The Baby's Guide to Exercise

The Baby's Guide to Exercise If you start following the Baby's nutrition guide, you are heading in the right direction. Now you want to sculpt the perfect physique. All APUA's, AFC's, PUAs should have a great body... It's a DHV. There are so many magazines that promise you "Rock Hard Ab's within 6 days" and "Remove Love Handles in 5 minutes"... BULLSHIT. The amount of exercise routines you can follow is mind blowing. All you want it the perfect body right? You can't be bothered to spend hours and hours reading magazines to get just a few tips. I have put together the most consise exercise regime you need. If you follow these rules while eating right, you will transform your body faster than you ever thought possible.

Exercise

Train with free weights three times per week. Avoid weights machines as these lock you into a fixed range of movement and do not fully utilise your muscles.

Focus on the big compound moves which use the most number of muscles and require the most energy. These are squats, deadlifts, lunges, pull ups, rows, dips, bench press, shoulder press, clean and press and burpees.

For cardio workouts, focus on interval training twice per week (mix up rowing, treadmill, bike and elliptical trainer) where you do a mix of medium pace followed by a sprint. This will take 30 minutes and can be either on one machine or mixed up by 3 x 10 minute slots on different machines. If you have the time, do a longer 45 minute steady cardio workout once per week.

Avoid sit ups as these predominantly work your hip flexors. Train your abdominals on alternate days using a combination of planks, woodchops, hanging knee raise, leg raises, and crunches on the biso ball (half swiss ball). You will not have hard, visible abs unless you have under 10% bodyfat (male) and 15% (female) which you will achieve with a clean diet, lots of weight and cardio training.

Avoid swimming unless you are able to swim front crawl non stop for at least 20 minutes. This is because most people swim 10 lengths and then rest, so their heart rate is not elevated for a long enough period of time to get maximal benefit.

Separate the days you do cardiovascular work from the days you train with weights.

Ensure that each workout is progressive and intensive. This means increasing the weight or number of reps each time by under 5%, doing full body work to develop a well rounded/ proportioned physique and doing the exercises that you hate - as these are most likely to be your weak points which you need to develop and will give you the greatest gains.

Radically change your workout every 4 weeks The greater the discomfort and shock to your body, the better the results will be.

Ensure you workout with good form. With free weights this is based on 2 seconds up, 1 second hold and 2 seconds down in a controlled movement. The downward movement is more critical than the upward movement as this is when the muscle fibres are under the most pressure.

Give your trained body parts at least 48 hours rest in between workouts. You can do this by training with weights on alternate days and filling the gaps with cardio. Also note that the larger the muscle group, the more rest period the muscle needs. E.g. biceps can be worked everyday as they are so small v. quadriceps (in the legs) needing up to 4 days.

Train to failure on every set. Do not compromise good form, but ensure that you push yourself to the maximum number of reps per set to ensure you are challenging your muscles.