Before starting any exercise plan it is necessary to get an approval from your doctor.
Start easy,don’t take strenuous weight programs in health clubs, which takes time out of
your working day. It takes too much of your time and becomes a burden.
Your exercise plan should be part of your daily routine to be successful.
It is better to exercise in the morning for twenty minutes than three hours at the gym
on the weekend.
Use your own body weight and gravity, instead of machines, which provide ample
resistance. It is best to progress gradually, there is no need to work to your limit.
Don’t strain. Your body doesn’t need to be heated in order to improve.
The rhythms of nature are your limits.
Your exercise plan has three goals:
First and most important: to maintain and increase your muscle mass.
Secondly: To maintain your cardiovascular system.
Thirdly: To maintain your flexibility.
The average person stiffens as he ages, increasing the risks of strains and tendon, ligament and skeletal disorders.
When you have your doctor’s approval, you can do a little aerobics to warm up the system and get your blood pumping. Twenty minutes at even mild intensity will have cardiovascular benefits.
I recommends aerobics to begin with for everyone, before you pick up weights.
Then 5-10 minutes stretching after your muscles are warm is all you need to maintain flexibility lifelong.
Now you are prepared to exercise your muscles. Your exercise plan should include resistance exercise for shoulders, arms, chest, back, legs and abdominal. If you exercise three days per week, which is the starting level for consistent benefit, then do:
Day 1 – Shoulders and arms
Day 2 – Chest and back
Day 3 – Legs and abdominal For 5 days per week, do one body part per day.
1) Never do more per exercise than one warm-up set of 12 – 15 easy repetitions, followed by one medium heavy set of 6 – 10 repetitions to exhaustion.
2) Work a body part only once per week. It takes about 48 hours for exercised muscles to breakdown worn cells, then 48 – 72 hours to build new, stronger replacements. The muscle remains at maximum strength for 5 – 8 days and then slowly declines. Exercising a muscle every 5 – 8 days is the optimum program for progress.
3) Don’t train with weights for more than one hour per workout. Your ability to gain lean mass,is limited by your hormone levels. After 45 minutes to one hour,hormone levels decline.You can force yourself to continue,but it doesn’t do your body any good.
4) Use a wide variety of exercises in your exercise plan. Restricted resistance exercises, especially on machines, stress only certain fibers of a muscle in certain positions.
You need to get all the fibers in all positions.
5) In one hour at two sets per exercise you can do 12 exercises easily. Don’t force yourself to do more. For weight exercises, see Bill Pearl’s book: The Encyclopedia on Weight Training.
6) Accentuate the return phase of the repetition, when the muscle in question is lengthening under load. In a barbell bicep curl for example, the eccentric contraction occurs when you are lowering the bar to the start position.
Restrain yourself all the way down, because it is the stress of lengthening under load that causes most of the strength and lean mass gains that you are seeking.
7)Take a protein drink daily within one hour after workout. Research shows that weight training puts subjects into protein deficit, despite the high protein level of the American diet.
8) Take daily antioxidant supplements. All exercise increases oxidation in the body.
9) Eat an alkaline diet. All exercise increases body acidity. See www.nutrobalance2.com/ the alkaline/acid food theory.
10) Sip a cold light carbohydrate drink (7-10%) throughout workouts. Drinks containing a little glucose, a little zylitol plus mostly glucose polymers are best. It will trickle carbohydrate continuously into your blood and spare your muscle glycogen, thereby maintaining your energy level.
It will also prevent dehydration. Even 3% dehydration can reduce strength by 10%. And it will help to keep your body temperature down, at the same time reducing the amount of blood diverted to the skin for cooling, thus leaving more to supply your muscles with oxygen and nutrients.
A final note about weight-bearing exercise: without the stimulus to your body to grow, nutritional supplements can’t work properly. Important new research published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows, that multi-vitamin and mineral supplementation had little effect in improving the health of old people. But when a resistance exercise was added
to their exercise plan, the health benefits were astonishing. Ranging from over 100% improvement in strength and muscle size to big improvements in mobility and recreational activity.
It takes a bit of puff and stick ability to grow a high-performance body. But once you’ve done it, a little bit of exercise necessary to maintain it is one of life’s greatest bargains.
Here is an exercise plan that covers the basics of exercise, aerobics,
weight bearing exercises and nutrition for athletes.
