Just when you thought we couldn’t climb any higher…
Let’s be honest with ourselves, we’re getting fatter year after year. With every sugar drink and super-sized soda consumed, we hobble yet another step higher up the fat chain. Staying lean and toned from our workouts becomes more and more of a distant dream.
But climbing up the fat chain represents more than the expanding state we are in. The fat chain not only shows us that we occupy the very top of this top-heavy hierarchy, but it also tells us how we arrived there. The fat chain is also a chain of events that leads us to arrive at the state we are in. It’s a repeating cycle, or a chain reaction that only becomes harder to stop with time.
This is because getting fat isn’t something that “happens” to anybody. Nobody rolls out of bed in the morning to suddenly find themselves overweight. Instead, we slowly climb the chain link by link. Whenever it seems that the top of the chain is reached, we add another link and climb a bit higher.
These tiny links accumulate slowly, day by day, over time. We can add these links in so many ways, but we are hardly conscious of the links we add through what we drink. And most people aren’t aware of the triple hit that our system takes when we drink soft drinks. And even fat-loss types of workouts (such as FatBurnFurnace) can’t overcome these liquid calorie surpluses. (more…)
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If you ask me, calves are probably the most stubborn muscles on the body.
Getting them to grow and take on the shape you want is no easy task. One possible way to help shape your calf muscles is to either point your toes in or out as you do calf raises.
Actually, there’s a bit of disagreement out there as to whether this helps to shape your calves or not. Let’s take a look at both sides of the issue.
Pointing Your Toes
I’ll explain the idea behind pointing your toes on calf raises. It goes something like this: placing more weight on the outside of your foot and onto your little toe causes the muscle opposite of your little toe to do more work. Your little toe is on the outside of your foot, so the outer calf has to do more work.
To accomplish this, get into position for calf raises with your feet facing straight forward. This helps to make sure that your feet are the correct distance apart. Once your feet are in place, rotate your heels outward so that your toes are pointing inward and proceed to do your calf raises as usual. (more…)
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I love the term “resistance progression”.
I mean, really, think about it. Without any resistance, there would be no progression. Whether it’s in the weight room or in our own lives, facing resistance is how we make progress.
And at the very core of this term lies a simple message: if we continue to do things the way we have always done them before, we’ll always continue to see the same results we’ve seen before. New results come with new actions.
Without deviation, progress is not possible
-Frank Zappa
In order to continue our weight lifting progress, we must find ways to increase the resistance placed on our muscles. As promised, here are 10 ways to achieve resistance progression: (more…)
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Weight Lifting 101 is a series of posts for those who are just starting their journey with weight training. If you are thinking about getting started in a gym or training at home, this reading is for you.
For the sake of these postings, I’m going to assume that you have never touched a dumbbell in your entire life. I’m not going to make any guesses about what you do or don’t know, so we will start from the very beginning and build up from the basics. If you are already at the intermediate or advanced levels, stay tuned… more is on the way.
A Time for Change
If you are just getting started, this is a very exciting time! Never again will you experience such a dramatic change in the way you look as in these upcoming months. I say never again because the changes you are about to make should be lifelong changes with principles that you will never abandon.
Thus, you are currently standing at the inflection point in your life. It is this very moment when you can decide to make a change, and the rest of your life can be altered as a result of this decision. Since this is the precise moment that you are changing to a new direction, the following months will show you more results than any other time in your life. After your initial transformation, you will simply continue further and further down this new path that you are starting on today. (more…)
