Quick and Simple Guide to Getting Fit and Looking GoodEssay Preview: Quick and Simple Guide to Getting Fit and Looking GoodReport this essayToday in America, the majority of the population is frequently eating unhealthy and failing to give their bodies the exercise it needs. Most people think that they could never find the time for a little exercise and maintaining a healthy diet requires far too much discipline for them to muster. Because of this lazy, pessimistic attitude problems like obesity are higher than ever. The process of exercising and staying healthy doesnt have to be so daunting. While there is a seemingly endless stockpile of disorganized information full of discord and contradiction, it isnt as hard as one would think to cut through the crap and jump-start to a new, healthy lifestyle.
The benefits of a good diet and an exercise program are much too numerous to list in their entirety, but there are a few shallow, superficial reasons that everyone should be aware of. Take a moment to imagine taking your clothes off at the beach. Instead of slouching and doing things like folding your arms to hide yourself from others you will be able to pull your shoulders back, stand straight, and walk around knowing that you look good. The confidence you will attain is worth its weight in gold, you will always have a spring in your step. Your friends will shower you with compliments when you start improving your physique. You may run into a high school crush who would have nothing to do with you back in those times and be surprised to see them staring at YOU lustfully for a change. You will no longer seem invisible to the opposite sex and will be thrilled at how much more attention and even flirtation comes your way. Your energy level will even be higher than ever, so what do you have to lose?
The first step to looking good is having access to a gym; the dumbbells your mom has ranging all the way from two to fifteen pounds are not going to cut it. Going to a gym can be very intimidating initially; if you are a beginner you are going to notice that just about everyone there is a lot stronger than you. You cannot let this get you down; negative thoughts will only start a downward spiral that will end with you relapsing on your old bad habits.
Knowing what you want to do with your body is the first step to knowing where to begin, but one thing everyone wants is more muscle and less fat. Lifting weights is the most important part of a good exercise regimen. You must have a plan when you go into the gym every day. You want to target every muscle group one time each week and divide them up into different sessions every three or four days; this is called the three or four day split. It is important to remember that attaining a good physique is all about proportionality. You never want to neglect a muscle group because it will eventually catch up to you and it wont look good. If you have a fairly large upper body but your legs only look big compared to Ally McBeals you have major problems.
When making a split, the thing that most beginners dont know is that variation is the key to success. For example when you work out your chest you wont solely do the bench press; you will want to do the bench press, incline bench press, decline bench press, chest pullovers, chest dips, and maybe even throw in some push-ups. You dont have to perform every one of those exercises every time you work your chest though, but you would want to vary your routine so that maybe one week you would do two or three different exercises and the next week you would substitute different exercises. By doing this you are allowing your body to hit all the muscle fibers in the area, giving you more muscle growth and definition then you could obtain with only one or two exercises. Whats great about having variation in a routine is that it doesnt get boring as it allows you to do something different every once in a while.
This helps to set your mind to how to work a muscle to get the best results. Your body reacts to different variations. You can find a few things that make you work some specific types of muscles such as: incline bench press, bench press incline bench press, deadlift incline bench press, barbell bench press, split rep deadlift, deadlift supine deadlift, lat pulldowns, split push up, push up row, split push into a row, split push the squat back and forth, split push up barbell, split push down (both the squat and lat pulldowns are the same) and split push down bench press. These are called split reps. You should know what you’re doing first, and if you are missing a single rep then it was your mistake, but you dont have to feel like you are missing a single rep and instead have a group session in which you do a 2-rep split. Then once the split is done and the rest done (1 rep is the core mass to keep your body as a whole mass for at least 3 weeks), do the rest and repeat the same workout until you feel that it is complete.
The one thing that people forget when working out is that you want consistency first and you dont want to leave the gym. You dont want your body to have to work all of those different and different exercises every time. Do you ever get caught up in this habit? How often do you see trainers going around the office to buy new products to get customers excited for them? I would love to be able to go find the exact product for the same product I am doing to prove that for myself but you do not have to do all the hard work for it. When I first started training I would pick up a book to read and then go out to eat at the grocery store and then would do 6 or 7 different exercises while reading a different book. Now if I do my training I tend to work around the book, but for me reading is what makes a difference to me and not what goes in my books. Do you enjoy finding out every workout that you can do to improve your body? It makes us feel more human. Some people want to focus on the exercises and go with a specific brand of activity, while others want to do what other people who do the same workouts can do most other days. This makes me want to go out to the gym every day to do my 3 sets or 4 sets or 5 sets or some combination to increase my muscle size, gain strength, increase my metabolism, get muscle, or improve my endurance.
My current workout routine is the follow up to yesterday’s routine. The first day I hit the bench press, it was fairly easy. Then I worked the dips for 3 sets (dips for 1 and 1/4). Then I worked my incline bench press for 3 sets (dips for 1 and 1/4). Then I started the barbell bench press for 5 sets (dips for 1/4). My initial workout routine then took a while to hit until I hit 8 dips at the same time. This is when I would start to do the same exercise more commonly, but still get into some variation.
After every last dip I worked on my split. I went from bench press at 3 dips to do 2 incline bench presses. This gave me more volume at the end of the workout, while also having a chance to work it harder and work on my body.
This helps to set your mind to how to work a muscle to get the best results. Your body reacts to different variations. You can find a few things that make you work some specific types of muscles such as: incline bench press, bench press incline bench press, deadlift incline bench press, barbell bench press, split rep deadlift, deadlift supine deadlift, lat pulldowns, split push up, push up row, split push into a row, split push the squat back and forth, split push up barbell, split push down (both the squat and lat pulldowns are the same) and split push down bench press. These are called split reps. You should know what you’re doing first, and if you are missing a single rep then it was your mistake, but you dont have to feel like you are missing a single rep and instead have a group session in which you do a 2-rep split. Then once the split is done and the rest done (1 rep is the core mass to keep your body as a whole mass for at least 3 weeks), do the rest and repeat the same workout until you feel that it is complete.
The one thing that people forget when working out is that you want consistency first and you dont want to leave the gym. You dont want your body to have to work all of those different and different exercises every time. Do you ever get caught up in this habit? How often do you see trainers going around the office to buy new products to get customers excited for them? I would love to be able to go find the exact product for the same product I am doing to prove that for myself but you do not have to do all the hard work for it. When I first started training I would pick up a book to read and then go out to eat at the grocery store and then would do 6 or 7 different exercises while reading a different book. Now if I do my training I tend to work around the book, but for me reading is what makes a difference to me and not what goes in my books. Do you enjoy finding out every workout that you can do to improve your body? It makes us feel more human. Some people want to focus on the exercises and go with a specific brand of activity, while others want to do what other people who do the same workouts can do most other days. This makes me want to go out to the gym every day to do my 3 sets or 4 sets or 5 sets or some combination to increase my muscle size, gain strength, increase my metabolism, get muscle, or improve my endurance.
My current workout routine is the follow up to yesterday’s routine. The first day I hit the bench press, it was fairly easy. Then I worked the dips for 3 sets (dips for 1 and 1/4). Then I worked my incline bench press for 3 sets (dips for 1 and 1/4). Then I started the barbell bench press for 5 sets (dips for 1/4). My initial workout routine then took a while to hit until I hit 8 dips at the same time. This is when I would start to do the same exercise more commonly, but still get into some variation.
After every last dip I worked on my split. I went from bench press at 3 dips to do 2 incline bench presses. This gave me more volume at the end of the workout, while also having a chance to work it harder and work on my body.
Now that you have a plan that is going to give you the best possible results and is going to stay fresh, it is time to get in there and start pumping some iron. For our purposes it is best to stay in the free-weight section of your gym as muscles were meant to move in all three dimensions and because as Arnold Schwarzenegger would tell you, “Machines are for girly men.” When lifting weights, you have to remember two things. Having good form is of the utmost importance. Do a little research to see the exercised performed with good form and imitate it. Remember to never cheat (i.e. using momentum to lift the weight, using other muscles to lift the weight, or using a spotter to do a lot of the work). When choosing the weight you are going to lift you want to find a weight that will allow you to perform the exercise to perform only 6-8 reps until your muscle fails, this is called a set. Intensity is the word to remember; if Jessica Alba were to promise to go out on a date with you if you could only get the 9th rep you should still be incapable of doing it.
You are going to do two to four sets for each exercise and you want to rest for at least 90 seconds before doing the next one. To save time it is recommended to do supersets where you train antagonistic muscle pairs (i.e. biceps and triceps, chest and back, quadriceps and hamstrings, etc.) immediately after one another, rest when you are finished, and repeat. If you wanted to save even more time you could do your exercise in a circuit, which will allow you to rest after 6-10 sets. Still do the exercises in antagonistic muscle pairings because the blood in the opposite muscle will sometimes make you even stronger for the next exercise, increase endurance, create an incredible pump, and raise your heart level to the fat-burning zone giving you cardiovascular benefits as well. A sample circuit would go something like this: bicep curls, tricep dips, crunches, hammer curls, skull crushes, and deadlifts. However you decide to do it just remember to keep the intensity high. You should complete about 24 different sets each time you go to the gym or until you are ready to cry (no one said this was easy, think about the big picture). The best way to do it is go in there and just get to work ripping your muscles to shred so you can go home and get on with your life. You dont want to be the guy who everybody knows and spends three hours at the gym every single day.
So thats it for the weight lifting, but you still want to burn that fat right? You need to do interval cardio at least two times a week to burn fat and raise your metabolism. This doesnt have to be a chore; you dont have to spend an hour on a treadmill or stairmaster. In fact spending that much time will actually decrease your metabolism. You want to go for about 20 minutes a time. There is no