Month: May 2011

Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

Body Building At Home: Can It Be Done?


So can you do body building at home? That is, can you effectively work and build all of the necessary muscles to have a toned, sculpted and overall big muscular body without all of the specialized equipment that you will find at a gym?

Of course, you could set up a home gym with your own equipment and then there would be no problem following a routine for body building at home. But let’s assume that you do not and cannot have a fully equipped home gym. What are the bare essentials that you need for effective body building?

Unfortunately you are not going to be able to do body building at home successfully with no equipment at all. There is no way that you can hope to build serious muscle mass without some weights.

Dumbbells are cheap and easy to store in the smallest apartment or dorm room. If you really do not even have the money for those – for example if you are a teen with no job and a tiny allowance – then you could start out by using plastic water bottles, the kind that you can easily grip in the middle. However, you will soon want to move up in the weights, so plan on saving your allowance or asking for a set of dumbbells for your next birthday, Christmas or as a random gift from any family member who is feeling generous.

Hint: you will find that family members are much more likely to buy stuff for you if they can see that you are going to use it and get the value out of it. If you ask before you even start working out, they may say no automatically. If you ask after you have been working out regularly for a month, the answer may be very different.

The next thing that you will need is a flat/incline adjustable bench. This will cost you a little more and it takes up more storage space too but it greatly increases the number of exercises that you can do. The bottom line is that an adjustable bench is going to be essential if you plan on doing any serious body building at home.


Finally, a barbell with a set of barbell weights completes the basic equipment. You can manage with either dumbbells or a barbell, you do not strictly need both, but if you have the space and a few more dollars this can add variety to your workout.

Your workout can then include bench press exercises with and without weights, and the full range of dumbbell or barbell exercises (rows, curls, extensions and raises). Be sure to plan your routine so that you are covering different muscle groups each time. Do not work out every day but have two or three rest days in the week.

So how long will it take before you see results? It would be great if we could bulk up overnight, but that simply does not happen. Be patient, keep to your routine as you planned it for body building at home and you should start to see results in a couple of weeks.

Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

Breads and Vegetables evil or good?


Breads and Vegetables? What do these have in common? Not much. The reason that we want to consider these two staples of a diet is for opposite reasons.

Breads are a nightmare for many people trying to cut down on the carbs in their diet. There is good reason to cut the carbs as most people are taking in to many carbs in the first place. In saying that cutting down carbs is good I am not writing about a zero carb policy like with the Atkins diet but instead just talking about cutting a quarter or half of your carbs out and not replacing them and thus you will have cut your calorie intake quite substantially. Bread as any diabetic can tell you is a very addictive food. To most people the cutting of bread from their diet is one of the biggest sacrifices they can make and once it is out of your diet for a week or two you will feel better and will not have those cravings anymore. I know this from experience as I have a bagel every morning (equivalent to 5 slices of bread) and for a week I went without and felt badly in the morning but by the next week I was not missing it at all.

Vegetables are also carbs but are much better for you and in the typical North American diet most of us would be very short of the six or so servings that we should have. The advantages to increasing your vegetables are threefold. First vegetables are fairly high in Water and fiber which helps your body to keep everything running smooth. Secondly vegetables are a great source for most of your vitamins and minerals and thirdly vegetables are filling and will keep you from getting up after your mealto grab something sweet.

Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

The Power of dramatic change


Usually people do things in half measures. I have in all of my articles talked about the things you can do to make a change and most of them are not particularly hard. Take a look back now at all of the changes that I have put forward. Are you comfortable with each of these changes? Probably. But once all of these changes are instituted you are looking at a whole new you, a new outlook, a new body, a new way of looking at eating as well as exercise.

Most change in life that is really serious and permanent comes from radical changes. When you make a break from the past and change the way that you look at all things in your life you are changing a paradigm and you never need look back. I have been in points in my life in the past where I would look at some kind of exercise or lifestyle change and would kind of chuckle saying “No, I couldn’t do that” and six months later I am at that point.

I would like to pop up some role models that you can look at to see what is in fact possible. First lets look at Lance Armstrong, as many of us know Lance Armstrong endured cancer and came back to win the Tour De France seven times. Here are a few things that make Lance Armstrong seem like a normal guy: he has 2 kids, and a failed marriage, part way through his first Tour De France he considered quitting, he came from a trailer park in Texas. Now let’s look at what it takes to do what he does. He leads a team of seven riders that protect his position in the race, he rides 3500 KM in 21 days and in the last Tour De France he only won one stage but was so close to the lead in every other stage that he was able to easily win overall. One more person would be Bill Clinton, like him or not Bill Clinton cam from a very poor family, a broken home, put himself through university to become a lawyer which should have been tough enough but this gave him a chance to become a politician and to become the governor of Arkansas and finally to beat all the “backwoods” stereotype attitudes from the rest of the country to finally become president. Just so we could look at him again as a real person, Bill Clinton committed infidelity within his marriage and is now trying to rise up again as a great international statesman.

Both of these stories teach us that anyone can do great things and that there can be doubt and setbacks to our great changes. The other thing that we see is that most people are normal people and that we can pull ourselves to succeed

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