How to exercise after 25
Written By: Chris Chandler
Copyright By: Chris Chandler 2017
Table Of Contents
1. Introduction
2. About Me
3. Losing Fat
4. Building Muscle And Injury
5. Lifting Weights
6. Juicing
7. Enthusiast Exercise
8. Conclusion
Chapter 1
Introduction
This is a self help book for anyone age 25 and older who exercises regularly or wants to exercise regularly.
We all age every second of every day. As we get older it gets more difficult to exercise. You have probably already noticed a tug of war with your body. It is more difficult to do things you didn't use to have difficulty doing. You can get back to your optimal weight or fitness achievement easier than you think, but it takes effort, commitment, risk, or sacrifice. Instead of figuring out everything by yourself, knowing how to lose fat or gain muscle is already half of the way to success.
The first step in achieving your goal is to accept you will not be able to do everything you used to be able to do, as fast as you used to be able to do it, and as quickly progressing to your goal as you would have been able to years ago. This does not mean you cannot meet or exceed some of your previous physical achievements and goals. Body weight, race times, weight lifted, duration of exercise, or frequency of exercise are some potential fitness goals. You should choose the most important things you want to achieve and accept that it is ok to sacrifice other goals. On the other hand, you will probably be surprised at what you are able to achieve with your older body. I witnessed a minor world record broken by a 72 year old man at a Powerlifting competition in 2014. He was not even visually that strong like most powerlifters you see. The sooner you start trying to improve your body the sooner your body will improve. When you try to achieve your goal you will get closer to achieving your goal. The intent of the following chapters is to make your attempt more effective and reduce the time and effort needed to reach your fitness goal.
Chapter 2
About Me
Before spending the next hour or two reading what will help you achieve your goal I want to explain why I am qualified to give advice on this topic.
After topping out at 435 pounds body weight when I was 20 years old and letting my muscles atrophy, I decided I would never let that happen again. I went to the gym religiously with no idea what I was doing or how to exercise. It was a good decision in hindsight to go to the gym a lot, but it took me 10 years before I realized some things like eating cake and drinking sugary liquids aren't the best way to win a foot race. I realized jogging slow and lifting weights only 10 times a week per muscle group isn't the best way to build muscle and make progress. I worked at one of the biggest chain gyms in America teaching aerobic exercise classes. A few years after I began playing organized indoor soccer when I was 30 years old. At 34 years old I began officiating soccer as a referee. I plan on competing in my first powerlifting competition before I'm 40 years old. I would like to participate running a competitive marathon one day. My body weight is between 220 and 250 pounds at the time of this book publication. This is exactly my preferred body weight range. Muscle weighs more than fat as you may already know. I'm just under 6 feet tall, so if I had average muscle, I would weigh about 180 pounds. Taking a good body fat percentage test my body fat percentage falls in the 'average' range. According to the height versus weight fat percentage test i am extremely obese. This disparity between fat percentage tests is explained in a subsequent chapter. As for me, personally, I'm literally half the man I used to be.
In addition to my personal experience I watch every documentary available to me on health, fitness, and anatomy. I read a few medical magazines on these topics as well. Even though I don't have a degree in medicine or health, I had basic anatomy certifications, basic first aid certifications, and a few classes in college about health. I would say I'm an expert on exercise and health, which is why I decided to write this book. I disagree often with my very competent primary physician regularly on things. I've disagreed with all my primary physicans about many of their conclusions since i was a young adult. In my physicians' defense they don't have the time to watch objective documentaries and read current medical journals with a full time job and a family. My doctors were told to use the height verses weight fat percentage test, which obviously doesn't take muscle into account. My doctors always used to tell me to take fish oil to reduce high blood pressure or cholesterol when I had high blood pressure. If you look back to the reasoning behind why fish oil in capsule form is supposed to reduce cholesterol you will understand the major fallacy with perscribing fish oil as a cure for cholesterol. Most doctors simply assume what they are taught by other doctors is totally correct. Incorrect information like this has been passed down from doctor to doctor. The best solutions are solutions which work the best. Everyone's body is different. Everyone should be able to learn something from this book. I am not only rewriting things I've heard or read. Some things in this book would be considered heretical about health and fitness, but they seem to be true. I don't have the money to perform mass studies, but if everyone i talk to seems to benefit from something and not from another thing, this is an informal study of my own. a lot of information from mass studies is decades old and incorrect anyway. Why not question this information every few decades? You don't need to ask tens of thousands of people what happens if your knee hurts. You should stop exercising until your knee gets better. You don't work the joint in the hopes the pain is all in your mind. You don't work the joint because it might be a cramp instead of a break. You don't need to know everything about a topic to use deductive reasoning to make a helpful conclusion. The majority of medical professionals are overworked anyway. I don't want a medical professional who sees me 15 to 30 minutes every year, and knows marginally more than I do about medicine and health to be making major health decisions for me. Do you?
Chapter 3
Losing Fat
Everyone falls into one of two categories. You either eat "too much" or you don't eat enough. This chapter is for people who eat too much; not people who "think" they eat too much.
When you look in the mirror if at some point you think to yourself "I should lose fat," there is something in your exercise or diet you should change. If you think you can't eat any less and are still getting an obese measurement on a good fat percentage test this chapter is for you. If it's obvious you are fat and you don't think you can eat any less this chapter is for you. If you have a fat belly for men or fat hips for women, then you can eat less. Unless you have a physical disorder like a thyroid problem you can eat less. A thyroid problem would show up in a blood test.
If you want to gain fat and you swear you can never eat enough this chapter is not for you. If you say you have a "fast" metabolism, you aren't eating as much as you could. Overeaters do not stop eating when they aren't hungry anymore. If you are too thin and want to gain fat (no idea why you would want to gain fat after 25) simply eat as much as possible every chance you get. It's not difficult to gain fat. it's difficult to lose fat. For people who want to "put on weight" you want to build muscle, not gain fat. Unless there is a legitimate reason to gain fat you want to gain muscle weight not fat weight after 25.
I've never had a major problem losing fat when I want, even though losing fat is one of the hardest things to do fitnesswise. I have lost more weight than anyone I have talked to or written with in my life. I'm sure there is someone somewhere who has lost more fat than I have with and without surgery, but it's rare to encounter someone who has lost a lot of fat. I feel bad for people who go from diet to diet and none of the diets work. Don't get me wrong. Doing the latest fad diet works for some people. I heard on a documentary that fad diets fall into 2 categories. Diets which make the person sick, or diets which flood a person's system with an unusual nutrient. Neither of these strategies is very healthy, but could help some people. It's ok if fad diets work for you. It doesn't matter how you accomplish your fitness goal. It's your fitness goal. Eating less and exercising harder works for just about everyone. Maybe eating healthier is a better option than eating less for you. I didn't feel like eating healthy things when i was in my 20s. In hindsight this was surprisingly a good decision fitnesswise. I have never broken a bone in my 30s even with all the ice skating and soccer i did in my 30s. It might be hard for you to exercise and eat less. It might be impossible for you to run, but you can exercise with your arms. It is always possible to eat less without getting malnutritioned. It is difficult to lose fat after 25, but it's far from impossible. It boils down to putting your mind to it. Exercising and eating less or eating healthier is the best way to reduce your body fat without hurting your mind. Losing fat without taking suppliments will pay off when you get older. Weight loss pills have negative side effects if taken for long periods of time. It is slightly more expensive to buy healthier food, but in today's superficial appearance society it's worth it. How many conversations would have ended differently if you looked like miss universe? How many promotions would you have been offered in your job if you looked like Michaelangelo's david? Eating healthier might be less expensive if you grow a garden. Seeds cost next to nothing. Eating healthier and exercising doesn't always cost money, but it usually costs more money if for nothing other than washing your clothes more often due to your sweat.
A lot of the things I was taught and tested on when I got certifications ten years ago were not even correct. I didn't realize this until years later when I read in a health magazine that journal publications used to be hailed as scripture, but not so much anymore. The problem was some of these journal studies from decades ago were accepted and taught to millions of people even though they were significantly flawed in their concultions, and frankly wrong. Take the food pyramid as an example. The food pyramid was taught in America in the late 1900s as being the standard of what everyone should use. In fact when you look into the history of the food pyramid you learn the pyramid levels were simply reordered to bring in a little more money to the grain business at that time. The correct pyramid was never disclosed due to the chance it would hurt big business in America. We also know eggs, milk, and cheese are not supposed to be fed to adults of any species on a regular basis. Milk only does the body good of children. Milk is very destructive as an "every day" food to adults. Hundreds of millions of people were taught milk is good, and milk does have significant nutrients which should not be removed from an adult's diet without supplimenting the major nutrients in other foods. Still, this does not assuage the destructive effect of milk on your body as an adult. Cutting meat and dairy almost entirely out of your diet will cause you to lose fat. When using a simple height versus weight body fat percentage test I have always registered as obese in my adult life when i was actually not obese. No wonder people have eating disorders when doctors can't even distinguish the difference between a person who is fat and a person who isn't fat. If all my blood tests are normal and I'm telling my doctor the height versus weight test is not giving an accurate result, why would my doctor insist I am obese? Simply because some doctor in med school told my doctor 15 years ago the height versus weight test is the standard for fat percentage test? This is the worst widely used fat percentage test. Everyone's body is very different. Your height multiplied by your weight multiplied by a number will not give an accurate fat percentage for everyone. Even people who don't work out have significantly different bone densities and even water weight levels. Are medical professionals really using a test from half a century ago multiple times per day as the best fat percentage test, when a pinch test would be just as effective and quick? There are devices you hold with both hands which tell you what your fat percentage is. Instead of investing in the latest automatic doors, why not invest in an accurate fat percentage test? Most gyms have these things, because they are not that expensive. If your doctor is perscribing medication based on your fat percentage, why not make sure the fat percentage test is more correct?
I made up the phrase "eat like a pig and workout like a beast." This is good advice for people who are young adults and have difficulty exercising. After you get on a regular exercise routine I suggest a new motto "the less you put in your mouth, the less fat you carry around." When you eat more food your mind feels healthier, which helps you exercising more. For some people who take medication, you will even find you can reverse some chronic diseases and illnesses. I was actually told my arthritis will be with me for the rest of my life when i was 19 years old. By the time i was 25 I never had arthritis pain anything like what i was getting then. Don't use exercise as a replacement for medication immediately. Make sure it's ok to stop taking the medication though. If your thyroid was removed don't think exercise will magically make it so you can stop taking thyroid medicine. I was taking medicine for 15 years I didn't need to take, but i believed all my doctors who said I need to keep taking it. It wasn't until I almost died I released the medication was not neccessary. My body corrected itself with the influx of exercise in my 20s and I actually developed an allergic reaction to all the medicine I was told I needed for the rest of my life by my doctors. Of course my doctors would say my body chemistry changed, but instead of using a vague conclusion in some ambiguous test, it's better to notice how exercise helps the human body to correct problems, even problems like bad medicine. My doctors were wrong. It wasn't just one condition or one doctor who was wrong. I was taking medicine for multiple problems in my mind and in my body, all of which arguably did not exist. I have not taken any medication for any of these phantom diseases for the last 7 years. Not only are my blood tests all within normal ranges, but also I feel better and my head isn't cloudy like it used to be. As soon as i stopped taking all 6 medications my blood tests went from abnormal to normal and I felt a lot better. Whether it was a lot of misdiagnosis or a result of conditions I actually had at one point I don't know. The point is a lot of very respected doctors were absolutely wrong about what they told me, and I even disagreed with my doctors occasionally while they were trying to explain why these conditions will never get better. Sadly, a lot of doctors today tomorrow will continue to be wrong and tell patients untrue things. I am not particularly against medical professionals. I start out using an objective point of view on everything. If something seems wrong, even if a medical professional is telling you it's correct, it's probably wrong.
It's not necessarily what you eat, even though what you eat does make a difference. It's more how much you eat. If you are struggling to eat less, try changing what you eat or how often you eat. You would be surprised how long you can go without eating. Chances are you are eating more than you need to. Eating less, eating healthier, or eating less often should help everyone lose fat. Even diabetics can take insulin shots and eat less food. Some diabetes can be reversed with enough exercise. I would even fathom all diabetes can be reversed with enough exercise.
Another trick which helps me is to "like" the feeling of being hungry. It's not masochism. You can condition your mind into enjoying the hungry feeling. You can fool your mind into looking at food unfavorably. You can attempt to see how long you can go without eating as a game. Often the simplest solution is the correct one. Occom would agree if he were alive today. Realistically, if you compare yourself to other people, are you fatter or thinner than other people? Are you just fine fatwise? Beware you can get into a destructive cycle where you always think you are too fat or not fat enough. These are classified as eating disorders, but they really are perception disorders. Perceiving how fat you are objectively is very important for achieving your goal. Acceptance is the first step to recovery. You might think you know and accept how fat you are, but have you really accepted how fat you are? Do you look in the mirror and think those 5 pounds will be gone by the time you go into public? are those 5 extra pounds really 50 extra pounds?
Humans can survive eating once a day. It's easy to gauge how much you are eating if you can get down to eating once a day. It doesn't take a pen and paper calculating calories if you eat once a day. Just because it's time to eat does not mean you have to eat. Food can be enjoyable, but if you are fatter than you want to be, is it more important to enjoy eating or is it more important to lose fat? You can enjoy eating less frequently as well as eating more frequently. If you can condition your mind to pretend every breath you breathe you are losing fat, and every bite you take you are gaining fat, this is an easy way to lose fat. Of course this takes a lot of self control to do it this way. Losing fat will take self control however you do it. Decide how you want to lose fat first. Everyone's path to success is different. Eating like a pig might be just fine for you. Exercise very hard and eat whatever you want, and you probably will reduce fat. If you can make yourself think you are eating excrement when you eat, this might help you lose fat. Ironically this may not be far from the truth with some foods.
The more fat you have, the easier it is to build muscle. Instead of simply losing the fat and having "no hips" why not build muscle? Intentionally building glut (butt) muscles or oblique (side stomach) muscles will cause some fat to be reduced. Being "overweight" is not wrong. Society says having a lot of body fat is wrong. Society is not always correct. Ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish with your body. After you have the answer to this question, losing the most fat the fastest way isn't necessarily the best method to your goal. As of 2017 the life expectancy for Americans is in the high 70s. This makes 38 "middle age". America has one of the longest life expectancies on earth, so if you live in a different country, it's probably slightly younger than 38. If you are over 38 you want to have the least body fat possible. if you didn't have much fat prior to 38 , unfortunately you are more susceptible to bone fractures later in life. Muscle prevents bone fracture and injury indirectly. The healthiest thing for your mind and body if you were able to be obese as a child and lose the fat as you age, completely losing all the excess fat at 38. If you are older than 38 any excess fat is more destructive than helpful.
However, you should make your own decision if you have the optimal amount of fat and muscle you want. After all, you live with your own body. You have to be happy with your body and how it looks and you feel. If you want to change your body it takes effort. If you are perfectly happy with the way your body looks and feels that is your prerogative. Most people should have more muscle even when they don't realize they should have more muscle. Before Arnold Schwartzenegger was governor of California he was Mr. universe. He won Mr universe so many times he set the record for most times winning Mr universe, and I believe that record still stands today. Arnold gave good advice about bodybuilding in a documentary made in 1977 named "Pumping Iron" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076578/. He said something like "bodybuilding is like sculpting a statue. You look at what part of your body needs improvement, and you work to improve it. It's easier to sculpt a statue than change your body though". Losing fat is almost always more difficult than building muscle, so if you think building muscle is difficult, reducing fat is even more difficult. Most men want to have low fat and defined muscle. Most women want to be thin and curvy. When people "see" someone who looks thin they don't actually measure the person's body dimensions compared to the size of the person's head. Because heads are roughly the same size, people visually compare how much fat other people have with how much muscle instead of the size of their head. Most people would agree the hulk has a very low fat percentage, but if you measure the hulk's body weight and actual waist size from a picture you will find the hulk's body fat is higher than you would expect. Even taking height into account I've never seen a tiny waistline in a hulk pictue. A truly thin person with very little muscle looks more like a ten year old child than Miss america or Mr. universe. People who look "good" in a swimsuit usually have significant muscle. Curves are muscles, ladies. "Curves" mean non defined muscles. Women who do not work out may have curves, but the curves are in the wrong places. Often women are afraid to step into a gym because they think any exercise will make unattractive muscles appear. Muscles do not appear by accident unless you aren't paying attention to exercise you do often. Exercise is not bad. Look at yourself and judge your progress objectively. A mirror is helpful, but a video is better. Watching a video of yourself around other people is best for seeing how fat you are compared to others. With men, you probably have less visible muscle than you think. Most men want big biceps, so the optimal size for your biceps is larger than what you think they should be. Your biceps should look slightly too big than you think they should to get the desired appearance. They say the silver screen adds 20 pounds. The same is true with visible muscle size. It's better to have average fat and significant muscle than little fat and little muscle from a health point of view. Most female supermodels hit the iron for hours every week. If you don't exercise regularly, and you start exercising regularly, notice how your head clears up. If you exercise regularly and stop exercising for an extended period of time, notice how you get fatter and irritable. Maybe chronic problems you thought you overcame will come back. When I exercise at least once a week, even my body takes longer to smell bad. I think this has something to do with how sweat pushes bacteria out of your skin pores. If I'm not working up a sweat at least once a week I have to make sure to shower every day if I don't want to smell like a barn animal.
Decide what you want for your body. After all, it's your body. Whatever you decide is not wrong. Nobody wants a pot belly or a saggy butt. Losing ten pounds is a respectable goal, and might be your ultimate goal. The next step is to decide your preferred method to success. This might be the fastest possible method, or it might not be the fastest possible method. I'm not advocating smoking, but if you want to lose fat and smoking cigarettes or marijuana is your fastest method to success, this would be your preferred method. I suggest your next goal to be to stop smoking.
Just because you are trying to improve your body, does not mean it will be free either. It might not cost you any additional money, but usually it does cost more money. Chances are it's not as expensive as you expect. It might cost you more time, but not as much time as you expect. The rewards outweigh the extra time and money. There are good ways to change your diet and exercise without spending any additional money. It would be more difficult to find ways to improve your diet and exercise without paying more money, but definitely possible. Even one additional hour of exercise per week will make the other 167 hours of your week better.
There are synthetic ways to lose fat. I took a weight loss pill several years ago. I felt like I was running when I was sitting. My heart palpitated, my heart rate increased, and I began to sweat. I thought to myself, "self, this can't be healthy." Weight loss pills may work for some people, and if this your method to your success, it's your method, but it's always better to go the non surgical or non weight loss pill route. If something seems like a bad idea; it probably is a bad idea.
I try to make a point of lifting weights before i eat or drink anything. Yes this ends up making me lift weights a dozen seperate times per day. This also helps me by delaying the connection between wanting to eat or drink and the physical satisfaction of the food or drink. sometimes after doing a couple minutes of lifting weights i realize i am not hungry. An empty stomach does not mean you are hungry. When your stomach makes noise it does not mean you are hungry. You will know when you are hungry, because it will feel like you are hungry. Often people confuse being hungry with wanting a food or drink high.
Running on a treadmill or running outside is a good way to track progress. If you have access to a swimming pool, bring a stopwatch and try to swim several laps in under a certain amount of time. Run around your block. see how fast it takes you to comfortably run around your block. Now try to reduce that time by one minute. Train to compete in a pedal bike race or a foot race. Foot races are inexpensive. Most communities have foot races like a walking 1 mile, a 5k, or a 10k. These add excitement and a very tangible goal to a workout. You aren't just running to look better. You are running by yourself so when you run the 5k the person at the starting line doesn't finish before you who is so fat you can't tell if they are male or female. 5k races usually have a 30, 45, or 60 minute cutoff, so it helps to know what the cutoff is, and if you are going to finish the race before the cutoff time. Watching a short weight lifting competition in person inspired me enough to supercharge my weight lifting for the next few years. In the 2016 Arnold Strongman Competition Arnold Schwartzenegger gave a speech in the beginning where he said one powerlifting competition inspires him to lift weights for the rest of the year.
Changing your diet even a little tends to have significant effects in the long term. i tried to go 100% healthy with my diet a few times, and i was not able to do it. i realized if i change my diet just a little, and then after i adjust to my new diet i change my diet a little more, it's easier to make progress. If you are eating dessert type food, drinking alcohol, and you eat whatever you can get your hands on, try only drinking healthy alcohol, eating less dessert type foods, but still eating as much non dessert food you can get your hands on. if you are eating burgers, pizza, and drinking coke daily where you don't eat any dessert type foods, try eating a "rich" salad and non high sugar fruits. Make the burgers, pizza, and coke the "sometimes" food. i have no issue eating meat, but i realized eating less meat makes you lose fat. Eat more vegetables whenever you can tolerate vegetables. Don't go to the store to buy beans, peas, and corn if you aren't used to eating that type of thing. Start with a beans in sauce, mixed vegatables, and creamed corn. You would be surprised how easy it is to adjust to a healthier diet if you do it gradually. The trick is lowering your addiction to rich foods, which can take a lot of time. It can even be fatal if you are used to eating a lot of sugar and fat and cut them out entirely. It's rare for someone to die from malnutrition, so it's not something to worry about.
When you exercise you do tend to lose fat. The more you exercise the more you will prefer to eat healthier foods. This may not occur at first. It could take months or years, but it will happen. Your diet might be "just perfect" the way it is. You may be in your exact range fatwise. You might simply want to focus on your exercise instead of changing your diet. Weight lifting and exercise has more of a psychological effect on fat loss than a direct physical effect I think. People who look fat and flabby tend to do intense aerobics. Even marathon runners on tv look flabby sometimes. I see the bone, i see the skin, but I don't see the muscle. I don't know exactly why this is, but if it looks bad to you, it probably looks bad to other people. The more you exercise the more you lose fat. If you think you are "too thin" it does not mean you are not "fat enough." It probably means you don't have enough muscle. Gaining fat later in life for the first time in your life is always unhealthy. Even if you have not lost any fat yet, if you "think" you are losing fat, you subconciously will make that happen. Exercise is mainly physical, but losing fat is mainly psychological. Even the terms for people who exercise too much and too little verses the people who eat too much and too little support this. People who eat way too much have 'overeating disorder' and people who eat way too little usually have 'anerexia nervosa'. People who exercise too much are named "fanatics" or "gym rats", whereas people who exercise too little are termed "couch potatos" or "lazy." If you think you will never lose fat, you probably will never lose fat. To take it one step further it's actually better if you don't think about execising when you exercise. It's better to focus on what you are eating while you are eating to lose fat. You can think yourself to less fat for most people. It does require self control to reduce body fat, and it gets more difficult as you age. I've heard of very fat people go on hunger strikes who died of malnutrition. If you are used to eating a pound of sugar per day you should not stop eating sugar entirely overnight. You could go into a diabetic coma even when you have not been diagnosed with diabetes. You should reduce your sugar intake gradually. You might have been told you have to eat every day or every meal to lose fat. This is one of the biggest hurdles to losing fat for most people. If you don't feel like eating for 20 or 40 hours don't eat. If you feel like eating 3 dinners in a row after intense exercise you should probably do that. When you get good at listening to what your body is telling you you will be able to lose fat easier. This does not mean to get good at listen to what respected people are telling you your body should be saying. Something as simple as sitting in a chair or walking are the most unhealthy things a human can do ergonomically if you consider the alternatives. Sitting and walking like four legged mammals is a better way to lose fat. When a scientist looks at the way humans' arms and legs are made they would say it's more probable humans were made to move around on four appendages rather than two appendages. A german comedian recently said in a new netflix standup special "running on two feet was invented in africa." Apparently tens of thousands of years ago humans moved around more like four legged mammals. Recently fitness professionals say moving around in a "push up" position is a new craze, but this isn't a new thing. I heard somewhere a study was done where college students retain information better when on all fours. I guess it's a more natural position for humans to be on all fours than sitting or standing. Take knee replacement surgery for example. There are circular and oval knee replacements. Circular knee replacements are unnatural, but if people are only walking the circular knee replacements are better. Humans were not designed to walk around like birds. If you look at apes and monkeys they stand on 2 legs, but when apes and monkeys move around it's on hands and feet. I believe this is why there are thin lanes in olympic races. They didn't want humans alternating back and front legs. Humans can run faster alternating back and front legs if humans were never forced to walk. It's usually a struggle to get toddlers to walk on two legs. Toddlers "toddle" because it's not the natural way the human body wants to move. Toddles don't need to be taught to crawl. You could teach humans to hop on one foot or walk on hands and keep their feet in the air. It sounds strange to hop instead of walk, but walking itself is strange. The point not everything which is done is correct. The sooner you question everything the better off you will be. You don't need to have an answer to everything, and you don't need to question things which are reasonably correct. However, there are things which "beg the question." Another example of a widely accepted and rarely questioned practice is why are we the only mammal on earth which drinks milk for their entire lives? Milk is healthy to drink as an adult, but not in the high quantities most people consume. Milk is one of those things which won't hurt you immediately when you consume a lot of it. Milk eventually clogs blood vessels, increases fat, and can make a person develop an allergy to it in the form of lactose intolerance. Drinking animal blood is probably healthier than drinking animal milk as an adult human. Almost all predatory mammals drink another animal's blood through their adult lives. Just because something is widely used and old people will say it's a good thing does not make it correct. Thousands of years ago the scientists of the day thought fire was one of the four basic elements which made up everything. It wasn't until a few hundred years ago scientists discovered this was completely incorrect.
If you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner just as routine try skipping a meal. Instead of stuffing your face read a book at lunch. Play a free video game on your smart phone instead of eating dinner if you aren't hungry. If you need something going down your throat as an oral fixation try something slightly healthier. Don't worry about food. You should be aware if you get too thin. Just because you feel like you have lost fat does not mean you have lost fat. Look in the mirror to see if that belly or butt is still enlarged. Babies need to eat, but I see many parents force feed or threaten teenage children to eat. Teenage children know how to eat by that age. I think it's the parents' fear of going to prison if their children get malnutritioned. Children are essentially similar to animals in america with their rights until they are eighteen years old. I heard a nurse yelling at her twelth grade daughter to drink milk even when the daughter said she didn't want to. A 17 year old daughter knows better than the mother what she needs to eat. I bet that girl developed lactose intolerancy. I find fat free milk is a good alternative to high sugar drinks. If you don't feel like drinking milk, don't drink milk. I drink fat free milk because my excess fat is more destructive to my health than a few glasses of milk a day, and it keeps me from drinking sugary drinks. If a child eats irresponsibly after 13, the child should learn from their mistakes. Unfortunately the law in america is counterproductive to teenagers learning the hard way. This leads to many 20 somethings with bad drinking and eating habits when they should have had the benefit of trial and error in their teeange years with experienced adults to give advice, not forcing rules which make little sense. If you are trying to lose fat you should not be eating unless you are hungry. Your stomach making noises, your stomach being empty, or acid reflux does not mean you are hungry. You will know when you are hungry. Being hungry is a slightly different sensation than wanting a food or sugar high from eating or drinking. A common practice is for people to drink sports drinks with electrolytes and sugar when sweating outside (gatorade and powerade). These drinks do help recover from dehydration, but dehydration is relatively rare. If a person is getting dehydrated on a weekly basis something is wrong. You don't need a lot of electrolytes and sugary sports drinks to suppliment physical activity. If you only drink these drinks when sweating try to drink a little water at first. going completely off of the sugary drinks in your 30s or 40s can make you hate sweating very quickly. Drinking the sugary recovery drinks do help in the short term, but hurt your body in the long term if you were drinking only water instead. I try to keep it simple when i am sweating. I have a cold water and a cold sports drink nearby. If I feel like drinking a sports drink i drink a sports drink. If i feel like drinking water I drink water. If I don't have a preference I drink water. I can't stand the low sugar sports drinks. I think it's because the other ingrediants taste bad to me. Without the sugar I can taste the other ingrediants. If you drink a lot of alcohol try cutting the alcohol with water or have a coke next to your drink. You don't need alcohol to have fun. There are probably other incorrect things you have been told from relatives, friends, or professionals which are hampering your fat loss and you don't realize it. While you eat what do you tell yourself? Do you say to yourself you need to finish the plate? Why do you have to finish the burger? Do you need to finish the meal? Are you going to lose money if you don't eat everything? Are you so poor you need to eat the perishable food before the food spoils? Are you going on a mountain climb where no food will be available? When is the next chance realisticallly you will be able to eat? You will not die of starvation if you don't eat for a couple days. Some religions encourage fasting for a week every year. You can't go more than a couple days without drinking, so don't stop drinking. Fasting means to stop eating, not stop drinking. I suggest to eat something every 3 days even if you aren't hungry. If you are eating less than once a day you probably do not have an excess body fat problem. You want to eat once a day optimally. Look at your eating habits objectively.
When you lose body fat by changing your diet it will probably affect you negatively at first. This is normal. Your body will eventually adjust. You will feel better than you did before after your body finally adjusts. Stick with the new diet and see if you can notice when your body adjusts. Half of the time I don't have a preference what I want to eat when I'm hungry. When I don't have a preference what I want to eat I should eat vegetables. Vegetables aren't tasteless, and even adding some condiments or dressing to vegetables is healthier than scarfing a pizza usually. On the other hand if you have a craving for a particular type of food you should eat that food. Sometimes you may crave dessert food. Don't confuse smelling food with craving food. I can notice the difference between when I want a salty food, a dariy food, a sugary food, and a healthy food. Some people can distinguish between more types of cravings.
Chapter 4
Building Muscle And Injury
When you grow muscle, not tone muscle, you are changing your body. Your body does not necessarily agree building muscle is "good." You may lose flexibility as you grow muscle. You might find your posture and mood change. Muscle weighs more than fat. When you build muscle you increase body weight. Muscles protect against injury. Building muscle seems easier than losing fat. I think men can never have too much muscle. Men might have bad muscle ratio though, like Olympic weight lifters.
Two of the best known sayings hold true for building muscle and injury. "No pain, no gain" and "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger". Not all pain produces gain. It is painful to gain physically or health wise after age 25. Injury is not wrong or even bad. We should not be afraid to get injured. It's important to know when we have injured a part of our body so it doesn't become a worse injury. It is very bad to keep working out an injured body part, which is why medicating to dull pain is not a good idea during exercise. Stop exercising as soon as possible when you think you have an injury. If you frequently injure yourself you will build muscle very quickly, but you might not be able to walk half the time. If you will lose your job if you cannot walk, you probably should reduce the frequency of injury. Sometimes getting injured is unavoidable.
"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" does not refer to injuring internal organs or losing limbs. A serious joint injury may stay with you for the rest of your life. You should not be afraid of muscle injury though. Doctors and people with medical education will tell you there are certain injuries which heal weaker and other injuries which heal stronger. This is false. Every injury heals stronger even if that particular injured body part heals weaker. Holistically, the pain, muscle spasms, and the way you avoid getting pain builds up the surrounding muscles. It even corrects ergonomic problems you may have had for decades. Building muscle doesn't necessarily have to be painful, but often the microscopic tears in your muscle associated with building muscle are confused with serious injuries. It gets more difficult to distinguish the difference between injury and soreness as you get older. The window between building muscle without injury gets smaller as you age.
It helps to have something to achieve when trying to progress physically. With weight lifting, lifting your body weight in a certain lift could be a good ultimate goal. Maybe even something as simple as doing a normal sit up is your ultimate goal. If you are more athletic it could be doing a one arm push up, an inverted vertical push up, or sitting on the wall without a chair for so many minutes. A good way to progress quickly is doing as many push ups on your knees as you can. Even "athletic" people will struggle after a few dozen repetitions. After you can do 10 or 50 push ups on your knees progress to normal push ups. After you can do 10 or 50 normal push ups put your feet on a step or a chair. Having a creative or enjoyable workout is one of the most important parts of exercise. Not only is it healthy to work out the same muscles in slightly different ways, it makes weight lifting not be as boring. Hating exercise works for some people, but it's better not to hate exercise.
Building muscle can also be done by aerobic exercise. Why not watch television while walking? Instead of watching the sports game at a bar or over a table of food go to an inexpensive gym and watch a sports game pedaling on a bike or using the elliptical. Listen to the news on the radio or your phone as you walk outside. Keep a light dumbell next to the television and lift while watching tv.
It helps to be able to distinguish the difference between soreness and injury. When you are under 25 you heal quickly from injury. It's not as important to notice when you are getting injured younger than age 25. There is a "good pain" and a "bad pain." The good pain feels like a burning sensation, and doesn't usually feel like a sharp pain. Some people even claim to enjoy the sore sensation of "feeling the burn." When you build muscle the muscle is "torn" microscopically, and then the tears are filled in with more muscle. When someone says they "tear" or "pull" a muscle that's slang for tearing a muscle a lot. It's not a bad thing to tear or pull a muscle to the point of injury. The muscle will heal stronger. Even tearing ligaments or tendons makes the muscles surrounding the injury heal stronger.
A non injured body part takes two days to five months to heal. Fitness and medical professionals will tell you it takes two to four days for muscles to heal. This is untrue. Taking four days off from working out a muscle when I was 20 didn't give me the full efficiency of the muscle as when i would take two weeks off from "overloading" that muscle. Muscles have to take more than four days to fully heal if the muscle is correctly overloaded. Even personal trainers will disagree with the two week recovery time mentioned here for muscles. Personal trainers are still taught two to four days recovery time for muscles. Avid weight lifters work out a different body part each day of the week. That means the people who consider a workout spending an hour lifting weights leave an entire week for each muscle to recover. If it only takes three days average for a muscle to recover the avid weight lifters would work out the same body part two to three times a week. It's closer to two weeks for a muscle to fully recover from exercise. It took two weeks for me to fully recover after overloading a muscle when i was 25 years old, and it still takes two weeks for a muscle to fully recover at 37 years old. You are constantly tearing muscles and rebuilding those muscles stronger even if you aren't doing "exercise." Walking buiilds leg muscles and sitting builds back muscles. These muscles are growing slower than if you used consiously worked those muscles on a weekly basis.
While exercising if you feel pain in your shoulders, ankles, or knees you should stop working them out immedidately until the pain goes away. You want to make sure your major joints are not injured before you continue to exercise those joints. There are muscles surrounding major joints which can be painful without a joint injury at all. Unless you can determine where the injury is exactly you should stop that activity until you are more certain it is not a joint injury. Maybe seeing your primary doctor is your way of determining if a body part is injured as opposed to sore. You can exercise other areas of your body while waiting for the pain around that joint to go away. You might be able to work out that joint another way while it's injured. For example your leg can hurt when you run but not when you do leg presses. If you have been doing leg presses instead of have your leg in a cast, your sorrounding muscles would be stronger and you will be less susceptible to leg injury in the future. You should not assume every time you guess what type of injury you have you are correct. Doctors will ask you to point to where it hurts, and then the doctor manipulates your body to pinpoint the injured body part. Unless you know enough about anatomy to do this yourself you could be wrong about what body part is injured when you feel pain. A broken foot feels similar to a sprained foot. A broken arm can feel like to a torn muscle or tendon. When you injure your main neck muscle (trapezoid muscle) it feels like a headdache. If you feel pain in your chest area don't assume it's a heart attack. Doctors put "heart disease" as a cause of death in america when they don't know what the cause of death is in order to avoid a malpractice lawsuit. The statistics of heart disease as a result of death in america are skewed due to this practice. A stress test can determine how healthy your heart is. If you have a healthy heart don't assume chest pain is a heart attack. If you are 50 years or older even with a healthy heart you want to refrain from doing a lot of intense exercise. After 50 years old the first heart attack can be fatal. Your first heart attack can kill you at any age, but there is a higher chance when you are older of dying from intense exercise.
If your intention is to only exercise to keep your muscles the same size it doesn't have to be painful at all. The risk of injury while maintaining muscle volume is less than the risk of injury while building muscle volume. Your body is used to your current volume of muscle. This is how you stay "in shape." People usually refer to staying in shape as not gaining fat though.
You can gauge your progress by recording how long it takes you to run one to three miles. You can gauge your progress by how much weight you can lift when you record repetitions and the amount of weight you are lifting. Muscles you have not exercised recently have a very high chance of getting injured when you begin working them out. The bigger the muscle is the less chance it will be injured. The bigger the muscle is the better chance you will still be able to use the muscle when it's injured. You don't want to start working a muscle at age 40 you haven't worked out since you were a child at the most weight or the most repetitions. If you are using a barbell try using no weight on the barbell at first. After your body is used to the motion put a little weight on the barbell each subsequent day you lift. Even if you get injured doing this it will be a lesser injury than if you did the most you could lift initially. Don't assume you are the exception to the rule. Assume you fall into the norm. Your body gets less efficient as you age. On the other hand your body works better than people's bodies who don't exercise, however your body will not heal as fast as a child's body. Being realistic about what you can do helps you progress faster.
Muscle twitching and muscle shaking while lifting are normal. They are nothing to be afraid of. Muscle spasms might be nothing to worry about either. I suggest to stop exercising if you are getting muscle spasms. These three things are good indicators your muscles are at their limit. With muscles you work out regularly you don't have to stop exercising when your muscles shake or twitch. I think muscle spasms occur when a muscle is trying to heal and is not able to heal. Back spasms are common if you are sitting for many hours and the muscle is ready to heal, but the position or activity is not letting the muscle heal. This is my guess. Pain is a good way to know you have an injury. When tell a doctor, "it hurts when i move this way," the doctor sarcastically replies not to move that way. You don't have to be a medical professional to learn how to exercise effectively. Paying for a chiropractor or personal trainer is a good idea, but these don't need to be permanent expenses. Once you learn how to do what these professionals do you don't have to pay to keep seeing them. Even animals drag an injured body part behind them or have the injured body part sticking out to the side when they move. Animals have no education other than what they have seen or possibly instinct. When an animal drags an injured body part behind them or out to the side they are still getting exercise when they locomote their bodies. The injured body part is not causing them additional pain because of this. This is a great way to keep body fat low and build muscle while you have an injury. Why do humans throw a pity party every time they get injured instead of going about their routine immobilizing the body part without a sling or a cast? This is mainly a fault of accepted medical practices. Even when it's common practice to use a cast for a broken bone it does not mean it's a good thing. The bone will heal faster, but instead of the pain associated with the injury the cast takes away the pain and reduces the surrounding muscle growth instead of enhancing it as the injury heals.
"It aint what you dont know that kills you. Its what you know, that aint so."
-mark twain
If you are being told something which seems wrong by someone in the medical profession it does not mean they are correct and you are wrong. Someone in the fitness profession is not always correct when they talk about fitness. To become a personal trainer it only takes one to two days of lectures and a test. You can miss up to 30% of the answers on some national personal training certifications and still pass. This does not qualify a personal trainer to be the expert on all things fitness and nutrition. All a personal trainer is certified to do is help a person gain muscle and lose fat better.
After a body part is more than halfway healed it helps to work out the muscle. I don't know any way to know when a body part is halfway healed other than trial and error. When you start working out a previously injured body part and it feels better than before it's getting better. When you start working out a previously injured body part and it feels worse than before you should stop working out that body part and let it heal longer. When you work out a body part which is almost fully healed it is an opportunity to create new tears in muscles and new microfractures in bones which would be difficult to create if the body part were 100% healed. Workig out a previously injured body part is a way to gain flexibility. In the old Jean Claude Van Damme movies he does a straddle with his legs and he pretends it's painful. We know Jean Claude doesn't have anything between his legs so it can't be painful (that's an untrue joke) There is truth to this myth. Injuries follow a downward and upward curve of pain when they heal. Once you hit the lowest point, not neccessarily the most pain, the body part gets better from then on. The body part usually gets stiff or numb during the second half. You can take anti inflammatory drugs in the second half to speed up the process of healing or to gain flexibility. The muscle has already knitted itself in the deepest part of the tear i'm guessing. I always had trouble sitting on the ground cross legged until i had a few serious upper leg muscle injures. Now I can sit on the ground with "perfect posture" without a problem. I can also run faster than i ever have in my life in my 30s. If you are able to determine when the body part begins the second phase you can use injuries to gain flexibility and gain muscle. Injury isn't wrong. Injury can be used to change your body quickly. You can relate the fear of injury to the fear of a virus. There is nothing inherently evil or wrong about a virus. Some viruses are fatal, but viruses by themselves are as natural as the sun. Both the sun and viruses are useful and potentially fatal. Viruses are the best transport mechanism for distributing things to cells. It's possible to make a synthetic virus distrubute something around our bodies even though this might never have been done yet. No doubt synthetic viruses will be used more commonly in the future. Viruses can even have bacterial infections themselves. In very rare cases a bacterial infection inside a virus infecting a host can be transferred to that host. Before pennacillin was descovered mold was feared. Mold was originally only thought to be bad. Penacillin was discovered by accident. Penacillin would have probably not been discovered until decades later if Alaxander Fleming did not have the accident in his lab. The discovery of Penacillin saved many lives and limbs in world war one. People fear things they don't need to fear.
It's more difficult to heal from injury as you age. The same activities you did when you were younger may cause you injury later in your life. If you expect one day you will not be able to run a ten minute one mile you won't be surprised when this happens. Generally it gets more difficult to exercise and change your body as you age. In my 20s I wish I didn't try to avoid injury as much as I did. It would have been healthier in my 30s if I had exercised harder in my 20s. In my 30s I am trying harder to avoid injury than I could have been trying. Recovery from an injury can take years if you get injured in your 30s. You probably have to reduce the intensity or amount of your exercise in your 30s if you want to avoid injury. It's possible to get joint and bone problems you never had before if you exercise too hard in your 30s. I imagine in my 40s I will have to limit my exercise even more to avoid injury. I will probably have to stop consuming all potent suppliments to mask pain and reduce inflammation unless I'm recovering from injury. If you are far from a fitness goal by the age of 40 you probably aren't going to accomplish this goal without major risk to your health. After 50 a person knows what their body can and cannot accomplish. If you don't have a serious physical disease after 50 consider yourself lucky. After 60 you should not be doing intense exercise at all, or it could be fatal. If you have gained a lot of fat after 38 you need to be careful about increasing your exercise intensity. Too much exercise could be fatal as young as 25, but the risk of fatality when carrying excess fat increases as you age. There is negligable risk with everything you do. Think objectively about what should be feared and what should not be feared.
A 65 year old man prevented me from light jogging with occasional sprinting in an easy 45 minute soccer game because he thought I would drop dead from a heart attack. There was no basis for his decision. He looked at me and decided a 35 year old man should not be running even though this 35 year old man says he will be fine running. The 65 year old man told me a 70 year old man died from doing the same activity I was about to do. I've been exercising all my adult life. I train by running hard 30 to 40 minutes every week. I played very competitive organized soccer for a few years in my 30s. I had no physical problems at all. I had not gained fat since I played soccer. My exercise routine was the same as when I played soccer. 45 minutes of easy jogging with occasional sprints would barely make me break a sweat. This is an example of an unrealistic fear. You may have an experience in your life with an unrealistic fear. The 65 year old man was fired a month after for something unrelated. It was no surprise he was fired, because the man probably made other bad decisions.
Chapter 5
Lifting Weights
The ideas behind building muscle by weight lifting all center around lifting heavier weights. While this is generally the idea, often people misunderstand the difference between the cause and the effect. Lifting heavy weights doesn't get you as strong as fast as lifting lighter weights and more repetitions.
The best way to build muscle is to start with heavy weights. When you can't lift that weight anymore lower the weight and do as many repetitions as you can at the lower weight. Then lower the weight again and do as many repetitions as you can, and keep repeating this process until you are lifting no weight and you can't do any more repetitions.
You should figure out what works best for you. If you prefer to only do 10 repetitions of the heaviest weight possible. That's your workout. That is better than not lifting weights at all. You will build muscle doing any type of lifting. Overloading your muscles well builds muscle the fastest though. If it's irrelevent to you what method to use when you lift weights I suggest to follow a method described by me or a method described by a good fitness professional. You will eventually modify the method to fit better with what you want in a workout. If you change your diet and it isn't acheiving the results you want you need to change your the diet again. Fitness professionals will say there is a "good form" and a "bad form" when lifting weights. Even though this has some truth I disagree. If you are swinging weights in an awkard manner it has a greater chance of hurting your body, but injury is not wrong. Doing straight pull ups is not the only type of pull up accepted by professionals as correct form now. The new accepted method of doing a pull up is where you swing like you see an olympic athlete when they initially start a routine on the uneven bars.
Remember it's your workout. Just because everyone would say there is good and bad posture does not mean everyone is correct. It's better to lift how you think you should lift. A good example is I got diagnosed with spinal sculliosis recently mainly due to lifting heavy weights and stretching the way i'm "supposed to." It did eventually help me to bend over and touch my toes easier, but I would have preferred to focus on passing my fitness test for work instead of healing from making my spine curve more for no real reason. Forcing yourself to grab your toes in your 20s and 30s can hurt your spine. Thankfully after a lot of bed rest and weight lifting modifications the sculliosis is gone.
Something taught still today is a low intensity workout for a longer period of time is supposed to make a person lose fat better than a high intensity workout for a shorter period of time. The reasoning with this conclusion is while you are doing the exercise you do actually burn more calories with the lower intensity workout over a longer time. The 30 seconds you spend lifting heavy weights as opposed to the 5 minutes you are lifting lighter weights burns less calories. The equation to calculate calorie burn is not meant to draw conclusions whether a higher intensity exercise over a shorter time should be replaced with a lower intensity exercise due to the amount of calories burned during the exercise. Calorie burn needs to be calculated over 5 minutes in both these situations to get a correct result. Logic is not fitness professionals' forte apparently. Warmup, Cooldown, and simply breathing burn calories too. When you jog slowly for 1 minute, after you stop jogging you usually have no trouble breathing or walking. When you sprint for 1 minute it takes a few minutes to breathe normally again. You begin to notice sweat after you finish running. Your shirt is totally dry and only gets wet when you are standing still after sprinting. Unfortunately a lot of medical and fitness professionals are still taught lower intensity exercise for a longer period of time reduces fat better than higher intensity exercise for a shorter period of time.
There is usually some truth to a myth. Indirectly if you are eating or drinking constantly the lower intensity workout for a longer period of time will prevent you from eating or drinking. This indirectly reduces your body fat. If you do not eat or drink every waking hour of every day then this will not be the case for you. You should go by what the "percieved exertion" is for your workout. If you workout for two minutes doing high intensity exercise, and then workout for 5 minutes doing low intensity exercise, whichever exercise "feels" harder is harder. The exercise which feels harder will burn more calories and reduce fat better. Knowing what to do is half of the way to success.
Chapter 6
Juicing
There are a lot of different types of things you can take to get bigger faster. Even anabolic steroids are very good to get big fast if not overused or abused.
Ginsing is the thing I suggest to use to help with work outs best. Ginsing doesn't directly help you work out any better, but it has a strong indirect effect to help you exercise. It's always at least a little painful to exercise after 25, so ginsing makes you feel "good" without masking pain or affecting your exercise directly. With ginsing you can feel if you are getting injured. Unlike some other ways to juice there are no direct side effects or direct risks to use ginsing to enhance your exercise. I even suggest the pill form of ginsing with a higher dose than recommended on a bottle. You can take ginsing in tea form, but that's literally "watered down." I don't think you get a high enough dose drinking any tea. Ginsing is from a tea leaf itself, but unless it's ginsing tea it's the pill form of ginsing simply added to the tea. Even though ginsing is pretty inexpensive the biggest downside is it takes a pretty high dose to enhance your workout and wears off rather quickly. To keep a ginsing high while running a 5k you would have to take ginsing every 15 to 20 minutes. Ginsing is also the opposite of addictive. You will eventually dislike the way ginsing makes you feel. Until then supercharge your workout with ginsing!
Painkillers help with exercise, but not while you are exercising. Take a painkiller before or after you work out. You don't want the painkiller to be active while you work out unless it's a low dose and you are used to taking painkillers. If you take a painkiller right after you stop exercising it actually does a lot of psychological good as well as physical good. Most painkillers have a non steroidal anti inflammatory effect too. This which helps for reasons described in the naproxin paragraph below. Painkillers can lower your blood pressure so you don't get a heart attack or a blood clot while you exercise without the risks of taking statin medication.
Naproxin (brand name aleve) alone is not a painkiller. Naproxin is often mixed with painkillers, so you want to make sure there is no painkiller included with naproxin if you simply want a powerful over the counter anti inflammatory drug. Naproxin is totally ok to have affect you while working out. If you are starting an exercise routine you had to stop for a few weeks or months naproxin is for you. Naproxin is a stronger anti anflammatory than most anti inflammatories in painkillers, but naproxin is still a non steroidal anti iniflammatory. The two main risks with naproxin are you have to make sure you always take it with food, and to be careful what you are doing while it is affecting you. Even lying down in a bad way can cause you to sprain your hip or back with naproxin. Naproxin is one of the drugs I'm surprised is over the counter in america. Naproxin has such a high risk of a stomach ulcer if taken without food and a high risk to injure any part of your body it would make more sense to only be given with a perscription. Naproxin is a great drug if used correctly. Unfortunately people are used to a certain amount of safety when taking over the counter drugs it could cause you to hurt one of your joints very badly if you use naproxin unwisely. Naproxin should have a warning on every container with the two main risks. A good time to take naproxin is when you are about to go to bed and you know you won't sleep on a part of your body wrong. If you have a serious injury I suggest not taking naproxin until the injury begins to heal. Inflammation ceates an internal cast when you have a serious injury. Preventing the inflammation does reduce pain in the short term, but will make a serious injury heal slower in the long term. Don't just take naproxin because you like the flavor of the pill coating. Make sure you want the pros and accept the cons of naproxin before taking it. If you want to take a drug like candy low dose painkillers are almost always helpful.
Creatine helps you recover from workouts in half the time, but Creatine is something you take for one month and then not take creatine for one month. Creatine has a high chance of dehydrating you. Make sure to read the directions when you buy creatine. Creatine replaces lost fluid in cells making you able to workout harder and recover faster.
I have never taken the needle form of anabolic steroids, but I do take synthetic steroids once a year. I don't suggest taking any steroid for an extended period of time. Even synthetic steroids have major psychological effects. I buy prednisone from an online pharmecy in pill form and take a pretty high dose of it 1 week every year. Prednisone is a synthetic steroid made in a lab and approved by the high standards of the FDA. I believe prednisone does a similar thing as anabolic steroids for your workout. I've heard people argue with this saying injecting steroids into a muscle with a needle is better, but why not simply work out the muscle after you take the steroid? You don't need to mess with a needle form of anabolic steroids when you might inject it incorrectly, and the needle form has negative social rammifications. If you are trying to heal a part of your body taking prednisone is a good idea for the anti inflammatory effect. If you are depressed and don't want to be depressed steroids is a good way to cure depression. You would be surprised how potent and helpful steroids are if you never experienced them. Steroids don't directly help you exercise like if you used a machine which sends electrical currents through your muscles via pads. If you take a steroid and simply sit on a couch while it's affecting you it won't do much to help you. When you take steroids the last thing you want to do is sit on a couch all day long. You want to get up and do something. The first time i was ever on steroids was because I was in the hospital and given steroids to save my life by a doctor. I was put on steroids because of a bad allergic reaction to medicine my primary physician perscribed to me. The steroids made me feel like Superman. People take an oral form of steroids very often, even without realizing it. You can explain it away the oral form of steroids in your blood with low level sports. That won't help with mid or upper level sports with a policy about juicing. Another major problem with any steroid is it hurts your immune system for a next few months. You want to take an antibiotic right when you start taking the steroid to avoid getting sick. If the psychological effect becomes too much with steroids you need to stop taking steroids. Abuse of steroids isn't just taking too much. It's considered abusing steroids if you cannot handle the psychological effects also. Steroids start by making you feel happy. Eventually steroids will make you irritable or angry.
I don't want to go explain every possible low cost method of juicing. The aforementioned methods are easy to use and should help improve your workout if you feel your exercise is stagnating. Everything except creatine I have had personal experience with. Ginseng is the best to kick start your workout. The rest of the juicing methods have to be used properly. Juice responsibly.
Chapter 7
Enthusiast Exercise
So you have been exercising for years. Exercise is not intimidating for you. You will probably be doing some form of exercise regularly for the rest of your life. You like working out. This means you are an exercise enthusist. There are some things you probably did not think about which could help improve or sustain your exercise activity.
The best thing to tell yourself is "if you don't make progress you regress." Don't take for granted you can run 5k in 30 or 40 minutes. Try to run a 5k in 25 or 35 minutes. If you have been lifting the same amount of weight with the same amount of reptitions for a year try increasing the weight a little and see if you can still do the same number of repetitions. Arnold Schwartzenegger said in the "Pumping Iron" documentary something like, "It's the 11th and 12th reptition which really builds muscle." What Arnold didn't iterate is that it's not a certain "number" of reptitions which helps more than another number of repetitions. Decades ago weight lifters used to think 10 repetitions is a good number to attain when lifting weights. If you are used to doing 10 repetitions of a weight, naturally when you try to lift 11 or 12 repetitions you will be struggling more with the 11th and 12th repetition. It's a good idea to write down your progress and plot your progress on a graph. See if you are keeping up with your goal and timeline. If you track your progress over years you will see your progress is slowing down. Don't let this discourage you. Everyone ages. You are more athletic than people who don't consciously exercise who are also your age. Don't feel content to cruise on your larells of a flat tummy. Try to keep progressing even if it's only 1 pound every year. When I was 20 I would only lift weights for 5 minutes once a week. That was my entire conscious exercise routine. At 25 I was doing 1 hour of some sort of exercise once a week and 5 minutes per day. At 30 I was doing 1 hour every other day and 2 to 4 once a week. At 35 i was exercising for several hours every day, but not making as much progress as you would expect. At 40 i expect even exercising half of my waking hours my progress will be minimal. Starting out with only 5 minutes a day when i was 20 made me not hate to exercise. It still feels like i'm exercising for 5 minutes when I exercise for 1 hour now. You can fool yourself into enjoying exercise. Starting with small goals and a very short amount of time is a good way to make yourself not hate exercise. Someone said video games give frequent rewards for hard work. If you aren't getting rewarded for exercise it can sabotage your desire to exercise. Running one mile in under 15 minutes is a good place to start if you don't consider yourself a "runner." If you are not a weight lifter you should not be embarressed if you are lifting with a small amount of weight. If you struggle do to a single sit up try going as far as you can towards a sit up, and do as many of those half sit ups as you can.
Brian Shaw won of many Arnold Strongman Worlds Strongest Man competitions. Brian said in a youtube personal training video lifting at 50% of your maximum is the best at building muscle. I don't like to spend hours lifting weights, so I start at 75% of my maximum. If you have enough time you can do the lowering of the weight as I described in chapter 5. If you are rich you can buy multiple dumbells or barbells and put them in lines according to each type of exercise you do. I've never felt guilty after buying more weights. You might not have the time to spend 30 minutes a day exercising. You don't need to spend a lot of time to get a lot of exercise. You walk for a large portion of your day, so even though you don't consider walking part of your workout it can be part of your workout without doing anything else while you walk. If you work out your legs very hard for 10 minutes, the rest of your day you will be working out your legs more than you would if you didn't work out your legs earlier. It will be a struggle to walk even. You might even find yourself getting out of breath simply walking because your legs are tired. This is part of your workout too. You burn more calories for the rest of your day simply from 10 minutes of hard exercise in the morning or right after work.
One of the fears people usually have is they think when they get out of breath it means it is an unhealthy thing. The act of huffing and puffing is very healthy. If you feel yourself starting to get out of breath from exercise and that causes you to stop exercising, this is one area you can improve with your exercise. If you don't get out of breath once a week you probably should do something which causes you to get out of breath, even if it's just for 1 minute. It takes average 30 minutes of exercise before you start burning fat. It hurts more when your body is burning fat. Long distance runners talk about the "wall" when they run. A long distance runner wants to be so fit they never hit the wall during a race. When you exercise, your body begins by converting sugar to energy. Whenever the body decides the sugar is depleted it will turn to converting fat to energy. If your body decides you have no more fat your body will eventually convert your muscles to energy, but this would only happen for people who have less than the average body fat percentage I'm guessing. If you are average or above average with your body fat percentage, you want to try to enter the fat burning phase of exercise at least once a week. Remember it's not always a good thing to reduce fat. If you struggle to lose fat and you are in the middle of what is considered average body fat percentage for an average person I don't suggest continuing to reduce fat. You should focus on eating more and exercising harder. Simply reducing fat might be good for your profession or socially, but for your brain and your health this isn't the best decision. A good body fat test is essential to correctly determining how much fat you have. The fat pinch test is probably the best inexpensive way to do this. You can buy a pincher from a physical store or an internet store. This is an easy way to see how much fat you have. You can do this fat pinch test yourself. Height versus weight is the most commonly used fat percentage test, and it's not even an accurate test. The height versus weight test doesn't take bone density or muscle volume into account. The height versus weight fat percentage test will tell you you are losing fat as you get older, when this is not the case. You are are losing bone density as you get older.
Most people want to lower the fat percentage in their body. If you are in the average body fat percentage and still want to reduce your body fat, this is your ultimate goal. It's not terribly unhealthy to have a very low body fat percentage. In fact the ranges created for body fat percentage don't apply to everyone. You can be below or above the normal range and be perfectly healthy according to the standards used to determine the normal range of body fat percentage. "Percieved exertion" plays the primary role in how best to burn fat. "Percieved exertion" means the harder the workout feels the better the workout is. If you run one mile as fast as you can. then you run 5k (3.14 miles) as fast as you can, you will be running the 5k at a slower speed than when you ran the one mile. Assuming both distances and speeds have the same percieved exertion you are getting the same benefit with either exercise. It's not to say running lower intensity for longer isn't a good idea. Probably for most people a lower for a longer period of time does reduce fat better somehow, but not directly. Don't assume working out at a lower intensity is helping you more than a higher intensity if it doesn't feel like it's helping you. Some people do not have time to spend an hour every day working out. A simple 5 to 10 minutes of very intense exercise per day or per week is all they can manage and it is enough to keep them healthy. You can use your body weight in many different ways to exercise. Pumping a 2 to 15 pound weight while you watch television or do something which requires one hand is always a good idea healthwise. You don't need to have formal exercise in a environment dedicated to exercise to get a good workout. Most of the fittest people I know do regular exercise in their home somehow. Think of exercise as a part of you, not something you need to get up the guts to do.
There is no magic pill to getting fit, even if there is literally a magic pill to getting fit. There are negative side effects to weight loss pills. The best way to a healthier you is to exercise and eat healthier food. A little change in your diet goes a long way. Changing to a healthy diet cold turkey doesn't usually work. Most people do not have easy access to healthier food, so eating healthier will costs a little more money. Eating a mostly veggie sandwich instead of a doughnut or a hamburger is worth the extra cost or preperation time. You would be surprised how a rich salad with a lot of different things in it can fill you up simarly to a high meat food.
Don't forget to "let the crazy out" when you work out. Simply working out harder does give added results. It helps to know how to exercise, but it's not neccessary to know how to exercise to exercise. Attempting to run further, lift longer, or try harder will change your body. I don't suggest gauging your success by looking in the mirror. Don't pass by a mirror and ask yourself "did i lose fat"? It's better not to think about the immediate physical changes from exercise or diet change, or you could get hung up on the physical results. It does help to look in a mirror objectively though. You should be asking yourself "am i working out and modifying my diet enough?" Force yourself to give an answer. Maybe compare your body to other people's bodies. I never seemed to have a problem building more muscle. My challenge is losing more fat. I eat a lot. This is good for my mind, but not good for my appearance. It is risky to my health carrying around any excess fat as i get older. You should keep trying to succeed in whatever goals you choose. If you find the goal is too ambitious, modify your goal and keep trying. Just beacause you ate a doughnut or binged on food for a weekend does not mean everything you did is lost. There are studies showing the food you eat on avearge is what your body wants to return to expecting. It's ok to mess up with your workouts or diets occasionally. I don't want to offend Aunt Mary by not eating her sugar rich chocolate cake. I can stuff my face with the chocolate cake until my tummy looks like I'm pregnent, and the next day after a dozen flushes I can go back to my normal eating routine and my body will forget about the cake. Cheat on your diet only if you want to, not because it's part of the fad diet you chose to follow. Every bite of healthier food, every step, and every repetition helps toward your goal. Don't think eating something people tell you is unhealthy is unhealthy. Don't think eating something unhealthy somehow undoes the exercise you did in the last week. I heard in a recent documentary about nutritional food people are more interested telling people what the newest diet is instead of telling people how to diet well. You hear people argue about what are good foods and what are bad foods, but not about the whole point to eating a good food or a bad food. A comedian commented how you get mixed messages in food stores from magazines. One magazine will show a picture of a fat celebrity, and another magazine will explain the risks with anarexia nervosa. Don't look for an answer from what society thinks you are supposed to look like. Even if you get an understandable answer it will probably be incorrect anyway. Don't change your diet just to try the latest diet. Most people are not searching for new ways to spend unneccessary money with their food. Most people want a low cost solution to an effective diet. Most people already know what they have to do to lose fat and eat healthier, but they don't want to do it. The obvious solution has not been working, and they don't know why it's not working. Most of the mainstream diets intentionally make you sick so you lose your apetite. The less you put into your mouth the less fat you will have. it's probably healthier to eat normally and put your finger down your throat than it is to try the atkins diet. At least you are getting some of the nutrition with the food in your stomach before the food comes racing back up past your tongue. This destroys your throat in the process, so I don't suggest puking to lose fat. Chewing on rare meat and spitting the meat out instead of swallowing is a healthy but weird way to satisfy your hunger. This is also a rather costly way to buy meat in a high enough grade you don't have to cook it fully, and it will leave you hungry just drinking blood. Realize you don't have to finish all the food in front of you is a very effective solution to dieting.
Even if you knew everything there was to know about exercising and dieting you would still need to do it. Knowledge is power, but knowledge is not neccessary to exercise well. I saw the best male mma fighter in 2010 interviewed. He could barely carry on an intellectual conversation. Even in most sports you don't need to be an intellectual to succeed. You might not be the first person through the gate in the race to a perfect body, but you will finish eventually. Don't give up. Focus on the next step or the next repetition if you are exercising and having trouble maximizing your workouts. There is nothing wrong with pushing yourself to your absolute limit. Make sure you have to be able to walk the next few days if you do this. Try taking a vacation for sleep and exercise. Check into a nearby hotel if you cannot get satisfactory sleep and exercise at home. Try to find a few ways you can exercise while you are on your health vacation. Plan healthy meals. I hate salad, but with a little breaded meat, a little fruit, and some low fat cheese even a salad can taste good. Swimming laps is a better workout than you would think. Make it an annual health vacation. Even walking for a few hours is a very healthy thing. It improves the rest of your year if you take an annual health vacation. Often people do not realize they are overworked until they stop working. They tend to feel a lot better when this happens. When they go back to work they feel refreshed for months.
Chapter 8
Conclusion
Set a goal. Even if it's a laughable goal don't feel bad. Don't feel bad about juicing either. Don't feel bad about taking weight loss medication. You would be surprised how many people take something potent to help with exercise and weight loss. Go to an aerobics class instead of the movies. Going to most gyms once a week is cheaper than going to a movie once a week. Instead of going to dinner with your significant other, go roller skating. Go ice skating. Eating while bowling is better than sitting at a table waiting for a server to bring food to you as you stuff your face.
Set a very attainable goal and set an ultimate goal. If you can run a 15 minute one mile try to run a 14 minute one mile. Your ultimate goal could be to run a 6 minute one mile or a 10 minute one mile. See how fast you can run a mile. Figure out how you will achieve this goal. If you want to lift your body weight in a particular lift see how much you can lift. Increase it two pounds or five pounds and try to do the same amount of repetitions as before. It takes a lot of time and dedication to build muscle. Just because mr. 20 year old ex football player can run a 6 minute one mile does not mean he will be able to do that in 10 to 20 years. He would be not be an ex football player at 20 years old if he were good enough to play college football. Just because wannabe mr. universe can lift twice his body weight does not mean those chicken legs can compete in a race. Maybe wannabe miss america can lift weights, run, and that long silky hair requires a lot of product to maintain the look. Wannabe miss america's job might be modeling. If you ask her to carry on a conversation there would be more "um"s and "right"s than useful words in each sentance. What you see is not what you get when you look at people. Do not judge a book by its cover. I lost a 5k to someone who i would have bet would never beat me. I've never seen a man that fat run so well. As he passed me late in the 5k race I saw the back of calf muscles. It made sense at that point why he passed me.
If you want to lose 50 pounds of body weight attempt to lose 5 pounds first. Once you lose 5 pounds of body weight take a week off from consciously losing fat. The next week try to get down 5 pounds lower body fat than before. Don't feel bad about whatever goal you set. Even if someone is making you feel bad about your goals, or you think someone is making you feel bad about your goals, don't let that discourage you. When I weighed more than 400 pounds I would have probably been fat for the rest of my life if I didn't try to lose fat. You have to have a desire or a reason to reach your goal. Find a reason to exercise. The reason doesn't even have to make sense. When I was a child I thought it helped me to pretend I was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle when I exercised. That helped me focus and exercise harder. Of course I don't suggest telling an adult you think you are a super sehen from dragonball z while you are running. If it helps you not to think about anything when you exercise that is the way you exercise. If you lift weights in your bed that's your exercise. Whatever your exercise is it's ok.
People might laugh. People might tease. When you put enough time and effort into your exercise the people who were laughing will be shocked. They were laughing because they don't think it's possible to do what you have done. Some people have such big egos they think nobody on earth is smarter than they are when that's obviously not true. If the people with inflated egos can't understand it it's not possible. One of the best ways to prove people wrong is to be successful. I'm not talking about earining a lot of money, but if that's what you consider successful that's ok. Your effort pay off sooner than you realize. You may only need to change something small if your method isn't achieving your goal. It's your life, your body, your diet, and your workout. You will be living with yourself for the rest of your life. You don't want to wake up next to yourself regretting not spending 5 minutes each week exercising for a decade. Put this book down and go exercise.