Your chest workout is probably one of your favorites. As you get stronger your chest starts to fill out and your upper body begins to get a “V” shape to it which is helpful in making your midsection look tighter and your waist look thinner.

So now that you know why you want to Build huge pecs and you probably already knew this. The next question is how do you Build huge pecs?

OK there are a few things that you need to know. To build up your chest you need to have a very focused workout for your chest.

Here are those keys to build huge pecs

Lift big to get big - This means that you need to train with heavy weights to get stronger. As you get a bigger bench press you will get a bigger chest. Read the rest of this entry »

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Many people this time of year would love to burn more fat and the best way to do this is through a great fat burning workout. There are three kinds of workouts. There is a weight lifting workout where you are slowly conserving energy and trying to gain muscle. There is a cardio workout where you are burning all of the glycogen in your muscles and hopefully some fat as well and there is a Circuit training workout that will help you burn fat really quickly while gaining some muscle at the same time.

To do a great fat burning workout you will want to get a bit of a warmup first by doing 5 or 10 minutes of cardio. You can warmup with either a bike or treadmill or even an elliptical trainer.

After you are well warmed up you can get to the point of starting your fat burning workout. The key to the fat burning workout is both to use different muscles to failure and to not rest between sets. Here are the exercises you can try to start with Read the rest of this entry »

With the switch back to Weight Watchers for my wife we have also added a new twist to our daily eating, no eating after 7:00 PM.

I didn’t want to mention this until after we had done it for a few days but what started out as a joke has become a great change in our lives. We started on Wednesday night not eating after an hour or so after dinner and over the last three or four nights I have missed snacking less and less.

The first two evenings of not eating I found that I was hungry when I went to sleep and my stomach was a little unsettled for some unknown reason but in the mornings I have not felt any different then I did before, not too hungry.

I have spoken to a few people that have done the exact same thing and found that they have lost weight wityhin the first week or two just from making the cahnge to no evening snacking.

What do you eat at night? Is it good or bad food or nothing at all? I know that I was not eating any really bad foods although I was eating some not very great food. I was eating fruit as well as trail mix and other kinda salty food.

There is one drawback that I am concerned about and that is the really long time between meals and what it will do to my muscle mass and my metabolism. I am a bit of a graser usually and eat throughout the day so my body never has to get nervous about me starving and because of this my metabolism is always pretty high and good.

Next of course is the whole catabolic balance. If your body is looking for energy it will use the energy within your muscles but if your muscles and the rest of your body can not find any energy it will go into a catobolic state where your body eats away at the protein and fat in your body. I know that this is what we are really looking for when we try to lose fat but the problem is that with any prolonged fast that you will lose the muscle that you really want to keep at as great a pace as you are losing fat.

Time will tell if this experiment with not eating at night will be a great method of cutting some calories and maybe even helping improve sleep cycles.

Last week was a really cold week up here in Calgary. I rode to work once and the temperature other than that has been dropping to around -20 which is a bit too cold for me. I hummed and hawed about my exercise and even though I should transition immediately to indoor training I was a little slow. Last night I finally worked out indoors.

I got home from work, changed into shorts and popped in a DVD of the Survivorman TV show. I hit the exercise bike for 26 minutes and then my elliptical trainer for another few minutes and then relished the fact that my indoor workout was a great way to keep myself in shape.

Even though I ride my bike almost everyday from about March to October or November I really am not sure how good that workout is. I try to ride quickly but the breeze and the fact that I am moving stops the sweat from really building up on my skin and clothes so it is really hard to judge the workout.

When you are training indoors you can definitely feel how hard you are working out. Last night when I was on the exercise bike I could really feel how hard I was working and my next workout on the elliptical trainer will be a lot more difficult in that it will work my arms well. After having a few workouts indoors I am sure that my body will be sore again. Everytime that you change you workout you get sore because you are working the muscles differently then you did before.

Of course when I wrote the last articles about this subject I talked a lot about the weights in my basement and how you need to have those too. The strength training that you do will add a lot of calories burned, mix up your workouts and actually help you lose fat. Did you know that a pound of extra muscle that you put on will force your body to burn an extra 50 calories a day? This can add up really quickly.

What do you think? Are your workouts tough enough? Are you working out indoors or hoping to just wait until spring comes back?

I thought that over the next few days I would put up some posts about arthritis. My wife has settled with arthritis for years and not a lot has helped. There are of course a lot of pills on the market notably Vioxx and Celebrex (which my wife did take) the problems with these drugs is that the Cox-2 inhibitors have been linked to heart problems.

Arthritis

Arthritis is a general name for over 100 conditions and diseases that affect the joints of the bones. Many people with arthritis do not have any symptoms in the early stages, Later, there may be joint pain, swelling, and stiffness. The muscles surrounding the joint may be sore, too. Some common forms of arthritis are osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, tendinitis, and gout.

While not all of the causes of arthritis are known, several factors that may contribute to a person’s risk of developing the condition have been identified, including: Read the rest of this entry »

Interval training is a way of doing cardio that will give you the ability to make gains in time and distance much more easily than any other method. The principle of interval training is that you push yourself really hard and then you slow down.

This repetitive form of training leads to your body needing to adapt to changes and this is really great for you. The body begins to build new capillaries, and is better able to take in and deliver oxygen to the working muscles. Muscles develop a higher tolerance to the build-up of lactate, and the heart muscle is strengthened. These changes result in improved performance particularly within the cardiovascular system.

When people begin running they automatically do interval training where they will alternate walking and running to get a better workout in. As people get better at running they will start just running and not stopping until the 30 or 60 minute run is over. The upside of this is that you will get a much better workout and feel fantastically exhausted at the end, the downside of interval training is that you are going to be pushing your comfort zone so the workout itself is going to be painful

So how can you implement interval training into your regular workouts? I have a few examples. When you begin running as I said before you are going to have trouble running for any length of time so you decide that you are going for 20 minutes and you will do cycles of jogging for 30 seconds and then walking for 30 seconds. As you get better at running you will be able to jog for one minute and then walk for 30 seconds. You will notice that your rest stays the same but the running time increases until you get to the point that you do not need a rest for your 30 minute run.

As an advanced runner you are not going to slow down for a walk but instead your will run for 5 minutes and then break into a spring for 30 seconds or a minute and then slow back down to your regular pace. As another way to do interval training you can go to another location that is more hilly and use the uphills to change up your pace. The hills are going to force you push harder to keep the same pace and of course the downhills are going to use different muscles but as far as exertion goes you will find the running easier.

Try interval training soon either indoors on a treadmill or outdoors as long as the weather cooperates.

I commented on a blog this morning by a fellow blogger that found that he got stronger after not working out for a few days. This is pretty common and I have found this myself in the past.

There are two reasons that you would be stronger after not working out after a few days. First you could be overtraining, which I believe is much more prevelent than we realize, or it could be that after a few days the glycogen levels in your muscles are really back up to a good level.

Overtraining

Overtraining can happen quite easily if you are working a muscle group too often, as you probably realize if you work a muscle group more than a couple of times a week you get really sore because your muscle fibers have not had a chance to heal. Make sure that your rest is good and that you do not directly or even indirectly stress your muscles too often! Also be aware that your muscles really do not increase in strenght durin your workout but instead in the days after as your muscles heal completely.

Glycogen levels

One of the things that you will notice after a few days between workouts is that your muscles get stronger and stronger. At the same time when you workout your muscles seem to get weaker and weaker during your workout. The reason for both of these effects is caused by your glycogen levels in your blood and muscles. As you workout your muscles use glycogen for energy and as it depletes so does your strength. Glycogen is just a derivative of sugar that is found in your muscles. Very soon after your workout it is important to take in a lot of liquid carbs. I used to drink sugar and water mixed together but really it is probably better to drink some kind of a post workout energy drink (not Gatorade) and this will help you quickly raise blood glycogen although it really takes a few days to really bring the level back up to the point where you are stronger.