the brain releases two such neurotransmitters, dopamine and noradrenaline, which speed up people's thinking and reaction times, Altmann said.

Research also has shown that those same neurotransmitters are released when a person is exposed to novel and challenging tasks. The researchers think that these two venues of neurotransmitter release may improve the efficiency of the brain, and thus boost both motor and cognitive performance, they said.

In the future, the researchers would like to see if they could use their findings to get older adults to exercise more intensely, Altmann said. A lot of older adults have started exercising in recent years, and some may be encouraged by research showing that exercise may improve people's thinking skills. But some people do not exercise intensely enough to gain health benefits from aerobic exercise because they don't like to get sweaty, Altmann said.

The people in the study did not even realize they were cycling faster, and therefore exercising more intensely, when they were doing the cognitive tasks, she said. If researchers could figure out a way to convert the concept of the study into a game format, they could perhaps get older people to increase the intensity of their workouts, Altmann said.

The study was published May 13 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Follow Agata Blaszczak-Boxe on Twitter. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

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Choosing a fitness tracker is kind of like deciding which cereal to buy at the grocery store; the sheer number of options is overwhelming. They all look good. 

To start, you should consider your lifestyle and what you want your tracker to do for you. Maybe you want one that records your speed while you run and counts your steps taken per day or one that documents your REM and non-REM sleep cycles and monitors your heart rate. Perhaps you want a fitness tracker that is a combination of all the above.

Different devices excel in different areas, which is why we recommend spending time researching your favorites before finalizing a purchase. For your easy perusal (and shopping), we listed the key attributes of 6 highly-ranked options, below. The ball is in your court. 

1. The Fitbit is undoubtedly one of the best in its category; it uses continuous heart rate monitoring, which, in turn, can provide you with more accurate feedback on your activity, sleep, and calorific burn than its competitors. Its OLED display also let's you see your call notifications (it links to your smartphone), daily stats, and the time of day. 

Fitbit Charge HR Wireless Activity Wristband, $149.95, available at Amazon. 

2. The Misfit Shine turns all our your daily stats — steps, calories, distance and sports activities — into easy to read charts. Unlike other devices that need to be recharged constantly, this one features a replaceable, coin-cell battery that runs for up to 6 months at a time. 

Misfit Shine Activity and Sleep Monitor, $70.67, available at Amazon.

3. This tracker isn't as sleek-looking as the Fitbit or Jawbone, but don't let its bulkier appearance dissuade you from giving it fair consideration. Its built-in GPS accurately tracks your running, biking, and swimming with live paces and distances. As an added bonus: The display is touchscreen-enabled and sunlight-readable. 

Garmin Vivoactive, 229.99, available at Amazon.

4. Aside from being waterproof up to 3oo feet (!!), Runtastic's Orbit also tracks your steps, active minutes, calories burned, sleep cycles, personal goals, and ambient lighting. It's under-$100 price tag is pretty sweet as well. 

Runtastic Orbit 24 Hour Activity Tracker, $78.62, available at Amazon. 

5. Your can clip the Jawbone UP to your person or strap it around your wrist to track your steps, exercise, overall calories burned, hours slept, and quality of sleep. Using its associated Food Score app, you can also track your food, drink, calories, and nutrients — helping you stick to a balanced and healthy diet. 

Jawbone Up More Activity Tracker, $39.99, available at Amazon. 

6. For just $45, this devices offers sleep and step tracking at a fraction of competitor prices. The Razer Navu X's has a "no-screen, no-fuss notification interface, meaning you keep your head up and in the game at all times," according to Amazon. Our favorite feature is its LED light display, which — with the accompaniment of the Nabu X Utility app — can be color customized to correspond to incoming notifications, so you know exactly what you've received.

Razer Navu X Smartband, $45, available at Amazon. 

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Tony Horton has long been known as one of the most visible people in American fitness.

He created P90X, one of the most successful home workout programs of all time. But Tony doesn't try to hide the importance of diet in fitness, weight loss, and life in general.

We recently asked him the $1 million nutrition question: What does Tony Horton's diet look like?

We talked to him around 12 p.m. Pacific time, and this was what he told us about what he had eaten — and was going to eat — that day:

"This morning I had scrambled eggs with ground chicken sausage ... a slice of avocado, and thinly shaved Parmesan cheese with some peppers and onions.

"For a midday snack I had a handful of pistachios, pecans, almonds, and cashews. Lunch will be a burrito filled with brown rice, grilled peppers, chicken, avocado, in a gluten-free wrap.

"Tonight I’ll have a piece of salmon, a bunch of broccoli, some quinoa, and a big old salad that consists of kale — which I don’t necessarily like — but I surround it with basil, that way I don’t really taste the kale that much. Then I’ll add some kind of blueberries or strawberries in there and little cherry tomatoes, and some red onions, in some kind of balsamic vinaigrette dressing.

"And then I’ll follow that up with a big old gorgeous, gluten-free Chocolate chip cookie. Because you know I’m a human — I look at desserts as a reward food. I’ve eaten a clean and healthy breakfast; I’ve had a clean and healthy snack during the day. And I’ll probably have a little shake with blueberries, strawberries, vegan protein powder and egg white protein powder, with some cashews just to kind of make it creamy.

"So I’ll get my 3 meals, I’ll get my snack, I’ll get my shake, and I’ll get my sweet thing at the end — my chocolate cookie or my thin slice of key lime pie. That’s the reward for doing well all day long.

But most people eat garbage all day long and then they pile dessert on top and they wonder why they have a stroke or heart attack at 52."

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Chronic back pain is both bad and common enough that it has been described as a modern epidemic.

Musculoskeletal issues — mostly, back pain — are the leading cause of new and existing long-term disability claims, according to an analysis by the Council for Disability Awareness. Even those of us without chronic pain may feel stiff and sore after a day hunched over a computer.

Yet surely, even though the human body has a number of notable design flaws (I'm looking at you, knees), there's no way we've evolved to have our spines, the primary support system for our bodies, fail out on us on a regular basis?

Our spines aren't the problem, according to Esther Gokhale, an acupuncturist who started researching back pain after experiencing an excruciating amount of it herself. The problem is our posture.

Gokhale, who the New York Times has referred to as the "posture guru" of Silicon Valley, says that by reintroducing the concept of "primal posture," standing like babies or theoretically, like our ancestors, we can fix posture and back pain at the same time.

She says we've forgotten how to stand.

As NPR reports, Gokhale started by looking at indigenous groups around the world, where she says the back pain of the sort that's so common in modern society is nonexistent. She studied the works of anthropologists who examined posture like Noelle Perez-Christiaens and looked at physiotherapy approaches like the Alexander Technique— multiple physiotherapy organizations say that posture is the key to a healthy spine. And Gokhale traveled around the world to see what people look like when they stand.

The first thing that stood out to her were the shapes of people's spines in these small villages of Brazil, West Africa, Portugal, India, and other places. "They have this regal posture, and it's very compelling."

We tend to think that a spine with an "S-shaped" curve is normal, but Gokhale says we should try for more of a "J-curved" spine, as seen in the second image on the right (or above, on mobile).

"The J-shaped spine is what you see in Greek statues. It's what you see in young children. It's good design," she told NPR.

But Gokhale thinks we can fix our posture by focusing on the way we stand and sit, and by doing so, "reposition and reshape your shoulders, arms, neck, torso, pelvis, hips, legs, and feet the way they were designed to be."

She's got a series of exercises that she recommends on her website to help people fix their posture (and also offers both free and paid classes and has written a book about back pain).

As the NPR story about Gokhale points out, this idea that people have forgotten how to stand and have developed bad posture and back pain as a result isn't a scientifically confirmed fact.

But there are elements of our lifestyle that contribute to bad posture, and many experts would say that fixing those could help solve back pain.

One neurosurgeon told NPR that a large part of the posture difference between the indigenous groups that Gokhale looked at and modern Americans may have to do with obesity rates. Carrying extra body fat and having weaker abdominal muscles is likely to pull your back forward — causing that slump and potentially, back pain too.

Fixing that, largely by developing stronger abdominal and core muscles, should help fix people's posture, and eliminate back pain along the way. If Gokhale's exercises help people build up their core muscles in the back and abdomen, it makes sense that they would help.

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The FDA just announced that trans fats — an unhealthy ingredient that researchers have linked to heart disease risk— should no longer be considered safe in food.

The new rule released Tuesday, June 16 gives food companies three years to cut the dangerous ingredient from their products. Use of these fats has already declined a lot in recent years, but some companies are slacking on cutting back. 

Given that the FDA's statement says that "there is no safe level of consumption of artificial trans fat," many companies still have quite a bit of work to do.

Here's a complete list of all the food products that still contain trans fats, based on a list compiled by the Center for Science in the Public Interest:

• Jiffy Pop butter popcorn: 3 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp unpopped popcorn)
• Bisquick complete buttermilk biscuits: 2 grams trans fat per serving (1/3 cup mix)
• Marie Callender's banana cream pie: 1.5 grams trans fat per serving (1/9 pie)
• Marie Callender's "I Heart Chocolate Cream" pie: 2 grams trans fat per serving (1/8 pie)
• Marie Callender's Razzleberry Pie: 3.5 grams trans fat per serving (1/9 pie)
• Marie Callender's 2 Pastry Pie Shells: 1.5 grams trans fat per serving (1/8 crust)
• Marie Callender's Chocolate Satin Pie: 4 grams trans fat per serving (1/6 pie)
• Duncan Hine's whipped chocolate frosting: 2 grams trans fat per serving (3 tbsp)
• Duncan Hines Creamy Home-Style Strawberry Cream Frosting: 1.5 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp)
• Pepperidge Farm coconut three-layer cake: 2.5 grams trans fat per serving (1/8 cake)
• Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen Onion Rings: 3.5 grams trans fat per serving (18 count)
• Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen Cajun Fries: 3.5 grams trans fat per serving (large fries)
• Blue Bonnet Stick Margarine: 1.5 grams trans fat per serving (1 tbsp)
• Giant Guaranteed Value Buttery Spread Sticks: 1.5 grams trans fat per serving (1 tbsp)
• Fleischmann's Original Stick Margarine: 1.5 grams per serving (1 tbsp)
• Jolly Time The Big Cheez Popcorn: 4 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp cup unpopped popcorn)
• Jolly Time Mallow Magic Popcorn: 3 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp unpopped popcorn)
• Jolly Time Jalapeño Butter Popcorn: 5 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp unpopped popcorn)
• Jolly Time Blast O Butter Popcorn: 4 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp unpopped popcorn)
• Pop Secret Homestyle Popcorn: 4.5 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp unpopped popcorn)
• Pop Secret Jumbo Pop Movie Theater Butter Popcorn: 5 grams trans fat per serving (1 cup popped popcorn)
• Pop Secret Butter Popcorn: 5 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp unpopped popcorn)
• Pop Secret Kettle Corn: 5 grams trans fat per serving (3 tbsp unpopped popcorn)
• Pillsbury Funfetti Aqua Blue Vanilla Flavored Frosting: 1.5 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp)
• Pillsbury Creamy Supreme Buttercream Frosting: 1.5 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp)
• PillsburyCreamy Supreme Sugar Free Chocolate Fudge Icing: 2 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp)
• Turkey Hill Party Cake Ice Cream: 1 gram trans fat per 1/2 cup serving
• Sara Lee Classic New York Style Cheesecake: 4 grams trans fat per serving (1/6 cheesecake)
• Sara Lee Original Cream Classic Cheesecake: 3 grams trans fat per serving (1/4 cheesecake)
• Betty Crocker Bisquick Complete Mix Cheese Garlic Biscuits: 2 grams trans fat per serving (1/3 cup mix)
• Betty Crocker Petal Pink Decorating Cupcake Icing: 1.5 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp)
• Cake Mate Coffee House Icing Creamy Coffee: 1.5 grams trans fat per serving (2 tbsp)
• Odom's Tennessee Pride Sausage & Buttermilk Biscuits, Snack Size: 2 grams trans fat per serving (2 sandwiches)
• Odom's Tennessee Pride Chicken & Buttermilk Biscuits, Snack Size: 2 grams trans fat per serving (2 sandwiches)

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Don’t fret if you've procrastinated your New Year's resolution to live a healthier lifestyle (i.e. hit the gym more than once every other week); you still have another six months to follow through on it. 

With Striiv Fusion's lifestyle tracker strapped around your wrist there’s no room for flaking on eating healthy and exercising. The device counts your steps taken, calories burned, distance traveled, and active minutes; it also tracks the quality and duration of your sleep. Hopefully, by supplementing your routine with the device you’ll be able to better manage your goals.

Bonus: The tracker can receive text messages, emails, incoming calls, and weather notifications. And, at $59.99, it’s a fraction of the price of its competitors.  

Striiv Fusion Activity & Sleep Tracker, $59.99, available at Stack Commerce.  [39% off]

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