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Weight Loss Exercise

How to Prevent Injuries This Summer


I have always found that the best way to get started on something is to do it for consecutive days. Exercise is no different than anything else but in the past I have been terrible for this as I used to never do enough to prevent injuries

What I have always done is set a goal, lets say to run a 10k. Well I go in gung ho and run hard everyday for a week, not getting started and moving up in distance but just moving up too quick and I end up with lots of aches and pains and injuries that just end up stopping me. This is bad.

What happens when we start and exercise program is that we need to strengthen a few things. We need to strengthen our will, our tenacity, our strength, our joints, and our form. Lets looks at each of these.

Prevent Injuries By Working Up

How to Prevent Injuries This SummerStrengthen our Will – The very first day that you go for a walk or run, or even a weight workout you will be excited and carve out a piece of your day to squeeze it in. We are all busy and fill everyday so something falls off that day. What falls off? TV, or Facebook, or just some quiet time, even sleep sometimes. Well after that first day, especially after the first week life invades again.

For me my internet surfing and quiet time have to be sacrificed to get a workout in unless I workout at lunch. The trouble is that after a few days of this for most people, me included means that life is not the same as it once was. I miss idle time, I miss just “catching up”. But these priorities are not as important as a daily workout. In my household workouts are a top priority but in most households they are not. So what do you do? Strengthen your will, get serious about your exercise priority and realize that there are no shortcuts. You can workout at lunch (like I tend to do) but if that is not convenient then maybe getting up an hour earlier to workout will help. Whatever it is this is a painful change in your schedule.

Strengthen our Tenacity – I call it this because I am not much of a runner. If I start running then a few minutes in I will think about walking for a few minutes. After about 20 minutes of running I want to just be on the couch. Again this is tough at the beginning but exercise in the beginning is always tough. After a few workouts, and I really mean a few like 5 or 6 workouts your brain gets less lazy, and your body is able to get these workouts done and you don’t have the lazy brain telling you to stop because your body knows it can handle more.

Our Strength – Leg strength and arm strength, even core strength takes time to increase. The trouble is that we get sore. After a weight or cardio workout you feel invigorated but in the morning it is hard to get out of bed. I feel this most in my legs and lower back but truth is that your body will get the hang of it and strengthen pretty quick unless you take a week or more off of your training. This is another reason to not be dumb like me but to progressively up your output as you get your workouts, or new style workouts going.


How to Prevent Injuries This SummerOur Joints – This is a tough one for me. Whenever I start running I know that my legs and back will get sore later but what really has always stopped me is my joints. I have trouble with my hips and my knees and always have. One of the problems with me is that I have a pretty big frame with a fair amount of muscle on it and I don’t think that 200 pound guys are really built to run.

What I have always found is that there are alternatives to hit joints and the internal ligaments better. I find that bike riding has always strengthened my knee joints since there is a lower amount of force but a huge number of reps when you ride a bike. Try to find these high rep ways to strengthen your joints and you will be in much better shape to make them work better.

Our Form – This is critical. Have you ever seen a good long distance runner in training? These guys are awesome. They have short strides, float between strides, and seem to make the action more effortless. This is good form and this makes all the difference to all of the points above. If you learn proper form then the mechanics of the exercise will make things much easier for you and lead to less injuries and a much more enjoyable time training.

Another opposite example of this is a new weight lifter. Have you ever seen a guy on his first time doing lat pulldowns or bench presses? It is all about jerking the weight up and down, once you learn the biomechanics of the exercise you will see people with really smooth reps up and down and there is a much more even and steady force on the muscles.

Safest Way to Move Up Our Training

Really there are no excuses for bad form. The easiest way if you are running is to join a running club, if weightlifting get a few workouts from a personal trainer, and otherwise with most sports you can have someone record you on an iphone or video camera and then after watching this you can go to youtube and watch how a pro moves and see what you are missing.

All this leads to progressive exercise. I know that just for my wife and I starting to do distance walking for our Kidney March we have to eventually get to 100 kilometers in 3 days. The forst week is just a 3 kilometer walk for three days which is easy, but after 8 weeks there are a couple of 20 kilometer walks. Finding time for a 40 minute walk is ok now and our muscles and joints can take it but finding 4 or 5 hours a day in a few weeks will be tougher on our time, muscles, and joints. Having a chance to progressivley move up from 3 kilometers in 40 minutes, to 5 kilometes in and hour and 10 kilometers in 2 hours over a few weeks will allow everything from our style of walking to our joints, our will, and our muscles to get stronger

Follow these steps to prevent injuries and you should have a much more safe and enjoyable summer


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Weight Loss Exercise

The keys to getting a big chest


Getting a big chest is a big deal. For most people lifting weights and getting ready for summer there are a few big priorities. One of the things that most guys want is a big chest. There are a few exercises that are key to increasing chest size but also there are a couple of important facts to remember. I think that if you follow all of these you will have huge pecs in no time.

Getting a Big Chest – Don’t Overtrain

First of all you need to be aware that it is fairly easy to overtrain your chest so especially for someone that has been weightlifting for a yea or less it is very important to make sure that all of your chest exercises and related are done in the same workout, this includes chest as well as shoulder exercises. First things first, make sure that your chest workout is hitting all three angles to his all of the muscle fibers of your chest but do not do to many exercises or sets as this is the easiest way to overtrain.

There are three parts of your chest pec muscles. Your pectoral muscles can be broken up into three parts, well kind of anyway, the top near your shoulders, the middle of your chest and the bottom of your chest.

Getting a Big Chest- Upper Chest Exercises

getting a big chest

getting a big chest

To his the upper chest you can do incline bench or incline flyes. Try switching each workout to doing one or the other and try to keep your reps are 6-10 reps for three sets, each set to failure.

Getting a big chest – Middle Chest Exercises

To hit the middles of your chest you can do flat bench bench presses or flat bench flyes. For your lower chest you can do flat bench flyes or cable crossovers. Make sure that you are changing your exercises each workout but try to always hit the upper and middle of your chest and every second or third workout do some decline bench for your lower pecs.

Getting a big chest – Lower Chest Exercises

Lower pec muscles will grow very quickly but really what people are looking for is a bigger upper chest as a bigger lower chest makes your chest look a little saggy. The difference between doing flyes and bench press are important to think about. When doing flyes you will get a very focused chest exercise but in doing bench press you will be heaving more weight and most people seem to agree that the increases to your chest size will be higher.

I know that I have glossed over the exercises for increasing your chest size but there are a couple of issues that are almost as important as the exercises and that is the shoulder influence as well as the frequency of the workouts for your chest.

Most of the time in magazines you are told to do 12 – 16 sets to work your chest muscles but no one really looks at the mechanics of how your shoulder muscles will really influence your chest workout and this is critical. After you have finished your chest workout you should work your shoulders, I say this because a tough chest workout of nine sets or so is really going to burn your shoulders and if you try to isolate your shoulders again in the next couple of days then you really do risk overtraining your deltoids.

Work Chest and Shoulders Together

Make sure that after your chest and shoulder workout that you rest at least two days before hitting pecs and delts again as you will really need the rest to let your chest and shoulders heal. I do not want to dwell on nutrition again but it is very important to eat lots of protein, 30 or so grams of high quality protein per meal.

There is always an urge to workout more often than this but I really believe that if you really nail all of the angles of your chest and do all of your sets to failure then you are going to have a good chance to getting a big chest.

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Weight Loss Exercise

Don’t Let Your Emotions Cloud Judgement



I feel bad today because I am just sitting on the couch. Last week was a tough week as my kidney deprived daughter was in the hospital a couple of times and it just weighed me down.

On Sunday Taylor was fine and then in the evening she came down with a fever and was misdiagnosed on Monday, which made me furious and then again in the hospital on Wednesday until Thursday to get fluids pumped into her as she was dehydrated. She is fine now but the week was emotionally exhausting

The reason I tell this story is because this week my emotions took me away from my priorities and because of this I have made some super bad decisions due to lazy judgement calls.

I would like to dissect my situation and see if this can help you out.

What I do

Everyday I have certain priorities that I want to complete and I rate my day based on doing these. Mostly my days have to have the following to be successful; exercise, blog posting, facebook twitter and Google+ interaction, family time, sleep, eating healthy, and helping others in some way. Of course there is work too and I want to make sure that I get as many of these things done although I do not have a lot of scheduled or written priorities.

What happens 

I know that this is bad but it usually works for me, well usually until weeks like this knock me down and out.

So what happens during weeks like this (days as well sometimes) is that emotionally we get hit by something, feel a bit down, and then hit by something else and this will just lead us to shield ourselves. In these situations we just shut down the things that are important and we go into protection mode. I have done this, I bet you have done this, and we are all built with a defence mechanism that forces us in times of trouble or distress to just do what is needed and let everything else fall be the wayside.

Is this ok?

I know that how I act, and how we act as individuals is fine. This is the way we are built and how we are supposed to be. I look back on my last week and know that I did what was important (taking care of my family and especially my daughter) but I also made some bad decisions in that I have vague priorities that I did not complete.

I remember a story a few years ago about Kobe Bryant and how he was able to compartmentalize parts of his life. He was in the middle of the rape trial that could possibly put him in prison and he would fly back to LA and play some of the best basketball of his career as he was probably in his worst personal trials of his life. The power of this compartmentalization is something that we should all think about and try to do when the world feels like it is closing in on us.

What to do, what to do…

I am really not that great at this but I am learning. What you need to do is have some goals and plans. Every morning, or the evening before decide based on your life, short term, and daily goals what is important to get done. This does not mean that you have to have 20 things planned or anything in fact just having two or three outcomes or goals for that day are all you need.

This is not what I do and it is my own fault. If I had a goal just to sit down for 30 minutes each day this week to write a blog post and interact on Facebook then I would have got things done while at the same time I could have helped my wife, son, and daughter with their problems better.

Even better of course is to decide on Sunday night what your priorities for the week are and then extrapolate what needs to be done each day to reach those before the next Sunday night comes along.

Also we have to remember that life is supposed to be about those around us. Family and friends are always the top priority and down weeks will happen, this last week fore me is fine but people will have their lives spiral out of control through inaction and bad decisions all the time. don’t be that person!

So now it is time for you

So what do you do? Hop in here with a quick comment and let us all see some other ideas. Do you plan your day? Do you have any daily goals? Do your emotions lead you to making bad decisions or like me just no decisions? I know this could lead to the whole issue of emotional eating but I wanted to keep it a bit more defined to what we do in the situation of emotions and lifestyle.


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