Best Exercises with the Bowflex Blaze

The Bowflex Blaze Home Gym is a very popular piece of home workout equipment. Bowflex as you probably know uses long bending rods instead of weights to add resistance to exercise and the Blaze is a great example of this equipment

In the beginning of using the Bowflex Blaze Home Gym it would be a good idea to concentrate on doing just a few compound exercises for three sets each and then after a few weeks start to mix it up.

One of the things that happens with workouts is that your body becomes accustomed to exercises that you are doing and strength gains stop happening so you regularly need to change exercises to keep a certain amount of muscle confusion.

Sets and Reps with Bowflex Blaze

As for number of sets and reps it is a good idea to do 3 sets of each exercise with 10 reps per set. I usually do the first set with a light and slowly through the entire range of motion of the exercise get the muscle warmed up and then do two heavier sets.

You may want to take it kind of easy for the first couple of weeks though as you may be tired after your workout but the next day and two days later your muscles will get really sore if you push yourself too hard.

The goal of doing the compound exercises on the Bowflex Blaze is that you will gain muscle mass and this will also lead to a faster metabolism when you are gaining muscle your metabolism will need to be higher for both maintaining the muscle and the healing of the muscle and this happens between workouts.

With cardio you obviously raise your metabolism during the time that you are exercising and then if you have worked out hard enough for more than 20 minutes you will get an additional raise in your metabolism for about 12 hours.

Try doing this 3 times a week on non consecutive days.

So say Monday Wednesday Friday and initially without the curls. I do this kind of workout as a circuit doing every exercise once and then repeating.

You may not need as much time between each exercise as you are hitting different muscle groups on each set so your muscles will not tire as quickly.

It should only take about 45 minutes to get through each workout after you get the swing of it.

So as for the exercises that you will want to do, there are 65 total exercises for the Bowflex Blaze it looks like and you really want to only be doing 6 or so at a time.

The page numbers listed below are the pages that the exercises appear on in the Bowflex Blaze manual.

Best Exercises for Bowflex Blaze

Bench Press This works the Chest and Shoulders and also the Triceps as a secondary muscle (p18)

Wide Grip Lat Pulldowns This works the Lats (upper back) as well as the Shoulders and Biceps (top p30)

Shoulder Press This works the shoulder very hard and the triceps as well (top p23)

Leg Extensions- This works the Quadriceps which are the biggest muscles of your body as well as the Calves (p45)

Leg Curls – This works the hamstrings (not in the book but just lie on your stomach and pull the weights up. See link) http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/Hamstrings/LVLyingLegCurl.html

Crunches– For the Abs and to add to core stability. To start with you do not need to use any . (top p34)

Good Mornings- This is not really part of the Bowflex but it is a great exercise to strengthen your lower back which adds a lot of stability to your core.

Seems easy but if you do to many reps or work to hard with it your lower back muscles can get really sore the next day. There is no need to do this with weightsfor a while and I do them with my hands on my head to add to upper body in the exercise. http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/Hamstrings/BBGoodMorning.html

Bicep Curls (bottom p37) and Tricep Curls (top p34) – The Biceps and Triceps are kind of show muscles and you are working them anyway using the compound exercises so it although not needed you may want to add these exercises after you are more comfortable with your workouts after a couple of weeks or so.

Try out the Bowflex Blaze. This is one of the great pieces of workout equipment on the market today and with it you can quickly increase your strength and improve your fitness.