Hasta La Gadget!

Photo credit: Foodess

There are a few different ways to get your hands on a glass of iced coffee, the official caffeinated beverage of summer. You can go out and buy one, but everyone knows it’s priced way too high. Another option is to have the foresight to make a batch of cold brew at home, but that means thinking about what you’re going to drink tomorrow, today which is very unlikely. There’s the quickie method of brewing hot coffee on cold iced cubes. It works, but if not done correctly it’s basically just watered down, lukewarm coffee. So, in other words, gross.

Or, there’s this other option. A really good one. One that lets you make a gallon (or less) of good iced coffee in just 15 minutes. How is this possible you ask? It’s all about the ice bath.

Photo credit: Foodess

Food blogger Foodess brought this simple concept to our attention and we are ever so grateful. If you can make a good batch of coffee, you can make great iced coffee — by chilling the freshly-brewed coffee into a simple ice bath. You’ll need lots of ice cubes, btw. (And coffee ice cubes for the the finished iced coffee.)

Head on over to Foodess for exact instructions — and drink iced coffee whenever you want it.

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The Question: How do I know when to stop pushing through the pain during my workout?

The Answer: We’ve all heard the infamous training phrase, “No pain, no gain,” but there is a limit to how many times we can mutter “ouch” during a sweat session, and how high on the pain scale we can climb, before suffering real consequences. To better understand where to draw the line, The Huffington Post spoke with Dr. Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine physician at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, about the ways in which he typically advises his patients.

“My general take is that if it doesn’t hurt a little bit, you’re not getting [more fit],” Metzl told The Huffington Post. “Pain and feeling uncomfortable is definitely a part of the exercise prescription for anybody who wants to help take their fitness to the next level, so that’s important to think about. On the other hand, there is such a thing as unhealthy pain and being in an uncomfortable place.”

So how do we know when too much is too much? It turns out there’s a relatively easy way to distinguish between a few sore muscles and an actual injury that could grow more serious without proper care and attention.

“Pain that changes the way you move, pain that is in your bones and soft tissue is unhealthy pain,” said Metzl. ” So if a shin splint is changing the way you run or a shoulder problem is changing the way you swim, then you have to get that checked out, because that could be making a problem worse and creating another problem. That’s the red flag I use.”

Not all exercise pains lie within the muscular and skeletal systems, though. For example, if you’re working to improve your cardiovascular fitness, there is a limit to how labored you want your breathing to be, or how high your heart right should go during the peak of a workout.

“Certainly, huffing and puffing means you’re working harder,” said Metzl. “But if that crosses over into feeling dizzy or fainting or those kinds of symptoms, then you’ve got to get that checked out as well.”

Some may be familiar with the Borg scale, which measures levels of personal perceived exertion during exercise using a scale of one through 20. Many sports medicine physicians ask patients to fill out the scale as a part of their intake paperwork, and while it proves useful as a diagnostic tool, it does have its limitations. A 2008 study comparing hypertension patients’ increased blood pressure levels to their subjective feelings of intensity during exercise using the Borg scale found that the patients’ own assessment of pain was not enough to provide a true measure of the effects of exercise.

Another limitation is the fact that people’s pain thresholds vary dramatically, meaning the same numbers can mean entirely different things to different athletes. A study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health explored the potential roles both genetics and environmental factors play in determining a person’s pain tolerance, but the extent of their effects requires further research.

When it comes to pushing through the pain, Metzl finds that women are more likely than men to move beyond the point of injury and worsen their condition before seeking medical attention.

“I think women are tougher than men, I do,” he said. “In general, if a guy gets a bad pain they’re like, ‘Alright, this is terrible, I’m going to stop.’ But women are just tougher and they will push themselves, which is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is it makes them great athletes, but the curse is they sometimes make injuries that are moderate much worse, because they push through pain and don’t listen to their bodies’ cues.”

The most common exercise injuries tend to be the result of overuse and overtraining. When left unacknowledged, tendonitis can turn into tendinosis, and a stress injury can become a stress fracture. It’s critical to pay attention to your body’s cues and address these types of pain in their early stages. Notice if your form is changing to compensate for a pain, and ask yourself if the pain is recurring and grows worse each time you perform that type of exercise. When it comes to knowing whether to push through the pain or get it checked out, your intuition can be mighty powerful — so long as you listen to it.

Have a question for Healthy Living? Get in touch here and we’ll do our best to ask the experts and get back to you.

“Ask Healthy Living” is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice. Please consult a qualified health care professional for personalized medical advice.

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There’s no need to go to drastic and deadly lengths to have beautifully sun-kissed skin when you’re armed with the best bronzers.

Though it’s true that 20 minutes of daily sun exposure without sunscreen has actual health benefits, recklessly laying out or lounging in tanning beds can have horrific consequences. There’s no better way to go about your desire for tanned skin than by protecting yourself with SPF when in the sun for extended periods of time, and by applying bronzer for a healthy glow.

When applying the powder, celebrity makeup artist and cosmetics creator Mally Roncal recommends starting behind the ear and working down along the jawline. Then, lightly sweep across the forehead (along the hairline), bridge of the nose, cheeks and tip of the chin.

To avoid ending up with a “muddy” or “dirty” complexion, make sure you also apply a great pink blush on the apples of the cheeks and a sweep of highlighter on the tops of the cheekbones.

Now go get your bronzing on responsibly!

Top Row: Smashbox Bronze Lights Face Glow, Laura Mercier Bronzed Pressed Powder, Too Faced Snow Bunny Luminous Bronzer, Maybelline Fit Me Bronzer

Middle Row: NARS Tahiti Bronzing Powder, Elizabeth Arden Pure Finish Mineral Bronzing Powder, Benefit Hoola Bronzer, Jane Cosmetics Multi-Colored Bronzing Powder

Bottom Row: Bobbi Brown Face & Body Bronzing Duo, Lancome Belle De Teint, Rimmel Natural Bronzer Sun Shine, Iman Sheer Finish Bronzing Powder

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As an entrepreneur, I run into people all the time that have great app ideas. They’re in the early concept stage, and a budding future founder pitches me a great way to solve a problem. But often, he or she has a huge problem: they don’t know how to code, and they don’t know any developers. This hurdle sends them into a huge spiral – I watch a good idea ultimately fail because it gets built the wrong way. They use the wrong developers who don’t know how to code, take too long, or don’t understand the entrepreneur’s vision. It’s a frustrating process, and if you don’t have a team you trust and know, there will be a change, and all your hard earned investment goes down the drain, along with your idea.

So what’s the key to finding the right developers to build your amazing app idea? There are several criteria I’ve found that are essential in picking the right development house to select the best team for your project. My personal favorite has been STRV, who has met all the criteria in delivering a reliable product.

1. Try Building a Wireframe first, or Build with the team: Most first time app entrepreneurs come to me because they receive 5-10 quotes from different developers ranging from $5,000 to $100,000. This is obviously confusing. I try to liken it to building a house. How does the team know how to price it unless you give them some blueprints? They’re not sure if they’re building a one bedroom bungalow or a huge mansion, and depending on how you described it, they’re interpreting it differently in their head than you actually may be thinking. Building the blue prints using Omnigraffle, or Justinmind by yourself or even having the team do it as part of the bid will give you an exact price range with less wiggle room.

2. How are they building? Ask if they are building native or on an engine. What code base are they using? Most “native” apps choose to go either iOS or android first, work out the features for the first few iterations and then build for the other platform once they have A/B tested. Get quotes on both. If they’re using an engine or using HTML5, it’s possible to build for both platforms at the same time. See examples of the work first, as HTML5 is improving in its functionalities, however, it’s not quite there. Find a development house that has built using many of these methodologies and are flexible to the needs of the customer, rather than building based on their own skill set alone.

3. How long will it take? Everything is based on deadlines, and in my personal experience, always take whatever time they tell you, and multiple by two. Mostly because you’ll make changes through the process, debug, etc. and it just takes longer than expected. Always. However, you can usually check around and find developers that are faster than other developers. Ask these questions when you are searching for excellence because they are the right questions and are probing enough to find your better developers. Ask your potential development house who they’ve worked with and if they always hit their deadlines, which is incredibly rare. If you’re going to have to hit your monthly goals, so must they!

4. Who’s working on it? Some teams like to outsource to another country and keep a project manager domestically for customer service reasons. Others like to keep everything in house for more control. Typically you’ll get more cost effective pricing if they outsource, depending on where the outsourcing takes place. The downside is sometimes outside your country, the code isn’t noted properly, and if you hand it off to another team, they won’t want to use it.

5. Always look at their portfolio. Look at their portfolio projects and ask specifically what they worked on and when they handed the project over to the internal team. It’s possible they worked on a great project…but their code was barely used. Don’t be afraid to reach out to the client and ask how the project went, and if they’d recommend it.

6. Choose a team with plenty of experience. You want an advanced team that’s worked on many successful projects with similar features and UI to your own. Whether you’re familiar with them or not, is not relevant, because the development team wasn’t responsible for the marketing. Focus on apps that are similar to yours, with features that work like yours will work. Find a development house that has been in business creating apps for years (not months), and has many qualified developers, so they’ve seen and made it all. I always make sure I’m guaranteed to have an engineer who knows how to build what I’m looking for.

7. Evaluate the Design Team: A lot of development houses offer a full design team who will create the assets and branding for your app. These designers will insure your vision translates in terms of user interface, user experience, and of course, colors and branding. When you’ve narrowed it to the top 2 or 3 designs, see if they’ll mock up a few screens of what you describe to see if the team correctly understands your vision for your app.

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Creative thinking is best achieved by collaboration, and the configuration of an office space can severely hinder successful working and outcomes.

U/S Sports Advisors, a national sports entertainment and marketing agency has recognised this, and has created a different corporate environment for its employees.

With half of its staff female, including a 4-3 majority of senior staff, I spoke to their Founder and President, Ken Ungar on how he has achieved creating a business built on collaboration, unity and trust.

How is U/SSA reinventing the open door policy?
Throughout my career, I noticed that traditional offices became “silos.” People used closed doors as an excuse to not communicate and collaborate. When I started U/S Sports Advisors nine years ago, I wanted to do it in a better—and smarter way. In essence, an open door policy isn’t needed, simply because we have no doors, except for several conference rooms.

Our individual workspaces have no walls, and no one–including me, as the President–has an office. This type of environment leads to a feeling of oneness and enables our team to work smarter through collaboration. You can look around the corner to ask someone a question or to ask for help. We hear conversations that keeps up plugged into what’s going on with our clients and our company. This environment is critical to the fulfillment that an employee has in his or her work and the product that we create.

How are women playing a leading role at your agency?
Presently, our overall staff is just about 50/50, and our senior management is a female majority (4-3). Our Vice Presidents of Marketing, Planning & Strategy, Operations and Administration are all women, and key decision makers in the company. When I’m sitting in a senior staff meeting, I don’t see gender as much as I see savvy and smarts. As our company continues to grow, our leading women will be at the forefront of building one of the nation’s top sports and entertainment marketing agencies.

What highlights and challenges have U/SSA embraced over the past several months?
Perhaps one of the biggest highlights has been the hiring of several new senior staff positions, including a VP of Operations and VP of Consulting. This has allowed us additional creative and professional internal resources to cultivate and grow a more diverse client base. We’re experiencing a significant rate of growth and expect to exceed 40 employees and one additional satellite office by 2017. As that process continues, we’ve gone from a very small, organic company to one that’s becoming larger almost daily. With that comes new personalities, and you have to work hard on preserving the corporate culture to ensure that new personalities will mesh the larger team. One of our challenges is we’re outgrowing our Indianapolis headquarters, and are in the process of determining our expansion plans.

What tips can you offer to other organizations that are seeking to create a work environment geared towards collaboration?
Knock down the walls and do away with individual offices. By having your people together, you foster dynamic interaction throughout the workday. Creative ideas start to flow though the constant interaction with one another. There’s no one person that has a franchise on ideas at U/S Sports Advisors, and often, the best and brightest ideas come from a collaborative effort. While our company culture may not be for everyone, it works for us. Ultimately, that means we play smarter for all our clients.

What are U/SSA goals in the next 12 months?
Our goals continue to be focused on our growth. That means having top talent available in our employee pipeline. With the additional senior level hires we’ve made, our client base will become far more diverse, as we position ourselves as one of the leading sports and entertainment marketing agencies in America.

How have you introduced collaborative working practices for your business? Share your thoughts with me in the comments or on Twitter.

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