Setting Fitness Goals Posted By : Jonathon Hardcastle

Written by Editor on March 9th, 2007 in fitness.

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Many people make the mistake of setting their fitness goals too high when they embark on an exercise program. This leads them to abandon their plans out of frustration and impatience. Setting manageable goals is key to maintaining a fitness program over time.

High repetitions burn fat while low repetitions build muscle.

Progressive overload is needed to make muscles bigger. Meaning that you need to perform more reps than you did for your last workout for that particular exercise. If you perform the same amount of reps at each workout nothing will change on you, also if the weight doesn’t changes on the bar nothing will change on you. You need to become stronger.

Definition has two characteristics, muscle size and a low incidence of body fat. To reduce body fat you will have to reduce your calories; the high repetition exercise will burn some calories, but wouldn’t it be better to fast walk to burn these off? Better still; use the low reps to build muscle, which will elevate your metabolism and burn more calories (less fat).

Vegetarians can’t build muscle.

Yes they can! Strength training with supplementation of soy Protein Isolate has shown to increase solid bodyweight. Studies have shown that athletic performance is not impaired by following a meat free diet, and people strength training and consuming only soy protein isolate as a protein source were able to gain lean muscle mass.

[Rob’s Note:] I agree. I was vegetarian for 12 years and vegan for two of those. I was able to put on over 40 pounds of lean muscle tissue on a plant based diet.

Strength Training will make you look masculine.

If it is not you’re intention to bulk up from strength training you won’t. Putting on muscle is a long hard slow process. Your strength-training regime coupled with quality food will determine how much you will bulk up. To bulk up you also require more food. Women don’t produce enough testosterone to allow for muscular growth as large as men.

By working out you can eat what ever you want to.

Of course you can eat whatever you want, if you don’t care how you want to look. Working out does not give you an open license to consume as many calories as you want. Although you will burn more calories if you workout than someone who doesn’t, you still need to balance your energy intake with you energy expenditure.

If you take a week off you will lose most of your gains.

Taking one or two weeks off occasionally will not harm your training. By taking this time off every eight to ten weeks in between strength training cycles it has the habit of refreshing you and to heal those small niggling injuries. By having longer layoffs you do not actually lose muscle fibres, just volume through not training, any size loss will be quickly re-gained.

By eating more protein I can build bigger muscles.

Building muscle mass involves two things, progressive overload to stimulate muscles beyond their normal levels of resistance and eating more calories than you can burn off. With all the hype about high protein diets lately and because muscle is made of protein, it’s easy to believe that protein is the best fuel for building muscle, however muscles work on calories which should predominately be derived from carbohydrates.

If I’m not sore after a workout, I didn’t work out hard enough.

Post workout soreness is not an indication of how good the exercise or strength training session was for you. The fitter you are at a certain activity, the less soreness you will experience after. As soon as you change an exercise, use a heavier weight or do a few more reps you place extra stress on that body part and this will cause soreness.

Resistance training doesn’t burn fat.

Nothing could not be further from the truth. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue and has a role in increasing the metabolism. The faster metabolism we have the quicker we can burn fat. Cardio exercise enables us to burn calories whilst exercising but does little else for fat loss afterwards.

Weight training enables us to burn calories whilst exercising but also helps us to burn calories whilst at rest. Weight training encourages muscle growth and the more lean muscle mass we possess, the more fat we burn though an increased and elevated metabolism.

No pain no gain.

This is one myth that hangs on and on. Pain is your body signalling that something is wrong. If you feel real pain during a workout, stop your workout and rest. To develop muscle and increase endurance you may need to have a slight level of discomfort, but that’s not actual pain.

Taking steroids will make me huge.

Not true, strength training and correct nutrition will grow muscle. Taking steroids without training will not make you muscular.

Most steroids allow faster muscle growth through greater recovery, while others help increase strength which allows for greater stress to be put onto a muscle. Without food to build the muscle or training to stimulate it nothing will happen. Most of the weight gain seen with the use of some steroids is due to water retention and is not actual muscle.

Strength training won’t work your heart.

Wrong!! Strength training with short rest periods will increase your heartbeat well over a hundred beats per minute. For example, performing a set of breathing squats and you can be guaranteed that your heart will be working overtime and that your entire cardiovascular system will be given a great overall body workout.

Any intensive weightlifting routine that lasts for 20 minutes or more is a great workout for your heart and the muscles involved.

I can gain muscle and lose fat at the same time.

Wrong. Only a few gifted people with superb genetics can increase muscle size while not putting on body fat. But for the average hard gainer, they have to increase their muscle mass to its maximum potential and then cut down their body fat percentage to achieve the desired shape.

Gary Matthews is a trainer from “down under” who has been coaching clients from athletes to bodybuilders for two decades. You may visit his website at Maximum Fitness.

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more about this post…

Chet Day is a trained journalist. We are not. So we begin with his synopsis of this 43-page eBook. “In 1939, a man called Peter Kelder wrote a book called ‘The Eye of Revelation’, a little health treatise that revealed to the world for the first time five previously secret Tibetan rejuvenation rites. Now you too can practice the exercises used by Tibetan monks to remain ageless.”

Now, forget the blurb that sounds exotic and mysterious. This is seriously good, and seriously good fun too. If you like Indiana Jones type action movies, the story that has the rites embedded in it is going to really give you a ball of a read.

The five rites are five ‘exercise’ movements with demo illustrations that should be shown compulsorily to any illustrator of contemporary exercise teaching books. Look and do, perfectly, first time. The text that goes with each is as concise and clear. These are idiot- proof, and safe, and fun, and work.

What do they do? Loosen up, tone, and produce the sort of energy high you may never have experienced, even as a child. Bon talks about ‘vortexes’, other traditions talk about “chakras,” and enlightened western medicine now recognizes ‘energy centers’ of the body. The moves undo locked in tension in these specific body areas, and free the ‘bound’ energy so you will feel like a million dollars, even if you currently don’t rate ten cents. Find time for these five fun bits (very little time) in your day, and while you may not make 150, your three score and ten are going to be a lot nicer. Absolutely brilliant, and even the village idiot can’t mess the moves up.

Part 2, rite 6, is for men who aspire to transform from wimps to supermen. Ladies may care to float this one past their men folk and bin the advert for Viagra, which is nasty dangerous stuff anyway.

Part 3 deals with nutrition and has elements Rea certainly aren’t going to tilt at. To the point and as applicable in Ohio today as in Lhasa of the past.

Part 4 is a voice exercise and it is an absolute riot. You’ll love it.

Overall, the interest will be in the first five rites. Chet reckons, from personal experience, that you get results in three weeks.

The man is wrong!

We put three friends onto the five rejuvenation rites as a test, and they report the improvement is noticed in four days. So, if you are looking for a gripping adventure story plus a way of using a few minutes a day to turbo boost energy and feel good, this is money you won’t regret spending. Better still, if you think the book is junk, Chet will give you an unconditional guarantee of refund in full — and you keep the book.

It’s cheaper than Ms Wiggles Exercise vid, ten times more enjoyable and it does the business. Go for it!

Are the Five Rites the Fountain of Youth Sought by Ponce deLeon?

This downloadable eVersion of Kelder’s manuscript contains not only the original drawings but also the unedited and unexpurgated story of British Colonel Bradford, the man who searched for and found the long-hidden Tibetan monastery that housed the ageless monks who taught him the secret rejuvenation rites in the 1920’s.

As the original publishers say in their foreword:

The Five Rites produce remarkable mental and physical rejuvenation within a month. So much so, in fact, that one gains new hope and enthusiasm with which to carry on. However, the greatest results come after the tenth week. When you stop to consider that the average man has endured his afflictions from 30 to 50 years, to obtain such amazing results in such a short time as ten weeks sounds almost miraculous.

Most Important: The information given in The Eye of Revelation was, for twenty-five centuries, confined strictly to men. Now, to the surprise and delight of all concerned, it has been found that women, too, get equally beneficial and amazing results. Now, after this long period of waiting every adult, man or woman, can go on to grand and glorious things, regardless of age, environment or circumstances.

Get started at once on the marvelous work of Rejuvenation, Transmutation, and Youthification. May success, health, energy, power, vigor, virility, and Life follow your footsteps forever.

Rob’s Note: I have know Chet for years and have learned a lot from him. I have talked with him personally and highly recommend this book on the five tibetan rejuvenation rites for anyone inclined to have a safe, easy and effective exercise routine they can perform daily. Great nutritional advice comes along with it too..

Simply go to the Five Tibetan Rites website now

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