Author Archives: schatzi

Plan a Family Camping Trip at Disney’s Fort Wilderness

Posted on by

When you want to plan the ultimate camping trip consider Fort wilderness at Walt Disney World in Florida, they offer many loops containing 784 campsites. Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort offers 4 different types of campsites Tent/Pop-Up Campsite, Full Hook-Up Campsite, Preferred Hook-Up Campsite and Premium Campsites.

Fort wilderness makes a great home base since you are literally at the center of the Magic Kingdom; retreating to your site during the hot afternoon hours may prove to be an excellent idea.

Exploring Disney can be somewhat daunting if you do not have a general idea of how everything works the transportation and ticket center (ttc) is the hub of most Disney owned transportation. You can catch a ferry to Walt Disney world, monorail to Epcot and buses to most popular destinations.

There are many ways to keep your family entertained in your campground like horseback riding, boat rentals. Authentic country dinning and plenty of room to walk around and enjoy the beautiful landscape.

Discovery island in right in your neighborhood and trust me if your kids like animals this is a great way to spend an afternoon. Parrots gators and even giant turtles are just some of the animals they will find on the island. I recommend staying for the Parrot / bird show its real fun.

You may be thinking alright this sounds great I will book now, well there’s a snag you are going to need to book at least a year in advance even for the lesser sites. I recommend you plan two years out this gives you a little more choice.

Personally, I have been to Disney seven times and I always have wanted to camp there the mood is real laid back and serene, this is the kind of place I want waiting after fighting crowds in the parks all day.

How To Travel The World Full-Time

Posted on by

This might sound tough, but with the internet and modern tools, publishing online is as easy as writing a Word document. It doesn’t take much to put a few hundred words on a page… but with help you’ll be able to sell those words and get paid to travel the world.

How can you become a full-time travel writer? There’s two parts, really: travel and writing! In fact, there’s a third – marketing your work, or selling the idea of your story to magazines or paying websites. What happens if you can’t sell your story? Then add it to your own website and use that to sell hotel stays and other travel services – you can make money both ways, and you’ll be building a sustainable business as you travel around the world.

I would recommend looking into different writing courses. The best of these will not only give you an idea of how to improve your writing and tell better stories, but will also show you how to pitch to editors, market your existing work, and leverage new media to build your reputation and income.

Unfortunately many books on travel writing are out of date. Although the basics of story-telling are still the same, the style of writing for a magazine and for the web are very different. Because readers treat them differently, a good writer will craft each piece differently.

And, unfortunately, many travel blogs don’t make money. A recent survey of 100 bloggers showed that only 5% were making more than US$2000 a month… more than 50% were making less than $20!

Thankfully, there is an answer to both of these problems. MatadorU writing school is a new-media course created by professionals currently working in the industry. The course is completely online and is supplemented by student/teacher forums and a job-listing board which allows you to find work almost immediately. Read a MatadorU writing course review to find out more.

There are also lots of free resources available to help you make money travel blogging. My favourite is Make Money Travel Blogging, which has lots of great ideas from start-up to advanced tweaking. They also review plenty of paid resources, which means you get to see something about online courses before you buy them.

Best MMA Training Tips

Posted on by

First of all, what is MMA? MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) is a full contact combat sport that allows a wide variety of fighting techniques and skills, from a mixture of traditional martial arts, wrestling and boxing, to be used in competitions. The rules allow the use of both striking as well as grappling techniques, both while standing and on the ground. Such competitions allow martial artists of different backgrounds to compete. The MMA fighters compete using techniques from these distinct forms of fighting inside of an eight sided cage. A win is when the other opponent is knocked out, submits, or succeeds by the decision of the judges.

As a result of the different techniques used in MMA, fighters must be highly trained and in top physical condition. Practitioners that prepare to fight in matches have to work on their speed, strength, agility, and endurance. Becoming a professional MMA fighter takes time and patience. Most MMA fighters have to start out from the basics – martial arts such as Tae Kwon Do, Karate and Jiu-Jitsu. Wrestling and boxing are also valuable skills to have. If you don’t have these skills, it is essential that you join a mixed martial arts gym, school or club to be trained properly.

After you acquire the basic skills, the next steps are practice and physical conditioning. It is essential for a MMA fighter to develop strength, endurance and balance. Here are some important tips to achieve your MMA dreams!

Tip 1 – Follow a Program. The worst thing you can do is go to the gym and spin your wheels. There is no point in wandering aimlessly around in circles. If you’re serious about being an MMA fighter, then you must have a serious strength and conditioning program. You must always be thinking about what you need to do to improve those aspects of your training that need work and to practice and perfect those skills in which you excel.

Tip 2 – Maximize your Efficiency. If you want to succeed as a mixed-martial artist, at a minimum, you’ve got to train in jiu-jitsu, boxing, kickboxing and wrestling. This doesn’t leave you a ton of time to work on strength. So you’ve got to get in an efficient workout in the little time that you do have. In your strength program, you can do so by training full body workouts focused on movement patterns. Instead of generally working on your chest, biceps, quads, hams and back, think squats, lunges, deadlifts, pushes, pulls, and twists.

TIp 3 – Use a Medicine Ball. By far the best tool for developing MMA specific power is the medicine ball, since you can throw the ball as hard and fast as you can in rotational movements that heavily involve the core. Integrating the medicine ball will allow you to develop knockout power with your strikes, as well as explosive take down ability.

Tip 4 – Get the Right Gear. You can’t fight or train without the proper equipment. Experienced competitors involved in fighting sports such as MMA, wrestling, jiu jitsu, and boxing know how important it is to wear the right protective gear and clothing. Safety and performance are of the utmost importance when choosing the proper equipment.

For even more training tips and highly rated training programs to help you get bigger, stronger and faster, see the author’s website at www.squidoo.com/best-mma-training-tips

Dining Out, Weighing In – Restaurant Meals Are Higher in Calories

Posted on by

With two out of three Americans overweight today, it’s getting harder to believe that all this extra fat is a simple problem of self-indulgence or poor personal discipline.

In fact, researchers and clinicians from various sciences say unequivocally that it’s not. Certainly adults are responsible for what they put in their mouths. But when so many are affected, from all across the American demographic, we have to also look what’s going on in our culture at large.

And one thing that’s going on is that there’s a lot more going out. In 1978, just 18 percent of the calories Americans consumed were eaten away from home. But by 2003, that was up to half.

Why should that even matter? A calorie is a calorie is a calorie, right?

At the bottom line, yes. The trouble is that when we eat out, we simply have much less control over what ends up on our plates, and from there, on our bottom line. That shows up in a variety of ways.

Nutritional research indicates that for almost any given dish that you might choose to prepare at home, when it’s compared to a restaurant dish of the same name, it’s often not the same thing at all. So even trying to consciously select what looks like the healthiest choice on the menu might not do you much good.

Restaurants tend to use more oils and fats, more sugar, and more salt in their food preparations. The reason is simple: if the food is yummy, you’ll come back! But that tends to add up to a lot of extra calories you weren’t counting on.

And speaking of extras, how about all those extra nibbles: the plates of appetizers, the baskets of warm bread with pots of cool butter, the bonus beverage specials? Most families simply don’t have all those edible accouterments with regular home meals.

But at a restaurant, your drinks are brought before you even order. You often get bread or rolls to eat during your wait, and appetizers and desserts are helpfully suggested by your server.

Yet those extras can have even more calories than your meals! An order of buffalo wings with blue cheese dressing? That’s a tidy 1,010 calories before dinner. For a fried onion blossom with dip, figure around 2,000. Even a basket of garlic bread is about 800 calories. How many people are sharing those calories at your table?

Then you get to the main attraction, and the major problem with dining out–portion size! Restaurant meals are often three to four times larger than a normal serving size.

Even plates, glassware and utensils have grown. Very often, the dinner plate you get in a restaurant would qualify as a platter in any home kitchen, but then, they have to be bigger to accommodate those super servings!

It wouldn’t be such an issue if we were better at walking away. An old adage about fitness says that the most important exercise to do is “pushbacks,” as in, when you’ve had enough, push back and get up from the table.

But research shows that Americans in general tend to be “completers,” and many of us were raised to feel a sense of guilt if we left food on our plates. Add that programming to a giant dish of pasta, and suddenly, you’re stuffed!

The truth is, no matter how we’re raised, or whether we’re slim or fat, if more is put in front of us we’ll eat more, period. And usually, we’re not even particularly aware of it. This has been proven out by study after study, in both the United States and abroad.

And that’s not all. The research also shows that as we become accustomed to those mega-sized meals we’re presented in restaurants, we tend to prepare bigger portions at home, as well. We may not use all the extra oil, salt and sugar that restaurants do, but we’re certainly having more of our main ingredients, and we’re eating big and hearty.

The other thing that restaurants have over the home meal is variety. Even the most accommodating home cook typically won’t make a different special meal for each member of the family. Again, the nutritional research shows that the more different things you can have, the more you’ll eat overall.

United States Department of Agriculture studies showed that when offered three varieties of a given food item–say, sandwiches or cookies–people would eat more than if they were offered three items of the same variety. That’s part of why those all-you-can-eat buffets are such a caloric catastrophe. Who ever has just a little?

Given the demands of today’s busy lifestyles, dining out nowadays is not only a pleasure, but a time-saving survival tool. Restaurants may eventually be required to provide nutritional facts for their meals, but even without hard numbers, awareness of the pitfalls can go a long way toward helping us control those calorie counts.

We just need to think about what we’re up against when someone else is serving, so that when we’re eating out, we’re not taking so much in.