Most of us know Shaun White. He’s the incredible snowboarder who wins every Olympic and X games. So what does this guy to keep in shape? Does he work out? How exactly do you “train” to Snowboard? FoxNews post’s an interview where he reveals a little about his philosophy on fitness and nutrition.

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Shaun White goes big. Olympic champion big. Oprah big. No snowboarder is as decorated. No redhead is as nimble.

He’s been a sponsored rider since he was 7 and turned pro at 13. At 23 he’s already won two Olympic gold medals, plus a ton of X-Games hardware, and he is the undisputed ambassador for his sport. He carries so much clout that Red Bull built a private half-pipe into the side of a mountain — complete with a practice foam pit — that was only accessible by helicopter just because he asked for it.
As if that weren’t enough, Shaun White is also a top-shelf professional skateboarder.

AskMen.com had a chance to catch up with the golden boy, just days after his big Olympic half-pipe victory in Vancouver.

Shaun White on Post-Podium Partying

You must be doing nonstop press right now. Have you been able to squeeze in any partying since you won your latest gold medal?

Doing the press stuff has been a real gauntlet, an NBC madhouse. I didn’t sleep for a day or two after winning the medal, so the celebrating is more like having dinner with friends and family. The real party stuff comes after I get through all of this. Red Bull threw me a little celebration party in Vancouver before I flew to Chicago to meet Oprah though.You clearly know your way around a half pipe, but how good are you at handling your liquor? I’m not a big drinker. I have a couple drinks and I’m pretty much good to go. An average college kid could probably drink me under the table pretty quickly. I’m pretty sure that the average college kid probably hits it a lot harder than we do. We just get to do it in really cool places, like going out in Japan or Vancouver.

Shaun White on Food

That’s a pretty good segue into talking about what you put into your body. Are you careful with what you eat? Are there foods that you can’t resist?
I can’t stay away from Chinese food. I really love that stuff. Not even the really nice places though. Like the sketchy “Wok Garden” or the random ones in the airport. I love ‘em! So I go to town on that as my guilty pleasure, but I’m pretty good when I eat normally.

I also love going to steakhouses. That’s my thing. I usually eat a pretty big steak the night before I compete. Other than that, I just pick up little things from friends here and there. I’m pretty good with what I eat now because I’ve been traveling around since I was 11 or 12, and it was one of those things that if you don’t open your mind and start eating everything, you’re going to be in trouble. Traveling all over in a place like Japan, you can’t always find your average cheeseburger or whatever.

Are you a big gym guy?

The stuff that I do when I get to go to the gym is more like a maintenance thing. I’m not trying to build up muscle or bulk, or anything like that. In a lot of traditional sports you need to be big — you need to knock over someone who’s bigger than you. But it’s a different strength you’re looking for in snowboarding. It’s more like tennis. You gotta be quick and you’ve gotta be really mentally prepared. You gotta predict where you’re gonna go, where you’re going to land, what you’re going to see.

When I do go to the gym, everything’s combined with balance. I’ll do a lot with those big, weighted medicine balls and those half moons. I’ll balance with one leg or squat on a half moon while getting the medicine ball thrown at me.

How does this improve your riding?

When you’re losing balance on your snowboard — doing that arm waving thin —, what you’re doing is straining yourself, and your body is grabbing every single muscle around it in order to bring you back into balance. So, that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to strengthen all those little muscles that help the big muscles, and build overall strength — not size.

You’re also a pretty accomplished skateboarder. How does skateboarding help your snowboarding?

Skateboarding helps a ton with balance, precision, with air awareness… it gets your senses to be spot-on and it’s also a great way to take my mind off things. If you eat the same cereal every day it’s gonna get old. And if I had thought about snowboarding every day, I would have quit a long time ago.

So it keeps it fresh for me. If I skateboard all summer, I can’t wait to get back on a snowboard. And after the winter, all I want to do is get out of my snow gear, throw on a T-shirt and go skating.

Shaun White on Injury Prevention

We don’t see you bail often, but you did manage to smack your head pretty nicely at the X-Games this year. How do you keep yourself out of the hospital?

Ha! I could have been a boxer, huh? I can take a hit! Wearing a helmet is always nice. It flew off that time, but it did its job.A lot of it is just riding within your own limits. You try to push yourself, but if you step to something you’re not ready for… Something I learned when I was really young was to fully commit. When I was 8 or 9, I’d see so many kids who’d want to learn a backflip at the Mt. Hood Summer Camp in Oregon. And every single one would panic as soon as they got up in the air, stop rotating and land on their heads.And that motivated you to smack your head too?I just realized at that point that if they’d fully committed, they would have been way better off landing on their butts or their backs than upside down. Ever since then, I’ve never gone into a trick without fully committing to it.

Shaun White on Killing It at the Olympics

Tell us about that Double McTwist 1260 that you threw in Vancouver.

A lot of people have asked me about that last trick because I didn’t have enough speed going into it. I landed really low on my hit before it and I lost a ton of speed and momentum, but I threw the trick anyway. And as I came around, I basically willed it to land. You can see this little jerky motion at the end where I twist my board and force it to land, because that was my only option

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Everyone knows how big of a fan Fittron.com is of Crossfit. We’ve blogged about it, participated in it, and advocated it for a while now. Crossfit isn’t just a workout, it’s a way of life. It leaves the monotony of the gym behind and takes your fitness to places you never thought possible.

Check out these two stories for proof.

It’s been a while since we posted a Nikki Fitness blog. Too long. So here’s one that gives you some tips on how to get some ripped biceps.

Client: Do you know the nearest vet office?

Trainer: Why?

Client: I have some sick pythons. (Client flexes his puny arms and kisses each bicep.)

Trainer: (Rolling her eyes) Drop and give me 50.…

Taking your “sick pythons to the vet” doesn’t have to be a joke. You can really have great guns (amazing arms) in just a few easy steps.

1) Melt the fat over the muscle. That means doing more cardio, eating lean protein after your muscle workouts, and making sure you eat 6 healthy meals a day including lots of fruits, veggie and fiber.

2) Build the muscle my increasing your weight. You won’t get too bulky by lifting 15 lbs free weights, and if you never move beyond the 5 lbs weights you won’t see definition. Work on your arm muscles 3 times a week with a rest day in between. Increase the weight by 2 lbs each week. Aim for 8 reps your first day, 10 the next and 12 the last day, then up the weight.

3) Work the different fibers in your muscles by hitting them from different angles. For example, do outside biceps curls (elbows in by your sides hands lift away from you out to the sides, then up to your shoulders), forward curls, hammer curls, preacher curls and cross curls (bring weights across body from left hip to right shoulder).

4) Make your triceps a triple threat with French presses (hands together overhead holding weight, then lower weight behind your head keeping elbows pointing to the ceiling and press back up), kickbacks (lean forward, lift elbows up near your ribcage and move weights from shoulders to hips and back to shoulders), and dips (sit on a bench, hands at your sides and lift your butt off the bench, lower down toward the floor until elbows are bent at 90 degrees and lift yourself back up by pressing through the palms).

5) Push that weight off your shoulder. Do overhead presses with weights facing forward and another set with them facing your ears. Do front and side extensions by keeping arms straight and lifting the weight away from your body forward and to the side. Throw in some planks and yoga-style down dogs in your other workout days to continue to define those delts.

If you can’t get to the gym or are traveling, push-ups work all three areas conveniently. And save the corny jokes. Arms like yours are seriously sculpted.

Fitness — Fit it in!

Nikki Fitness DVD

Few fighters stir emotions of ambivalence, admiration, and pity, like Mike Tyson. At 19 years old, Kid Dynamite was the champion of the world and before he went to prison, considered by many as the greatest fighter who ever lived.

His story is tragic and bittersweet. Plucked from the streets of Brooklyn by Cus D’Amato(who makes an appearance in this video) Tyson began a meteoric rise to the top of the fight world, only to have it all come crashing down before the age of 28. He spent his prime years in a prison cell instead of the boxing ring.

We’re not prepared to pass judgment on the man, his actions, or his character. Rather we found a video that shows the highs and lows of a kid from the streets of Brooklyn who once sat atop the world. Sit back and enjoy the greatest fighter who almost was. The talent and promise will leave your breathless.

The great Obama Stimulus, you know the one that created all those millions of jobs(ha), has a little read line item mandating that all Americans register their Body Mass Index for electronic recording purposes. BMI is a metric used to find the ratio between your weight and height which then tells you whether you are overweight or obese for your size. So here we go America. It’s law. Now everyone is going to be watching. Let’s hope this goes over better then the stimulus and actually accomplished what it sets out to do.CNS News reports:

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New federal regulations issued this week stipulate that the electronic health records–that all Americans are supposed to have by 2014 under the terms of the stimulus law that President Barack Obama signed last year–must record not only the traditional measures of height and weight, but also the Body Mass Index: a measure of obesity.

The obesity-rating regulation states that every American’s electronic health record must: “Calculate body mass index. Automatically calculate and display body mass index (BMI) based on a patient’s height and weight.”

The law also requires that these electronic health records be available–with appropriate security measures–on a national exchange.

The new regulations are one of the first steps towards the government’s goal of universal adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) by 2014, as outlined in the 2009 economic stimulus law. Specifically, the regulations issued on Tuesday by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Dr. David Blumenthal, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, define the “meaningful use” of electronic records. Under the stimulus law, health care providers–including doctors and hospitals–must establish “meaningful use” of EHRs by 2014 in order to qualify for federal subsidies. After that, they will be subjected to penalties in the form of diminished Medicare and Medicaid payments for not establishing “meaningful use” of EHRs.

Section 3001 of the stimulus law says: “The National Coordinator shall, in consultation with other appropriate Federal agencies (including the National Institute of Standards and Technology), update the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan (developed as of June 3, 2008) to include specific objectives, milestones, and metrics with respect to the following: (i) The electronic exchange and use of health information and the enterprise integration of such information.‘‘(ii) The utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014.”

Under this mandate in the stimulus law, Secretary Sebelius issued a regulation–developed by Dr. Blumenthal–that requires that all EHRs keep track of a person’s Body Mass Index (BMI) score. Body Mass Index is a ratio between a person’s weight and height, and is used to determine whether or not someone is overweight or obese. It is the preferred method of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for measuring obesity.

Michelle Obama has made dealing with the problem of childhood obesity the main theme of her term as First Lady.

U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin. (Photo by Penny Starr/CNSNews.com)
According to the CDC, “BMI provides a reliable indicator of body fatness for most people and is used to screen for weight categories that may lead to health problems.”

A person’s BMI score is used as a tool to screen for obesity or excessive body fat that could lead to other health problems. While it does not actually measure body fat directly, according to CDC, the BMI scores generally correlate with a person’s body fat percentage.

The new regulations also stipulate that the new electronic records be capable of sending public health data to state and federal health agencies such as HHS and CDC. The CDC, which calls American society “obesogenic” – meaning that American society itself promotes obesity – collects BMI scores from state health agencies every year to monitor obesity nationwide.

“Electronically record, retrieve, and transmit syndrome based public health surveillance information to public health agencies,” the regulations read.

With the spread of electronic health records, the CDC apparently will be able to collect such data more efficiently and with greater accuracy because the electronic record keeping systems can send the data automatically, eliminating the need for government – both state and federal – to keep, send, and process physical records.

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We seem to post a number of beach workouts on this blog. And why not? The beach rocks. And it’s summer!!

Here’s another one for some fitness and fun in the sun.

The Boston Marathon is generally considered among the more challenge in the US. You have to qualifiy, and it boasts the infamous “Heartbreak Hill.” But according to this morning’s Wall Street Journal the truly challenging course is the San Francisco race. Encumbered with steep hills, and difficult terrain, this course separates itself from the rest.

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Every year, marathons in New York and Chicago draw some 40,000 participants each.

But not the San Francisco Marathon. The race, which takes place July 25, attracted fewer than 7,000 runners last year, and open slots for the upcoming event remain plentiful. The reason: San Francisco’s famous hills, which draw tourists from around the world, are a bear for runners to traverse. “To put it tactfully, this course is not for the casual runner,” says Jenny Schmitt, spokeswoman for the San Francisco Marathon.

The relatively small and unheralded San Francisco Marathon gives runners some inspiring views.

The San Francisco Marathon’s low profile frustrates its fans. This year, the race’s organizers have hired new publicists to try to raise its profile. Many runners loath to do the full race have been drawn to a half-marathon option added about a decade ago, and more recently a second half-marathon alternative route has been put in place.

Going the whole distance in San Francisco has put off some first-time marathoners who don’t want to risk falling short of the finish line. And many seasoned runners don’t want to waste their energies on a race that offers no hope of setting a personal record.

For example, the fastest of Julie Fingar’s six finishes in San Francisco was 3 hours, 29 minutes. That’s 19 minutes slower than her fastest finish of the Boston Marathon, says Ms. Fingar, a 34-year-old running star and an organizer of the San Francisco Marathon. Still, she says, because of the difficulty of the course, “it really means something when you finish this marathon.”

San Francisco is one of America’s most beautiful marathons. At about mile six, a point typically reached about an hour after the marathon’s 5:30 a.m. start, runners cresting a challenging hill ease onto the Golden Gate Bridge, run across it and loop back—in one direction, typically visible through the fog, is a national park and in the other are the landmarks of San Francisco.

In a sizzling hot month that is largely bereft of marathons in many parts of the U.S., San Francisco offers running addicts a race where temperatures rarely exceed 60 degrees. That, in fact, is why I recently decided to run this year’s San Francisco Marathon. Although I’m based in Chicago, a recent weeks-long assignment in New York started me taking hours-long jogs around Central Park. It also got me thinking about running a marathon for the first time in nearly two decades. Hitting the Internet in search of a summer race, I found few options other than the San Francisco Marathon.

Over the years, San Francisco Marathon organizers have dismissed talk of altering the course to make it easier, choosing instead to take runners through all of the city’s most-famous neighborhoods. “The Embarcadero, the Presidio, the Golden Gate Bridge—for me there is no more beautiful marathon,” says Nicole Matthews, 29, a veteran marathoner from Brentwood, Calif.

Unlike the ING New York Marathon or the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, San Francisco lacks a large corporate sponsor. That not only leaves it with little marketing clout but also without the large purse needed to attract a field of professional runners. The first-place finishers in New York and Chicago can collect six-figure cash prizes. Such rewards can boost overall attendance, because the slowest marathoners often get a thrill from running the same course as the world’s fastest.

But the San Francisco Marathon has no purse and is typically won by amateurs such as Andrew Cook, who coaches running at a high school in Flower Mound, Texas. Mr. Cook, 29, finished first in San Francisco the last three years. (He isn’t running this year because his wife is preparing to give birth.)

Back in Texas, Mr. Cook finds that he doesn’t get much credit for running—let alone winning—the San Francisco Marathon. “People will say, ‘Have you run the Boston Marathon?’ ” he says. “Problem is, nobody’s ever heard of the San Francisco Marathon.”

To be sure, obscurity also plagues other marathons, in large part because the number of races keeps expanding. There are currently about 475 active marathons in the U.S., double the number from 25 years ago, says Running USA, an industry-supported research center in Colorado Springs, Colo. Even with the number of marathon runners increasing steadily—the number rose nearly 10% to about 467,000 in 2009 from a year earlier—many of the 26.2-mile races struggle to attract crowds of runners.

The San Francisco Marathon is far from being America’s most difficult 26.2-mile course—a distinction that likely belongs to next month’s Pike’s Peak marathon. San Francisco isn’t even the most difficult marathon in California. Harder yet is the Big Sur International Marathon, a spring-time race that took Ms. Fingar three hours, 46 minutes to complete.

As a professionally managed marathon, San Francisco is an official qualifying race for the Boston Marathon—a race famous not only for its long history but for its high standards. Only fast runners, those who have run a previous marathon in speedy fashion, at the top of their age group, are allowed entry into Boston.

Some marathons such as Chicago’s are famously flat and fast and therefore popular among runners wanting to qualify for Boston. But to do so in San Francisco is altogether harder. “It’s more prestigious to qualify for Boston on a harder course,” says Jennifer Lashua, a 33-year-old retailing executive who in 2008 qualified for the Boston Marathon with a San Francisco Marathon time of three hours, 23 minutes. Even so, that time was a full 11 minutes slower than her best Chicago marathon time.

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Gabby Reece is a former professional Volleyball player and wife of surfer extraordinaire Laird Hamilton. They live a pretty nice life out on the beach in Hawaii, where in between shooting promos for American Express, surfing, and going to the beach, they manage to stay in pretty decent shape.

See how Gabby does it in this video below.