Weight training and exercise FAQ.

Atomicide

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It seems an increasing number of people on here are starting to realise that looking at the internet all day is having a negative impact on their weight, health and whatever else. Since theres an increasing number of threads asking for advice, im going to start compiling a lot of information and answers that should hopefully provide a decent amount of reading material for people to sort themsevles out with.

What I will say before I begin is that i'm not you, your body has a different genetic make up from mine, it may be more or less resilient than mine. The information contained in here is designed to be broad, and cater to just about everyone, its the basic rules you can follow and still get decent benefits, for excellent benefits you need to get specific, and unfortunately I don't think anyone on here could really get down to the specifics, because we would need to know you well outside of the internet.

The first thing you need to get to know are some technical terms, knowing what they mean, and what the equate to makes everything easier to understand, and you will soon realise how some people manage to spout a pile of crap and have people agree, when they are actually wrong.

List of Definitions/Explanations for dieting:

Stone - 14 lbs (pounds) *note: useful for mathematics later on.
Calorie - An actual calorie is equal to 4.1840j of energy
KiloCalories (Kcal) - 4184j of energy (these are what people refer to when they say Calorie)
Joules (j) - The standard defintion for measuring energy of any kind
Cardiovascular - Exercise designed to increase heartrate and bloodflow.
Muscle Fibre - These make up your muscle, try to think of them as the fibres in a pillow.
Red Fast Twitch - fibres that are linked to speed and endurance
Red Slow Twitch - extreme endurance, think paula radcliffe
White fast twitch - powerlifting and weightlifting
HIIT - High Intensity Interval Training (more later)
ATP (adenosine triphosphate) - The immediate energy stores located in muscles, ready for instant release. (4 seconds of work)
Creatine Phosphate - Takes ADP (the product from burning ATP) and combines it with energy from the body to create additional ATP (further 25-30 seconds of work on top of the previous 4)
BCAA - Branch Chain Amino Acids: The protiens that make up about 60% of muscle fibres. These are used to prodcue energy and are lost during exercise, the idea behind these in supplements is they instantly replace what is lost, and allow the body to use its own BCAA's for muscle growth.

Some more will be explain later on in more detail. For now lets move on to the bulk of the information.

Diet
Everyone seems to think that by eating salad and doing 1 billion situps a day your going to lose all your fat by the end of the week, and have a 6 pack. This is entirely false. What people need to know is your body needs a certain amount of energy (calories) to sustain itself. Depending on your weight, build and Metabolic rate, you will need a certain calorie intake to maintain your current weight. The one's printed as "Recomended daily allowance" etc are guidlines for an average healthy person, if everyone ate like that, then we would all eventually end up around the same weight, but the issue is, not everyone can hit that target so easily.

Each person has set needs they need to reach in order to maintain a functioning body, fat people have a higher rate, and slimmer people have a lower rate.

Application of diet information
Now onto applying some information. The easiest thing to do first of all is to find out if your gaining/losing/mainting your current weight. The best way to get an accruate reading is to weigh yourself naked each morning when you wake up. Write down each day and check after two weeks to see if there is any kind of trend, there will always be fluctuation, but as long as you havent put on/lost significant weight in that time 3lbs or more you should be ok.

The best way to check your target is from the old mathematics of averages. take the highest weight and Lowest weight, and find the middle of the them. eg. 12st 0lbs and 12st 6lbs = 12st 3lbs (Median). Then add together all your weight recordings for the week, and divide to find the average (best to work in pounds only to keep it simple), this gives you the Mean

Now for the end calculations:
If you Mean > Mode that indictes possible weight gain, the higher up your number is, the more likely this is true

If Mean < Mode this indicates possible weight loss. The lower it is, the more likely this is truie

If Mean = Mode then it means your most likely stable in your weight.

At the same time as doing this, try and keep a rough trak of how many calories your eating. Everything should have some kind of guide on it and you can work out a fairly accurate score of this.

Example
Ill use myself as an example now, I have a calorie intake of around 2750 per day, Im not gaining weight currently, but I am slightly overweight at 12st So what you do is the following:

2750kcal = 12st (non gaining)
2850kcal = 12st (gaining) [+100kcal]
2650kcal = 12st (losing) [- 100kcal]

dietary actions
Always work in sets of 100-200 to gauge your bodies reaction to the drop. Work in a time period of around 1 week, and see what happens. When your trying to lose weight, you want your weight to stay the same or go down. If it starts to drop a little, then STAY at that. If it remains the same, shave another 100 calories off. If you begin to gain weight, then increase yourself back to what you were at before, seriously.

Bodily reactions to diets are an important indicator for a few things. First of all, it can give you a quick reading of your body type, which will be either Endomorph, Ectomorph, or Mesomorph.

Ectomorphs have difficulty gaining weight of any kind, these are the people that increase their calorie intake and see almost no change at all. They also have difficulty gaining muscle because of this.

Endomorphs are the opposite, they gain weight easily, but muscle increases slower than fat does. These people will gain fat very quickly if they increase their diet to more than they need.

Mesomorphs are the easy mode of deiting and training. They gain muscle fast, and fat slowly. This isnt a free ticket to gorge and lift weights however.

These three types are the extreme of each possible scenario, and most people will slot inbetween two of these groups in some way. What you have to remember here is "You cant bull**** yourself" this is your genetics, you cant pretend to be a Mesomorph, because if you do, you will **** yourself over. Ectomorphs can reduce exercise and eat more and eventually slow their metabolic rate (this will only increase fat gain) Endomorphs can use exercise to increase their metabolic rate which will lower fat gain. These changes will only be minimal, they wont be able to alter your body type significantly.

what happens when I diet?
The first thing you should take note of here is dieting doesnt mean weight loss, and certainly doesnt mean weight loss. People who crash diet effective starve their body of energy. Our bodies are programmed to recongise a halt to food as a sign there isnt actually any food available. Once this happens it will start to burn your fat stores, however when you eat again, its number one priority is to replenish those fat stores above all else, for the simple reason it doesnt know when its next meal will be available. The end result is the body stores extra fat because its in emergency mode.

What you need to know about fat is it is an incredibly potent source of energy, its easily stored, and this is why it's stored, its the perfect thing to have around when a decent meal isnt available. Your body prizes fat above all other forms of energy, and it doesn't like to use it as a replacement for energy defecits from elsewhere.

So if you decide to diet, you need to do it carefully, by dropping calorie consumption like I outlined up above, you can guage the reaction and see if your body is concerned or not. 100 calories of fat a day is easily considered expendable by the body, 1000 calories isnt. You need to train your body up t each level, and by doing so properly you can increase it's efficiency as well.

Also, by dropping calorie intake gently you can increase fat loss with some mild cardiovascular exercise, this can at times hide the loss to your body from the diet as it can be written off as exercise related. Don't ever crash diet and exercise thats a sure fire way to screw your body up, and it'll take much longer to fix that and get back to where you started than to slowly lose the weight.

in closing
I'll end this with some calorie information that people should know, and im not going to spout crap like people on the TV do, im going to give decent qoutes with some sources that are relevent to people wh play games and ****.

First off, the comparison between Regular soft drinks, and low sugar kind. Ive got infront mf me right now, Fanta ice lemon, and Fanta Orange Zero.

Ice Lemon = 50 calories per can
Orange Zero (low sugar) 3 calories per can
Big Mac (Mcdonalds) = 570 calories = 5 cans of coke or so.
McD's chips (fries) *small* = 210 calories

Add that up with a drink and you have 830 calories or 33% of your daily allowance (the government stated one) 3 meals a day like that and your more or less sorted, so i dont see what the whinging is about. This is why when people go "look how many calories are in this" they obviously dont know what they are on about. The fat content however isnt exactly great.

This ends the part on dietary information for now, im sure there will be questions which I'll address and add to this post as they come.
 
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Atomicide

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Section 2 of the guide is:

Cardiovascular Training
Ill start by explaining what it means. Cardiovascular training is designed to get your heart, lungs and bloodflow working hard. This helps get your heart and lungs into good shape, and gives you a solid platform to start building yourself on. Generally the effects of this exercise will include a stronger heart, which will lower your resting heartrate, and increase your potential maximum heartrate (although you should never hit your maximum because thats very dangerous). The increase heart strength leads to better bloodflow around the body in general which will improve your overall "feeling of health" leading to less chance of fatigue, you won't feel tired every morning when you wake up and you will be far more alert.

Breathing
One thing people tend to neglect in this area is their breathing, when people don't think about their breathing, they generally don't notice it. When your not paying attention to your breathing, it will usually take perfect care of itself and you will inhale and exhale at controlled and regular levels determined subconsiously. When you start exercising however your body naturally draws attention to your breathing, and you suddenly find that your trying to control it yourself and you end up breathing to fast, not holding long enough and generally messing the entire thing up because you can't get a rhythm going. The simple and easy way to deal with this it to take note of your breathing when your not exercising, don't focus on the actual breathing itself at first, but try to pay attention to the rising and falling of your chest, and note the rough rhythm. Then you need to work on taking control of your breathing and being able to control it enough to keep it near the regular rhythm. Then once you start exercising you will find breathing should be easier to manage.

Exercise Theory
Right onto the actual exercise itself. When doing cardiovascular your looking at working your slow red fast twitch, and red slow twitch muscle fibres. If possible, you should also be looking at working as much of the body as possible while doing cardiovascular (from know on ill refer to it as "cardio". The reason you need to work as much of the body as possible is to get the full benefits of the increased bloodflow. Working just the arms or legs each time will result in them developing at different rates for example.

The basic premise behind cardio is a lot of work over a long period of time. Cardio will never be useful if its a 15 minute run before and after school. Your looking at taking at least 30 minutes a day for it, preferably 1 hour if you have that kind of time to use. You shouldn't need any kind of warm up as long as you take the first 5 minutes at a slow pace and build yourself up steadily. 5 minutes of walking before jogging for example is perfect. Now a little trick that I like to use can come into play here. Ive done the research and theory behind it and it sounds like it should work, but as for the actual benfits, im unsure because they would only add a small supplement to the basic routine each time, and build up grdually so it would be hard to notice anyway. What I do is a 5 minute warm up at slow pace, stop for 2 minutes, then absolutely burn myself for 15 seconds before starting the steady paced cardio.

The reason for me doing this is to use up the ATP (Instant energy avaiable in your muscles) that I spoke about before, as soon as this is gone, the body starts shipping oxygen to the muescles to get energy going. So in effect its a great way to get the bloodflow going just make sure to rest yourself a minute or so afterwards so you dont overdo it.

Heart rate
Your heart-rate during exercise is the ultimate in measurement. No matter what you think, your heart-rate knows better and more accurately than you do. The first thing you need to do is find your maximum heart-rate. The best way to do this without paying to undergo a psyichal Examination is with the following formula, and test.

Step up and down a single stair for 3 minutes, then measure your heart-rate for 1 minute afterwards. Then add one of the following numbers depending on your estimated fitness (and dont kid yourself or you might as well ignore this guide because there will be no benefit.

Poor shape = 55
Average shape = 65
Excellent shape = 75

This will give you an estimated maximum heart-rate. Then find the 70% and 80% (Estimated max Heartrate / 100 *70 and then *80. You should aim to keep your Heartrate between that mark for maximum progress. Obviously this is hard during exercise if you dont have a Heart-Rate Monitor, but you can get them cheap nowadays. If you cant be arsed to get one, then stop every 5 minutes and take your Pulse for 15 seconds, then multiply by 4 to make sure.

Your heart-rate is the most accurate reading you can get, and you cannot cheat it, you can pretend its wrong, but then your just kidding yourself, and wasting your time.

Scheduling and Routines
Ill write out some schedules and note what kind of people should be using them, and give a rough estimate on how long it should take untill you can move to the next level. Pretty simple to follow them as long as you stick to the right days etc. An X marks a day you should exercise, and a O indicates a day you should rest on.


X O O O X O O - Routine 1
X O O X X O O - Routine 2
X O X X O X O - Routine 3
X X X O X X O - Routine 4


Routine 1 - This is for all the people who havent done any serious exercise in ages. The first 2 weeks will be very hard because there will be some "shock" to your body, It should learn quickly enough and improve enough to progress to Routine 3 after about 4-6 weeks.

Routine 2 - For people progressing from Routine 1, and for people who have been doing some kind of regular exercise. You should stay here for about 8 weeks befor progressing to routine 3.

Routine 3 - For people from R2 and for people who already do a fair amount of cardiovascular activity in some way. For anyone looking for a decent amount of general fitness, you can stop here, there isnt much need to progress any further, unless you really want to push yourself. If you want to go further, your looking at doing at least 24 weeks here before you can take it further.

Routine 4 - This is as much as is needed, with enough recovery time in between to keep yourself at your absolute best. What you have to remember is the exercise needs to be sustained to keep yourself at this level, and any kind of drop in activity will eventually set you back again.

Activities
Right, onto what you can do that counts as cardiovascular exercise. Ill list them in order of how good I personally rate them, although it should be said ive got access to a decent amount of equiptment, and im going purely on how good I think they work. So the best for you might be the most available. Doing the best rated once a week, is nowhere near as good as doing any of the others every two days.

Rowing/Rowing machine - This is the absolute BEST in cardiovascular activity, I really cannot think of anything better. Theres very little impact, its easy to build rhythm and it works your entire body.

Swimming - Again, Zero impact, works a lot of the body, and its something easy to get the hang of and build a decent pattern with. The downside to it is public swimming pools and their *sometimes* limited times.

Running/Jogging - Pretty good exercise, although there is some impact involved, this is great for people who dont want to go to/dont have access to/dont want to pay for a gym or swimming pool session.
General In house - Things like sit-ups, push-ups etc. While these arent perfect they will still work well as cardio, get a decent speed going at a sustainable rate and you should be ok. Just make sure to make a "curcuit" of it so that you rotate and use as many parts of your body as possible during it.

Important notes
Its important to try and keep a standard pace and rhythm during the exercise, while it doesnt have to be perfect, theres a lot more benefit if you can keep it as steady as possible.

One of the absolute best things to invest in is a HRM (Heart Rate Monitor) most will tell you how to work out your max heart-rate and you should wim to work at 70-80% of this during exercise. The great thing about a Heart-rate Monitor is that it doesn't lie. If your not capable of sustaining the activity, it will show that. If you choose to ignore it, then your just ruining it for yourself, and its not like you need to cheat to win, because there isnt any competition.

If at any point during exercise you feel yourself struggling to cope, then stop. Dont **** yourself around if this happens, light strain is progress, struggling to breathe and cope is damaging. If you do find yourself having real trouble coping with breathing, stop and rest with your elbows resting behind you on the back of a chair. This will open your lungs right out and enable you to make full use. If your in this situation on very light routines, I would very much suggest talking to your doctor to check for serious issue's such as asthma.


If anyone has any further additions to this, PM me or post them here and ill organse and add them. If anyone has any questions relating to a specific area, qoute it, and ask the question in the thread. Questions about something not covered in here should be posted as well.
 
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Atomicide

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Section 3 - Preperation, Planning and Practice.

This section was originally going to be on the process of toning, but after consideration and some consultation, it was decided this would be a waste of time as toning isnt really anything ultimately spectacular, and the mindset of this forum wouldn't enjoy it as there are little to no visible results.

Instead this is now going to be a short section on preperation/continuation. Basically if you dont want to progress to serious weightlifting you can stop on this scetion and see some smaller level results which will generally give you some definition and mass, but on a small scale. Those who want to progress further should still read as this information is vital to give you a solid platform to step onto when your ready to hit the big weights.

Diet
By now you should at least have the idea of eating healthy planted into your mind, especially if you were working to lose some excess fat on earlier sections. What you need to consider now is the addition of a vital part of the diet in if you haven't already. Protien. Protien is what your muscles use to rebuild themselves, you need to have a decent supply in there to repair. Protiens do not last very long in the body so its a good idea to have a regular intake. Tuna is an absolutely awesome source of protien.

This is going to sound weirdly specific, but you should really really try to get tuna thats in sunflower oil. First reason is because sunflower oil contains your "good fats" (Essential fatty acids) which is great for health n general. Also, Tuna contains ALL of the protien you need. To expand on this, protien is made up of Amino Acids, there are 7 types of Amino acid, and you need all 7 present at once to actually get the repair process in motion. The Protiens only last for 3-4 hours in the body before they are broken down and disposed of (Turned into Ammonia [Urine]).

Im not going to tell people to eat Tuna every 3-4 hours because I know thats a bit over the top. What I will suggest is that you take it very shortly after your exercise. Stranger still im also going to suggest that you have something sweet shortly after the tuna (preferably a sweet(ish) drink). The reasoning behing it is that your body's energy stores are depleted after exercise. Its first priority is to ship the energy out to the muscles ASAP, and since there is protien waiting to go as well, it heads out with it and the mucles will soak it up in seconds.

If you skip out everything else, the basic idea is you need to get some additional protien into you diet if you dont get much of it normally, and that tuna is the obvious source.

The Exercises (Courtesy of Urbanfox)

***Note: I won't waste my time explaining how to do these exercises. Mr. Fox has provided a link with examples of everything, and all the exercises can be found here with decent visuals etc to ensure your doing them right.

Triceps
Dip
Board Press
Cable Pushdown

Shoulders
DumbeBell/BarBell Shoulder Press
Lateral Raise
Rear Delt Row

Chest
DB Bench Press
Flys
Dips

Stomach
Sit-ups (If possible add some weight to them by holding some dumbells across your chest while doing them - basically hold them and cross your arms over so your holding the weights near opposite shoulders)

Reps
With each of these your looking to only do a small amount of work. It's been decided about 12 reps in one set is enough for most people here. What you need to do is figure out the kind of weight you need to work with. To do this you need to find out how much you can actually lift. Some people wont have access to decent weights, so for them I suggest lifting the largest weight availble as slowly as possible. Some Trial and error will be involved, but basically your looking for a slow lifting speed that leaves you feeling "****ed" when you finally finish the lift. The same principle can be applied to sit-ups /press-ups etc.

Once you have found your max weight (known as your 1 rep-max or 1RM) *thanks urbanfox* you need to work at about 50-60% of that weight for all exercises in this section. So say you can lift 50kg. your looking at working about 25-30kg for these exercises. 2 x 3 lifts, then 1x6 lifts, the final 6 should put some singnificant pressure on you, but you should be able to cope fairly easy. If at any point your not coping stop, and rest, dont even bother dropping the weight and trying again, just take your recovery period and start afresh.

Its natural after doing these for the first time to feel quite sore for the few days afterwards, hence the expression "no pain, no gain" and you can end up quite stiff as well. Now, a couple of days and a dull ache is normal. A lot of days, significant pain that doesnt respond to painkillers, or brusing/marking oin the muscle is not, and you should consider getting it looked at by a doctor and explaining why.

Every 3 weeks or so you should "re-test" yourself and see how you are progressing with your max lift to make sure your keeping yourself challenged. Sticking at the same weight will slow down the building process and eventually it will stop altogether, however the process wont reverse at all as long as you keep lifting.

Its important to use this time of easier lifting to practice and perfect your techniques before moving on to the big guns. You should NOT progress on to larger weights until your managing these with no injury and with a fair amount of ease. If your hurting yourself, being injured and decide to move onto larger weights, your going to do real damage, and were not talking just pain, Torn muscles and even ligamants are the kind of things that put you out of action for months, and requie physiotherapy to treat. Your also looking at permenantly scarring the muscle in a way that can never be fully repaired, leaving it prone to tearing again in future circumstances.

***section concluded for now, more may follow after additional research***
 
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Blaminator

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I'll give you more **** to chuck in later on


edit: Put stuff about muscle fibres, red fast twitch etc.
 

Atomicide

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ive put definitions of them in already. However the first part was just an intro, some definitions and information on diets etc. Im going to start with the exercise and lifting ones shortly. Spent around 2 1/2 hours sorting that first post and getting all my research that ive done on it together.
 

Blaminator

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I see I see, You should definitely put something in about spot reducing fat and how it's impossible, because so many people think that if they do 100 situps a day their belly will go, or 100 squats a day and their thighs will go, but no, they're wrong, it's a good way of toning up if you have less than 12% body fat, but no way will it reduce the fat in that area.

You can't target a certain body part and lose fat there, impossible.
 

Turin

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That was an excellent read Atom thanks, is this from general knowledge or did you take some sort of health science course at college?
 

Blaminator

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That was an excellent read Atom thanks, is this from general knowledge or did you take some sort of health science course at college?

Most of it is from another forum but quite alot of it is from experience
 

Sawell

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Pfft, do what you think is natural to lose weight and/or gain muscle, unless you've got no common sense you will achieve what you need.

I often found that reading about it just complicated a simple process, or made me wonder why I'm sat reading about it when I could be down the gym/dojo or going for a run/playing with the bag (not my personal one, one that you hang outside).

Good write up none the less.
 

Blaminator

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Pfft, do what you think is natural to lose weight and/or gain muscle, unless you've got no common sense you will achieve what you need.

I often found that reading about it just complicated a simple process, or made me wonder why I'm sat reading about it when I could be down the gym/dojo or going for a run/playing with the bag (not my personal one, one that you hang outside).

Good write up none the less.

The thing is some people think it's natural to do 100 reps of say, bench press because it's what they see in TV's / Movies etc.
 

Stonehelm

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Think the important thing people have to realise is that noticable affects wont happen over night, you need to stick with it and get yourself into a routine.

Unfortunately for me i dont have an awful lot of willpower so its hard to stick to my exercises but i do my best. As im in a flat in uni i dont have any room to use my barbell so im limited to dumbell exercises atm.

I didnt really know how to go about it so i got list of exercises and tried them out and eventually came up with a routine:

Stretch for 5 mins

35 Alternate front arm raises with 5lb dumbells
20 Upright rows with 5lb dumbells
50 Alternate curls with 10lb dumbells
25 Side waist bends with 5lb dumbells (hold for 2 sec each side)
15 Side raises with 5lb dumbells (hold for 3 secs.....kills me)
30 Alternate shoulder press with 5lb dumbells
20 lunges (each leg) with 2x 5lb dumbells
15 Seated tricep extension with 5lb dumbells
15 (each arm) Bent over tricep extension with 5lb dumbell (hold for 2 secs)
10 Bent over rear arm raise with 5lb dumbells
40 situps

Jog on the spot for 10 mins

Stretch

35 Alternate front arm raises with 5lb dumbells
20 Upright rows with 5lb dumbells
50 Alternate curls with 10lb dumbells
25 Side waist bends with 5lb dumbells (hold for 2 sec each side)
15 Side raises with 5lb dumbells (hold for 3 secs.....kills me)
30 Alternate shoulder press with 5lb dumbells
20 lunges (each leg) with 2x 5lb dumbells
15 Seated tricep extension with 5lb dumbells
15 (each arm) Bent over tricep extension with 5lb dumbell (hold for 2 secs)
10 Bent over rear arm raise with 5lb dumbells
40 situps

Stretch

It not a lot with big waits or anything but i find it a good work out as im quite bolloxed by the end of it and i sweat buckets so i know im exerting myself.

I have no idea if this right but it works for me atm
 

Blaminator

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Think the important thing people have to realise is that noticable affects wont happen over night, you need to stick with it and get yourself into a routine.

Unfortunately for me i dont have an awful lot of willpower so its hard to stick to my exercises but i do my best. As im in a flat in uni i dont have any room to use my barbell so im limited to dumbell exercises atm.

I didnt really know how to go about it so i got list of exercises and tried them out and eventually came up with a routine:

Stretch for 5 mins

35 Alternate front arm raises with 5lb dumbells
20 Upright rows with 5lb dumbells
50 Alternate curls with 10lb dumbells
25 Side waist bends with 5lb dumbells (hold for 2 sec each side)
15 Side raises with 5lb dumbells (hold for 3 secs.....kills me)
30 Alternate shoulder press with 5lb dumbells
20 lunges (each leg) with 2x 5lb dumbells
15 Seated tricep extension with 5lb dumbells
15 (each arm) Bent over tricep extension with 5lb dumbell (hold for 2 secs)
10 Bent over rear arm raise with 5lb dumbells
40 situps

Jog on the spot for 10 mins

Stretch

35 Alternate front arm raises with 5lb dumbells
20 Upright rows with 5lb dumbells
50 Alternate curls with 10lb dumbells
25 Side waist bends with 5lb dumbells (hold for 2 sec each side)
15 Side raises with 5lb dumbells (hold for 3 secs.....kills me)
30 Alternate shoulder press with 5lb dumbells
20 lunges (each leg) with 2x 5lb dumbells
15 Seated tricep extension with 5lb dumbells
15 (each arm) Bent over tricep extension with 5lb dumbell (hold for 2 secs)
10 Bent over rear arm raise with 5lb dumbells
40 situps

Stretch

It not a lot with big waits or anything but i find it a good work out as im quite bolloxed by the end of it and i sweat buckets so i know im exerting myself.

I have no idea if this right but it works for me atm

No offense, but that routine is pretty bad, too many repetitions, what are your goals? Mass gain? Toning? Just strength?
 

Blaminator

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Well for toning, ideally you want to be lifting heavier weights, but not so heavy that you can only pull off a couple of reps, the general consensus for toning is 3 sets of 12-15 reps of the exercise, create a decent split as I suggested in Beards thread. Try not to isolate muscles too much and do a variety of exercises (Are you a member of a gym?), so for example on your chest day, don't do 3 exercises which all do the same thing.

As for abs, don't do situps, do weighted crunches. I work my abs every now and then but it's not in my routine, jsut penciled in now and then
 

Blaminator

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Breath out as you exert force on the weight, so when you push up if you're benching, then breath in as you bring the bar down
 

Atomicide

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I did P.E at GCSE level as well, so a lot of this comes from that, ive used research from some other forums, and personal experience as well. Once all the information is on here, people can start using it, and ill try and give an insight into how to track how much it's benefiting you so you can change it to your needs. Going to start writing the next section on Cardiovascular training.

Updated to add section 2 on cardiovascular fitness.
 
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Sawell

Golden Oldie
Golden Oldie
Dec 29, 2003
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The thing is some people think it's natural to do 100 reps of say, bench press because it's what they see in TV's / Movies etc.

I call shens.

People who try to apply movies to real life are cuntfaces. They can tear every muscle in their bodies, for I do not care for their stupidity :(