Tag: Exercise

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Weight Loss Exercise

Free Weights or Weight Training Machines



Should you do only free weights at the gym or use weight training machines? Something you need to keep in mind and never forget is that when you exercise, you are training for life. You still may spend an hour a day in the gym, although that will still leave another 23 hours or so for your muscles to function without using any fancy equipment.

Whenever you do any type of exercise, the movement of your body during the exercise is known as the range of motion. The more difficult the range of motion is, the more effective the exercise will be, because your body has to work twice as hard to perform the movement.

Bicep curls – Free Weights or Weight Training Machines

Take for the instance the classic dumbbell bicep curl. If you aren’t familiar with the exercise, it is performed by standing up straight with your palms facing forward, and a pair of dumbbells held down by your sides. You’ll contract your biceps to bring the dumbbells up to your shoulder height, then repeat the exercise as many times as you wish.

Using that same movement for exercise on a bicep curl machine, you should sit down, brace your upper arms on a pad, grasp 2 handles that are in front of you, then perform the same movement as above to move the handles in an upward motion.

Now, looking at the muscle contractions in this exercise, you are contracting essentially your biceps if you are using the curl machine, and that is pretty much all you are doing. When you use the machine you are sitting down, which will limit just how much your shoulders give. The machine has several muscles used in this exercise limited to the biceps, as well as the muscles in your forearms and fingers.

Limited Range of Motion with Machines

Free Weights or Weight Training Machines

Weight Workout Machine

Most of the time, when using machine weights, you will always be limited as to what type of exercise you can perform. You must always follow a strict procedure, which is pretty much the same with free weights. Unlike free weights, machine weights offer a certain degree of resistance.

One of the best thing about free weights is the fact that you move a little chuck around to select the weight you want to use. Instead of dragging it over to your exercise area, you simply select it on the machine. When you are tired during a workout, this can be a blessing.

A lot of people argue in the fact that free weights are the best for your body. While this is normally true, many people out there feel that machine weights are the best. There are pros and cons with both machines, although free weights have been around a lot longer and have been proven time after time to achieve dramatic results.

Body builders for example, have used free weights over the years to build very impressive bodies. If you ask most of them about machine weights, they would probably laugh at you and tell you that you need to quit joking around.

Should You Use Free Weights or Machines?

In a nutshell, free weights will use more of your muscles than the weight training machines do, which makes them more effective overall. This doesn’t mean that the machines are a waste of use, as they offer some great advantages. In some cases, it is best to stabilize the muscles that are being used in a movement, which is where machines are the best to use.

The decision on which to use for you should be based on what you hope to achieve with lifting weights and where you plan to use the equipment, such as home or at a gym. Both systems are great for your body, although the free weights are best to use if you want the best possible workout, and always ensure that your muscles are getting the right workouts they need.

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Weight Loss Exercise

Creating some 21 day habits



Experts say that it takes 21 days to create a habit. I do not even know if this is true but the one thing that I do know is that if you do something, anything for 21 days it becomes ingrained inside you.

Let’s take that idea and run with it here shall we? Today we are as we are, if I decide that I am going to become more positive (this would make my wife and coworkers crazy) then I would think in my head as much as I could all day everyday about my successes in the past and the things that are going well. This would change me from being pretty positive to excited as I would feel that there is nothing that I can not do.

Building Great 21 Day Habits

Creating some 21 day habitsAt the same time if someone wanted to become healthy and they started to jog everyday as a runner would they would be sore the second day, sore the third day, stronger the fourth day, and very powerful by the fifth day. The habit is being formed, by the 21st day this person would be areal runner putting in mile after mile a week. Often runners have trouble taking days off even when they know they have to because that cadence of exercise reminds them of who they are, the habit has already been formed.

There are really only three steps in creating new habits that will become ingrained within 21 days, and really probably more like 10 days, and these are the following:

1. Decide on the Change – This means that you are making the very concious decision that whatever you are doing starting now will be different than before. This may be big like deciding you will exercise daily, eating better, or giving up alcohol, or this could be something smaller like deciding to start the day with a glass of water, or giving up some inane TV show.

2. Make the change often – To ingrain a change you have to conciously make that change as many times as possible. Usually if it is gaining something this is easier but if it is losing something than it will be more difficult. For instance every single time you want a cigarette but decide against it you will be giving something up, but if everytime you want to go for a walk you just get up and walk around the building you work in then you will be making an easy concious decision that you are looking forward to.

3. Understand that this is YOU now – The final step is the acceptance that you have changed. I do not consider myself a smoker anymore because it has been 15 years or so. I also don’t feel lazy becasue I have proven enough times that I know it is not true.

You should make your habit like SMART goals as well to help you to be able to get them right. If you wanted to lose weight this 21 days to a habit is even a shorter time but it works the same way. If you decide to eat only fruit instead of candy then you struggle for about three days and then it is over and three weeks later you have some chocolate and it starts burning in your stomach and the sugar rush gives you a headache, the habit was formed already.

My Experience in Building Lasting Habits

Years ago when I quit smoking I just imagined myself as a non smoker and then I just quit, I had been unsuccessful at cutting back so I decided that cold turkey was my best chance. After a couple of days for struggles I was OK and I continued my working out then one day weeks later I realized that the habit was now that I looked at myself as being in good shape and that I was flushing those bad toxins of smoking, I had turned the corner.

So now it is up to you. What do you want to do now? Do you have any bad habits to reverse? Or some Good habits you would like to incorporate into your daily life? As I said earlier, the change is the tough part and as you go along creating habits is a 21 day process so three weeks from today you can make a difference in yourself that you can be proud of.

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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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