If you are trying to eat right, you probably eat a lot of broccoli. It’s been a staple for bodybuilders for decades, but because of its heartiness, affordability, healthfulness, and availability, it’s a popular veggie for just about anyone trying to eat properly.
- Broccoli stalks contain nutrients and taste great – don’t waste them
Usually, when people say they are eating broccoli, they mean the florets – the bumpy, green, brain-looking top of the plant. So you cut those off of the stem (the stalk) and discard the stalks. Even though by weight, you paid more for the stalks than you did for the florets.
Don’t you hate wasting the broccoli stalks?
Good news for you. Here is what to do with them.
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I sometimes forget that some of you have really never done any serious exercise and most of my advice is for beginners, or possibly intermediates. But you might be pre-beginner (what I call a newbie). If that’s you, or if you have a loved one who needs something really simple to get started, this article is for you. In fact, please forward this to anyone you know who just keeps finding reasons to never get started. I assure you, this will not scare anyone off and after 6 weeks they/you will feel better and more confident, ready to take on the next stage of fitness.
Your First 6 Weeks Of Fitness
Starting something new, like a fitness routine, can be confusing and intimidating
After years of never exercising, you are ready to get started. The problem is, you are really out of shape and don’t know where to start. All the routines you see actually seem intimidating – you don’t understand the terminology and they look really hard.
You don’t want to start on something too hard that you give up after a few days.
You may have even read 3 Months To A New You, but maybe even that’s too much for you to start with. Let’s face it, for obese or grossly out of shape people, you need to start with much less intensity.
So here’s a very slow, very easy way to get started. You of course have been cleared by your doctor as being able to exercise, right?
I call it, the Just Help Me Get Started or My First 6 Weeks Of Fitness plan.
Many of you will read the rest of this and say “is that all?” It’s really simple and slow. If you aren’t in too bad of shape or you are already doing some exercise, then this article wasn’t really written for you.
And some of you will dismiss this, saying that “it can’t be this easy to get started.” And so you’ll go back to your couch and your TV and your bag of chips.
But a few of you, I hope, will say “ok, I know I’m terribly out of shape, but I can do this; it doesn’t seem too hard; let me give it a try”.
And once you finish these 6 weeks you will feel better than you’ve felt in years and then be ready for a more typical, less easy routine. For example, the free routine in 3 Months To A New You.
This plan for 6 weeks does require you to learn a few exercises for which you’ll either need a gym membership or a few sets of dumbbells. But trust me, you can do it!
Let’s Take It Day By Day
Week 1 (more…)
Continue reading about The Workout Routine and Eating Plan For The Total Newbie
I know how much you all love Tom Venuto’s articles so this is a fun one! Now, don’t feel bad if you discover that YOU are making some bonehead mistakes! Just take it as a learning lesson…
By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.burnthefat.com
“Common workout mistakes” has always been a very popular topic in fitness publications. But no matter how many times this subject is re-hashed, you almost always hear about the same half a dozen or so mistakes, including poor form, overtraining, going too heavy, not stretching, not warming up, yadda, yadda yadda. Ironically, you seldom hear about the biggest mistakes of all. I call these humongous bloopers “bonehead mistakes” because once you start to analyze and think about them, they’re really just common sense and they all seem so obvious… except of course to the person doing it… who is often quite oblivious until someone else points it out to them… then the light goes on and it’s like… “Doh!”
Before I begin the countdown, (in no particular order), there’s one more gripe I have about the treatment this subject has been given in the past: Most of the attention has been put on the mistakes, but very little on the solutions. It’s all too easy to point fingers and say, “Don’t do that” and “Shame on you, dummy” but only 1% of your time should be spent on problems. 99% should be spent on solutions. So in that spirit, after I bring each mistake to your attention, I’ll give you a solution-oriented training tip to help you avoid boneheadedness and join the elite group who “kick butt” in the gym at every workout…
Bonehead workout mistake #1: “Winging it”
“Winging it” means having no written goals or plans, no training journal and no way of “keeping score.” It’s when you just show up at the gym day after day and do whatever strikes your fancy, whatever machine happens to be available, or whatever you’ve become habitually accustomed to doing. Winging it is when you don’t know where you are, where you’re going or how you’re going to get there – but you start your journey anyway – no compass, no roadmap. It’s been said that “Action without planning is the biggest cause of failure,” and I believe that statement is 100% accurate.
Kick butt workout tip #1: Develop a strategic plan
Successful people never “wing it,” they always have a plan. Strategic planning is a never ending process and includes: Assessment (where am I now?), goal setting (where do I want to go?), creating a plan or strategy (How will I get where I want to go?), executing the plan (what action steps must I take daily to reach my goal?), and measuring results (how will I know if I’m moving towards my goal and how will I know when I’ve reached it?). Boneheads “wing it.” Butt–kickers have a master plan and goals for every workout.
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Bonehead workout mistake #2: Repeating the same workouts… without progressive overload
In one respect, repeating the same workouts is important – it’s called “continuity.” Continuity means that to experience an adaptive response (more muscle, more strength, less fat and all that other good stuff), you must a repeat a certain modality or exercise consistently over a long enough period of time to allow the adaptive response to occur and to reap the full benefits (rather than changing exercises at every workout). That type of repetition is good. The bonehead mistake is when you do the same exercises, same reps, same weight, same everything, week after week, without ever challenging yourself to do more than you’ve done before. If your muscles could talk they would say, “Yawn…. Did that, done that, been there… we’re just going to stay exactly the way we are… no need to get bigger or stronger today.”
Kick butt workout tip #2: Strive to beat your previous workouts
Muscle growth and strength increases occur when you place demands on your body above and beyond what it has experienced in the past. Your body responds to this progressive overload by getting stronger in order to handle this type of demand in the future. Your objective at almost every workout is to set goals to beat what you did during the previous one. If you can’t add more weight, it could be as simple as one more rep with the same weight or the same sets/reps/weight in less time. It could also mean one more minute of cardio, one level higher on a stairclimber, or half a percent steeper incline on the treadmill. Continuous and never-ending improvement is the name of the game.
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Bonehead workout mistake #3: (more…)
Should you be training to failure? What does that even mean?
- The last few reps are more important than all the previous reps.
See, for strength and muscle growth, frequency trumps volume, but intensity trumps both volume and frequency. And so the absolute most important thing you can do with lifting is to do so intensely. This is true pretty much no matter what your lifting goals are. This chart shows you why [explained below].
There are a ton of ways to increase the intensity of your lifting (see here and here) but almost all of them involve dancing around with “failure” on your set. There are two basic forms of failure I’ll talk about today: form failure and muscular failure.
Form Failure
Think of form failure as the point where you are no longer able to do the movement with good form. Good form means proper alignment, proper tempo, using the muscle rather than momentum (unless it is a power movement).
This is also very mental – when you “think” you can’t do another one properly, you are probably right. In my experience though, most people fail mentally before they should (but I won’t describe mental failure here).
Here’s an example. Let’s say you are lifting alone. Your target rep count would be 8 for this exercise. You just finished your 7th rep and you are feeling a little shaky but confident you can get one more done safely. So you start the movement. But at the bottom of the move you realize you can’t finish it without sacrificing form. At that point, you’ve reached form failure.
Muscular Failure
Muscular failure is when you (more…)
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Guest article by Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.burnthefat.com
Not long ago, one of the members of my health club poked her head in my office for some advice. Linda was a 46 year old mother of two, and she had been a member for over a year. She had been working out sporadically, with (not surprisingly), sporadic results. On that particular day, she seemed to have enthusiasm and a twinkle in her eye that I hadn’t seen before.
“I want to enter a before and after fitness contest called the “12 week body transformation challenge.” I could win money and prizes and even get my picture in a magazine.”
“I want to lose THIS”, she continued, as she grabbed the body fat on her stomach. “Do you think it’s a good idea?”
Linda was not “obese,” she just had the typical “moderate roll” of abdominal body fat and a little bit of thigh/hip fat that many forty-something females struggle with.
“I think it’s a great idea,” I reassured her. “Competitions are great for motivation. When you have a deadline and you dangle a “carrot” like that prize money in front of you, it can keep you focused and more motivated than ever.”
Linda was eager and rarin’ to go. “Will you help me? I have this enrollment kit and I need my body fat measured.”
“No problem,” I said as I pulled out my Skyndex fat caliper, which is used to measure body fat percentage with a “pinch an inch” test.
When I finished, I read the results to her from the caliper display: “Twenty-seven percent. Room for improvement, but not bad; it’s about average for your age group.”
She wasn’t overjoyed at being ‘average’. “Yeah, but it’s not good either. Look at THIS,” she complained as again she grabbed a handful of stomach fat. “I want to get my body fat down to 19%, I heard that was a good body fat level.”
I agreed that 19% was a great goal, but told her it would take a lot of work because average fat loss is usually about a half a percent a week, or six percent in twelve weeks. Her goal, to lose eight percent in twelve weeks was ambitious.
She smiled and insisted, “I’m a hard worker. I can do it”
Indeed she was and indeed she did. She was a machine! Not only did she never miss a day in the gym, she trained HARD. Whenever I left my office and took a stroll through the gym, she was up there pumping away with everything she had. She told me her diet was the strictest it had ever been in her life and she didn’t cheat at all. I believed her, and it started to show, quickly.
Each week she popped into my office to have her body fat measured again, and each week it went down, down, down. Consistently she lost three quarters of a percent per week – well above the average rate of fat loss – and on two separate occasions, I recall her losing a full one percent body fat in just seven days.
Someone conservative might have said she was overtraining, but when we weighed her and calculated her lean body mass, we saw that she hadn’t lost ANY muscle – only fat. Her results were simply exceptional!
She was ecstatic, and needless to say, her success bred more success and she kept after it like a hungry tiger for the full twelve weeks.
On week twelve, day seven, she showed up in my office for her final weigh-in and body fat measurement. She was wearing a pair of formerly tight blue jeans and they were FALLING OFF her!
“Look, look, look,” she repeated giddily as she tugged at her waistband, which was now several inches too large.
As I took her body fat, I have to say, I was impressed. She hadn’t just lost a little fat, she was “RIPPED!”
During week twelve she dropped from 18% to 17% body fat, for a grand total of 10% body fat lost in three months. She surpassed her goal of 19% by two percent. I was now even more impressed, because not many people lose that much body fat in three months.
You should have seen her! She started jumping up and down for joy like she was on a pogo stick! She was beaming… grinning from ear to ear! She practically knocked me over as she jumped up and gave me a hug – “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
“Don’t thank me,” I said, “You did it, I just measured your body fat.”
She thanked me again anyway and then said she had to go have her “after” pictures taken.
Then something very, very strange happened. She stopped coming to the gym. Her “disappearance” was so abrupt, I was worried and I called her. She never picked up, so I just left messages.
No return phone call.
It was about four months later when I finally saw Linda again. The giddy smile was gone, replaced with a sullen face, a droopy posture and a big sigh when I said hello and asked where she’d been.
“I stopped working out after the contest… and I didn’t even win.”
“You looked like a winner to me, no matter what place you came in” I insisted, “but why did you stop, you were doing so well!”
“I don’t know, I blew my diet and then just completely lost my motivation. Now look at me, my weight is (more…)
Continue reading about Health And Fitness Is Not A 12-Week Program
Last month I shared with you some tips for lunchtime workouts. Now I’ve got an article from Mike Geary with a totally different take on how to squeeze fitness into a busy day! This is unusual, but he gives LOTS of details in this article (it’s longer than he usually writes). Enjoy (and post comments!).
by Mike Geary, Certified Nutrition Specialist, Certified Personal Trainer
Warning: this style of workout is WAY different than anything you’ve ever tried before and may result in a dramatically leaner, stronger body so that your friends no longer recognize you in a matter of weeks!
Alright, I exaggerated about your friends recognizing you, but this workout is still great for busy people that always use the excuse that they don’t have time to go to the gym, or even for the normal gym rat to try out for a few weeks to break out of a plateau.
Please keep an open-mind and don’t worry so much about what other people think, because this is quite different and you may get some funny looks, but you’ll get the last laugh with your new rock hard body! To be honest, most people are too self conscious to try something like this. If that’s the case for you, then that’s your loss.
Here’s how it works (these workouts can be done at home or even in your office):
Instead of doing your traditional workouts of going to the gym 3-4 times a week and doing your normal weight training and cardio routines for 45 miutes to an hour at a shot… with this program, you will be working out for just a couple minutes at a time, several times throughout each day, 5 days/week.
The program will consist of only (more…)
Continue reading about Time-Crunched Workouts: Quick Exercises to do at Home or the Office
