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7 days to a Better Body : Day 3

Published on June 28, 2006 in Daily, Exercises, Health, Physical, Physical activities and Self-Improvement. 0 Comments

Now onto the most expected part of this 7 days to a Better Body series of articles: The WORKOUT.

The parts of the body that require special attention are the muscles of the shoulder and arms, abdomen and back, legs, and the heart, lungs and blood vessels.

It is recomanded to isolate each muscle you want to train in order to get the maximum results. This mean you should only be using force on a specific area of your body for that particular moment.

As we aren’t going to go to the gymnasium as it’s not everyone that can access one, we’ll use our own body weight to train ourself. Yes, this method is worth doing, Pavel Tsatsouline even wrote a book called The Naked Warrior where he teaches various exercises using your own body weight. You could, for example, do push-ups hand and feet on ground (basic push-ups) and move to handstand push-ups (where all your weight would be applied). When this would be done, you’d be doing one hand push-ups and then increase inclinasion until you do one handstand push-ups.

The basic idea of this method is to increase the % of your body weight that you use in order to increase the difficulty. But for now, we won’t use his method but the 5BX method. If you are a girl, you might want to use the XBX method instead. While The Naked Warrior is simply a shift in difficulty by using more of your own body weight (the more you inclinate your body the more of your body weight you use), the 5BX method increases the difficulty by increasing the difficulty of the form thus making it look like a completely different exercise.

If you haven’t read 7 days to a Better Body : Day 2, you should do that now. There are important steps to do before going for the workout. At this moment you should have already warmed up and have done a bit a cardio.

THE WORKOUT

Both 5BX and XBX method can be downloaded:
5BX – XBX

If you do not want to download this document, you can go to Getting Fit 5BX guide. You’ll find all the images and chart you need to perform the exercises.

A bit of explaination about the workout, the 5BX method
This method is called 5BX because it is composed of 5 Basics Exercises. You’ll be performing these 5 exercises under 11 minutes. The program is divided in levels and charts. There are 12 levels and 6 charts. You begin at D- and you go your way up to A+ and then you can go to the next chart. The difficulties of the exercises increase with each new chart, the 6th chart qualifying you has a champion athelete if you are able to perform them PROPERLY and IN 11 minutes.

Each exercises is to be done under a certain time restriction which will stay the same for each 6 charts: 2 minutes, 1 minutes, 1 minutes, 1 minutes and 6 minutes. Each exercise work on specific muscles, pretty much like when you are working in a gym. Exercise 1 aim to work you abs while exercise 4 aim your pectorals and your arms. Exercise 5 is there to help you to do some cardio work. There you have done 5 exercises under 11 minutes, you have the rest of the day to do whatever you want. Isn’t that wonderful?

Let say we were to do one level each day. To get to the 5th chart we would have to do 4 x 12 = 48 days of exercises. Simple exercises yet they will help you get and maintain an healthy lifestyle if you take your 11 minutes a day to do them properly because form is important.

For those who would like to use machines
You also have the possibility to use machines if you have access to them but I won’t get into details about it because this serie of articles is about getting a healthy lifestyle, not how to shape yourself like a god or whatever extraordinary. Yes, you’ll get great results, results that will improve the way you live and how you feel in general, you’ll have a better cardio, will be able to perform a lot more in physical activities but it’s not about appearance, it’s about feelings. You will be confident that you can perform physical activities even though you did not in the past.

General advice to those who does use machines to do their workout: You should be exercising 3 times per week, generally monday, wednesday and friday. You MUST ABSOLUTELY give yourself time to recover in order to not overwork your muscle and so that you get the benefits of your workout. On your day off, you’ll still be invited to do cardio activities because those are always beneficial.

I can’t comment about specific exercises you should do because everyone is different and everyone has different goals: some want to lose weight, some want to gain weight, gain muscle mass, work their arms, work their legs, work their whole body, get a 6-pack abs (which is often not showing because of non-proper nutrition, too high Body Fat %), etc.

You’re now done with the workout. You should now proceed to the cooling down step in order to get better recovery from this session.

See you tomorrow for day 4.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

7 days to a Better Body : Day 2

Published on June 27, 2006 in Daily, Exercises, Health, Physical and Physical activities. 0 Comments

OK, now onto day 2. Today, we’re going to discuss about the basic routine you’ll have to do in order to keep yourself “top shape”. A daily routine consist of 4 important points: warm up, cardio, cooling down and logging. Let’s get into detail for each of these point.

THE DAILY ROUTINE

WARM UP
This step is important in order to activate your body and prepare it for intense workout. It helps to increase blood flow and warm up the muscle. If you don’t warm up, it’s possible that during your workout you could strain, pull or tear your muscle which isn’t good.

When you’ve warmed up, your muscle will be more apt to extreme conditions but this doesn’t mean you should attempt doing them. This will just prevent from any accident to occur if you weren’t warmed up. Warm up is used to increase the intensity of your physical activity because you do not want to jump from none to an extreme one.

The benefits of the warm up are numerous: higher effectiveness of your workout, higher muscle temperature which allows better elasticity and extensibility and increase of the heart rate.

A warm up could be:

  1. Jogging or jump-rope

    2. This stage will get your heart rate up and will increase your body temperature.

  2. Calisthenic (dynamic) active stretches

    3. This stage prepares your body to do various movements. You should get your muscle to work on their full range. Press-ups, lunges and squat thrusts are good for this.

  3. Sport-related exercise.

    4. This stage involve repeating the same movement in order to heat specific areas which are used a lot in the sport you practice. If for example you play soccer, you’d prepare your kick by kicking the ball back and forth to a partner.

CARDIO
In this part you have the choice between running or biking. You can also do specific training such as Air Alert 3 (AA3) or High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).

If you’re on a day were you practice your sport, this would be the moment you’d be playing your game or doing whatever the sport is. Your body is now ready to accomplish what you want him to. If you haven’t been warmed up to swim, you might have some trouble at the beginning to feel great in the water. If you have warmed up, swimming benefits will be at their maximums.

COOLING DOWN
The cooling down step is important because it will help your body to remove the lactic acid waste created by the exercise. When you feel sore after exercising, this is most likely because you didn’t took the time to cool down. Stopping suddenly to do an intense activity will leave this acid in your muscle and this is why it hurts. The idea here is to slowly reduce the intensity of your sport. Say you’ve been running for a while, now start jogging, then walk. Then you can stop.

Once again, you’ll be performing stretching, but this time static active and static passive stretching. The goal of this type of stretching is to improve and facilitate your flexibility and the muscle will be quite warm at the moment. It will at the same time help your to relax as there’s no more cardiovascular activities going on.

KEEP TRACK (DAILY LOG)
This is part of day one idea. In order to keep you motivated, you must absolutely log your progress to see them increase. This will push you to do even more as you see you can.

Your log should contain:

  1. The date
  2. Your weight
  3. The exercice name
      4. If it’s in sets

    1. The number of repetitions in each set
    2. The difficulty level of the exercise
      If it’s on a period of time

    1. The lenght of the period
    2. The difficulty level of the exercise
  4. How you felt at the beginning of the workout
  5. How you felt at the end of the workout

I generally leave a mark beside the exercise I feel I can do more than what I’ve done that day. This way I know that tomorrow I’ll be doing more than what’s written there.

Here’s an example of an Excel sheet that would contain this information. Log example
It’s up to you to design your own if you don’t like this one.

Resume

WARM UP: Jogging or jump-rope, dynamic active stretching, sport related exercise.
CARDIO: Jogging or AA3 or HIIT or biking.
COOLING DOWN: Slow down the activity, static active and passive stretching.
LOGGING: Log your progress.

For stretching examples, I recommand Tricks Tutorial Developing flexibility. (Contain images)

A daily routine is important as it helps you keep the flow going on. When it’s installed, it’s a really good thing. When you’ll see the results, you’ll just want to keep going.

See you tomorrow for day 3.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7