Fitness is a great topic, there are a lot of experts, lots of people that think they are experts, and lots of people trying to figure out just how to get in shape, stay in shape, and reach their goals. Fitness isn’t just a goal it is also a destination and a way of life. What many people who attempt to get in shape don’t realize is that there is no magic pill, or specific exercise that will whip them into shape. Fitness is a change that takes place and must stay in place long term, or you will never maintain your goals.
Contrary to what many people seem to think it is easy to loose weight or even get in shape. Just eat less and workout a little bit every day. The hard part is maintaining the level of fitness you desire.
One thing that many people do not take into account is that a new fitness regime will through their life out of balance. You must spend time exercising, you have to change your schedule, you must eat differently, you have to sleep differently, you look at things differently, and you interact with people differently. Often times all of these changes are not recognized or acknowledged and this leads to problems. Often times these changes are made to quickly and the new lifestyle is too hard to sustain.
It is often said that id you do something for 30 days it becomes a habit but is it is also very easy to break artificial habits that are not cemented into your regime. It is also easy to break habits that take will power to maintain. Exercise hurts and takes some serious motivation, so it is not hard to cut it out of a busy schedule.
Recognizing that fitness is a new way of life and that you must strive for balance is important in achieving life long fitness. It also applies to many other areas of life. When you are doing one thing you cannot be doing another. If you are at work you cannot be at home, if you are watching TV you cannot be spending time with your family, if you are running 30 miles per week you will not be able to put on muscle mass. Striving for balance is difficult because we all want instant gratification and it takes a long time to develop proper balance.
Think about what happens if you are trying to balance a stick on your finger and you make a sudden movement. The stick falls, if you make numerous small fluid corrections you are much more likely to hit your target of balance. This also applies to all other areas of life including fitness.
Assembling your home gym isn’t really as hard or expensive as you might think. Getting the right exercise equipment is important but you may also be surprised at the quality of workout you can get with some simple pieces of exercise equipment.
Today I am going to talk about push up bars. These are simple pieces of equipment that make one of the best exercises of all time even better. Push up bars can be had for less than $10 and are another piece of equipment that will pretty much last forever.
The push up works nearly every muscle in your body, it is no wonder that the military loves to use them. Push ups are challenging and rewarding, you can work up to doing hundreds if you put your mind to it and in the process build a fabulously strong body.
The push up bars are simple. They are just two handles that rest on the floor and allow you to go deeper when you reach the bottom of the push up position. They simply increase your range of motion making the exercise more difficult, forcing you to work harder and getting more out of the muscles involved.
Push up bars also allow your wrists to sit at a more neutral state when doing the exercise. This basically eliminates the most common push up injury, tweaked wrists. Some brands of push up bars actually rotate while you are completing the push up to maximize this neutral position and reduce the risk of injury.
When you are looking for a little more from your home gym and don’t have a bucket load of cash to spend this is a great investment. You will be able to use these for numerous exercises and your ROI will be substantial. If you combine push up bars with the weight vests that I have previously discussed you will increase your gains further and see even better results.
If you are a Scrooge or just too lazy to go to the store and spend the money for push up bars you can get away with using dumb bells instead. They don’t work quite as well because they don’t have any built in slant, they may not be tall enough and they have the tendency to slide on hard surfaces, but they are an alternative.
Body weight workouts have made a lot of noise lately, partly because of the 300 movie, but also because people are always looking for something new and better and these workouts offer some great alternatives and really boost the metabolism, burn fat, and can build muscle. The greatest part about them is that they are quick, you can do them anywhere, and you don’t need any special exercise equipment.
I have been doing body weight workouts for years and I have maintained an excellent level of fitness using just body weight but sometimes that just isn’t enough. We must, after all keep challenging ourselves if we want to continue to get better and it reaches a point where you are just doing too many reps with a body weight workout. When you get to this point I suggest that you add a weighted vest into the workout.
These come in all different weights and many of them have interchangeable weights so that you can continue to challenge yourself or change weights for different workouts. These vests can make push ups and pull ups what they were when you started exercising and they can also assist with muscle gain. Body weight workouts are not famous for adding muscle because they are usually so high rep and low intensity. The vest allows you to drop the reps and increase the intensity while still doing an incredibly flexible home workout with limited exercise equipment.
Weight vest can be used for cardio vascular exercise as well but I would caution you not to add to much too fast. If you are going to run with a vest, start with the lowest weight possible and slowly increase the weight. It would also be wise to slow your pace until you are conditioned for the new weight. Adding weight will significantly increase the pressure in your knees and if overloaded bad things happen to knees. There is a reason why many overweight people experience significant knee problems.
Go ahead give this piece of exercise equipment a try and see where it takes you. This is also a very wise investment in your future and while it may not last as long as a hunk of steel it still has a pretty good life expectancy and is not as expensive as some other pieces of gym equipment.
