ANTI-AGING FITNESS

WORKOUT PROGRAM DESIGN

Learning the Basics of Antiaging Exercise

Antiaging exercises focus on building muscle and maintaining flexibility.

• Building muscle mass – by sufficient weight training intensity to create that burn sensation. If you do it right – you should be sore the next day and ready to work out again the following day.
• Building cardiac fitness – by using High Intensity Interval Training – short 30-60 second bursts in amongst your 30 minute aerobic session.
• Stretching – on those non muscle mass building days to develop the lean muscle fibres and keep the joints flexible

To enable you to design the most appropriate workout routine for your body type, exercise personality and antiaging goals, it pays to understand the basics requirements and fitness program protocols.

For the purpose of seeing how all the different types of workout programs fit together I have added paragraphs from other fitness and antiaging pages. Follow links to get more details on these topics.

Work Out Equipement

For this program you only need free hand weights. If you don’t think this is as good as using a gym, let me share with you how much better hand weights can be than all that expensive equipment.

Firstly, working out in the gym is how you move your body for maybe one hour, 4 times a week.

The rest of the time you move your body without them. So do you want to build strength and fitness based for the movements you do 4 hours a week or the other 164 hours.

Secondly, for example, bicep curls done at the gym uses a machine to isolate just that muscle, by restricting the use of other muscles. And you are sitting down – probably just like you have all day!

Standing up doing bicep curls needs your body to brace – this brings into play your abdominal muscles and the muscles of the lower back and spine. Isn’t this a much more efficient use of your time?

Free-weight exercises mimic athletic moves and generally activate more muscle mass.

Mind Focus

To make your workout really effective you must focus and concentrate each and every minute you exercise. You have to perform using the right form that will employ the target muscle and you have to focus like a laser beam on the sub-muscle group.

The chest muscle group should be separated, for example, into 3 groups, each one of them to be worked separately: the upper, the middle and the lower muscles. But the most important is putting your mind into action and focus your thoughts on the specific sub-muscle group.

You think about the sub-muscle group and your mind gives a command to engage the specific muscle while isolating any other muscle.

Starting Out

If you are just starting out, be patient. Any muscle that hasn't been worked hard in more than a week or so will let you know within 24 hours that it has been stressed. That's OK. You will be sore at first. You should be sore at first. But that goes away.

• Start light, ease into hard work. For most people, fitness is not a competitive activity, but one of self-realization. Do only what is right for you, and don't worry about the person at the next machine. Resist the temptation to do more than you can.
• Whenever you start a new exercise, make certain that you master the correct form. Use weights with which you can complete, with good form, three sets of 12 to 15 reps. Only then should you increase the weight.
• Start with a program and schedule you will be able to maintain. Fitness is a long term proposition not a short term endeavour.

Warming Up

Warming up takes two forms - overall, and specific. For the "overall" part, it's always a good idea to begin any strength workout with a short aerobic exercise to "get the blood" flowing. This should be a 5-10 minutes low intensity warm-up, and is not a substitute for a more focused aerobic workout.

"Specific" warm-ups are done before you begin heavy lifting with any given muscle group. The first time you work a muscle group you should do 10-12 reps at 60% to 75% of your intended first set weight. When combined with stretching, warming up will help prevent injuries and allow you to get the most from your workouts. If you allow a muscle group to cool by resting too long, between exercises, you should warm it up again before heavy lifting.

Sets and Reps

Reps or Repetitions: The number of times a movement is done consecutively without stopping.

Sets: A set is a group of repetitions. By choosing the proper combination of sets and reps you can shape the effect of your workout. Note that the number of sets doesn't include warm-ups

Working to Maximum Exertion Point

Also known as “working to failure” Performing an exercise until you are no longer able to complete another rep and maintain good form. Once you have advanced beyond the starting point, you will want to optimize your workouts.

To increase definition or add muscle mass you should to do each set to failure. That means selecting the right weight, and/or changing the weight between sets.

Use Soreness as Your Guide - It’s a common myth to never exercise a sore muscle. Instead, determine how sore you really are. If your muscle is sore to the touch or the soreness limits your range of motion, give the muscle at least another day of rest. If not, use light aerobic activity and stretching, and light lifting, to help alleviate some of the soreness.

In designing your total fitness program you need to consider your fitness goals. Are they to:

Fat Burning

During moderate-intensity exercise, the body burns fat for energy. And by engaging in that type of activity over and over, you are effectively telling your body that you need that fat. So, to prepare for the next time it is called on to repeat the activity, your body will store more fat.

Conversely, when you engage in short bursts of high-intensity exercise, your body uses glycogen stored in the muscle tissues for energy. Over time, this conditions your body to store energy in the muscles - rather than as fat.

Exercising this way will also cause you to burn more fat during your recovery period, as the glycogen in the muscles is restored.
The key to fat loss is muscle building. For every pound of new muscle, your body will burn an additional 60 calories per day.

Three pounds of muscle burns as many calories as a one-mile run - while you're sitting still! An extra five pounds of muscle automatically burns an additional 31 pounds of fat in a year.

High Intensity Interval Training [HIIT]

[Also known as Cardio Training]

Goal Focus: Strength, Cardio Fitness, Fat Burning

The only way to strengthen any muscle is to contract the muscle against increasingly greater resistance. When you exercise, you alternately contract and relax your skeletal muscles. This alternate contraction and relaxation squeezes the veins near the muscles to pump blood toward the heart.

Your heart is like a muscular balloon. The increased flow of blood to your heart stretches the balloon making the heart contract with greater force to pump the blood back to the body. This “workout” makes it stronger.
So, the harder you contract your skeletal muscles, the more blood you pump toward your heart, the greater the stretch on the heart, the stronger the body gets, the stronger the heart gets.

Endurance exercise actually makes the heart, lungs, and muscles smaller, so they can perform longer with less energy. No matter how good you get at HIIT, don’t overdo it and don’t exceed 20 minutes including the warm up and cool down.

Don’t focus on "Spot Training" - A body system that is in balance moves better, stands straighter (this means looking better in your clothes), can be trusted to perform physical activities longer and better and is less likely to sustain injury.

Time of Day - There has been a lot of controversy on this subject. Some say doing cardio workouts in the morning is better at fat burning. Studies have proven that indicates that a kilogram of fat will be oxidized sooner when exercising in the fasted condition in the morning than when doing the same exercise in the afternoon.

Trouble is, if your nutritional state at this time of day is not adequate [eg enough protein resources] you could end up burning muscle instead. So you can see that it largely depends on your current body composition and diet.
If you don’t have enough oxygen resources after sleeping for 8 hours – you will produce more free radicals, which reduce energy and do all sorts of damage.

I prefer to use direct results decision making. Try one way – measure the results, then try the other. It’s the only way you will work out what works best for you to get the results you want. Stop reading articles on what other people achieved for their body – it most likely doesn’t apply to you, and can only lead to confusion.

Cardio Workout

• Workouts – 1-3 per week
• Duration - 20 minutes MAX.
• Warm Up – 2-3 minutes below 85% of your maximum heart rate
• Intensity bursts - up to 85% of your maximum heart rate.
• Max burst - last 1-2 minutes can be even 90% of your maximum heart rate

[NOTE: heart rate over 85% boosts your free-radical production, so don’t overdo it].

Core Strength Training

The “Core” refers to your mid-section [lower abs, upper abs, obliques and lower back.

Core strength training is a major focus in pilates and yoga exercises. It is the core that coordinates all the movements of the other two major regions: the upper body and lower body. Imagine your body as three links in a chain... the upper body, the core and the lower body.

Core strength training uses high tension techniques to train your body to function as one complete unit. This will translate into greater overall performance improvement.

You cannot develop core strength using machines; use of machines eliminates the adaptive stress for the stabilizer muscles in the body. These stabilizer muscles give stability to the core and permit the extremities, to exert force. Lack of core muscle strength will prevent the movement.

Core strength training uses a variety of exercises, stresses and resistance. They can be incorporated into many other exercises; thereby training the body to function as one complete unit. You should look at every exercise you do as core strength training! This is martial arts experts use.

Core strength training exercises

Body Shaping

Heard of toning programs that promote slow cardio, light weights with high reps? If you are after changing your body shape - Forget them!

Changing your body takes sweat, grunt, and hard work using discipline, intervals, multi-muscle exercises, and eating the right foods at least 90% of the time. In other words, you need to step out of your comfort zone and plan exercise programs that challenge you.

Sorry, even jogging doesn’t do much.

Planning a workout takes effort and doing it takes even more. But you get out what you put in. For example a 5 day / 20 minute routine plan could be:

• Day 1 - lower back and upper abs
• Day 2 - chest exercises
• Day 3 - legs squats, leg raises and oblique abs.
• Day 4 - shoulders and upper back
• Day 5 - arms and lower abs.

Weight Training

Weight training is pivotal to any antiaging fitness program. No other exercise is as effective at building muscle and strength. When the muscle is pushed beyond normal exertion, small tears in the muscle tissue occur. The repair process, builds additional tissue, increasing the size and therefore strength of the muscle.

More detail on Weight Training

Muscle Balance

Your exercise program must keep comparable strength levels in opposing muscle groups do not have. Uneven development results in complications like poor posture and joint instability.

It is also important to understand the different muscle types and how to best design your program to increase the volume of the right muscles to support the types of movements you most often make in your unique lifestyle.

Aerobic or Anaerobic

Aerobic simply means in the presence of oxygen. Activities performed at low to moderate intensity [brisk walking, slow running, very low weight / high repetition exercises] allow oxygen to be used to generate energy for the muscles.

Anaerobic activity is any activity where the body does not use oxygen to generate energy. The body uses different metabolic pathways. Anaerobic activities [sprints and very heavy / low repetition weight lifting] tend to be short duration [less than 90 seconds], burst of activity where the body just doesn’t have time to circulate oxygen to the muscles.

To maximise fat burn; include BOTH in your routines.

Aerobic Benefits

1. Increased cardiovascular endurance
2. Decreased body fat

Aerobic Liabilities

1. Doesn’t build muscle
2. Decreased muscle mass - when the body uses fat for energy it also breaks down muscle.
3. Decreased speed
4. Decreased power

Now, anaerobic training, the kind where you push yourself hard for short periods of time, uses a different metabolic system to supply the muscles with energy, which trains the body to respond in a different way to exercise.

Anaerobic Benefits

1. Increased Cardiovascular Capacity
2. Increased Cardiovascular Recovery Ability
3. Strength Gains
4. Power Gains
5. Improved Speed
6. Decreased Body Fat - yields the most post workout fat burning

Anaerobic Liabilities

1. Increased Risk of Injury in Untrained People
2. Requires a Good Aerobic Foundation

More detail on Anaerobic Training

Overtraining – Why more is not better

Overtraining means too much, too often and too intense. Once you start seeing results, and the exercise endorphins start kicking in, it is tempting to increase training intensity and frequency too quickly.

Instead of double the result, the result is more likely to be tendonitis or a strained muscle. There are two simple disciplines to avoid overtraining.

Plan your program around varied workout focus each session over your weekly program; and keep mixing it up as you develop more strength.
Sometimes this is as simple as changing the way in which a particular exercise is performed so as to train the muscles differently. For example:

• In some exercises, adding a slight twist towards the outside as you raise during a bicep curl, moves the concentration more towards the centre of the muscle, or pointing your toes down in a side leg raise, or
• Vary the speed of the lift from workout to workout, like very slow one day, the faster the next time the muscle group is worked.

Rest

Muscles need rest between workouts. Tiring muscles by working the same muscles in the same way too often moves the pressure to the joint. This overloads the joint resulting in injury and a reduction in performance. Tendonitis and joint pain are pretty common indicators of overtraining.

Stretching

There are lots of theories on when, how, if and how long we should stretch with our exercise workout. So lets start by understanding two key points:

1. A muscle expands before it contracts and its strength is related to its ability to stretch.
2. A warm muscle stretches more easily than a cold one, and therefore more resistant to overtearing with heavy use.

So stretching is NOT a warm up, instead you must always warm up before stretching.

The purpose of a warm-up is to get the blood flowing to the muscles and joints and get the heart ready for what is to come.

Running warm up – 5 minutes walking

Weight training warm up – 5 minutes on the stationary cylce or treadmill followed by 5 minutes of a lower intensity version of the activity you are about to perform. If you like, you can add some rhythmic arm movements to warm up upper body joints whilst on the cycle or treadmill.

Now stretch! At least 3-5 minutes

Then reverse this routine at the end of the session as your cool down period.

Stretching promotes a balanced range of motion in the joints and generally promotes the feeling of relaxed well-being after a workout.

More detail on Stretching

Progressions

Progression is just a term to indicate that something "extra" is added into the exercise to add further challenge. Progressions can also be used to add variety to exercise routines and the change the emphasis on the muscle group used.

Typical progressions include:

• Supersets
• High Tension Techniques
• Pyramiding
• Stripping
• Compound Exercises

Supersets

A superset consists of two exercises that work different muscle groups, performed back to back, typically with no rest or a very small period of rest in between.

They work at reaching that Max Effort Point sooner, hence shortening your Intensity Interval workout.

Typical examples include:

• Bench Press and Seated Row
• Lat Pull and Military Press
• Ham Curl and Quad Extension
• Biceps Curl and Triceps Extension
• Pectoral Butterfly and Rear Deltoid

High Tension Techniques

When performing any exercise, incorporate as many muscles as possible into the movement. The three high tension areas are: fists, core muscles and but muscles. By tightening these muscles during any exercise the body functions as one complete unit.

Pyramiding

Pyramiding is a weight training progression using a series of low rep, high weight sets aimed at increasing mass. It involves changing the reps/sets routine to one optimized for gaining size. Each set in a pyramid uses more weight at fewer reps.

See more detail of Pyramiding in Weight Training

Stripping

Stripping is increasing intensity by progressively removing weight at the end of a routine. It involves working beyond failure.

In your final set of an exercise, once you have reached failure, stop momentarily, reduce your workload a little (often by "stripping" plates from a bar) then immediately start again, to failure.

Repeat this until the amount of weight being lifted is negligible for you. This will result in a very significant "pump" because it recruits every possible muscle fiber. But remember - maintain good form.

See more detail of Stripping in Weight Training

Compound Exercises

Full-body "compound" exercises are a type of strength training. 2 or 3 compound exercises each day can get life-changing results in minutes.

Compound exercises are functional, multi-joint, multi-muscle movements that mimic the actions and movements we perform on an everyday basis.

For more detail on Compound Exercises

Breathing

Considering breathing is a automatic activity essential for life, it is surprising to know that most of us do not breathe properly. Not considering medical conditions, poor breathing may be due to poor posture, stress, or a lack of exercise.

Impact of Poor Breathing - depletes oxygen levels, taxes your immune system, decreases energy, and allows toxins to accumulate in your body.

Breathing Test - place one hand on your abdomen and the other on your chest. Take a breath. Does your - abdomen or your chest expand? If it was your chest, you are not breathing correctly. Proper breathing should take place in the abdomen.

Proper Breathing Technique - take a slow, steady, deep inhalation through your nose, allowing your abdomen to expand. Then slowly expel all the air from your lungs. Do this a few times a day.

Benefits of Correct Breathing - relieve tension, increase your energy, and generate feelings of well-being.

Breathing During Workouts

Correct breathing through your workout is very important. There is a tendency to hold breath in certain exercises, like abdominals crunches.

The breathing rules are simple. Every exercise has 2 motions: the resistance part and the return.

Exhale on the exertion/resistance motion and inhale on the return motion.
Continuous breathing provides critical oxygen required by your muscles to produce energy.

Hitting the Wall

I am sure you have seen an example on television or live race where an athlete surpasses maximum effort; falls to the ground and starts to shake.

This is called bonking: passing out from low blood sugar. Your brain gets almost all of its fuel from sugar in your bloodstream. When your blood sugar level drops, your brain cannot get enough fuel to function properly, you feel tired and confused and can pass out. There is only enough sugar in your bloodstream to last three minutes.

To keep your blood sugar level from dropping, your liver must constantly release sugar from its cells into your bloodstream, but there is only enough sugar in your liver to last 12 hours at rest. During intense exercise, your muscles draw sugar from your bloodstream at a rapid rate. Your liver can run out of its stored sugar and your blood sugar level can drop, and you bonk.

Bonking is common in bicycle races if a rider does not eat frequently, but is rare in long distance running races. When you run, your leg muscles are damaged from the constant pounding on the roads and you must slow down. However, you pedal in a smooth rotary motion which does not damage your muscles, so you can continue to pedal at a rapid cadence for many hours.

To prevent your blood sugar from dropping too low during intense exercise lasting more than two hours, eat at least every 15 minutes. It doesn't matter what you eat: salted peanuts, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, chicken, an apple, a banana or anything else. Almost all fit people can take small amounts of food frequently during exercise without developing stomach cramps.

More detail on bonking

How to Determine Exercise Intensity

When exercising, it's important to monitor your intensity to make sure you're working at a pace that is challenging enough to help you reach your goals, but not so hard that risk injury.

There are a variety of methods for determining exercise intensity levels. Common methods include the‘talk test’, the target heart rate range and the Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE).

Perceived Exertion Scale

Perceived exertion is how hard you feel your body is working. It is based on the physical sensations a person experiences during physical activity, including increased heart rate, increased respiration or breathing rate, increased sweating, and muscle fatigue.

The standard Perceived Exertion Scale is the Borg Scale of Perceived Exertion, which ranges from 0-20.

Practitioners generally agree that perceived exertion ratings between 12 to 14 on the Borg Scale suggests that physical activity is being performed at a moderate level of intensity.

How to Use the Perceived Exertion Scale

While doing physical activity, note how heavy and strenuous the exercise feels to you, combining all sensations and feelings of physical stress, effort, and fatigue.

Do not concern yourself with individual factors such as leg pain or shortness of breath; focus on your total feeling of exertion.

Choose the number from 6 [no exertion at all] and 20 [maximal exertion]
Adjust your activity to your goal exertion rate.

Typical Goal Levels

When to adjust your intensity.

• Walking moderate-intensity activity "somewhat hard" (12-14).
• If muscle fatigue and breathing is "very light" (9 on the Borg Scale) increase his intensity.
• If exertion was "extremely hard" (19 on the Borg Scale) slow down his movements.

Using Borg Scale to Estimate Heart Rate

Multiply intensity rating by 10 to get a fairly good estimate of the actual heart rate during activity.

Muscle Nutrition

To gain muscle you need to balance your exercise with the right nutrition AT The right time. This muscle workout nutrition guide supports a faster muscle recovering, allowing the muscles to work harder next session.

Eating carbohydrates and protein immediately after you finish your hard workout. Chronic muscle fatigue is associated with low blood levels of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. So, the sooner you eat protein after you finish your hard workout, the quicker you will recover.

Eat extra protein on the day that you take hard workouts. This reduces muscle damage during hard exercise. Eating carbohydrates along with a protein building block called leucine helps you to recover even faster.

Muscles are made primarily from protein building blocks called amino acids. Muscles heal from a hard workout when amino acids and other nutrients travel from your bloodstream into the muscles.

How much protein?

If you're working out hard, consuming more than 0.9 to 1.25 grams of protein per pound of body weight is a waste. Spread your protein amount throughout the following 3-step muscle nutrition plan.

• Have a post workout shake of three parts carbohydrates and one part protein.
• Eat a meal several hours later.
• Have a snack after another few hours with the reverse: 1 part carb: 3 parts protein.

This will keep protein synthesis going by maintaining high amino acid concentrations in the blood.

More detail on nutrition for antiaging muscle building

Energy boosting nutrition

Why proteins are so important