People who lose weight quickly by “crash” dieting or other extreme measures usually gain it all back or gain even more of the pounds that they lost because they haven’t permanently changed their eating habits. As a general rule though, most nutrition experts recommend never going below 1,000-1,200 calories a day if you’re dieting on your own. This explains why it’s crucial to do as much as you can to protect your metabolic rate, especially when you’re dieting. And this means dieting sensibly with a suitable, rather than a very low calorie intake so that you lose fat rather than muscle.Weight-lossWeight-loss typically involves the loss of fat, water and muscle. Weight management is about long-term success & will hopefully last a lifetime. Weight gain is often linked to certain medication, such as HRT, the contraceptive pill and steroids. Weight-Loss is something that many Americans struggle with. Weight-loss dieting increases the risk of developing gallstones. Weight cycling, or losing and [...] Continue Reading…

The Principle of Overload asserts that you must gradually and systematically increase your fitness training load.  Overloading causes changes within your muscles as a direct result of the type of training you perform.  Because your body gets used to working out at a particular level, you must progressively increase your work load in order to continue to improve.To apply the Principle of Overload to fitness programs, you can adjust some combination of intensity (how hard), frequency (how often), duration (how long), recovery (how much rest), and volume (total work) to achieve your desired results.  It is most important that you gradually increase your work load with a regimen of training activities that targets your goals.Training at an intensity that varies between 60%-100% of your maximum effort is a guideline for how hard to work.   Planned training cycles that include light, moderate, and heavy periods offer variation within an adequate range of intensity.  Periodically testing your maximum efforts provides a [...] Continue Reading…

You have been exercising and training regularly at your local gym for a couple of months now. At the beginning, you may have lost some weight, gain some muscle tone, strength and feeling wonderful after every exercise session, but you do not experience those wonderful moments anymore. Your results are now dismal at best or worse, you are not getting the results that you wanted anymore.You stayed on a healthy diet, supplemented with vitamins and minerals, but somehow you always feel tired and exhausted nowadays. Your enthusiasm for your workout sessions seemed to have waned. You even feel irritable and all stressed up. What is happening?You know something? If you find yourself dreading your exercise sessions or dragging yourself through the day, you may be pushing yourself too hard. These are the symptoms of overtraining. Training plateau is your body’s way of crying out for rest. It is time to now take a rest and recharge your body.When it [...] Continue Reading…

If you are serious about body building, you will want to learn as much as you can about the sport. One of the best ways to do this is to look into buying some body building videos that can show you ways to maximize your workout and build the body you’ve always wanted.There are so many body building videos on the market; it can be difficult to choose which ones will help you with your goals. You can find all sorts of body building videos on subjects as diverse as posing, contests, exercises, and much more.When you are choosing a video to follow, you really should keep some things in mind. First, decide what you really want to see. Do you want videos of people lifting weights and performing exercises so that you know how to do the exercises correctly? Do you want to have videos of body building contests that can show you the way you should be [...] Continue Reading…

This is a compound with the generic name Oxandrolone SPA, from S.P.A. Milano Company (Societa Produtti Antibiotica), Italy. The only original anabolic steroid available in Europe containing Oxandrolone, it is available in pill form – 30 tablets in one box with one push-through strip of 30 tablets.Oxandrolone is a mild steroid with only a slight androgenic component. In reasonable dosages, it has been observed to have very rare or no side effects. This compound was developed primarily for women and children.Oxandrolone does not prematurely close the epiphysial growth plates and hence does not cause stunting of growth in children. Oxandrolone is commonly used as a growth enhancer in children and to prevent osteoporosis in women. Its very light virilization symptoms, if any do occur, makes Oxandrolone ideal for female athletes at a safe daily dosage of 10-15 mg.In bodybuilders and powerlifters Oxandrolone causes a strong strength gain by stimulating the Phosphocreatine synthesis in the muscle cell without depositing liquid [...] Continue Reading…

One major reason that people do not gain muscle mass in because of an insufficient diet. Weight training only provides a stimulus for your muscles to start growing. It is when you go home and recover after the exercise that you start to add on muscle.For your muscles to grow you need to eat plenty of the correct types of food. Your diet provides the raw materials for your muscles to grow and if it is lacking then your muscles will stay the same size and you will see no results for your efforts in the gym.The key to weight gain is to consume more calories than your body uses. The excess will be stored as extra weight on your body. This will either be muscle or fat but the key is to consume extra calories.To build muscle you must consume extra calories with sufficient levels of protein, if you eat just extra calories but with no protein to [...] Continue Reading…

Let me tell you a quick story, twenty years ago I was very influenced by the bodybuilders and the training systems of the day. Hitting the weights five or six times a week, splitting upper and lower body workouts and working out twice a day was seen as normal.Every set was taken to positive failure, with three or more forced reps on top of that and if that wasn’t enough I would throw in a few negative reps to top it off. This type of training would leave me totally exhausted and render me sore for days after every session.The constant battering to my body lowered my immune system and I would always be sick or injured. I would take time off training and then go back to it again, all the time gaining nothing in size or strength.Can you imagine years and years of hard work like this all for nothing. The sad reality is that I still [...] Continue Reading…

Whey protein is safe to take for most people but there is one major side effect. Now this isn’t a side effect in the sense you might think about medicine having on your body. In some ways it’s actually much more intense and can even change your appearance!Are you ready for it? The main whey protein side effects are that you’re going to get pumped with more muscle mass!When you work out you’re stressing your muscles. Micro tears are appearing in the tissues. Post workout, your body needs to recover and rebuild your muscles stronger and bigger than before. Of course it needs to get the raw materials to do this from somewhere.This is where whey protein steps in.Because whey protein is such a high quality protein source the main effect it will have on you is to go right to your muscles and start making them bigger.  In fact, scientists have not been able to find a single [...] Continue Reading…

Long, slow cardio is not the fastest way to burn fat. Research shows that short interval training workouts burn belly fat faster.I was one of the first trainers to question long, slow cardio for fat loss back in the late 1990’s and I believe that traditional cardio is over-rated.Interval training, or interval “cardio” if you want to call it that, is much, much better for fat loss. It burns belly fat in half the workout time.I figured this out just before the year 2000. Back in 1998-99, I was but a lowly grad student, studying the effects of androstenedione (the supplement taken by the mighty baseball player, Mark McGwire during his record-breaking home run quest in ‘98).In my study (which was published in the Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology for any science nerds like myself out there), we had guys use the supplement and go through a couple of weight training sessions. By February of ‘99 I was stuck [...] Continue Reading…

Forgive the crunch pun, but is the best way to describe these tips on how to get some quick exercise training in when you have little time to do it.  We all have busy lives but for some of us who have made it a priority to stay in top shape, with little or no time to spare, here are some ways that you can continue looking and feeling great throughout the day with little to no effort.Quick Pull UpsIt is recommended that somewhere in your home in a place where you will not mind having installing and having a pull up bar such as a closet or the entrance to a private bathroom, that you do this for easy quick access to a few sets a day.  Making sure you are positioned right and the bar is even, doing about 3 to 4 sets per day will give you that upper body workout that you need to maintain [...] Continue Reading…