The Life Plan (38 page)

Warmup

Exercise

Cool-down

Before you begin your resistance training it is important to prepare your body mentally and physically to perform exercise. You should treat warming up as seriously as the workout itself. A proper warmup will not only get you physically and mentally ready to work out, but it also improves your performance significantly. When your muscles are warmed up they will contract more forcefully and relax more quickly, which decreases the risk of overstretching or overstressing your muscle.

A general warmup could be walking on the treadmill, riding a stationary or street bike, or running for three to five minutes, followed by a couple of light sets of your first strength-training exercise. Or you could just do a specific warmup for a particular exercise. For example, before working out on the bench press, you could do two lighter sets with just the bar before performing your actual “working” sets. Or, if you plan to perform a bench press with 75 percent of your 1-rep max, your warmup can be a few sets with 30 to 40 percent of your 1-rep max. This will prepare your body to perform more efficiently at a higher intensity.

The Life Plan Workout is designed with a warmup built in. If you follow the workout as it is designed in Chapter 8, you will not need to do an additional warmup. However, if you want to add an additional resistance training workout to your week, then you must warm up first.

Near the end of a hard set of hamstring curls, you may feel a cramp starting to come on and find that you have to stop the set. These cramps are usually a result of poor conditioning, sluggish blood flow to the muscles, and poor flexibility. Flexibility is a very important aspect of our total conditioning, but most of us choose to ignore it. Tight muscles get much less blood circulating through them than relaxed muscles. In a flexible person, blood moves freely and unimpeded through the exercising muscles, flushing out lactic acid and providing vital oxygen to muscle cells. It is this lack of oxygen combined with high levels of lactic acid that can cause pain and cramping.

If you include stretching exercises as an integral part of your overall conditioning program, you can prevent cramping and delay the development of fatigue. Stretching also helps avoid injury and improves overall performance. Also, be sure you’re conducting your exercises through the full range of motion. This will ensure a good stretch on the eccentric (negative) portion of the movement.

If your hamstrings cramp up, as mine used to, just massage the muscle, stretch it out, and get back to work. As your strength, conditioning, and flexibility improve, these cramps will soon become a thing of the past.

The actual exercise is measured in repetitions and sets. A repetition is one complete movement of a particular exercise. There are three phases of a repetition:

Eccentric contraction—when you are resisting the pull of gravity by not allowing the weight to fall on your chest.

Isometric contraction of the muscle—when the muscle is static and the opposing force (the weight) is not being moved at all.

Concentric contraction—the positive portion of the lift where the muscle shortens to exert force against the weight (for example, when you push the barbell up—against gravity).

The speed—or tempo—at which you perform a repetition is determined by your fitness goals. If you have not been working out consistently in the past, it’s important to increase your muscular endurance before you focus solely on developing increased strength. The Basic Health Workout will focus on endurance, while the two remaining levels will help you achieve both.

For example, if your goal is increased strength, the tempo should be slower to allow the muscle and ligaments enough time under tension to increase in size. A good tempo for this would be 4-2-2, that is, a 4-second count during the eccentric portion, a 2-second count during the isometric portion, and a 2-second count during the concentric portion. For strength gain, a 2-2-2 tempo would be more appropriate.

A number of repetitions performed one after another make up a set. If you are starting at the Basic Health Workout, you will start with endurance training, which has a higher rep range and fewer sets. This helps build muscular endurance and enables the nervous system to learn the correct movements and how to recruit the right muscles during each particular exercise, decreasing the risk of injury.

The general rule is it takes 500 reps of a particular exercise to train your body to perform it correctly. You shouldn’t train to muscle failure until your body has reached the point of total comfort with the exercise. Once you’ve got the form down pat, and your nervous system, joints, and muscle stabilizers are strong enough to keep the weight steady, you can then go to muscle failure. At that point, you can also branch out into other types of training if desired, such as strength training, where the optimal rep range is 6 to 8 repetitions and 3 to 4 sets.

Between sets, you should take a break. In endurance training, the rest period between sets is usually 30 to 60 seconds; in strength training, 2 to 3 minutes.

Intensity refers to the amount of force you should use—that is, how heavy the weight should be. Endurance training uses an intensity of 50 to 70 percent of your 1-rep max (again, each repetition should be at a weight equal to 50 to 70 percent of the maximum amount of weight you can lift on that particular exercise if you do it only one time). Strength training uses 75 to 85 percent of 1-rep max.

Each session should end with a cool-down period, such as walking/running on the treadmill or getting on the stair stepper for five minutes at about 45 to 50 percent of your target heart rate to bring your body back to a resting state. Stretching is an excellent way to cool down. The Life Plan Workout is designed with a cool-down built in. If you follow the workout as it is designed in Chapter 8, you will not need to do an additional cool-down. However, if you want to add an additional resistance training workout to your week, then you must add stretching when you are done.

We tend to perform better when we have someone there to push us. It always helps to have a workout partner, either a friend or a trainer, someone there to motivate you to push yourself a little bit harder than you would by yourself. And, for many resistance training exercises, it’s just not safe to get to muscle failure without someone there to spot you—someone who knows what he or she is doing.

If you are just beginning a resistance training program, it is wise to get your body acclimated by slowly easing into the workout. Start small, finding the exercises that you enjoy and that you will look forward to performing regularly.

There are some simple rules and guidelines you need to follow to maximize your success. First, start with 2 to 3 sets per exercise, 15 to 25 repetitions, and 45- to 90-second rest periods. Each rep should be performed at a slow pace of around 6 seconds.

For example, each of the suggested exercises will look like this:
Barbell Bench Press—100 lbs, 2 to 3 sets of 15 to 25 repetitions, 45- to 90-second rest after each.

The purpose of the higher repetitions and short rest periods is to build your muscular endurance as well as increase the integrity of the joints and connective tissues. Beginners do not possess high levels of neuromuscular control, so it’s important to perform your sets with lighter weights to help increase your ability to stabilize the weights. It is important not to rush the speed of the repetitions. Perform all repetitions at a 3-2-1 tempo (3 seconds eccentric, 2 seconds isometric, 1 second concentric).

A full-body routine is more advantageous during this phase, as the goal is not to increase muscle size and strength but to train your nervous system to interact with your muscular system. You should continue with this phase for four to six weeks.

The following is a sample workout. It is also suitable to perform this routine in a circuit fashion three days a week. Perform one set of each exercise without a break, and then repeat until you have completed three sets of each exercise. Performing a circuit will increase your heart rate and allow you to burn more calories. Just be sure to have at least one day between workouts for recovery. If there is still muscle soreness with one day of rest, wait an extra day to repeat the workout.

Warmup: 5–10 minutes

The circuit

Incline DB press

2–3 sets

25 reps

45–90 sec rest

Tempo 3-2-1

Seated row

2–3 sets

25 reps

45–90 sec rest

Tempo 3-2-1

Overhead dumbbell press

2–3 sets

25 reps

45–90 sec rest

Tempo 3-2-1

Leg press

2–3 sets

25 reps

45–90 sec rest

Tempo 3-2-1

Cool-down stretching: 5–10 minutes

When you feel comfortable at the gym and have completed the Basic Health Workout, you are ready to increase your intensity. During this next phase we will focus more on increasing lean muscle and decreasing body fat percentage. The percentage of your 1-rep max is greater in this phase in order to place enough stress on the muscle tissues to break them down, which forces your body to increase the size of the muscles to adapt to the increased load. If you don’t have a workout partner by now, you may want to seriously look into getting one: It is difficult and dangerous to perform workouts with heavier weights without a spotter.

The protocol for this phase is 3 to 4 sets, 6 to 12 repetitions, and 75 to 85 percent of your 1-rep max, tempo 4-2-1 (4 seconds eccentric, 2 seconds isometric, 1 second concentric), with 30- to 60-second rest periods.

Example: If your lateral pull-downs 1-rep max was 100 pounds, you would do:
Lateral pull-downs—75 to 85 lbs, 3 to 5 sets, 8 to 12 reps, 30- to 60-second rest period between sets.

During this phase a split routine is recommended: On one day you will work on your chest/shoulders/triceps, then the next workout you will concentrate on back/biceps/legs. This phase should be performed four days a week, alternating between workouts twice a week, for at least four weeks.

Warmup: 5–10 minutes

Day One routine

a) Incline press

3–5 sets each exercise

8–12 reps per set

75–85% of max

4–2–1 tempo

60–90 sec rest after each set

b) Machine fly