Muscle training (Read 1165 times)

Crunches aren't bad for you if you make sure not to hurt your back and neck in the process. Don't pull your head! Then you'll be fine. And make sure to do back extensions too (You know - lie on the floor face down and bend yourself upwards using your back muscles to do so..) so you get evenly strong both on your front and back side. Push ups are good yes. And pull ups/chin ups where you hang in your arms and pull your weight up. These are good to build back and arm mucles. If you really don't want to take time to hit the gym these would be fine exercises to start off with. Push ups, pull ups, sit ups and back extesions. I'd do 4 sets of each exercise to failure about 2 - 3 times a week.

I head to the gym every other morning and do some medium wieght trainning and crunches with high reps. It has halted my wieght loss but I still lost a pant size and my arms and chest are really starting to look good. The slower you move the wieghts the leaner the muscle becomes. At least according to the trainners.

yeah come on Pam, give us some tips!

Excess skin can be a real problem following substanial weight loss, and some folks actually need to get operations to remove it (which takes off even more pounds). Replacing the fat with muscles will fill up some of the skin until it tightens back down, but may increase your weight (with muscles), which means that you again have to carry more while running. You are doing great! But weight loss can have these unexpected side effects.

Amazing how much weight you lost. A few of my firends are at about your prevous weight. I wonder if they'll ever get it together to do something similar. Anyway, I cross train pretty much full time now. Right now I'm doing running and weights. Biking and swimming fell to the way-side, but I'm actually debating swapping swimming for running for awhile. Right now I run three days and do weights two days. The third running day is usually a race, though, so it's an all out effort. I also used to bike to work. Might do that again. From what you wrote, you're interested in weight training for looks (as am I, for the most part). To that end, you'll achieve the fastest results if you train for mass. But the flipside is your running times will likely suffer a bit. The other thing is mixing strength training with endurance training is rough on the body. I used to do a more rigorous gym workout but started burning out and scaled back. I do recommend a couple low calorie protein shakes (not weight gainer) on lifting days to aid in recovery and speed up results. I use EAS 100 percent whey and vanilla is pretty good with milk. My regular workout is a full upper body kind of thing with compound sets to save time. By compound, I mean I trade off exercises that work different parts of the body. Like I'll do biceps and delts at the same time. Some body parts will inevitably overlap and this sort of workout is, in my opinion, not 100 percent optimal for mass building because aerobic fatigue will start getting you at some point. But the tradeoff is time - spending three hours in the gym just isn't fun to me. Right now I do mostly 1 warmup set (50% weight for 50% reps), followed by three sets of 8 - 12 reps. The goal is the last set forces me to give it my all. If I really feel like I didn't do that, I might throw in an extra set, or bump the weight up on that last set. Since I'm only doing 6 main sets per body part each week, each workout has to count. Oh, and you can do your warmups as compounds too which saves even more time. So I might warmup biceps > warmup delts > first main set biceps > first main set delts. Some exercises don't need a warmup set. Abs, for example. Never had a problem going right into my routine. Others get a warmup from other exercises. Triceps, for example, get a good warmup from bench press. Another thing is I rotate the exercise each workout. So for chest, week 1 I might do bench press, week 2 incline press, week 3 fly machine, week 4 cable fly. I also rotate the order of body parts, except it's usually a good idea to save lower back to last or near last, since if you exhaust your lower back it can't adequately support you on other movements. I'd say for your first two weeks (four workouts) two sets per body part and not to failure is enough. Very easy to injure yourself with heavy lifting. You'll know when you can do more - your body will start saying "that was a little too easy", just like running. Also just like running, you'll find yourself getting addicted after awhile. Post exercise is key to me. I make sure to get a little sugar and then follow that with a protein shake. Fluid + sugar + protein. Improves results and recovery. You may want a second shake a few hours later. Hope this helps. Any other questions, feel free to ask.