Bodybuilding & Muscle Building Techniques
Thursday, December 30, 2004
How to Prevent Knee Problems
Kevin R. Stone, MD
The Stone Foundation for Sports Medicine and Arthritis Research
If your knees hurt, don't be surprised. Knees are more vulnerable to injury than any other joint. Even gentle walking can exert more than 300 pounds of pressure on the knees -- more if you're overweight.
Obesity is a key risk factor for knee pain and injury. Certain physical activities that exert pounding pressure on knees, such as jogging, basketball, tennis and soccer, also are likely to trigger knee injury. So is osteoarthritis, which causes wear and tear on the joints and inhibits the activities of as many as 70 million American adults.
Maintaining a healthy weight is one of the best ways to prevent knee disability. Also important...
Stand straight. People who stand with their shoulders squared and spine straight are less likely to have knee pain than those who stoop. Use a mirror to check your alignment. You should be able to line up your ear, shoulder, hip and ankle. You put tremendous pressure on your knees when you slump or contort your body into unnatural positions -- by cradling the telephone between your head and neck while standing, for example.
Wear comfortable shoes. Well-padded flats or shoes with low, flat heels absorb shock before it reaches the knee. High heels distribute most of the body's weight to the ball of the foot rather than throughout the entire foot -- so knees absorb more force.
Exercise daily, not just two or three days a week. Daily workouts increase joint strength and lubrication. Best activities: Walking, swimming, water aerobics, walking in a pool, bicycling, yoga and strength training.
Cross-training -- different workouts on different days -- strengthens muscles evenly throughout the knee, helping prevent injury. Example: Do yoga one day, swim the next, walk the next, etc.
Hill climbing is particularly helpful. On a treadmill or your favorite trail, walk uphill as long as you comfortably can. Caution: Walking downhill puts excessive pressure on the knees. Have someone drive you back.
Here are three good exercises for knee health. Do these every other day...
Squats: Pretend there's a chair behind you. Standing with legs parallel but slightly apart, lower your body as if you were going to sit, keeping your back straight. Slowly return to the standing position. Do this 10 times.
Adductions: Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the floor and a pillow between your knees. Squeeze the pillow with both knees... hold for five seconds... then relax. Repeat 10 times.
Single leg touch down: Put your right leg on a thick hardcover book. Put your left leg just to the side of the book, in the air, parallel to the right leg. Slowly bend the right knee so that the left foot touches the floor. Then slowly return to the original position. Switch legs. Do this five times with each leg.
Take glucosamine. This dietary supplement is used for prevention and treatment of knee problems. It promotes cartilage growth, relieves stiffness and reduces inflammation. Dose: 1,500 milligrams (mg) daily.
Improve balance. Falls are among the most common causes of knee injuries. Most falls -- especially in people 65 years and older -- are due to poor balance. Once or twice daily, try to balance on one leg with your hands at your sides for up to one minute. Then do it with the other leg.
Practice near a wall or next to a chair until you can comfortably and confidently maintain your balance. When that gets easy, do it with your eyes closed.
Drink water. Most people need at least one-half gallon of water daily -- more in hot climates or if they exercise vigorously. Staying hydrated nourishes tissues in the knee joints and increases lubricating fluid.
How to Prevent Knee Problems
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Muscle Cramps
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
The Way We Eat Now
by Craig Lambert
Last year, Morgan Spurlock decided to eat all his meals at McDonald's for a month. For 30 straight days, everything he took in (breakfast, lunch, dinner, even his bottled water) came from McDonald's. Spurlock recorded the results on camera for his film Super Size Me, which won the Best Director prize for documentaries at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Super Size Me is also a kind of shock/horror movie, as viewers see the 33-year-old Spurlock's physical condition collapse, day by day. "My body just basically falls apart over the course of this diet," Spurlock told Newsweek. "I start to get tired, I start to get headaches; my liver basically starts to fill up with fat because there's so much fat and sugar in this food. My blood sugar skyrockets, my cholesterol goes up off the charts, my blood pressure becomes completely unmanageable. The doctors were like, You have to stop.'" In one month on the fast-food regime, he gained 25 pounds.
Spurlock's total immersion in fast food was a one-subject research study, and his body's response a warning about the way we eat now. "Super Size Me" could be a credo for the United States, where people, like their automobiles, have become gargantuan. "SUVs, big homes, penis enlargement, breast enlargement, bulking up with steroids. it's a context of everything getting bigger," says K. Dun Gifford '60, LL.B. '66, president of the Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust, a nonprofit organization specializing in food, diet, and nutrition education.
Everywhere in the world, the richest people build the biggest homes, but as the world's wealthiest nation, the United States is also building the biggest bodies. It's hardly cause for patriotic pride. "We are leading a race we shouldn't want to win," says associate professor of pediatrics David Ludwig. Many foreigners already view Americans as rich, greedy over-consumers, stuffing themselves with far more than their share of the planet's resources, and obese American travelers waddling through international airports and hotel lobbies only reinforce that image. Yet our fat problem is becoming a global one as food corporations export our sugary, salty, fatty diet: Beijing has more than a hundred McDonalds franchises, which advertise and price the same food in the same way, and with the same level of success.
Two-thirds of American adults are overweight, and half of these are obese. (Overweight means having a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 or greater, obese, 30 or greater: to calculate BMI, a widely used measure, take the square of your height in inches and then divide your weight, in pounds, by that number; then multiply the result by 703. Or calculate it on-line at www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/bmi/calc-bmi.htm.) Even adults in the upper end of the "normal" range, who have BMIs of 22 to 24, would generally live longer if they lost some fat; add in these people and it appears that "up to 80 percent of American adults should weigh less than they do," says Walter C. Willett, M.D., D.P.H. '80, Stare professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the School of Public Health.
The epidemic of obesity is a vast and growing public health problem. "Weight sits like a spider at the center of an intricate, tangled web of health and disease," writes Willett in Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating, arguably the best and most scientifically sound book on nutrition for the general public. He notes that three aspects of weight (BMI, waist size, and weight gained after one's early twenties) are linked to chances of having or dying from heart disease, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and several types of cancer, plus suffering from arthritis, infertility, gallstones, asthma, and even snoring. "Weight is much more important than serum cholesterol," Willett asserts; as a cause of premature, preventable deaths, he adds, excess weight and obesity rank a very close second to smoking, partly because there are twice as many fat people as smokers. In fact, since smokers tend to be leaner, the decrease in smoking prevalence has actually swelled the ranks of the fat.
The obesity epidemic arrived with astonishing speed. After tens of thousands of generations of human evolution, flab has become widespread only in the past 50 years, and waistlines have ballooned exponentially in the last two decades. In 1980, 46 percent of U.S. adults were overweight; by 2000, the figure was 64.5 percent: nearly a 1 percent annual increase in the ranks of the fat. At this rate, by 2040, 100 percent of American adults will be overweight and "it may happen more quickly," says John Foreyt of Baylor College of Medicine, who spoke at a conference organized by Gifford's Oldways group in 2003. Foreyt noted that, 20 years ago, he rarely saw 300-pound patients; now they are common. Childhood obesity, also once rare, has mushroomed: 15 percent of children between ages six and 19 are now overweight, and even 10 percent of those between two and five. "This may be the first generation of children who will die before their parents," Foreyt says.
Read the whole article at: The Way We Eat Now
Muscle building training tips for beginners
First steps in muscle building training are easy. Spend the first few weeks in gym knowing the exercises. During the first few weeks of muscle building training, the muscles react to the stress put on them, even with relatively light weights, with important increase in strength and muscle tension.
Every major muscle group should be trained and developed to prevent muscle imbalance on muscle building training. The major muscle groups include legs, calves, chest, shoulders, back, arms and abdominals.
Chose compound movements for each body-part (multi-joint movement like bench press, squat, dead lift etc).
During the first couple of muscle building training sessions, you will want to go pretty light just to get a feel for how to do the movement correctly. After you feel comfortable with the form, begin adding weight. Train in the range at 10-12reps.
A set is combination of any number of reps of a single exercise. You should have somewhere between 2-4 sets for each exercise of the muscle.
Start each set with a deep inhalation and exhale as you push through the most difficult part of the lift. Inhale at the top (or the easiest portion of the lift) and exhale as you push.
Rest as long as it takes for you to feel recovered from your previous set. That normally ranges from 60 to 90 seconds. Larger muscle group stake a bit longer to recover smaller muscle groups clear low pH levels and are ready to go more quickly.
Your body requires a minimum of 48 hours to fully recover after muscle building training sessions. Physiological processes at the cellular level require rest and nutrients before you can train that same muscle group again. For beginner train three times a week. An ideal schedule could be: Monday/Wednesday/Friday.
Sunday, December 26, 2004
Biceps routine - Biceps exercises
After the whole workout your biceps will be screaming for mercy, completely pumped up! Of course, your gains will be minimal without the use of effective form. Do not swing your back or move your elbows during the range of motion.
Muscle building in your biceps area is not an easy job. You must elevate your workload and more important the training intensity level to achieve more muscular mass. Of course, before you go carving them into oblivion, it is most imperative to amass the mass on your arms. You cannot shape what you do not have.
Here is an arm training program of biceps-blasting exercises designed to load up those guns for the big showdown:
A) Preacher machine curl. 8-10 reps
B) Inclined dumbbell hammer curls 8-10 reps
C) Inclined dumbbell curls 8-10 reps
