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Veronika Stutz
YOUR BASIC WORKOUT
A beginner’s guide to a full body workout
Photos 2009 by Bonnie Perkinson, BonniePerkinson.com
Bodybuilders’ Gym, Silverlake California
Introduction...............................................................................................................................3
What is a Basic Workout?........................................................................................................4
The major muscle groups.........................................................................................................5
The difference between cardiovascular training and weight training.................................5
Cardiovascular training – training the heart..........................................................5
Weight training – building up muscle mass............................................................8
How heavy should the weights be?........................................................................................11
How often do you lift weights?...............................................................................................13
The cycles of training..............................................................................................................14
Variety for man and muscle...................................................................................................15
The advanced workout...........................................................................................................15
Correct breathing....................................................................................................................16
The right grip..........................................................................................................................16
The warm-up...........................................................................................................................17
The cool-down.........................................................................................................................18
The exercises
Abs (rectus abdominus).............................................................................................19
Chest (pectoralis major)............................................................................................22
Back (latissimus dorsi)..............................................................................................24
Shoulders (deltoid)....................................................................................................26
Triceps (triceps brachii).............................................................................................28
Biceps (biceps brachii)..............................................................................................30
Quadriceps/ front of the thigh (quadriceps femoris).................................................32
Hamstrings/ back of the thigh (biceps femoris)........................................................34
Calf (soleus or gastrocnemius)..................................................................................36
The next steps..........................................................................................................................37
I believe that the strongest motivating factor for implementing and sustaining exercise,
and reaping its many benefits, is learning how to do it correctly.
Once you experience what working with a mixture of cardiovascular and weight
training can do for you, how it can alter your metabolism, energy levels, body composition
and overall state of heath, it becomes more difficult to quit. Why would you give something
up that works and yields results?
I call this a basic workout, because it gives you one exercise for each one of the major
muscle groups. Think of it as a skeleton for a correct workout as a place to start out from,
build up from, do variations of and add exercises to. Once you know how to work your whole
body, you can add exercises to sculpt problem areas, and you can expand your knowledge of
working out like a professional.
If you wish to train your body and build lean muscle mass, which in turn will over
time increase your metabolism, add strength, increase bone density, and increase energy
through improved oxygen consumption, you need to work all of the major muscle groups.
If you don’t, you may end up overemphasizing one muscle group, bringing the spine
out of alignment, and causing problems and pain down the line.
The combination of cardiovascular training and weight lifting can increase your
metabolism permanently. Meaning, even when sitting on the couch you’ll burn more calories.
It will change your body composition into a higher percentage of lean muscle and a
lower percentage of fat. And in case you’re concerned, muscle on women creates the lean,
toned look – not the bulky one. That is, unless you have a good amount of male hormones
running through your system, which is rare.
Exercise will increase your energy levels and wellbeing. If you’re physically active,
the body builds more capillaries (tiny blood vessels) so that blood and oxygen can travel more
quickly into the tissue. Increased oxygen consumption is what we call higher energy. And
who can’t use more energy?
And better, increased energy isn’t necessarily limited to a certain age. “Old and tired“
is so last century. At the age of 95 Jack LeLanne, the godfather of bodybuilding, works out
for an hour and a half using weights. After that, he goes for a half-hour swim. He reportedly
does this every day. At 61, he entertained himself one fine afternoon by pulling 10 boats with
77 passengers for more than a mile. He swam in handcuffs and took less than an hour.
(What’s up with the handcuffs? Anyway. You get the point.)
There’s a long list of heath benefits to exercise. I assume you know them all. There’s
Type 2 Diabetes, which can be fixed up with a combination of exercise and nutrition. High
blood pressure can be lowered – the systolic and diastolic pressure. Triglycerin, the level of
fat in the blood, can be lowered. Osteoporosis can be avoided or treated. Back pain can be
fixed. Same with poor posture and the ailments it creates. Statistically speaking, exercise will
lower heath risks and increase longevity.
Yet, you might have heard that your neighbor went to the gym, worked out so hard
every day, but quit because “it didn’t work out“. Of course, you wouldn’t be one of those
people. Of course not. Besides, you know things about exercise, from High School.
Something like that.
I mean, nobody would attempt to fly a plane, just because they’ve peeked into a
cockpit a few times and watched the pilot fly. “Easy! I can do this too!”
It’s not surprising if the thing won’t fly.
If you want to fly, it’s only prudent to check out the instructions before take-off.
If you learn how to exercise correctly, you can sculpt your body the way a trained artist
chisels a sculpture he’s been in love with before its creation.
I think the proper name for the weight lifting business should be “bodysculpting” not
“bodybuilding.” No wonder the confused still think they’ll get bulky at the gym.
What is a Basic Workout?
The Basic Workout is a full body workout. It trains every major muscle group.
It teaches you how to put your own workouts together, and how to observe proper form.
Every advanced workout is only a variation of the Basic Workout.
The muscle groups
Stomach Rectus abdominus
Chest Pectoralis major
Back Latissimus dorsi
Triceps Triceps brachii (back or outer portion of the arm)
Biceps Biceps brachii (top or inner portion of the arm)
Shoulder Deltoid
Quadriceps quadriceps femoris (top of the thigh)
Hamstrings biceps femoris (back of the thigh)
Calf Soleus or Gastrocnemius
The difference between cardiovascular and weight training
If you want to change your body, you need to understand the different modes of
training and apply them correctly.
Cardiovascular training - Training the heart
Cardiovascular training is different from weight- or resistance training in the sense that
the two use different energy systems of the body. Cardiovascular training is called aerobic
training and weights/ resistance training is called anaerobic training.
You can do cardiovascular training every day, and yes, it does use an energy system
that eventually derives its energy mainly from fat sources. Cardio doesn’t require resting
periods the way weight training does, in order to replenish its energy supplies. If you rested
during your cardio workout, you’d be lazy. If you rest in between sets of weight lifting, you
would be doing it correctly.
Cardio got its name from training the heart or cardiovascular system.
If you run up the stairs and your heart beats like crazy, leaving you gasping for air,
your heart is weak. What happens is that the heart has to beat a lot to move the blood from the
lungs into the tissue, where oxygen is needed.
If training requires the heart to beat faster, so that it can pump blood, and with it
oxygen, through the body faster and more efficiently, the heart becomes stronger.
A stronger heart is a healthier heart. Once the heart is stronger, it contracts more
forcefully. It then can beat less frequently to get the same amount of work done.
During the 1970’s, the idea was that anyone past age 40 shouldn’t exert themselves as
much anymore to protect their heart. Today we claim the opposite.
Since the body responds to demand in order to secure your survival, it will build more
capillaries (the tiny blood vessels that deliver oxygen into the tissue) so the blood can be
delivered more quickly to tissue in need of oxygen.
This is why you will have more energy once you do cardio. More oxygen circulating
throughout the body feels like a surge of energy.
Another benefit of doing cardiovascular training is that you burn calories, the little
detail we’re all after. I’m sure you’ve heard about using certain heart rates to stay within the
ideal fat burning zone while doing cardio.
The formula is: 220 minus the age of the person.
Then train at 55% - 65% of that amount..
220 minus age gives you the maximum amount of beats per minute your heart can handle.
65% of that amount is the fat burning zone.
The trainer says, forget about it. It’s fancy.
The uncomfortable truth is, if you take more calories in than you use up, they will be stored as
fat. To avoid that, you need to either take in less calories, or use up more calories.
You burn more calories if you train slightly higher than the fat burning zone. Fat burning
usually kicks in after about 20 minutes.
If you want to figure out at what rate to do your cardio, make it easy on yourself.
Instead of counting heart beats, make sure you sweat. If you don’t sweat after 20 minutes
you’re either a beginner and still adjusting to exercise, or you are too slow.
The ability to sweat is an adaptation to exercise. It shows that the body has “learned”
to cool itself off through sweating.
If you can’t sweat yet, try using this: exercise at a speed at which you could still talk if
you absolutely had to, but you’d rather not. The breath should become deeper and more even.
Why not worry about the fat burning zone?
At the end of the day, what matters is how many calories you burned, and if you burned
enough to create an energy deficit. Or, if you burned the pint of ice cream you had for dessert.
So whether you burn fat or stored sugars is not important in the big picture. That you
burn something – that’s what’s important. And, how often you do it.
So there are two details about cardio that I deem important.
One, do it as often as you can stand it. Twenty minutes every day will do more for
shifting your metabolism into higher gear, and for improving the health of your heart than an
occasional hour.
Also, the body burns more calories after exercise. The energy consumption peeks right
after exercise, and then decreases slowly. Even 12 hours after exercise, the energy
consumption is still higher – there is a lasting effect on the metabolism.
By doing cardiovascular exercise as often as possible, your body will get used to
burning energy on a faster rate. Once your system is running at a higher speed, it will last for
quite a while, even if you miss training for two weeks.
Increasing the metabolism through the use of cardiovascular exercise does require
some patience. For women, it takes 8-12 weeks of regular exercise to make a noticeable
difference. For men it’s a little faster.
Once your metabolism works at a higher rate, you may feel as if the food you ingest
dissolves very quickly. If you pay attention, you can literally feel how the energy you
consumed, in the form of food, is being used up.
Cardio in the morning increases the metabolism for the rest of the day. The
disadvantage of early exercise is that some individuals respond by eating more, because they
sense the increased energy consumption, and mistakenly use it to indulge. Early morning
exercise works best to maintain your ideal weight.
Cardiovascular training in the evening, ideally after dinner, burns up the excess
calories of the day while increasing the metabolism throughout the night.
The disadvantage of evening exercise is the hassle of trudging to the gym at
unpleasant hours, unless you own a piece of cardio equipment (which, by the way, I think is
the best investment you can make in yourself, if you want to be and stay slim).
Some clients have reported difficulty falling asleep after exercise. If you generally
have trouble sleeping, you may want to exercise at least 3 hours before bedtime. In a couple
of weeks, your system is likely to get used to exercising late, and it shouldn’t be a problem.
Cardio after dinner is most effective for weight loss.
Start your cardio with a warm-up phase.
Do the first 5-10 minutes at a comfortable pace.
After that, speed it up a little every 5 minutes, or increase the resistance of the equipment.
The final 5 minutes are the cool-off period. Return to the comfortable pace, and slow it down
every minute.
Cardio will only feel hard and uncomfortable if you are doing too much too soon. In
such a scenario, your heart beats like crazy, you gasp for air, and you may even feel nauseous
or light headed. Your legs feel like they have lead in them, and 5 minutes seem awfully long.
In contrast, if you build up by exercising regularly at a comfortable pace, you will
become stronger without noticing. The training will continue to feel easy, even though you
keep speeding it up. It will feel like the release of pent-up energy – not like an unpleasant
strain.
For your first week: 3x 15-20 minutes
Second week: speed it up a little
Third week: speed it up, increase resistance
Fourth week: now you understand what the term “fitness“ means. Keep building.
Weight training – building up muscle mass
Resistance training builds muscle, and muscle burns more calories than – well – having no
muscle does! (Let’s not call it fat.) If you have more lean muscle mass, you will burn more
calories. This is a highly effective way of losing or maintaining weight.
Muscle is anything that is firm on your body. You’d be surprised how often a client
comes in and says, “I want to tone, but I don’t want any muscle.”
I snicker and say, “What are we going to tone? Fat?”
Women are often afraid they could get “big and bulky” if they lift “heavy” weights.
My standard joke in response to this myth is, if it were that easy to get big and bulky, most
men would look like superheroes.
Women rarely have the testosterone that is needed to build a massive frame. Even for
men, or female bodybuilders, the effort required to gain that massive frame is near
superhuman, as far as I’m concerned. It requires dedication, discipline, sacrifice and a very
specialized way of working out. It’s not as easy as lifting a few heavy weights and ping! Huge
muscles pop up.
So don’t be afraid of lifting heavy weights.
What happens when women lift heavy weights is that we burn a lot of calories (up to
700 per hour!). Also, the “afterburn” (increased energy consumption) after a weight bearing
workout is substantially high – a nice bonus!
Building muscle doesn’t mean building bulk. Women can lift surprisingly heavy
weights without gaining mass. The worst case scenario is that you’d end up with Madonna’s
arms. (You don’t like it? Well, amputate. Just kidding.)
If you ended up with Madonna’s arms and you didn’t like it, here is what you do: you
stop.
If you build muscle, you have to maintain it or else you lose it. The body always
responds to demand in order to secure your survival. If there is no demand, there is no
response. So I’d say go ahead and try lifting the “heavy” weights and see what happens. If
you don’t like it, you can always lighten up.
Anaerobic training, or resistance training, requires a principle called Gradual
Progressive Overload.
If you want a muscle to grow, you need to work it more than it is used to, and then
give it a rest. If a muscle has been overexerted, it will respond with growth in the resting
phase.
You need to keep exerting the muscle progressively, if you want it to keep growing.
For your basic workout, the goal is to trigger muscular growth and increase basic
strength for the whole body. You can safely accomplish this by doing sets of 10-12
repetitions, and adhering to resting phases between each set.
If you are able to lift set after set, and find you don’t need to rest, most likely the
weight is not heavy enough. Lifting weights uses different energy systems than cardio does.
If you want to build muscle, you need to exhaust the muscle in a short period of time,
say 10-12 repetitions. At the end of the set, there should be a muscular burn, fatigue or even
muscular failure. It’s only the ph dropping.
The “burn” is often mixed up with a “pain”, and we usually associate pain with getting
hurt. The dislike you feel towards that muscular burn is an unconscious protective mechanism
to keep you from injury.
But, when working with weights, we want that burn. It means the muscle is being
exerted past its previous limit, while also using up stored energy.
If you exert that muscle correctly, you won’t get hurt.
You can find out how to gage Gradual Progressive Overload correctly in the next
chapter, “How heavy should the weights be?”
There’s another concept you need to know. It’s called Shock-Adaption-Staleness.
You put a shock onto the muscle, it adapts to the challenge, and then becomes
stale or stagnant. In plain English this means that man and muscle become awfully bored if
nothing ever changes. The solution to that is variety. We’ll go over it in detail in the chapter
“Variety for man and muscle”.
Another key concept to know is Symmetry. Muscles work in pairs of Agonist and
Antagonist. The biceps bends the arm; the triceps pulls it straight.
If you work one side (say, the biceps) more than the opposite one (say, the triceps), the
stronger muscle (the biceps) will pull more forcefully on the joint.
If you work the chest more than the back, the chest muscles will pull from the front,
creating a hunched over appearance and a hump back.
Or if you work the back more than the chest, it pulls from behind and the chest starts
to point to the sky. Not pretty. Besides, both upper body scenarios pull on the spine.
When the spine is anything but straight, there is pressure between the vertebrae and
one thing or another will squeeze a nerve. That hurts.
When you work out, always obey symmetry. Use the structure of the Basic Workout.
Always include the major muscle groups, and give them equal attention.
How heavy should the weights be?
If you want to use Gradual Progressive Overload, you need to know how to determine
the right weight. The muscle should be exerted past its previous limits. You need to exert it
just enough, keep doing it often enough, and give it adequate rest.
You are making use of the principle of gradual progressive overload if you are
exhausting your muscles just to the point where it responds with growth.
Let’s say you’re using the Basic Workout, and you want to know where to start the
weights. Let’s start with a little fitness test. For your first workout, use fairly light weights.
They should be so light that you can comfortably complete 3 sets of 10 repetitions without
muscular failure or excessive shaking.
By the way, don’t worry about the shaking. The neuromuscular system takes about 10
days to be able to translate the new information of heavy lifting to the brain. After 10 days the
traffic jam is sorted out, and the movements will be steady and secure.
So for your fitness test, do 3x10 of every exercise at a light weight and go home. Then
after 24-36 hours, listen into your body. How does it feel?
If you feel nothing, it wasn’t heavy enough.
If it hurts, it was too much.
In order to determine the right weights, you need to check in with your body every day
after the workout, and measure how it feels. Then adjust the weights accordingly.
If you used the right intensity of weight, you will feel a slight tingling sensation or a
minor swelling in the muscle. The sensation you’re looking for is increased circulation in the
muscle, which shows that the muscle has been exerted past its previous capacity and is now
being repaired. The muscle may feel slightly sensitive to the touch and unusually tired. There
shouldn’t be any pain. If movement is restricted and painful, the weight was too heavy.
Sensitivity to pain is highly individual. One client may claim he’s so sore he can
barely move, even though I know he barely lifted more than the weight of my purse. The next
person may say he hasn’t done enough and we’re proceeding too slowly, even though he can
barely lift his arm. To make it easier, use this Sensitivity Scale:
1 I don’t feel anything
2 I barely feel anything
3 I feel something
4 I feel that I lifted something
5 I definitely feel it; there’s a tingle in the muscle
6 I feel the workout; the muscle is tired
7 I did work out! The muscle is slightly swollen and could use a stretch
8 My body feels heavy and tired, the muscles are sensitive to the touch and somewhat
achy
9 The muscles hurt; it’s unpleasant
10 I can barely move
Rate your muscles 24-36 hours after every workout, and you’ll be able to determine
the right intensity.
In the first 2-3 weeks, you want to train at a 3 or 4 on the scale.
After 3 weeks you can start to increase the weights and train at a 5 or 6.
After 4-6 weeks you can train at a 6 or 7, but don’t go any heavier than that.
If you rate the state of your muscles at an 8 the next day after the workout, you need to
decrease the weights. Once you’re very advanced, you may work very heavy cycles to
facilitate intense muscular growth. You should build up to very heavy cycles, so that the
muscles are able to handle the strain without getting too sore. Generally speaking, muscular
soreness is a microscopic injury to the muscle tissue and should be avoided. Soreness can lead
to a shortening in the muscle, scar tissue or arthritis.
If you rate the feeling in your muscles 24-36 hours after the workout, and you feel
nothing (1-3 on the scale) it’s time to increase the weights. Make sure to rate every muscle
individually.
If you took gym class in the 1980’s, you may have been told that unless you’re sore
the next day, the workout is not doing anything. You may have also heard the criticism that
heavy weight lifting is bad for the joints. So which one is true?
Imagine you’re lifting weights that leave the muscle painfully sore, because it didn’t
have the necessary strength. All that weight, if it’s not supported by muscular strength, pulls
on the joints. You can see why this would be harmful.
Yet if you build muscle progressively, the muscles will lift only slightly more than
they can handle and they will adjust without posing an injury to the joints.
Additionally, when you lift progressively higher weights, the body responds by storing
more calcium in the bones. Weight-bearing exercises are sometimes used for prevention and
treatment of Osteoporosis.
How often do you lift weights?
If you overexert a muscle, it responds by growing to meet the challenge. The growth
process takes 48 hours. So, you should work out every other day.
If you train the same muscle groups every day, you break down muscle fiber in the
process of exertion, and don’t allow it to grow back. The muscle continues to be broken down
and becomes weaker and potentially injured.
The ideal schedule is 3x a week, say Monday-Wednesday-Friday.
The weight bearing workout shouldn’t take longer than 60 minutes; 75 minutes if you’re very
advanced. The cardio workout is separate.
Now you might ask about split routines. Split routines means that you exercise some
of the major muscle groups one day, and the rest on the following day. This may be an
appropriate choice if you do bodybuilding or power lifting, and you’re doing a large number
of sets for one muscle group, followed by 5 minutes rest.
If you’re a beginner, this isn’t necessary, because you won’t be working out at this
intensity. Split routines could lead to working the muscle groups less than 3x a week. For
beginners who want to see dramatic changes, split routines are not ideal.
Stick to a regular routine, especially in the beginning. If you let too much time pass
between workouts (say you train 1x a week), the muscle will atrophy again after its growth
spurt. The body basically “thinks” the challenge was only an isolated event, and the gains
won’t be maintained.
Besides, training regularly and overloading the muscles carefully, but progressively, is
the safest way to train. You can determine just the right kind of overload and give the muscle
adequate rest.
Once you’re in perfect shape, you can weight train 2x a week. This would be
maintenance.
The cycles of training
You can work your muscles to make them bigger, smaller, wider, more defined – you
can sculpt your body any way you like. To do so you need to work in cycles, and you need to
know how to combine cycles to get the desired result.
A training cycle can take 4-6 weeks. The first cycle is the Basic Workout. You can do
3x10 of each exercise, 3x20 of the abs.
After 4-6 weeks you can increase to 4x12, and maybe 3x50 for the abs.
After the first cycle of 4-6 weeks, you should change the routine by using new exercises for
each of the major muscle groups.
Advanced cycles may use more sets for each muscle group, less repetitions (to make
the muscle bigger) or more repetitions, as well as extra slow speed or isometric exercise (to
create definition).
For the first 3-4 cycles, you want to continue overloading your muscles, so that they
grow and the body becomes more firm. The shaping of muscle is referred to as definition. A
muscle has to grow first, before you can define it.
Cycles of definition follow cycles of growth.
After growth and definition you can take a week of active rest; work the body using
low weights.
Another cycle you can use after growth and definition is maintenance. For
maintenance you don’t aim to keep overloading the muscle. You keep training at the weight
you have used to get to where you are, so that the muscles don’t grow, but also don’t atrophy
or shrink. In this way, you maintain muscular power.
After growth, definition, active rest, or maintenance, you can continue growth cycles,
or simply maintain what you have.
Variety for man and muscle
Skilled, advanced workouts are “changed up” every time, meaning the muscle groups
are worked by using different exercises for every workout. This way, you avoid the plateau or
stale period, of Shock-Adaption-Staleness.
Once you have a good vocabulary of exercises, this is going to be easy.
For your first cycle, you can stick with the same exercises, because there is plenty of
adaptation.
After 4-6 weeks you should start to learn new exercises. Every workout should train
abs-chest-back-shoulder-triceps-biceps-quadriceps-hamstrings-calf.
You see, every advanced workout is a variation of the Basic Workout. Find a new
exercise for the chest, and exchange it for the old one, and so on.
The order of the exercises doesn’t matter. As long as you know what muscle group
any new exercise works, you can replace the old one and create your own workouts.
The advanced workout – Building up different aspects of the muscle
If you want to create the chiseled look of a sculpture, you need to build up the
different facets of every muscle group. Imagine each muscle is like a building that is several
stories high.
Take the chest. The chest press (the exercise you’ll find in the Basic Workout)
develops the outer chest, but focuses on the middle of the outer chest.
Now if you work only that area, the chest will only grow there. The result will be
disappointing.
You can exercise the outer chest,
and build up the lower, middle and upper “stories” there.
You can also work the inner chest,
and build up lower, middle and upper “stories” there.
You get the idea. It’s pretty much the same for every muscle group. Once you know
exercises for every “story” of any muscle, it’s going to be very simple. (A follow up book for
this one is in the works.)
Correct breathing
You may have noticed that it feels perfectly right to hold your breath while you’re
lifting something heavy. Unfortunately it isn’t.
The blood pressure spikes up so high – you don’t want to know! – and a person’s face
turns bright red. Particularly, once you’re past forty, you don’t want to do that.
When you’re jumping up, lifting, pushing, moving, dragging heavy objects, the
muscles need oxygen to regenerate used up energy. For that to happen, you need to breathe.
So, every time it’s heavy, you breathe out.
Or imagine it like this: if you want to lift, breathe in first, then breathe out as you are lifting.
If you choose to hold your breath anyway and you survive the spike in blood pressure,
you may notice chest pains the day after. I once had a client who thought he was getting a
heart attack.
What happens is that holding your breath during a lift can burst the alveoli, the tiny
lung sacs. While this isn’t dangerous, it’s painful and unnecessary – unless you enjoy pain.
The right grip
Always use a closed hand- or underhand grip when using weights. A closed hand grip
means four fingers of one hand wrap around the top of the grip, and the thumb wraps around
the bottom.
This way the hand is almost closed around the grip, and you’re hands are less likely to
slip off. Using gloves is a good idea, especially since it prevents calluses. Unless you’re a
guy, you probably won’t like callus. Gloves also offer extra protection so that the weights
don’t slip out of sweaty hands.
An experienced bodybuilder once confessed to me that he had dropped dumbbells on
his head during strenuous training. That is, he confessed after he came out of the hospital.
The warm-up
For both cardio and weight training, the warm-up period is crucial. You don’t want to
lift weights when you’re cold, because the risk of injury is high.
The goal of the warm-up is to increase the flood flow and loosen the joints. You don’t
want to lift weights when cold and stiff, because the risk of injury is higher.
For the Basic Workout, you can do 5-10 minutes of moderate cardiovascular training
as a warm-up. You want to get the blood going, and maybe even sweat a little. The more you
warm up, the easier the workout is going to be (– all due to increased oxygen transport).
For any moderate workout, 5-10 minutes of a cardio warm-up is sufficient.
On those tired days, you know, those days when you really don’t want to work out at
all, a 20 minute cardio warm-up can work miracles. Once you improve oxygen transport in
your body, you will feel energized. I know, it sounds quite unlikely, but it always works.
When you use heavy weights during a more advanced cycle, you may want to add
warm-up sets to the cardio warm-up. For warm-up sets, reduce the weights by 50%, and do 12 sets of 15-20 repetitions before you do heavy sets. This way you increase the blood flow
into the muscle, and ensure that the joints are properly warmed up.
If you did heavy sets during an advanced workout, and the joints are stiff the next day,
the warm-up was not enough and needs to be increased.
The cool-down
As a cool-down, you can either slow down the last 5 minutes of your workout, or do
some stretching. In fact, the cool-down is the best time for stretching, because the muscles are
warm and more flexible.
After a very strenuous workout, 10 minutes of moderate cardio can do miracles to
avoid discomfort in the muscles the next day. Accumulated lactic acid gets used up for
energy, instead of messing with the ph of your muscles the next day.
Working out heavily and then jumping into your car isn’t a smart idea, because you
could get light headed.
The exercises
The abs (rectus abdominus)
For beginners, I suggest you use equipment first to build the abs. Building abs is
possibly the most difficult exercise – that is, if you want to end up sporting a six-pack without
straining your neck in the process.
The most common exercise for the abs are crunches. It’s the exercise where you lie on
your back, hands behind the neck, pulling the upper body off the floor.
But in order to lift the upper body off the floor, the abs need to have some basic strength. The
lift is supposed to happen by shortening the abdominal muscles.
If you don’t have that kind of strength yet, you are likely to pull an awful lot on the
neck in an attempt to lift off the floor. That results in neck tension and tension induced
headaches. And, it won’t create a flat stomach either.
If you use equipment, you can use its head rest to support the neck, until the abs are
stronger. It’s easier to direct all tension into the abs, where it belongs.
Most of the exercises use 3 sets of 10 repetitions. Since the abs are not working
against a weight that you can increase steadily, you need to do more repetitions.
In the beginning you can do 3x10-20 repetitions. Eventually you want to work up to
6-8x50, or even 4x100.
If you desire the defined, firm look of six-pack abs, you need to do at least 300-400
repetitions, 3x a week.
Strong abdominal muscles protect the lower back by supporting the core. If you
combine strong abs with strong back muscles, you are likely to protect your back from injury
and back pain.
The Ab Roller
3x10 -20 repetitions
Rest 30-60 seconds between sets.
To start, rest your head on the head rest. The neck should stay relaxed at all times.
Lean your hands or elbows onto the frame wherever comfortable. Point the nose to the
ceiling.
Breathe in, then breathe out as you lift the upper body.
Pull the chin to towards the knees in small, repetitive movements, breathing out every
time you pull up.
Don’t let the Roller touch the floor during a set.
As you lift up off the floor, “listen” into the abdominal muscle and make sure that they are
tightened, and stay tightened during the entire set of the exercise.
Imagine that you are trying to “make a fist” with your stomach muscles, and keep that fist
tight as you do your number of repetitive crunches. There should be a burn. Keep going.
Start by doing as many crunches with the Ab Roller as you can without losing form, meaning
without pulling on your neck or pushing too much with your arms.