Exercising Programs and More
Exercise Programs
So you're on the prowl to find the ideal exercise program, one which fits your individual needs. You're hoping to find a program which fits your schedule, fitness goals, equipment access, and your personal taste. Well I'm sorry to break it to you, but that exercise program doesn't exist. The likeliness of finding an exercise program that will meet all of the necessary criteria is practically slim to none. Fortunately for you however, you can build your own! Yes, that's right, with some knowledge and patience you can take control of your fitness goals and build your own effective exercise plan. No more shall you operate under the helpless mentality of a non-adult, because you're fully capable of taking care of yourself in all other aspects of your life, and when it concerns fat loss or building muscle, it should be no different.
Why not a Fad Exercise Program?
As I mentioned, for an exercise program to be truly effective, it really needs to meet all of the criteria as mentioned. There's even more criteria, let us review what it takes for an exercise program to be truly effective:
- Fitness Goals
A lot of fad exercise programs claim to cater to being condusive to fat loss or packing on muscle, but nearly all of them have no clear direction. These programs are ineffective because they're purposely designed to be "easy" for those that follow. Why? Because it gives the public a false sense of hope that they can indeed achieve fat loss or muscle gain with a program that seems so easy.
- Personal Preferences
One thing that really lacks in these fad exercise programs is their inability to be flexible. They slap down a bunch of exercises that you are to follow along with when, how, and where and expect you to stick with it. Well it just doesn't work like that, you will inevitably fail if you try sticking to an exercise program that you hate or don't like.
- The Law of Individual Differences
This is a real law used amongst many fitness professionals. The law states that everybody is physically different and what may work for one person, won't work for others. This is probably the biggest down fall of canned exercise programs. All of them neglect this law because it's impossible for them to magically analyze every user's body and determine the type of exercise program that will work for them. This is the number one reason why people yield little to no results when following fad exercise programs.
- Equipment access
Some of these programs require that you use specific equipment that you don't have access to. They require that you go out and buy a piece of equipment (probably by a company that is paying them to be mentioned in their program) which will ultimately end up effective and a loss of money on your end.
- Time allowances
A lot of fad exercise programs tell you when and how long you're supposed to workout. This is also completely bogus as it will most likely interfere with your schedule, and it also violates the law of individual differences because some people need to work out longer than others, depending on their body and their goals.
These fad programs exist solely with one thing in mind, profit. Many of the top magazine publications are under pressure month after month to create new and "revolutionary" exercise programs because they need new material to keep selling. And where there is a cure, there is no money. This means that if the truth behind what it takes to lose fat and build muscle were ever revealed to the mainstream public, there would be no need for the many magazine publications that exist today. So please, continue reading so you don't have to fall victim to the fad mentality.
How do I build my own exercise program?
Well, it's all a matter of running through a checklist and bringing it together. The idea of building your own exercise programs seems like a daunting task to most people at first, but it really isn't once you understand what you need to know. First you have to ask yourself what exactly your goal is. Is it to maintain? To lose fat? To build muscle mass? To build strength or endurance? Once you know what your goal is, you can then begin piecing it together based on your individual needs, and the other necessary criteria.
Fat Loss
The majority of readers will fall under the category of wanting to lose fat, as that is the number fitness goal in America. When it comes to fat loss and exercising, it's all about burning calories and raising your metabolism. How many calories you should aim to burn depends on where you're at physically, ie; age, weight, gender, existing activity levels, time allowances, and daily caloric intake. It's a necessity to structure your exercise program around your diet because the only way you will lose fat is if your body is burning more calories than you give it through food each day. Your body burns calories through two different avenues, the processes that take place within the body and the physical activity you impose on it.
How many calories your body burns throughout the day is known as your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). A rough calculation for determining your BMR is:
| Women: | 655 + (4.35 x Weight in lbs.) + (4.7 x Height in In.) - (4.7 x Age) |
| Men: | 66 + (6.23 x Weight in lbs.) + (12.7 x Height in In.) - (6.8 x Age) |
Using this simple formula will help you determine how many calories your
body burns per day. Once you know your BMR, you can then use the following
formula in conjunction to determine how many calories in total your body burns
throughout the day:
| Sedentary (Little to no physicaly activity): | BMR x 1.1 |
| Light Activity: | BMR x 1.2 |
| Moderate Activity: | BMR x 1.3 |
| A lot of Activity: | BMR x 1.45 |
| Intense Activity: | BMR x 1.65 |
Using the above formulas, let's say you come up with the number 1,800 calories for your BMR alone (this doesn't include the activity formula). That means that your body burns 1,800 calories per day through its own functions alone (Brain function, heart function, digestive processes, and many other processes that take place within the body). And let's say your daily activities would fall under the light activity level. BMR x 1.2 would be 2,160 calories that your body burns in a day.
Now here is the fun part, the part where it all begins to make sense. Let's say you tally together all of the calories you consume on an average day and this number comes out to being 2,200 calories. Well you're consuming an excess of only 40 calories per day, which really isn't all that much. So what would you do if you wanted to start losing fat? You could raise your daily activity level by creating an exercise program which allowed you to burn roughly 300 calories per day, that way your total daily caloric expenditure would be around 2,460 calories while you're still only consuming 2,200 calories. That's nearly 300 calories that your body would be forced to take from your fat stores for energy, which eventually, day after day, results in significant weight loss.
Building
Muscle
It's necessary that you read the fat loss section above as I will be referring back to BMR. In order to pack on pounds you need to do the opposite of what it takes to acheive fat loss, you need to consume an excess of calories on top of buidling an exercise program that is condusive to packing on muscle. Simply consuming an excess of calories alone is only a part of what it takes. You also need to exercise in such a way that forces those calories to be used for building muscle. You do this through basing your exercise programs around resistance training.
Resistance training includes the use of two technologies, freeweight resistance and machine resistance. I always recommend using freeweights (dumbbells and barbells). Machines often times restrict the range of motion along a set path, which is both neglectful of your body's preferred range of motion and neglects strengthening stablizer muscles which can only be built through the use of freeweight training.
When you place a foreign amount of stress on a muscle (where it becomes significantly difficult), it strengthens thus building size, so that if it ever has to experience that amount of stress, it will be able to handle it easily without the risk of injury. And this is how you build muscle, and put on weight. When you see people lifting weights, all they're doing is trying to force their muscles to grow through strenuous resistance training.
I'm interested in more!
Great! At this point you're probably wondering more specifically how to create your own exercise program, like which exercises to perform and maybe even how to build your own diet program as well. There's still a lot more to it as far as the specifics are concerned, which is where we come in. FitPractical is a service based around educating it's members how to build their own fitness programs online for a low one time fee. So please feel free to take the FitPractical tour by clicking the image below. We also have a lot of other articles on exercising and dieting located right here.
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