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Fitness

Starting A Weight Lifting Program

by Dave on March 4, 2010

As this podcast deals with exercise, let me remind you to contact your doctor before starting an exercise program. This information is for entertainment purposes only as I am “just a dude” in the basement trying to lose weight like you.

I recently decided that as much as I HATE weight lifting, it is a necessary evil. However, once again knowledge comes into play here.

1. It’s very hard (if not impossible) to gain muscle and lose weight. This means I’m going to need to be patient.

2. In the long run, I will have a better “butter burning machine” and be able to eat MORE and have it no effect my weight (muscle burns more calories than fat).

3. You do not burn as many calories weight lifting (as in doing the exercise) as you do on a treadmill, but from different reports I’ve read you burn more calories resting when you have more muscle. So you may burn more calories after your exercise when you weight lift.

I wasn’t sure how much weight to lift, and how many reps to do. I found this on dummmies.com (they have all sorts of fitness books).

“You can’t design a strength-training (or weight-training) program without knowing two terms: rep and set. Rep (repetition) is one complete motion of an exercise. A set is a group of consecutive repetitions. For example, you can say, “I did two sets of ten reps on the chest press.” This means that you did ten consecutive chest presses, rested, and then did another ten chest presses.

How many reps should I do?
The number of reps you should do depends on where you are in your training (new, experienced, coming back from a long layoff) and your goals. To become as strong and as big as your body type will allow, do fewer than 8 or 10 reps per set. To tone your muscles and develop the type of strength you need for everyday life — moving furniture or shoveling snow — aim for 10 to 12 repetitions. Doing dozens of reps with ultralight weights (weights you can barely even feel) doesn’t bring good results of any kind, because you’re not stressing your muscles enough.

No matter how many repetitions you do, always use a heavy enough weight so that the last rep is a struggle, but not such a struggle that you compromise good form. After about a month of strength training, you may want to go to muscular failure (that is, your last repetition is so difficult that you can’t squeeze out one more).

If you have a few different goals in mind, you can mix and match the number of reps you do per workout. If you want to get bigger and stronger and also improve the endurance of those muscles, you can do a heavy workout one day and a lighter workout the next time out. Keep track of how you feel; your body may respond better to one type of training than another.

Be sure to adjust the amount of weight you use for each exercise. In general, use more weight to work larger muscles like your thighs, chest, and upper back, and use less weight to exercise your shoulders, arms, and abdominals. But even when doing different exercises for the same muscle group, you’re likely to need a variety of weights. For example, you typically can handle more weight on the flat chest-press machine than you can on the incline chest-press machine.

Write down how much weight you lift for each exercise so that next time around, you don’t have to waste time experimenting all over again. But don’t lock yourself into lifting a certain amount of weight every time. Everyone feels stronger on some days than on others.

(This is one of the reasons I loved using the vidaone software – Dave).

How many sets should I do for each muscle group?
There’s no simple answer. Several studies show that doing one set per muscle builds just as much strength as doing three sets per muscle, at least for the first three or four months of training. If you’re a novice or if you’re starting again after a layoff, begin with one set of 10 to 12 repetitions, and make sure your last rep feels challenging. You should feel like you have control of the weight but if you did one more rep, you may not be able to make it all the way.

Most people can increase their initial weights after two to four weeks of training; at that point, consider adding a second or even third set for each muscle group. However, if your goal is simply to build enough strength for good health, one challenging set may be sufficient.

How Much Weight to Lift
If you are using weight training to increase your strength, you need to lift an amount of weight that stresses your muscles. This should be enough weight so that you feel challenged as you’re lifting, and so that the last rep (repetition) is difficult to complete — difficult, but still possible and still using good form.

After about age 30, you lose bone mass for the rest of your life. But don’t let that frighten you, because there is a solution. To maintain bone density (that is, to build enough bone density to offset the loss of bone density that occurs as you age), you need to perform weight-bearing exercise.”

How Long To Weight In Between Sets?
According to about.com “Higher intensity (i.e., when lifting heavy) exercise requires a longer rest. When lifting to fatigue, it takes an average of 2 to 5 minutes for your muscles to rest for the next set. When using lighter weight and more repetitions, it takes between 30 seconds and 1 minute for your muscles to rest.”

Some of this information is paraphrased from the fitness for dummies book.

Listener Feedback

Mio Strapless Heart Rate Monitor

Dmed on the forums said this about “Whats working for them.” What’s working is using a Mio strapless heart rate monitor.
This is just a watch. No chest strap. YEAH! It gives you your heart rate when you hold with your thumb and index finger. It takes just a few seconds and when it displays it automatically shows your percentage of maximum heart rate. It has several timers on it. Even though I work out on an elliptical, I started using the double timer on the watch to do my workout. That way I don’t have to break my intervals into full minutes. Therefore, I can slowly increase the running part of my interval without jumping a full minute. It, also, counts calories burned while I use the timers. This has really allowed me to gradually improve my workout. For some reason I have improved my workout alot since I started using the mio watch. It also has a recovery check on it, which I was using a lot when I first got the mio.

For more information check out mio heart rate monitors at amazon.com

Exercising off Your Food For the Day

David_Sydney from the forums said,
“I know I can’t control my eating, but I can count my calories.Confused

I exercise down to my weight loss calorie intake each night. Depending on my motivation I burn anywhere between 1,000-3,000 calories a session.

When I am disciplined I have been losing around 1.5kg a week. A few years ago I tried not eating/meal replacement and I found that although when I stuck to the plan I lost weight, most of the time I spent trying to get onto the ‘fast’ side I failed, felt guilty, overate and was not motivated/did not have the energy to exercise and put on weight in off weeks.

It’s great – I don’t feel guilty when I eat, I can see the purpose of the exercise, and the pain of the exercise makes me think twice before I overeat.Cool”

My reply is, “What happens if something happens and you don’t make it to the gym?” Also different experts have advised not exercising over 90 minutes (Which I’m assuming you do to burn off 1-3,000 calories). Be careful with this plan, you could find some pitfalls.

As always consult your doctor before beginning an exercise program.

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Teach Yourself to Be Healthy

by Dave on February 13, 2010

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Many of you know that I am a technical trainer. I’ve been teaching people about technology for over 20 years. From time to time you have to make classes and courses from scratch. There is a process used to develop and implement a new class it’s called the ADDIE approach and while it works for building a new course, it can also be used in designing a new healthier lifestyle.

Analysis Phase
In the analysis phase, the instructional problem is clarified, the instructional goals and objectives are established and the learning environment and learner’s existing knowledge and skills are identified. Below are some of the questions that are addressed during the analysis phase:

• Who are the learners and what are their characteristics? (what are our eating habits)
• What is the new behavioral outcome? (what do we want to weigh eventually)
• What types of learning constraints exist? (what are our obstacles)
• What are the delivery options? (what options do we have in terms of packing lunches, exercising).
• What is the timeline for project completion? (when do we want to hit our target goal)

If we put this into a healthy lifestyle area we can say this is where we can weigh ourselves, measure ourselves, write down what we eat and see just how many calories we are eating. Write down any exercise we do and see how many calories we burn.

Design Phase
The design phase deals with learning objectives, assessment instruments, exercises, content, subject matter analysis, lesson planning and media selection. The design phase should be systematic and specific. Systematic means a logical, orderly method of identifying, developing and evaluating a set of planned strategies targeted for attaining the project’s goals. Specific means each element of the instructional design plan needs to be executed with attention to details.

These are steps involved in design phase:
1. Document the project’s instructional, visual and technical design strategy
2. Apply instructional strategies according to the intended behavioral outcomes by domain (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor).

In a healthy world, we are answering the question “How” are we going to get healthy? What is our strategy. We need to be specific such as “Exercise for 45 minutes 4 times a day.” If we wanted to get more specific we could say “burn 1200 calories through exercise.” We can say “We will pack our lunch and place it in a lunch box that will keep it cool so I do not need to rely on a refrigerator.” I will cook food on Sunday, and freeze it in small packages for the rest of the week.

Development Phase
The development phase is where instructional designers and developers create and assemble the content assets that were blueprinted in the design phase. In this phase, storyboards and graphics are designed. If elearning is involved, programmers develop and/or integrate technologies. Testers perform debugging procedures. The project is reviewed and revised according to the feedback received.

This is where put the pieces into place. Do you need a heart rate monitor? Are you going to use Workout DVDs because a gym membership is not in the budget? We are assembling out assets. Do we have a friend who can be our “workout buddy”? Do we have some music picked out that we can exercise to?

Implementation Phase
During the implementation phase, a procedure for training the facilitators and the learners is developed. The facilitators’ training should cover the course curriculum, learning outcomes, method of delivery, and testing procedures. Preparation of the learners includes training them on new tools (software or hardware) and student registration.

This is where we put our “healthy plan” it into place. All the planning and thinking ahead have lead to the steps you are now taking. If you follow the “Lesson Plan” you designed, you should achieve your “objective” and become healthier.

Evaluation Phase
The evaluation phase consists typically of surveys (as you exit the class) or test which show you know the knowledge. Realize if the majority of a class fails on a certain subject it may not be the students, it may be the class design. As a trainer there are times when I make notes in class, “Students don’t have same version of software as instructor,” and I know later go back and fix this. For you it might be “Take the Don Henley out of the workout music playlist.” An objective is a skill we want students to showcase outside of the classroom. This means we know they understand. If not, we go back and tweak. So you might find out that working out first thing in the morning is too much of a burden with you and the kids. This either means you get up earlier, or move exercise to another time. You evaluate, and tweak.
Tweaking is looking at your objectives (losing weight, etc something that can be measured, viewed) and identifying what didn’t work, and coming up with a new design that needs developed and implemented.
Then once it’s implemented you know what you do? That’s right evaluate? Is it working? Good keep doing it. If it’s not, tweak and repeat.

Analyze
Design
Develop
Implement
Evaluate

Try it. I bet you get an “A.”

Workout Music Track
It is hard to stay in your chair when you listen to the class “It takes two” from Rob Base

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Lessons From Super Bowl 44

by Dave on February 9, 2010

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Last weekend was the Super Bowl here in the states. The New Orleans Saints took on the Indianapolis colts. While I realize that people “across the pond” may not follow American Football, there are some things we can learn and take inspiration from.

New Orleans was not favored to win. When asked about their victory, quarterback and Super Bowl MVP Drew Breeze stated, “We believed in ourselves.” We can learn that even when we are “under dogs” against food, maybe it has beaten us in the past, the first step of victory is believing in ourselves.

New Orleans was down by 10 points at one point early in the game. However, another key to their victory is when they were faced with a challenge they did not panic, and more importantly they did not give up. They kept with their game plan.

They acted differently. The turning point of the game is when they executed an onside kick to start off the second half. This had never been done this early in a super bowl. When we decide to start exercising, our body may go “Hey wait! What is this? This hasn’t happened in a long time.” If we execute it successfully, it will deliver results. Yes exercising will be different than our current lifestyle.

Tracy Porter intercepted a pass in the fourth quarter that sealed their victory. When asked about it on the Jim Rome show he stated that he had studied their offense and had a good idea how the team was going to react. He said he knew that if one of the other players did this, that he would jump up and intercept the ball. Tracy has knowledge of his opponent. He didn’t just have knowledge, he put his knowledge into action and that is what clinched their victory.

So you may feel like an under dog in your battle of weight loss. You may have bad days – don’t panic. Learn from your mistakes and try to avoid repeating them in the future. You need to act differently. You can’t keep doing what you’ve been doing that got you out of shape. Lastly, you need to know your opponent. Fill your head with knowledge and then act on that knowledge to clinch you success in your battle of weight loss.