The Weekly Health Blog

We all know that feeling, looking at your arms and seeing twigs. You want to go to the gym but you don’t know why you should go. Don’t worry in this blog post we will be telling you the pros and cons of going to the gym, how to build muscle/ abs, what to train in which muscle group, how to effectively recover and the what not to do’s in the gym and outside of the gym, and how it can help stop/improve certain physical/mental traits.

Pros of going to the Gym:

• Builds muscle and makes bone stronger
  Can prevent breaking bones/ joints and building muscle in certain areas can relieve pain.
  A good example is the knee during exercise having muscle in the knee can relieve pain
• Can improve physical and mental health
  1. Some physical things it can improve are like lung health, improved kidney function and liver function
  2. It can also help depression and many more things.
  3. To get the benefits make sure to have frequent exercise.
• Can help to lose weight
  1. In addition to a healthy diet you can lose a lot of weight in a few weeks to months (with a calorie deficit of 500-1000kcal per day).
  2. With frequent workouts/exercise with good intensity you can get abs fairly quick.
  3. With this you can also get veins as well fairly quickly

Cons of going to the Gym:

1. Feeling aches wherever you trained the next morning (can be helped with proper recovery techniques).
2. Can get injured without a proper warm up (you could pull a muscle or injure yourself more seriously).
3. Gym accidents (could get seriously injured, not in a muscle but more-so just hurt, an example of this could be dropping a weight on yourself whilst dead-lifting to mitigate the risk of these injuries follow proper safety procedures for each workout you do).

Physical/ mental traits that the Gym can help prevent:

• The gym can help anger and stress management.
• The gym with regular exercise can improve posture making you taller.
• A Harvard study conducted in 2018 found that out of 38 men and women who abused type 1 drugs, who agreed to do 3 days a week of exercise (gym work and other things) in addition to regular swimming for 6 months it found a year later that just under half of the people were reporting abstinence or decreased use.
• The gym can help with depression and can give a sense of self worth.
• The gym can also help with loneliness (mainly if you cannot seem to find love) but you can also find a solid group of friends who go to the gym regularly.

What muscles should I train in each muscle group?

Arms:

Arms:

It is very important to train the right muscles on arms. This is mainly because most beginners instantly think about the bicep and start training the bicep and only the bicep when they are training arms. To a beginner this may not seem very important however the bicep only cover 30% of the arm, the muscle that covers 70% is the triceps so if you want your arms to look bigger you must train triceps just as much as biceps if not more.

Exercises to make arms look bigger:

Bicep curls are very good for biceps.

Tricep dips (assisted or not) and most grip exercises are very good for triceps.

Chest/abs:

For not having a shirt on at anytime having abs/ a good chest can be very helpful and here are some muscles you should train. You should train your chest frequently as this is one of the most looked at muscles on the human body. It is also important to train your abs as they are also pretty important. These muscles are great because you can train them at home and at the gym

Some exercises to make your chest and abs look better and fuller:

Some exercises for your chest is push-ups (which can help arms as well.) and you can do incline bench presses which focus on your chest whereas normal bench presses are for you shoulders and chest. For your abs you should use abdominal machines (which mainly focus on your 6 pack) some other exercises for home are planks (weighted or not they are both good). However, with planks it is important that you don’t just hold for a few seconds to consider it good you should have to hold for at least 30 seconds. Another good one is crunches don’t do sit ups because it only targets core whereas crunches focus on core and abs. A more difficult version of crunches is doing a crunch holding up at the top for a few seconds training endurance and core and abs more.

Legs:

If you don’t skip leg day then some good it is less like arms with you need to train some muscles that you some people don’t know to train however, there are some overlooked muscles. Most of us just focus on quads and calves and those are good to train but there are some you should train more. An overlooked muscle to train is the hamstring sounds silly but if you like to play lots of sports that require lots of run or just running in general you will need to train hamstring, because it is one of the most used muscles and in running and high-paced sports if you are constantly using it for a prolonged period of time, with little break then you are basically asking for an injury. If you train your hamstring, you will be less prone to injury and the thing with a hamstring injury is it takes a while to recover so that can set you back so much progress. It take months and years to build muscle but all it takes is a few weeks for them to be gone. For all leg muscles squats are great.

Shoulders:

Shoulders can be quite important for guys particularly considering that shoulders makes a fair bit about what most of us thing of when thinking of a male silhouette. Some exercises to make your shoulders look bigger you must do some exercises to make it look bigger. Some of the exercises you need to do are. Pull-ups are key to make shoulders look bigger but if you cant do a pull up another good one is a dead hang. Bench presses are also good but aren’t as good for shoulders and are more focused on chest and arms but are still good for Shoulders.

Back:

To make the muscles on your back there are many exercises that you can do. The first one is rowing exercises rowing exercises target your back and arms leading to feeling the pump in your back. Another good exercise is pull-ups and dead hangs as these also target back with a bit of shoulders as well.

How to recover properly – what are the do’s and don’ts.

Do:

• Hot and cold shower therapy
  – This method is where you take a 10 minute shower and each minute you alternate between hot and cold shower.
  – This method is good because it can relieve tension and stress in the muscles.
• Have a proper warm-up.
  – Instead of just going into the gym and trying to break personal records instantly try a few reps at comfortable weights then do personal max and then try to break personal records.
• Don’t train all the time.
  – You might think that you gain muscle when you are working out but that wrong. When you work out you create micro-tears in your muscle (don’t worry they are safe). You gain muscle when these micro-tears heal so instead of going to the gym every day every time you go to the gym give yourself a day of recovery where you don’t go to the gym.
• Eat protein.
  – Protein is what makes these micro tears heal so you need to eat enough. A general guideline is each day to eat 1g of protein for every pound of body mass

Don’t:

• Go straight for personal records
  – This is how you get injuries and how you can set back months of progress
• Not follow all the safety steps
  – For example if you don’t have a spotter and weight brackets etc. in bench presses all it takes is one mistake and that bar is falling on you
• Don’t eat protein
  – This could potentially over a long period of time lead to injuries not to overtraining but main just to not being able to recover
• Train all the time
  – You don’t build muscle when training you build it whilst recovering to build muscle you need time to rest

Where to buy

If you want to buy any of our tried and tested products to build muscle or just improve your overall health and fitness visit our store. We have a range of products varying from supplements to pull up bars to massage guns to pretty much anything that you can think of related to fitness.

Thank you for reading and we will see you next week when you will have more muscle. Just stay consistent.