Increase your energy, enhance muscle growth, improve performance, feel revitalized! These are all things I am sure you have heard about what multivitamins can do for you. They are all essentially correct. But before you take a multivitamin, it is important to know why you may need to take it. The most important reason someone may choose to supplement with a multi is because they may have nutritional deficiencies due to their diet. For example, someone who trains vigorously and is trying to lose weight may be on a specific, caloric restrictive diet. When dieting, you may not be having certain foods that contain certain vitamins and minerals that you need for optimal results. So in this example, you can have a multivitamin to fill in a lacking nutritional gap. It is not a standard replacement for vitamins and minerals, because your vitamins and minerals should be coming from a balanced diet from your “whole foods”. But it is important to have this supplement when you are purposely restricting yourself from extra calories you don’t need or want. Furthermore, someone who trains excessively will sweat, which means vitamins and minerals are being expended through perspiration and need to be replenished regularly. The supplementation of a multi will ensure you have the proper nutrients to execute a workout and receive results from it. Think about it for a moment, all those reps and sets of pumping blood into muscle tissue, but if you don’t have optimal levels of nutrients in your system, how is your body ever going to change? Your muscles need proper nutrients to grow and change. This may be the missing link to your maximum results!
Category: News & Updates
bookmark_borderYour fitness goals happen 24/7!!
Lets jump right into this. Lets say you are new to working out and you start your routine with 3 days per week with 1 hour workouts. EXCELLENT WORK! You’ve already completed half the battle by just getting off the couch or out of the office chair to get a workout in! And lets say you burn about 250-400 calories in a light to moderate weight training/functional training session. Honestly, you are doing great so far. But now is where you really need to stop and think about your time spent working out and if your are really maximizing your ability to attain your fitness goals. You are working out 3 hours per week out of the 168 hours in the week. In reality, only 1.7% of your time is spent working out!! Let me say that again, ONLY 1.7% OF YOUR TIME! So the real question here is, what are you doing with the other 98.3% of your time in the week to lose that weight or gain that muscle!? What this really boils down to is your lifestyle choices. Are you dieting correctly? Are you getting proper sleep? Do you drink alcohol and/or smoke? Do you party or stay out to late? Are you really in this for the long haul? These questions are crucial to ask yourself if you are serious about hitting your fitness goals. And ask yourself, ARE you serious about this? Look, weight loss and muscle building doesn’t happen over night and is not an easy task. If it was easy, America probably would not have an obesity problem. Listen, you don’t have to become a fitness fanatic or lock yourself in a gym to get results, you just have to be willing to make certain changes in your lifestyle choices in order to get those abs that you want or those arms to be admired. So keep up the hard workouts! Believe me, those calories burnt and that muscular fatigue is all going to be worth it! Just remember that this fitness game is a 24 hour, 7 day a week process.
bookmark_border3 EASY ways to MAXIMIZE your workout
1. Supersets
Whether your workout routine is more functional or old school bodybuilding, you really get more from your routine if you perform exercises back to back. A superset can be done 2 ways: more than one exercise on the same muscle group, or more than one exercise on opposing muscle groups (chest and back). Training this way increases your exercises intensity and keeps your heart rate higher for longer inducing a more so “cardio” effect on the body.
2. Rest time
If you do a set of bench press and then are sitting down for 5 minutes till the next set, you are being counter productive to your muscle growth. In case your did not know, periods of rest between sets actually DO have a scientific backing to them. Generally you should only be resting for 45 sec – 60 sec between sets. This is about the allotted time it takes for your muscles ATP to regenerate to pump out another powerful set. With shorter rest times, your routine will stay intense and will maintain momentum.
3. More Reps
If you are performing pyramid sets like your buddy told you at the gym and doing 3 or so reps for as much weight as you can, that’s great! However, if you are looking for a super lean, striated look to your muscles, you need to do more reps. A routine with a higher rep range will recruit more muscle fibers into action and pump more blood and oxygen into the muscle tissue. This will increase the muscle tissues endurance and over time will become leaner giving you that tight muscular tone you’re looking for. Increase your rep range to 12-16 reps with a moderate weight and slightly increasing the weight for every set.
Incorporate these 3 simple changes to your routine and you will see the changes IMMEDIATELY!