Walk inside any health club and you'll find row after row of machines. Nautulus, Paramount, and many other companies have gotten rich selling machines that break down the human body into many independent parts. The problem with this isolation work is it's non-existant in real life.
Your body wasn't designed to use one section of one muscle completely independent from everything else. Weight machines have been great for making the gym less intimidating, and allowing for exercise sans personal training. Machines aren't evil, they're just also not functional.
For body-builders and other figure athletes where muscle size and shape, not function, is the goal - isolation machines will always have a place. For most of us though, we exercise to improve our quality of life. Regardless if your goal is to lose weight, increase strength, or just promote good health, functional exercise is the key.less if your goal is to lose weight, increase strength, or just promote good health, functional exercise is the key.
This coming year, whether you're creating an exercise program or buying one from someone else, ask yourself if the movements are functional. Does what you're doing have obvious cross-over to things you'll do outside of the gym? Whether it's lifting your child off the floor, or throwing a softball, you'll be hard-pressed to find a real world activity that uses only one muscle in one range of motion at a time. Exercise should be multi-joint and functional just like life is.
If you're ever at a loss for how to create an optimal exercise program for maximum results - reach out to Ambition Health. We can help you.
OKKAY. YA'LL HAVE BEEN SAYING MY POSTS HAVE BEEN TO FEMININE AND EXPRESSIVE RIGHT? WELL THAT SHITS ABOUT TO CHANGE CAUSE THIS POST IS ABOUT CURLS AND PROTEIN SHAKES RARRRRRRR..
No but seriously, I have too little male followers (3 out of 16 lol) Anyways, as some of you may know I have been working out for about 5 months now and a lot of my friends have also started their journey to the Jay Cutler body. But there's a couple of things that I've picked up a long the way. I am by no means a well-seasoned bodybuilder but a regular teenager giving my two cents about working out.
Why you should start working out:
Honestly, if you're working out to get chicks and gain respect from fellow bros then you shouldn't even consider starting to work out. The reason being is that by becoming more muscular is not going to change anything. The other day I saw this other skinny, smaller dude wheeling like crazy and then I realized something. He has game. Like his character, confidence, and steel balls make him attractive to chicks; not necessarily the muscles on his body or whatever. Anyways, if popularity and chicks is the reason you start, its going to be really hard to keep on working out. Getting big takes dedication and if its a drag to get out of bed at 6am in the morning to workout then eventually you might lose motivation and all that muscle you originally built is going to turn into fat. The reason I like to workout is that I love pushing myself to the limit of collapsing and generally its a really big stress reliever. After a long day of bullshit and school, hitting the weights makes you too tired to care about anything LOL. That and another reason I started is that when I was in Grade 9 I was really skinny and insecure about my body. All my friends would tease me about being under 100lbs and my mom and aunties would keep on harassing me at family dinners about "eating more and stop being so skinny". It sucked. Going shopping for clothes and not even fitting XS sucked. Being mistaken for a 12 year old sucked. So in summary, if you're doing it for chicks and false respect from dudes, don't work out. Work on your character first then think about if you want to start working out. But if you're insecure about you're body and you're fed up with people talking behind you're back and you love being challenged then yeah go ahead.
Protein Shakes:
Their bad for you. When I started working out this was my go-to drink. I encouraged other guys to start taking it cause when I was training hardcore in badminton my coach kept on pushing me to drink it and his word was law. And hey, it felt super good to drink after you're muscles were sore. So the first couple months I had a lot of gains so I wasn't complaining. But then I started noticing that I was developing some love handles and I was eating pretty clean and working out a lot. At the time I wasn't suspicious but then my science teacher mentioned that protein shakes aren't beneficial at all and in fact they are harmful to your kidneys and liver. Apparently, your body can only absorb so much protein in a certain duration of time. It obviously varies with everybody but the point is that MORE protein is not necessarily BETTER. I decided to look into it and found a couple of sites from body builders who actually came across some liver problems due to the massive intake of protein shakes.
I decided that building muscle was not worth lying on a bed with kidney/liver problems 20 years later, so I stopped drinking protein shakes. I also saw YoutuberIce1cubeand he was on an all natural diet and he was SUPER FIT. His friendHanhChampiontook Creatine and drank Protein shakes butIce1Cubewas a lot fitter. Mind you, Hanh could lift more than Ice1Cube, but Ice1Cube was way more nimbler and looked a lot more healthy. Anyways I stopped drinking protein shakes and surprisingly, nothing changed. In fact, I got stronger and more cut than before.
Isolation vs. Multi-Joint
Now I've been starting to do more multi-joint exercises rather than isolation exercises. After competing at Badminton Nationals and getting my ass whopped, I realize how unfit I actually am. By doing only isolation exercises, I've gained un-lean muscle and it was making me too heavy. I guess my goal is to be able to the ULTIMATE athlete. Strong yet quick. And by that I mean being able to lift weights and run a decent amount. Also if you play sports it doesn't really make sense to do isolation exercises since in sports you are using more than one muscle at a time. So instead of curls, and skull crushers, I've started doing more pull-ups, dips, and pushups and stuff like that. My dream is to do at least 30 pull-ups in a row. No joke, I actually had a dream that I could just do unlimited pull-ups.
