Fitness Tips

For Fitness Try These 10 Powerful Fitness Tips

Most people think that if fitness is your goal, you must go to the gym. This is not necessarily the case. It is not always about how you look; it is not always about how you eat, for, having a healthy and fit body has many components.

Working out in the gym has many advantages for while there, your activities will be monitored, controlled and measured.

1. If you do work-outs in the gym, keep your weight work-outs to under one-hour sessions. Research has shown that after 60 minutes of work, your body begins to produce more of the stress hormone cortisol which can have muscle-wasting effects.

2. Lift light weights fast to build the strength of your muscles. Use dumbbells, barbells and machines in that specific order in your workouts. The smaller weight that you use (dumbbell) will cause muscles to suffer fatigue before your larger muscles when, at which stage, your progress to machines will require much less work and involvement from you as you grow more and more tired.

3. Sit-ups are very important. They increase your range of motion which make your abdominal muscles work harder and longer. You must at all cost avoid sit-ups with anchored feet for doing it this way can hurt your lower back.

4. When shopping for workout shoes, do so late in the day. Research has shown that at that time of the day, your feet are at their largest. You must make certain that there is at least some space in front of your longest toe and that you can easily wiggle that toe.

5. If during your workouts you do hurt your right arm, do not stop exercising your left arm. It has been shown that people who train only one arm for two weeks manage to increase the strengths in their non- exercising arm by up to 10%. The reasoning here is that exercising one arm stimulates the muscle and nerve fibres in the opposite arm.

6. This tip has strong impact on the way you accept the task that you are working on. When you're counting repetitions, do it backwards. By doing so, you will set-up positive motivations in your head where you would begin to think about how many you have left to do instead of how many you have done. By doing it this way, you will certainly want to complete each cycle.

7. Of course accidents do happen. During any period of work-outs when you might feel pain, there is one thing you must never do. Never take pain medication after your workout, for painkillers like Ibuprofen, Tylenol and other over-the-counter medications were no more effective than a placebo in relieving post- exercise muscle soreness. More importantly, research showed that such drugs may suppress muscle growth when taken after a workout.

8. Don't exercise when you're ill. By so doing you will be conserving and directing your body's healing resources towards health and healing and not towards building muscles and endurance.

9. If you had a hard workout, you can recover much faster from it by lightly exercising the same muscles the following day. Use a light weight which will deliver more blood and nutrients into your muscles causing them to repair faster.

10. If you've had a muscle injury, begin exercising again as soon as you possibly can. Try a few minutes of low intensity activities to test yourself and then go where your body takes you. If there is accompanying pain, stop immediately. You can then put an ice-pack on the area and try the activity the following day.

Follow this mantra: focus on small steps daily not on the completed task. Doing it any other way is a recipe for definite failure. If you treat every day as a new opportunity to feel and look your best, you will certainly end up being a winner. So, if you do want to stay healthy and have the body you want and do so safely, being fit and observing the fitness rules are your best bet.

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