Fitness Works

Health and Fitness: Working Out the Proper Way

When starting out a workout program, you need to start slow. You can set your program up in a 4-6 week phase. Each week you try to do a little more than the previous week. This process allows your body to prepare for the workout it is about to endure, as well as helping to prevent any injuries to yourself. One very important thing to remember is form. While you are doing your exercises, you need to make sure that your form is perfect. If you do not do this, then you stand a very high chance of no performance gain or of hurting yourself. Another good rule of thumb is to take it slow. The biggest thing that you can do for your workouts is to stretch both before and after your workout.

The first week you should try to pick one exercise for each part of your body. Perform these exercises with no weight or just a bare minimum of weight. Remember, you can always increase the weight in progressive weeks of your workout plan. Do each exercise for only one set at 10 to 15 reps. Once you have done each exercise once, you are done. In week one, you will only do the exercises in this routine once. Keeping in mind that you will be sore after your workout, you need to space your routine so that you have a couple days for rest in between.

The second week you will keep doing the same exercises that you had done in week one, but you will add weight to your exercises. Your end goal is to have made it up to enough weight that you can only do 15 reps of each exercise. However, you need to slowly add the weight so that you don’t over-tax or injure yourself. A good idea would be to write down how much weight that you use so that you will know for sure how much you will need next time. Also this will give you a base line of where you started from. So you can look back several weeks from and see how you have improved. You still are only going to perform your routine twice in week two. Again, make sure that you give yourself at least one day break in between days.

Weeks 3-5 are where you are going to start your major changes. What you want to start doing is once you reach 16 reps, add 3-5 pounds of weight and drop your reps back down to ten. Once you get back to 16 reps, you will add more weight. This is a good and safe way to build up your body. At the start of week 4 you will add a third day to your work out week. You always need to have a day of rest in between workouts so that your body has the chance to recover.

Once you hit week 6, you will add a complete set to your exercises. So now you will be at a total of 2 sets of each exercise each day, 3 times a week. By this time your body will be capable of taking on another set of exercises because you have slowly worked up to it in the prior weeks. You would maintain the two sets per exercise until you were comfortable adding another set to your routine.
By starting your routine out slow and with little to no weight, you allow your body to recover and also have less of a chance of injuring yourself. When you try to skip stages you run a higher risk of injury. You must also remember not to do the routine daily as your body won’t have any chance to recover from the workout.

About the Author

Zack Fair writes for online fitness retailer UltimateFitnessGear.com that offers the best deals in getting Hip hop abs, Turbo Jam, and P90X workouts.

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