EXERCISE TIPS

                                      EXERCISES TIPS

1. Lift More Weights

“Cardio is not the best way to get lean if you have limited exercise time. Intensive weight training will always win out if you can only get to the gym three times a week.
The more often and the harder you weight train the better, because resistance training is the key exercise modality that improves insulin sensitivity (which regulates muscle growth and fat storage) and your body’s ability to handle carbohydrates (to minimise fat storage).”

2. Break down your goals

“If you have a 12-week goal, break it down into bite-sized weekly chunks. Hitting small milestones on your way to big ones will raise your dopamine levels and keep you focused on the long-term goal.”

3. Be consistent

“We all need to remember that the body doesn’t stay in some sort of halfway house where it just stays the same: we are either anabolic (building up) or we are catabolic (breaking down).


There is no middle ground here. The inconsistent trainee always becomes the unsuccessful trainee.”

4. Mix it up

“If you do want to do cardio for fat loss and or fitness, mixing it up a lot will help prevent your body entering a more efficient, less metabolism-boosting mode. Different machines, difference paces, uphill, downhill… the options are endless and infinitely better for both mind and body than trying to grind away at the same level.”

5. Exert pressure on yourself

“I am a huge fan of using every mental trick in the book to help me achieve my goals. My own personal favourite is to imagine that I am doing a specific task (that is getting hard and I feel like capitulating on) for my children.

I visualise their faces in front of me and if I compromise on my efforts in the slightest I will be letting them down.”

6. Go hard

“Only by forcing your body to a place that it doesn’t want to go to will it make a positive adaptation, in this case by getting stronger, fitter and laying down new muscle tissue. If you want to go from gym zero to gym hero your resistance training focus should be all about placing maximum stress on your muscle fibres in order to stimulate the most powerful adaptive hypertrophy response. Or in plain English – muscle growth.”

7. Stretch and squeeze every rep

“We squeeze or shorten the muscle as we flex with what is referred to as a positive or concentric contraction, best envisaged as raising the weight. We stretch of lengthen the muscle as we lower the weight in what is referred to as a negative or eccentric contraction.

Personal trainer Nick Mitchell
It is imperative that you fully exploit the benefits of both types of muscular contraction in order to maximise your results, which means a forceful squeeze for the positive rep and a controlled and measured stretch as you lower the weight.”

8. Get the right order

“Always perform cardio after your weight training, as the other way around will hinder your lifting performance and limit the fat-burning effectiveness of the cardio: many more fatty acids will be freed up into the bloodstream for energy after weight training than before.”

9. Eat natural

“A good rule of thumb is to only eat food that grows out of the ground or food that once had a face. Alternatively, simply go caveman and think like a hunter-gatherer.

"A good rule of thumb is to only eat food from the ground or that once had a face" CREDIT: MATTHEW MEAD

When you’re looking at something on the shelf, ask yourself if it would have existed 5,000 years ago. If the answer is no, it probably isn’t anything that you should be eating.”

10. Green is good

“Make vegetables the foundation of your diet: every time you sit down to eat half your plate should be covered in a variety of green and fibrous vegetables. If you want to get lean to show off your abs then it’s worth remembering that you’d have to eat half a kilo of asparagus to ingest the same amount of carbs as you get in a single wholemeal pitta bread.”
Your Ultimate Body Transformation Plan: Get Into The Best Shape Of Your Life In Just 12 Weeks (Harper Thorsons) by Nick Mitchell is out now in paperback and on Kindle

NEW

Build Better Abs

Don't work your abdominal muscles every day. "Physiologically, your abs are like any other muscle in your body," says David Pearson, Ph.D., C.S.C.S., an exercise scientist at Ball State University. Train them only 2 or 3 days a week.

Protect Your Neck

Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth when you do crunches. "It will help align your head properly, which helps reduce neck strain," says Michael Mejia, C..S.C.S., Men's Health exercise advisor.

Keep Muscles Limber

If you're under 40, hold your stretches for 30 seconds. If you're over 40, hold them for 60 seconds. As you reach your 40s, your muscles become less pliable, so they need to be stretched longer.

Don't Drop the Ball

To catch a pop fly in the sun, use your glove to shade your eyes. It's bigger than your free hand and puts the leather in perfect position to snag the ball.

Grow Muscle, Save Time

Keep your weight workouts under an hour. After 60 minutes, your body starts producing more of the stress hormone cortisol, which can have a testosterone-blocking, muscle-wasting effect.

Exercise in Order

Use dumbbells, barbells, and machines—in that order. "The smaller, stabilizer muscles you use with dumbbells fatigue before your larger muscle groups," says Charles Staley, a strength coach in Las Vegas.  So progress to machines, which require less help from your smaller muscles, as you grow tired.

Strengthen Your Core

Don't be afraid of situps. We've changed our tune on these, and here's why: Situps increase your range of motion, which makes your abdominals work harder and longer. (Doing crunches on a Swiss ball or with a rolled-up towel under your lower back has a similar effect.) Just avoid situps with anchored feet, which can hurt your lower back.

Test the Bench

Press your thumb into the bench before lifting. "If you can feel the wood, find another bench," says Ken Kinakin, a chiropractor in Canada and founder of the Society of Weight-Training Injury Specialists. Hard benches can cause T4 syndrome—a misalignment of your thoracic spine that affects the nerve function of your arm, weakening it.

Swim Faster

To build speed in swimming, develop your ankle flexibility. Flexible feet will act like flippers and propel you faster through the water. To increase your flipper flex, do this: Sit on the floor with your shoes off. Extend your legs in front of you, heels on the floor. Point your toes straight out as far as possible, then flex them toward your shins as far as you can. Repeat for 1 minute.

Buy Shoes That Fit

Shop for workout shoes late in the day. That's when your feet are the largest. Make sure there's a half inch of space in front of your longest toe, and that you can easily wiggle your toes. Then slip off the shoes and compare them with your bare feet. If each shoe isn't obviously wider and longer than your foot, go half a size bigger.

Kill Your Excuse

If you think you're too busy to exercise, try this experiment: For one day, schedule a time to work out, and then stick to it—even if you can exercise for only 10 minutes. "At the end of the day, ask yourself if you were any less productive than usual," says John Jakicic, Ph.D., an exercise psychologist at the Brown University school of medicine. The answer will probably be no—and your favorite excuse will be gone.

Help Your Forehand

To build forearm strength for tennis and racquetball, crumple newspaper: Lay a newspaper sheet on a flat surface. Start at one corner and crumple it into a ball with your dominant hand for 30 seconds. Repeat with your other hand.

Muscle Up Your Back

When doing lat pulldowns, don't wrap your thumb around the bar. Instead, place it on top, alongside your index finger. This decreases the involvement of your arm muscles, so you'll work your back harder. Works for pullups, too.

Drink A Pint, Get Ripped

If you're a beginner, train to failure—the point at which you absolutely can't do another repetition—then throw back a pint. In a new study, beginners who trained to failure with three sets of six exercises per day then drank a supplement immediately afterward gained over 5 pounds of muscle in just 8 weeks. A pint of 1 percent chocolate milk will provide all the nutrients you need to achieve the same result.

Lose Your Weak Spot

If you don't like an exercise, start doing it. "You're probably avoiding it because you're weak at it," says Mejia.

Overcome Injuries, Build Big Arms

If you hurt your right arm, don't stop exercising your left arm. Researchers at the University of Oklahoma found that people who trained only one arm for 2 weeks managed to increase arm strength in their nonexercising arm up to 10 percent. The reason: Exercising one arm stimulates the muscle nerve fibers in the opposite arm.

Cut Pain, Increase Gain

Count your repetitions backward. When you near the end of the set, you'll think about how many you have left instead of how many you've done.

Turn Heads with Your Legs

Do standing and seated calf raises. You'll get better results. "Your calves are made up of two different muscles, so you have to do the straight-leg and the bent-leg versions of the exercise to hit them both," says Mejia.

Keep Your Stats, See Amazing Results

Test yourself often. Every 4 weeks, measure a variable—waist size, body fat, bench press—that equates to your end goal. "It'll show you the tangible results of your training," says Craig Ballantyne, C.S.C.S., a trainer in Canada. And that translates into motivation.

Kill the Pill

Don't pop a pill after you work out. Researchers at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences found that ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) and acetaminophen (Tylenol) were no more effective than a placebo in relieving postexercise muscle soreness. More important, they say the drugs may actually suppress muscle growth when taken after a workout.

Putt Like a Pro

Roll a golf ball across the carpet to improve your putting. The distance doesn't matter. Just toss it by hand and try to make it stop at a specific target. You'll hone your ability to judge speed and line without even picking up a club.

Blow Off Your Belly

Exhale forcefully at the top of the movement when you do abdominal crunches. It forces your abs to work harder.

Build Big Biceps

Bend your wrists to work your biceps harder. That is, extend them backward slightly—and hold them that way—while you do arm curls.

Heal Faster

Don't exercise when you're sick—unless your symptoms are above the neck. And even then you might do better taking a day off. "Your body will use its resources to heal itself, not build muscle and endurance," says Alwyn Cosgrove, C.S.C.S., a trainer in Santa Clarita, California.

Unfortunately, people tend to under-estimate the role of exercise in health care. Exercise is not just for getting fit; most would be surprised by the range of important health conditions that can be helped by the right type of exercise. Exercise can help millions of people, from babies to the elderly.

It is important to understand that there are many different forms of exercise and you need to use the right approach to get the best results. Sometimes people don’t appreciate this important fact. That is why advice from a physiotherapist can be so useful. Guided by the evidence on PEDro they can help set you up with the specific exercise program that will make a difference to your life.

We searched PEDro (which celebrates its 15th anniversary in October 2014) to find five common health conditions proven by high-quality clinical research to benefit from exercise.

Tip 1: Pelvic floor muscle training improves urinary incontinence in people with stress or any type of urinary incontinence

Exercise is the first-line treatment for urinary incontinence. Urinary incontinence is estimated to affect more than 200 million people worldwide. The best way to improve this is by sticking to specific exercises.

Tip 2: Therapeutic exercise decreases pain and improves function in people with knee osteoarthritis

Exercise has similar effect size as pharmacological treatments in knee osteoarthritis. People with hip osteoarthritis are also likely to benefit from exercise. Over 10% of people over 60 years suffer from osteoarthritis of the knee, with women more likely to be affected than men. Many people could benefit from drug-free treatment that has the same size of effect as medicines, without the same side effects.

Tip 3: Physical training decreases death, breathlessness and fatigue and improves health, quality of life and function in people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

An estimated 64 million people had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease worldwide in 2004. There’s a lot exercise can do to offset the effects of chronic respiratory disease.

Tip 4: Exercise programs decrease the rate of falls and risk of falling for older people living at home

Around the world, 37.3 million falls occur each year that are severe enough to require medical attention. It’s a world-wide problem, particularly among those over 65. Exercise programs are one way to combat the risk. Balance exercise is the most effective.

Tip 5: Early intervention programs for preterm infants reduce motor delay

More than one in ten babies, or 15 million babies a year, are born too soon. Survivors can face a lifetime of disability. Studies show that physiotherapy programs for these babies help them with movement skills.

Patients should consult their physiotherapist or doctor before making any changes to treatment.