Get The Out Of Your Workouts

By Philip Sergey


Ever taken a look around your gym to see what the people around you are doing?

Do you wonder if the workout they are doing will help you reach your own physical goals faster?

Those are a number of questions to contemplate as you continue reading this, but the fact of the matter is there is a 'better ' lift to do than almost all of the lifts that you see folk performing at your gym.

For instance, today a pair in my gymnasium took it upon themselves to do a selection of exercises working their body from head to toes, or that is what they thought.

Their workout began with some dumbbell shoulder shrugs. That exercise targets the trapezius muscles that, if massive enough, might make you look like you haven't got any neck.

On the surface of things that would appear to be a handy exercise to do, but if you dig a little deeper you will find that exercise does little in the way of helping you burn even the most minute of calories.

Let us look at it mathematically. The amount of work done is the same as the force times the distance you're moving that force and the amount of times you are moving that force. As an example, if you were to use 30-pound dumbbells you could move that weight a total of three inches maximum. The trapezius muscles aren't that large so do not have the range that the larger muscle groups do.

So that 30-pound weight moved three inches, 10 times, gives us a number of 9 hundred. The unit of measure at about that point is unimportant.

Now lets take a look at an alternative exercise, the army press. This exercise is done with an Olympic bar pressing it from about your jaw all of the way above your head till your arms about completely extended.

For this exercise we only employed the weight of the bar which is 45-pounds. If you make the motion as if you were performing the exercise you could notice the distance that bar is going to travel is around 24 inches or more depending on your size, and it was done for an overall total of 10 repetitions. So 45-pounds, times 24-inches, times ten repetitions gives us a bunch of 10,800- again the unit of measure is irrelevant. It only becomes important if we were to calculate that number into calories burned.

On the surface, doing the military press was 12 times better than doing a dumbbell shrug, and that was with only the 45-pound bar.

This is just one example of a way to see if you are getting the most out of your exercise session. Many individuals are insensible to some of the exercises that they decide to do and just do anything that comes to mind. You only have so much energy when you hit the gymnasium floor, make it count and put it towards exercises which will give you the bang for you buck.




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