Everything I Currently Know About Excercise
May 6th, 2007I’ve been working with a personal trainer for the past three weeks, and this post is an effort to both share what I’ve learned and have a record of what I’m learning. To lose body fat and maintain (or increase) muscle you need to do three things: eat right, weight train and do cardio. This post is for the exercise part of what I’ve learned.
Here’s a shocker: the purpose of exercise is to send your body messages about how you want it to change. It was a total surprise to me that you can appear to be eating reasonably well and exercising fairly regularly and be doing yourself more harm than good.
How to Exercise:
- Monday: Cardio
Do 45 minutes of relatively low intensity cardio. You want to go at an intensity high enough that you can sustain that rate for the full session, but not so high that you are out of breath and have to slow down. This tells your body to burn fat. - Tuesday: Arms and Cardio
Choose a handful of weight lifting exercises to work your arms and lower back. Follow up your weight lifting with 20-30 minutes of cardio. - Wednesday: Cardio
Do 45 minutes of relatively low intensity cardio. - Thursday: Legs and Cardio
Choose a handful of weight lifting exercises to work your legs and lower back. Follow up your weight lifting with 20-30 minutes of cardio. - Friday: Cardio
Do 45 minutes of relatively low intensity cardio, but increase the intensity from the previous sessions. This is so you can increase your endurance from week to week.
When doing the above workout, there’s a few things you need to do. One is that you’ll want to have two routines for each muscle group: so two sets of exercises for Tuesdays and two sets for Thursdays. Alternate them from week to week for variety.
The purpose of weight lifting is to break down the muscle and give it time to repair itself. This is the reason you do three sets of each exercise. You want to do enough repetitions at sufficient intensity to push the muscle to the point of muscle failure. Doing this tells your body and it needs to build up more muscles of this type for future similar activities.
I use three sets of 10-15 repetitions when weight lifting. I use the first set as a warm-up, lifting two-thirds of what I know I’m capable of doing. The second set is at the maximum weight I can lift. The third set is at a bit less than my maximum, to ensure that I have sufficiently broken down the muscle. I rest for about a minute between sets to give my heart a bit to rest. I also try to lift the weight as quickly as possible and then slowly lower the weight down, to get the most from the resistance of the weight.
To keep the pace of your workout moving along, you might want to use “supersets”. A superset is when you alternate two exercises back to back. For example, you might bench press a set of 15, and then do a set of 20 crunches, back to the bench press and then back to the crunches. I’ve been doing supersets, alternating three times before moving on to an entirely new exercise. Doing this allows you to not spend a lot of time resting between sets of one exercise, since you’re using different muscle groups when alternating.
When weight lifting, mix your exercises between using weight machines and free weights. Machines are great for beginners like me, but free weights use more and different muscles. When using free weights I use less weight than on the machines.
Keep a journal of how much weight you’re lifting and push yourself a bit from week to week. This way you can measure your progress and give yourself goals each week for how much weight to use on any given exercise.