LegendaryLife.com Blog

To say I enjoy working out would be an understatement… I LOVE working out. The more my muscles hurt the next day, the better I feel! I am not a masochist but I feel weird if some part of my body isn’t in some sort of pain on a daily basis.

Tips to improve your health and get more out of a workout

Here are my top 10 tips to improve your overall health and fitness, follow these at your own risk and be sure to always get a checkup by a doctor before partaking on anything that will stress your body.

10: Change your routine!

My exercises have evolved over the past decades from a regimented one in which I had to do 3 sets of one exercise followed using x weight with y periods of recovery between them. I am to the point now that it just doesn’t do anything for me anymore to follow this for more then a two week basis, my body just adapts too quickly. I now have a very simple regimen in which I have a different routine each time I enter the gym created in my head. I know I am going chest and back for instance today, so I go into the gym and start lifting what feels right. Regardless, never do the same identical exercise twice in a month.

9: Change your reps and sets every few weeks

I went from doing three to four sets of 8 reps to three to four sets of 20 reps… man did my body respond big time to that! I gained 2 kilograms in a month doing this… without taking protein powder, creatine nor any other supplement beyond a multi-vitamin. By the time you have done six to eight exercises with little rest in between them this way, the blood in any body part you have concentrated on feels like it’s about to explode out of the muscle. FANTASTIC! I managed to shock the hell out of my central nervous system and it was forced to adapt big time. So one month I went from 3-4×8 then 3-4×20 then back to 3-4×6, I think I will try 30 next time (I am doing this using drop sets by the way… for added difficulty).

8: The gym is a battlefield, your enemy the weight… it must be conquered!

I know I look a little weird wearing an army uniform when I workout, it keeps people away from me but also creates an internal image as to what I am doing there to begin with. I am not in the gym to talk, I am not in the gym to make friends, I am there to push my body and mind beyond it’s comfort zone. I am there to vanquish self-doubt, tell the weight whose boss and most importantly, try to attract some of the eye candy that surrounds me To me, a gym is a place of sacrifice, hard work and endless challenges. If you treat each workout like it’s a mission, you will get much more out of it.

7: Challenge others

If I see a guy doing squats and it happens to be my leg day, I can’t help but go to the rack right next to him, load up my bar with a little more weight and begin banging out the reps. I did this once with a guy who was 6 ft 3 and very well built, I didn’t realize his warm-up was my max weight… he cleaned my clock but you know what… at least I stepped up to the challenge without fear nor hesitation. Of course, this is more fun when you can motivate others to push their bodies further, bodybuilding is a game of one-up-man-ship, fair or otherwise, that is how you gain the respect of those at all levels.

6: Take care of your lower back

I keep getting reminded when I take my lower back for granted, just about every exercise from leg curls to standing dumbbell flies requires a lot of work from… you guessed it, your lower back (and abs) to keep you balanced. No matter how strong your legs are, no matter how many inches your arms, everybody has one achilles heel which is their lower back. Begin neglecting your lower back and EVERYTHING gets affected both at the gym and elsewhere. It isn’t any fun waking up in the morning feeling like an elephant used your lower back as a trampoline anymore then it is to have trouble sitting in an office chair for an extended period of time with a throbbing ache. A healthy lower back is vital to a healthy life and body.

5: Machines are for warming up and safely maxing yourself out

People who do entire exercise regimes using machines are loosing out big time on what they could be getting out of their time. It all comes down to neuro-muscular co-ordination or central nervous system optimization, that is what exercise does, it increases the efficiency of your neuro-muscular pathways, the fact that muscles get bigger and stronger is simply a by-product of this work. What I am saying is that there is a lot more stimulation occurring within your body when you use free weights then with machines. You are forced to recruit far more muscle fibers, neurons… you name it, simply to hold your balance, stamina and focus. Machines are great for allowing you to do what would be dangerous with free weights safely but they should be used as little as possible.

4: Bodyweight is an excellent weight onto itself!

When was the last time you tried one legged squats using nothing more then a smith machine and an empty bar? Well, give it a try, it will be a struggle. Same goes with pull-ups and many other exercises where the only machine you need is your own body. Free weights, machines and bodyweight all have an important role to play in optimizing your central nervous system, use them effectively for the best results.

3: Eat real food

Before you even touch a protein powder or the bottle of creatine tablets, consider this, nothing is more anabolic then food. NOTHING! All the protein powders in the world will produce zilch for you unless you include a healthy, whole food diet. If you can’t name the ingredient on something you are about to eat, don’t eat it. The good food you put into yourself is what your body uses to build muscle, produce growth hormone when you sleep and most importantly, repairs all the damage that exercise does to your body.

2: Rest and relax

Exercise produces a lot of micro-tears which the body needs time to recover from. If you don’t give your body enough fixing time, you are setting yourself for injury, over-training and possibly going backwards towards achieving your fitness goals. If you notice after a few months that you stop gaining, the best solution, more often then not, it to take a week or two off and eat as much damn food (read #3) as you can. You will not only gain weight but your strength will also increase along with muscle size.

1: Never stop learning

Like all things in life, the moment you stop allowing new thoughts, training ideas or others access to your methodologies, you will stop progressing. Health and fitness is no different. If you learn of a new training system that counters everything you have been taught, don’t ignore it, give it a try, maybe you will learn something that will go a long way towards improving yourself.

The Bottom Line

Weight training is as vital to a body as breathing, without it, you can never achieve your full potential as a human being.