A little knowledge can go a long way to improving your workout.

One of the more striking examples of this is to learn how your body moves and what muscles have to do with it. Because you know that ”making muscles” takes lifting weights, you go to the gym and you lift weights. You mimic what you see others doing, you lift what you can – perhaps in any manner that you can lift it.

As your interest builds, you do some research into what you’re actually doing at the gym.

Through that learning, you begin to understand that the PURPOSE of a skeletal muscle is to move your bones, you learn WHERE certain muscles originate on one bone then attach on another, and you see the PHYSICS behind how a muscles flexes or extends a joint.

At one point a light comes on and you realize “ARGGH!… parts of my routine have been totally futile!!”

Then you adjust your movement. Correct your alignment. Start working opposing muscles. You learn to move the weights against gravity, instead of with gravity.

Voila!  Better results… Bigger muscles. Increased strength. Pain-free joints. Better posture.

Now your’re working smarter, not longer at the gym to achieve your goals

My advice is to take some time to learn more.  This website (along with its embedded links) is a great resource for that. Browse through the categories and you’ll find lots of learning.

Testosterone has been getting a lot of press lately, and not all of it is good.

With hormone replacement therapy (HRT) increasingly prescribed to all types of men—young, old, gay, straight—who just want to maintain their strong muscles and lean midsections, a variety of medical groups have started waving red flags about the many potential pitfalls of testosterone supplementation, from permanent cessation of the body’s ability to produce testosterone on its own, to drops in the “good” cholesterol that promotes heart health.

Increasingly, leaders in the medical community have begun pushing to establish guidelines to use HRT only when it’s medically needed, not as a pharmaceutical fountain of youth.

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During an average week, I spend at least 30 hours in a gym.

Of course, most of those hours are spent working to assist clients achieve their personal fitness goals. The other hours are those that I spend staying true to my own.

On any given day I see a number of regular gym goers, as well as a few infrequent visitors. And on occasion, I see a gym patron who really knows what they’re doing.

Whoa!  Did I say “on occasion”??

Yes, I did.

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Consider this statement that I recently read on a colleague’s blog:

“Once you accept how HARD it is to lose fat and /or gain muscle, then it becomes Easy.”

Whaaaat?!!

Read it again. And think it through – do you understand what it means?

Compare it to saving for your next big vacation… once you understand and accept how much discipline it takes to save that money, then it becomes easier to do. When it’s important for you to achieve… it just seems to”gets done”.

So, it’s the same with your fitness goal… once you accept that it’s HARD to achieve it, then your realize what you must do – and it becomes easier.

How?

1. Plan, shop, and prepare in advance how you’re going to eat for the week… I spend time each Sunday doing exactly that – and I actually look forward to doing it. Menus. Cooking. Storing. A 2 hour investment of time.
2. Do at least three high-intensity workouts per week… prioritized based on your fitness goal – muscle mass and /or fat loss.
3. Keep yourself active on off days and avoid sitting in front of the TV or computer for at least 30 minutes less a day… in our house, it’s “All Screens Off” no later than 9 pm, at which time we usually go for a short “family walk”, or you could gently stretch those muscles you worked out.
4. Develop strategies to avoid bad night-time eating habits… keep some crunchy fruit or vegetables handy to settle cravings. If you’re on a “muscle-up” program, try protein powder mixed into plain yogurt with some nuts. Just lay off those empty carbs… (which I see that our cupboards have filled up with over the winter!)
5. Set strategies to overcome every sabotage behaviour that gets in the way of your success each week… notes, scheduling, whatever.

Now, it’s almost 9pm – time to abide by my own rule.

Doug

As reported in WebMD, a good source of general health and fitness information:

Better sex!

Infomercials promise it. Pop-up ads promise it. Magazines, too. There are love universities for it, and more how-to videos than you can count. And, of course, it all comes at a price.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it were easy to improve your sex life, for free? Actually, you can get more sizzle in sex, and all you have to do is get a little sweaty — with exercise.

All kidding aside, guys, some exercise really can give your sex life a lift. As a bonus, exercise also ramps up your muscle tone, strength, and sexual endurance. So which exercises can help put the vroom back in your sex life?

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How hard should you run when you’re out for your jog, or running on the treadmill?

If you’re running to stay in good shape and to achieve better heart health, a good way to determine your effort level is the ‘Talk Test‘.

Try this:

If while running you can talk and carry on a conversation with marginal difficulty, you are running at a good pace (that means one or two sentences between heavy breaths; no gasping). This probably represents about 60% of your maximum heart-rate.

When you are running so hard that you have great difficulty speaking, maybe slow it down a little bit. This indicates 80 – 90% of your maximum heart-rate. However, if you are doing Interval training, this IS the appropriate effort level for your high intensity interval sprint.

If carrying on a conversation is quite easy, allowing you to gently thumb through the latest issue of Vanity Fair while describing your past weekend’s triumphs in full detail, then you’d better push yourself a little bit more to get anything of value out of your running session.

Although I always recommend that my clients invest in a Heart Rate monitor (< $70) to track cardio output effort, the “Talk Test” does provide a very simple, and surprisingly accurate self-check.

Once you do acquire a HR monitor, it’s then fun to compare your estimated effort level against the actual HR rate… before long you become very self-aware.  And that’s an important skill for sustaining life-long fitness.

Doug

The Truth About Exercise and Weight Loss.

A good article on the importance of “ritual“… quite fitting for this time of the year!

http://tinyurl.com/28bqf9g

Doug at MyTrainerSays dot com