8/24/08

Picking The Best Bang For Your Buck Exercises

Sometimes I guess I take for granted what I know about training and assume people that do train with weights (I don't know much about jogging since I think it sucks) should know more. After all, this is the information age. That's probably a big part of the problem though. To much garbage information out there.

When it comes to weight training, you need to pick the right exercises that are going to give you the biggest return on your investment. It really doesn't matter much if your goals are to build muscle, gain strength, or lose body fat. Take the right tool out of the tool box that will do the best job.

It drives me crazy when I see someone paying a personal trainer and the trainer has them sitting on machines attempting to isolate muscles with pathetic poundage due to poor leverage.

If you want results, and you want them fast, you need to utilize the big, compound exercises that require lots of muscles to perform the exercise.

For example:

Squats over leg extensions
Dips over tricep kickbacks
Barbell curls over concentration curls
Barbell or Dumbbell Bench Press over flyes

I could go on forever.

One thing that makes it easy is think of the amount of weight you can lift in each exercise. Most of the time, the amount of weight you can lift will be greater with the better lift.

Nobody should be married to the gym and if you're spending more than an hour there you're either socializing or need a little help with your training.

Like I mentioned in some older posts, training longer than one hour becomes counter-productive from a hormonal stand point. Cortisol, one of your body's stress hormones is SO elevated and your androgens have already declined to the point of no return.

Get in, hit it hard, and get out and start the recovery process... eating clean food with high nutritional value and get plenty of rest.

Now all we need to discuss is loading parameters. How many sets, reps, and rest to take.
I cover that in the next post.

Stay Focused,
Chris Grayson