Rest

Rest, the Needed but Overused Section of Working Out

            Rest is a very valuable and necessary part of weightlifting, if you do too much of it though you are losing precious time you could use with lifting more and you are giving your muscles a chance to relax.  Although, if you don’t relax enough you can damage your muscles and risk overtraining.  Rest is something not a lot of people understand other than they’re tired and sore.  There is also the whole day rest that takes place in between workout days.  You don’t want too much or too little rest or both outcomes are horrible. 

            I understand that rest is the number one thing we all look forward to while we’re lifting because it feels so good.  But NO STOP IT!  Rest is valuable but it shouldn’t be the one thing you love the most about weightlifting because if it is then that’s what you are going to do for most of the time in the gym.  Rest is meant to give your muscles a chance to recuperate, THAT’S ALL.  Rest is not so you can get your breath back and feel the same as if you never worked out at all.  The main point is that your muscles work and work while you are exercising and rest is just for you to get a little energy back but if you rest too long then your muscles cool off and the next set or lift you do your muscles are acting as if you never even did the first lift.  It might be a bit confusing, but it makes sense if you think about it.  To get the best results and work out of your time in the gym I would recommend only resting for about thirty seconds to a minute between sets and lifts so that you get some energy back but you are not completely rested. 

            ON THE OTHER HAND, people also rest too much in the span of days.  Many people feel like sense they lifted yesterday that they don’t have to lift again for another three days or so.  This is even worse than resting too much between sets because your muscles are at constant rest and are losing mass from it.  Whatever the reason may be whether you worked out hard yesterday or your sore from a previous workout you still need to be lifting four to five days a week, SIX days a week at best.  Even if you are sore from working out them the next day you should work a different muscle group giving the previous muscle group some rest. 

            THEN there’s the guys who don’t rest enough.  They workout everyday all day and hardly ever rest.  These are the guys who show off that they work out all the time but wonder why they don’t see very good results.  The main reason is most likely from over training.  Overtraining is that special little jerk in the gym that teaches the try-hards the try not so hard.  The reasoning for this is that your muscles tend to rest a lot and get bigger and stronger but they need that little rest so that the newly broken down proteins can rebuild, if you don’t let them rest then you are just breaking them down more and more to the point that you are actually weaker than when you started.  Kind of a kick in the face huh?

            So you learned that you need to rest, but not too much and that overtraining is a serious issue but kind of hilarious if you think about it.  Remember, we’re all in this together, keep your stick on the ice.          

Too Much Running, Not Enough Running

Too Much Running, Not Enough Running

            Just about everyone that works out, tries to be healthy, tries to lose fat, or is in a sport knows about the goodness of running.  It can be one of the healthiest things for the body.  Most people do it to slim down or lose weight.  Although some people get a bit too reliant and extreme on their running habits.  The occasional five mile run or race with friends is a great and fun way to stay healthy but too much can be treacherous to someone trying to gain muscle. 

            Many people get the mistake that running a lot improves your leg muscles, thing can be true only under certain circumstances.  Yes, it strengthens your legs, but only if you are do quick bursts of sprinting and occasional resting in between will it.  For most people, they do long miles of jogging and cardio on the pavement, this actually diminishes your leg muscles because of the slow and burning from all that cardio.  Instead of exhausting your muscles and making them get stronger from the running, you are instead making them used to the repetition of a jog and slowly burning muscle mass.

            If you think of it like a car with a full tank of gas and your muscles are the engine.  In order for your legs to gain mass, the engine needs to get as hot as possible without burning all it’s gas at once.  The way you would do this is to rev the engine at a high acceleration for short amounts of time and then shutting it off as to not waste fuel and then repeating.  Your engine is getting very hot and you aren’t wasting any unnecessary gas.  A jog is more like you turn on the engine and run it on a medium acceleration for a long period of time.  By the end your car is out of gas and your engine never really got very hot.  Running is like that.

            I’m not saying that you shouldn’t jog or run in general all I am saying is that if you are trying to maintain muscles mass and gain strength from your legs you really should stop having your fun runs with your friends every week and maybe change it to a “see who can run to Wal-Mart the fastest” run instead.  Remember, we’re all in this together, keep your stick on the ice.

Working Out on Short Time

Working Out on Short Time

             Most people don’t work out because they feel that for them to actually get anything out of it they need to work out for hours at the gym.  They think that they need to sweat for hours to see results and to actually accomplish anything.  They are sooooo wrong on that one though.  You don’t need to be working for a long periods of time to see results and to get those great gains. All you really need is at least twenty minutes, some space to do it, and motivation. 

            Everyone knows about the basic exercises like pushups pull-ups and sit-ups and there is a good reason why these are so known.  Because they work.  Each of the main bodyweight workouts that most people are familiar with work many muscle groups in the body all at once.  So doing these exercises when you don’t have a lot of time can be great choices to make. 

            A rising new fad in the world of exercise is the tabata.  A tabata is when you take three or more common repetitive exercises, like pushups or sit-ups, and doing as many as you can for twenty seconds.  Then you rest for ten seconds and do the exercises again for twenty seconds.  The great thing is that you are getting a lot of rest, motivation, muscles work, and cardio, all at the same time. 

            For example let’s say that you wanted to do a tabata of sit-ups, pull-ups and pushups.  You would start by doing twenty seconds of sit-ups as many as you can for twenty seconds.  Then you rest for ten seconds.  After that you do as many pull-ups as you can for twenty seconds.  Then after resting again for ten seconds, you do as many pushups as you can for twenty seconds.  All of this is for one set and then you repeat this for as much time as you have.

            This is just one of the many ways that you can work out if you have limited amount of time.  It is a pretty fun and rejuvenating way to workout.  Remember, we’re all in this together, keep your stick on the ice.      

Helpful Advice from Others

Helpful Advice from Others

            I look up a lot of advice and information on weightlifting when I was beginning to work out and I have found a lot of websites and youtube pages that are very helpful.  I will talk about the page and what they are good at and et cetera. 

            Six Pack Shortcuts is a youtube page by a fitness trainer, Mike Chang, who gives tons of advice on strengthening the core and losing fat.  It is a good site for fat loss and beginner workouts.  He gives very helpful advice, although he does tend to advertise his products a lot so that gets kind of annoying.

            AthleanX is another youtube page that is centered more around workouts to give athletic motions and athletic attributes.  Some of his workouts are very intense and helpful although it is not a website I would give to a beginner because he talks a lot about terms and muscles groups that may be confusing to beginners.

            BuffDudes is a very humorous youtube page that focuses a lot on bodybuilding and muscle mass.  They give excellent workout routines and advice and are easy to understand even for beginners.  They also focus a lot on nutrition and teen bodybuilding.

            StrengthCamp is a youtube page that more so discusses weightlifting issues, or lifts, or problems faced in the gym.  It also gives advice on the right and wrong way to deal with or do certain things in the gym.  I would only recommend this page to people who really know their weightlifting because it could be very confusing on what they’re talking about because the topics discussed are very advanced.

            These are a few of the pages I watched all the time when I first started to weight lift and I hope that they help you too.  Remember, we’re all in this together, keep your stick on the ice.

Clean Weight Room is a Happy Weight Room

Clean Weight Room is a Happy Weight Room

            All the time I have to clean up my weight room, which I have in my basement, and I always get frustrated because I have tons of equipment but not a lot of room to store it.  This is a constant problem with home gyms, but you have to learn to be creative with storing your weights and equipment.  This is a post on some creative way to store your stuff with just a little bit of space to keep it all.

            I for one, have a lot of different weight bars, I have lat bars, bench press bars, EZ curl bars, face pull bars, and I even have a few bars for your forearms and one for your shoulders.  So what I decided to do was I took a big board of plywood, screwed shelving track on it, screwed it to the wall of my weight room and added shelf brackets to hang all of my bars on, so that they are on the wall and not on the floor.  It is very cheap and actually looks cool in your weight room.  It is a nice idea because you can customize it to whatever you want and put it in whatever desired location you want in your gym. 

            Another thing that you can do is to buy some weight racks that are sold just about everywhere.  They keep all your weights nice and organized and one rack can hold hundreds of pounds on it of weight.  Also if you home gym is like mine and used to be a bedroom, you can even use the closet and shelves in there to hold equipment.

            These are just a few suggestions to try to keep your weight room looking nice and clean all the time.  Of course, the options are different depending on your circumstances.  Remember, we’re all in this together, keep your stick on the ice.

The Right Muscles for the Right Sports

The Right Muscles for the Right Sports

            Lots of people especially school kids workout to try to get better at the sport they participate in.  Just about any sport that you play, you can get better at it with more strength.  Although most people think that for whatever sport they play they have to exercise every muscle in their body to get better at it.  This isn’t a bad idea although if you are just trying get stronger at your sport you need to know the main muscles groups that you need to be better at that sport.  This is a post on the most common sports and what muscle groups are essential to get better in these sports.

            Basketball- Basketball is a bit more of the obvious sports to figure out the muscle groups to work to get better at.  One of the most essential muscles groups to work for basketball players are quads and calves just from all the running and jumping thin the sport.  If you play basketball the exercises you should focus on the most are squats, lunges, barbell walks, and weighted calf raises.  This gives you all the power you need to get up and down the court before everyone else and get a jump shot past the other player’s waist.  One of the muscles groups basketball players seem to forget are the triceps, because of the follow through on the shot you are pushing up with your triceps to get the ball soaring to the bucket.  For this you need to work on tricep extensions, tricep rope pulls, and dips.

            Football- Football is a very physical sport and it is very important to work out and work out hard.  There are many position in football but they all need about the same exercises.  Because of the constant pushing and pulling in football you should exercise your back muscles mainly your lats, to help you push past the offensive lineman, curl up with the ball and plow past linebackers chasing you down, or pushing through to get the tackle to stop short the third down.  Also you need legs to get you down the field as a running back, a quarterback, or a defensive tackle chasing down the ball before a score.  For this you need hamstrings, and quads.  You need squats, lunges, leg levers, leg presses, and reverse leg levers.  The last very important thing in football is getting the ball through the air and into the receiver’s hands.  For a great, long, spiraling pass you need triceps and chest.  You should work butterflys, bench press, tricep extensions, dips, dumbbell press, and incline bench press.

            Wrestling- Wrestling is probably the only sport that you need to work out every part of your body get good at it.  You need lats for pushing and pulling your opponent, you need triceps for moving your opponent to your location and pushing their face to the matt, you need legs to push and pull you opponent to the point where he doesn’t know what’s going on, you need neck so you don’t get caught in a half nelson, you need chest so you can push your opponent off of you and off of a pin, you need forearms to get you that rock hard grip that you opponent finds impossible to get out of, you need your core so that you don’t lose your balance and accidently get put on the matt.  For this sport you need to constantly be in the gym working out everything all the time.   

            Track and Field- Track and Field is a pretty self-explanatory sport as far as what to work on to get an advantage in the sport.  If you are a runner, work your quads, but mostly your hamstrings by doing really deep squats, deep lunges, and jump squats, and also calf raises with a barbell.  If you are doing the shot ball or discus, then work your biceps and triceps with all types of curls, dips, and extensions.  It’s pretty easy to figure out what to do for this sport.

            No matter what sport you may participate in, strength can up your game tremendously, but you need to know what to work on.  Remember, we’re all in this together, keep your stick on the ice.