Tag Archives: weight training

Exercise for Muscle Growth

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In order to obtain muscle growth, physical activity is necessary in the form of weight training, in particular high-intensity interval exercise.

Physical activity is one of the four aspects of lifestyle, which have a major influence on our health and well being.
The other three are: nutrition, stress, and synthetic chemicals. Nevertheless, half the Australian population doesn’t have adequate exercise and one in eight adult is totally sedentary.
Being fit does wonders for the working of our bodies and minds, for our attitudes and moods and for the prevention of degenerative diseases and early aging.
The evidence for benefits in relation to heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure are overwhelming. More recent evidence confirms that there are benefits also for the prevention of adult-onset diabetes, osteoporosis, colon cancer, anxiety and depression.
In contrast to these benefits, sedentary living may be responsible for as much as one-third of the fatal cases of heart disease, colon cancer and diabetes.
When we analyze the large number of benefits which are responsible for being fit, it’s easy to get motivated to get started with activity, or to keep it up, whatever the case may be.

Some people will tell us – possibly to try to convince us or themselves that exercise is unnatural or unnecessary – that they don’t care for big, bulky muscles.
Women sometimes believe that exercise will make them over-muscled and unfeminine. While it is true that exercise can be used to build big bulging muscles, the amount of exercise required for body building as far more than for normal fitness.
The physical beauty of a man or a woman is due largely to the quality and shapeliness of the muscles. Properly developed muscles which in repose do not bulge, but are smooth in contour and firm in appearance, giving a pleasing and attractive outline, which was obviously part of nature’s plan! Only fitness and good health can achieve and maintain the body beautiful!

Would you like to stay in attention-grabbing muscular shape for as long as you’re alive and be able to exercise?
And become mentally and physically tough to withstand the stress, pressure and problems that come your way during your time on this planet? If you say “yes” to both of these questions, then read on.

Proper weight training can give you this – and contrary to the general opinion, it doesn’t have to take joint-busting, spine-crushing poundages. Your muscular look can last a lifetime, without soft-tissue damage or a lot of work, if you train smart.

Whether you’re 18 years and just starting your muscle building journey or a 50 year old trainee who has been lifting for years, training smart means training in the most efficient, safest and fastest ways to build muscle and burn fat.

Mayo researchers compared high-intensity interval training, resistance raining and combined training in a twelve-week study.
They monitored molecular and metabolic changes in adults, divided into age groups of between 18 and 30 and between 65 and 80 years.
All kinds of training increase lean body mass and insulin sensitivity, but only high-intensity and combined training improves aerobic capacity and mitochondrial function in skeletal muscle.

Mitochondria are tiny energy-producing structures inside cells. They change with age and activity, and tend to decrease, both in content and function, as we grow older. One result is that we have less energy.

In the study, high-intensity interval training also improved muscle protein content that not only allowed cells to create more energy, but also caused muscles to grow bigger, especially in older adults.

The ability of the mitochondria to generate energy was increased by 69% among the seniors, and by 49% in the younger group.

Over the past decade, Steve and Becky Holman have developed a workout system for men and women, that they call the F4X Training System. It is a revolutionary way of combining four specific exercises done in literally a matter of minutes. That’s all you need! And you can’t find this youth-enhancing system anywhere else!

You don’t have to do endless cardio sessions, as the F4X Training System is a great cardiovascular workout, and you don’t have to spend an hour a day in the gym.
The F4X Training System will be your personal breakthrough, to achieve your ideal body, to stay in tip-top shape with minimal time, and to have a life outside the gym.

However, you have to be prepared for some hard work – anything that gives you this kind of radical age-defying results that have stood the test of decades, will never be like a walk in the park.But it’s fast, efficient and safe.
This is a routine you’ve never seen before, and you will get in and out of the gym in record time.

Our bodies all age, one day at a time, but you can slow the aging process down and totally reshape your body,
to the point to where you look ten years younger in less than 90 days.

The F4X Protocol has three phases. Each phase is designed to give you exactly what you want for your body.
These few simple variations in the F4X Protocol plus the F4X Lean Meal Plan, will get you exactly where you want to go.
If you want to lose 50, or even 100 pounds or more, you will be doing Phase 1, with slight variations in movement style and nutrition.

After you start to lose all the weight you desire, only then you should procede to Phase 2, the F4X Shape. Once you lost all your fat you wanted, you can get some more muscle on your frame. Here you will slightly change your lifting style and nutrition plan. An added benefit of the F4X Shape phase is that you burn even more body fat because you’ve added lean muscle. Muscle burns 95% of your calories at rest. So the more muscle you have, the more food you can eat!

If you like the look of a fitness pro, what is called “a mini bodybuilder, you proceed to Phase 3, called the F4X Build.
You can build 15-20 extra pounds of muscle on your frame. It’s the same fundamental plan with some slight variations to the lifts and diet.

You remain in total control.
Here is the really good part, and especially for the ladies, you are in total control. You can simply stop when you have gained the muscle you want. And then you maintain it while using an even easier protocol.

Steve and Becky’s motto is: Make it simple, yet make it challenging!

If you like to wake up energized before the alarm goes off, rarely if ever be limited by typical age-related aches and pains, radically alter the shape, tone, and body fat you currently have and drop all the weight you desire in just 90 minutes per week, and so much more, than make a wise decision and start with the F4X Training System.

For more information about the F4X Training System, visit: https://tinyurl.com/ty4b87z

Exercise Plan

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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.

Built for Life: Motto for a New You

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Built for Life.” Kind of an interesting title, if you think about it, because it has two meanings. The first is staying in attention-grabbing muscular shape for as long as you’re alive and able to exercise—you will remain “built” your entire life, never embarrassed to peel off your shirt at the beach, lake or pool. And as my colleague 60-plus-year-old bodybuilder Tony DiCosta so aptly put it, “You’ll usually be the best built guy in the room.” (Talk about a conversation piece!)

The second meaning is that you’re mentally and physically tough, prepared for whatever life throws at you. You’re “built” to withstand the stress, pressures and problems that come your way throughout your time on this planet—almost like you’ve created a bulletproof mental and physical fortress, able to deflect any negatives, that attitude-altering artillery shot at all of us every day.

Proper weight training can give you both of those—and contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t take joint-busting, spine-crushing poundages to make it happen.

In fact, training with max weights can be a negative, especially as you get older. Sure, if you’re a young ego-driven dude looking for a monster bench press, training heavy is where it’s at. Low reps and lots of sets will build your strength to the extreme—but not necessarily lots of muscle, as I’ll explain in future blogs—just be careful. There’s a cumulative cost. I’m still dealing with injuries I sustained during my power lifting years.

I’m not saying power lifting or power bodybuilding are bad training models—just that throwing around mega weights is NOT necessary for you to build an impressive bodybuilder-type physique, a body so muscular that people comment on the size of your arms or the width of your back or the vascularity streaking down your forearms. You can have a muscular look for a lifetime, and it doesn’t take soft-tissue damage or as much work as you think—if you train smart.

Whether you’re 18 (that’s Jonathan Lawson, my former training partner, in his 20s in the photo above with us) and just starting the muscle-building journey or a 50-something trainee who’s been lifting for decades (like me), lifting smart means training in the most efficient, safest and fastest ways to build muscle and burn fat.

I promise you that Old School New Body is a no-B.S. program—that’s because my sole goal is for you to have all the ammunition you need to own a physique that turns heads and raises eyebrows and one that supports your health and well being. I want you to be able to keep that attention-grabbing, muscular look—and feel healthy doing it—for the rest of your days.

Stay tuned, train smart and be Built For Life.

Steve Holman

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Fat Burning: A Different Approach

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No more cardio? Well, not quite—but if you train with weights correctly, you won’t need to visit that boring treadmill quite as often to keep your abs sharp.

And I’m not talking about interval cardio, although the weight-training method I’ve been preaching has an HIIT feel to it. That’s the F4X method, (featured in Old School New Body) which is moderate-weight, high-fatigue training with short rests between sets. It burns more fat and pumps up your muscles like crazy too. Here’s the drill:

You take a weight with which you can get 15 reps, but you only do 10; rest 30 seconds, then do it again—and so on for four sets. On the fourth set, you go to failure, and if you get 10 reps, you increase the weight on the exercise at your next workout. Notice how those sets are like intervals with short breaks between—you can even pace between sets to burn extra calories, but there’s more.

Fat-burning pathway 1: While that training style does great things for muscle growth, via myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic expansion, you also get loads of muscle burn. That lactic acid pooling has a spiking effect on your growth hormone output—and GH is a potent fat burner. Fire up muscle burning to get your GH churning. (GH also amplifies other anabolic hormones, so it effects both muscle and rippedness.)

Fat-burning pathway 2: If you do the reps correctly on every set, you’ll also get myofibrillar trauma. The myofibrils are the force-generating strands in muscle fibers. By “damaging” them with slower, controlled negative strokes, you force the need for extra energy during recovery. In other words, your body runs hotter while you’re out of the gym as it revs to repair the microtears.

To attain that extra fat-burning trauma, use one-second positives and three-second negatives on all 10 reps of all four sets. On a bench press that’s one second up and three seconds down. It’s the slow lowering that will produce the metabolic momentum after your workout. (That rep speed will also give you 40 seconds of tension time on every set, an ideal hypertrophic TUT.)

Fat-burning pathway 3: Now if you really want to get some blubber-busting microtrauma, try your last set of a F4X sequence in X-centric style. That’s one-second positives and six-second negatives. You may have to reduce the weight, but it will be worth it. Try for eight of those, 56 seconds of tension time, and you should feel the results the next day. Your muscles will be aching, but it’s a good indication that fat is baking.

F4X for a GH surge, slower negatives for fat-burning micro trauma and X-centric for even more time under tension and fat extinction. It all adds up to faster leanness with less meanness—because you’ll need less cardio. Prepare for acid-etched abs! Yes!! Even as you age this system works, in fact it is the closest thing we have to the fountain of youth.

Stay tuned, train smart and be Built for Life.

Steve Holman

Editor in Chief Iron Man Magazine and co-creator of the Old School New Body program

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