Workout Routines

Before we start lets talk a little bit more about where to work out and why.  At home or in the small neighborhood gym you may not have the elaborate equipment but you also won’t have that unbearably bubbly employee scanning your membership card and asking if you are interested in the latest muscle drink for only $9.99.
One thing to remember is there is zero difference between a home or small neighborhood gym and the membership mega-center.
Regardless of where you work out your muscles respond to aerobic and weight training in exactly the same way. They grow and build no matter where you are. The process we are speaking about is called hypertrophy.  Your muscle cells (called fibers) begin to enlarge in order to lift the increasing load you are putting upon them. These muscles have no idea if you are in the garage working out or an elaborate gym. They do one thing and one thing only. They grow!
( For all you workout freaks who think this is too basic, relax, I want to build the process for everyone right now)

Lets start with resistance training and later we will move into aerobics. In my view they are both important but I feel that resistance training leads the way. Resistance Training is a term commonly used to describe the process of overloading a particular muscle. Overloading simply means you are making a group of muscles do more work than they are used to and forcing them to make adaptians. Simply put, you are lifting weights that are heavy enough to make a particular lift hard to do.

Resistance Training must cause your muscles to adapt to new challenges so they continually grow. You must slowly and steadily work with more weight over time to encourage growth and build resulting strength. This is a very gradual process, your muscles adapt best when you add a little weight at a time. Never lift weight that is so heavy you are uncomfortable with it.  On the other hand never stay with the same weights over a long period of time because you are too comfortable with it. People who stay in Stage #1 (You remember that group!) usually lift the same light weights for a long period of time and are disappointed with the results or they progress too rapidly and injure themselves. Either way they get discouraged and quit.

The reason your training must be gradual and slowly moving forward is because rest is as big a factor as the actual weight lifting. The biggest secret in this whole endeavor is that your muscles don’t get bigger when you are training, they get bigger when you are resting.  Muscle training is a constant process of tearing it down and building it up. The “tearing it down” is the workout and the “building it up” is the rest period.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating laying on the couch all day after a chest and back workout the day before.  What I’m saying is you give that particular muscle group a rest while you work on another. My particular workout is chest, back and arms one day and shoulders, legs and waist the next. (We’ll get in to that later, I don’t want to get ahead of myself.)

What we are talking about here is a term called specificity. It’s relatively simple.  I mean we all know your biceps won’t get bigger because you were doing calf raises. You must specifically target a muscle group to cause it to grow. While we are at it we should explain this is totally different when it comes to fat loss.  Your body sheds fat where it is genetically programmed to do so.  You can’t target a specific area for fat loss, no matter what anyone tells you. Muscle growth is different, you can generally choose the part of the body you wish to develop.