1. Preparation
Like in anything you’ll do in your life, preparation is always a good step, physically and psychologically. Confidence is a huge factor in how you’ll be able to accomplish the task that’s awaiting you.

Resume: Eat enough, try to avoid fast food at all cost, eat correctly (not too much), drink plenty of water (8 x 8 oz).

2. Daily Routine
The daily routine will make sure you get into a good physical cycle by keeping you working each and every day. Cardio activities such as jogging or rope-jumping will help you burn the fat and will also improve your heart muscle. If you’re looking to burn fat, you should do low intensity cardio which means you jog at 65%-75% of your maximum heart beat for the longest period of time. You should know that dropping 2-3 pounds max/per week is safe and higher will cause loose skin.

Resume: Warm up, cardio, Cooling down.

3. The Workout
Working on every muscle separately is a great way to improve your fitness. Not only will it improve your health in general but it will allow you to perform a lot better in the sports you do.

Resume: The 5 BX method will get you to work muscle everyone wants to be in shape: pectorals, abs, legs and arms. The exercises will take you less than 11 minutes to accomplish and are done in a specific order which will produce the best results. (no warm up needed as it is part of the work out)

4. The Sport
The sport is the best way to enjoy your strenght and agility while having fun at the same time. Sports also improve our fitness in many way and increase our coordination.

Resume: Do a bit of cardio to warm yourself, some stretching (specifically dynamic movements related to the sport) and cool down at the end of your session. Don’t forget to drink water before and after, water in-between can result in cramps.

5. Stretching: all covered
Stretching is an important part of any physical activity. You do not want your muscle to rip while performing your activities. Stretching allows you to improve the range of your movements and also prepares your body to physical performances.

Resume: Stretch should not fatigue you. Try doing the morning routine if you’re looking to improve your flexibility.

6. Supplements
Since only eating cannot provide all the nutrients our body need, we have to look somewhere else for that amount we carve in. Post-workout shakes are the best method to get your body back in shape after and hard and long period of work.

Resume: Post-workout shakes will give your body the nutrients he needs to repair the micro-tears in your muscles. As proteins is the main ingredient to muscle reparation and growth, a shake containing an high amount of it will give your body more than enough to repair and grow (exactly what we’re looking for).

Stay motivated

Our mind control everything about us. Staying motivated is the most important step to your workout and your sport since it will keep you doing it. Find ways to enjoy these activities and what is their return into your life. Logging your progress is a great way to keep you motivated especially in times where you think you’re going nowhere. Look back at your log each time you feel no more confident about yourself and you’ll see that results are still showing up.

Conclusion

The program comes to an end. I hope you’ve enjoyed the information I gave you through the whole 7 days and that you will continue to work with your body because it is the only thing we’ll own until our death so we must take care of it. Physical health will ameliorate your life in many way and will result in a more interesting lifestyle. Enjoy it.

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

STRETCHING: ALL COVERED

Once again, I’d recommand reading Tricks Tutorial Developing flexibility guide. If you have a lot of time on your hands, you could also read STRETCHING AND FLEXIBILITY: Everything you never wanted to know by Brad Appleton. Here’s I’ll be discussing about the important step of a good stretching session.

1. Stretching should not get you exausted. If you’re getting exausted, you’re putting too much strenght in it and it is not good because it will reduce your range of motion and will set your nervous system alert at this range, thus reducing your flexibility which isn’t what you’re looking for.
2. I’d suggest you do the morning routine they suggest on Tricks Tutorial as flexibility exercises are easier when you just woke up.
3. Like I’ve said many times, stretchings are to be perform at two different moment in your training session or your sport. At the beginning in the warm up session and at the end in the cooling down session. Each kind of stretching will provide specific advantages to your activities as the pre-session is used to prepare the muscles to perform and the post-session is used to make sure the muscle will recover faster from their hard work.

The WHYs of STRECHING

1. Static stretches help to speed up your recovery
2. Stretching reduce the possibilities of getting easily injured during and after your physical activities.
3. Stretching helps you recover from injuries faster
4. Dynamic stretching is a good warm up method as it involves movements, but don’t forget to do cardio also.

See you tomorrow for day 6.

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

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

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

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

2. Calisthenic (dynamic) active stretches

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.

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
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

From this serie of article you’ll learn…

• What is the perfect nutrition and diet to follow.
• How to be able to keep up with exercising and why many stop doing it.
• How you should perform your exercises. The magical order to gain better results than your average way of doing it.
• The workout which gives you the best results to lose OR gain weight.
• Tips on how to perform your sport(s).
• The magic of stretching.
• Which supplements to take and what they will help you to achieve.

See you on June 26 for the first article of this amazing serie.

Updates: This serie is now over. You can now take a look at each day:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7