Strong leg muscles really can make a world of difference. Posted on Rabu, 08 Desember 2010 | 0 komentar

Apart from the weight machines, some of the most effective machines in a gym are the walking, running and climbing machines. Walking and running machines include steppers and treadmills, while climbing machines have pedals that you push with your feet, making it feel like you are climbing stairs.

The reason these machines are important is that they exercise our leg muscles, which are some of the most useful muscles in our body, but at the same time some of the weakest. After all, we are descended from apes, who didn’t walk upright – in evolutionary terms, we’ve only just started walking, and our legs aren’t all that great at it yet. Building good muscles in your legs will help you stay on your feet and go for long walks, hikes or runs without feeling tired quickly, like so many people do in this age of the car. Once you get started, you might even want to take up walking as a hobby, and the more you walk, the better your leg muscles will get.

But in that case, why not just go for a real walk, or climb up and down real stairs? Well, you could do that, but you’d be leaving yourself open to the weather on the walk, making it difficult to have a regular walking routine, and while you could just walk up and down some stairs for half an hour each day, people would probably look at you a little oddly.

Within a few weeks of using walking and climbing machines, you should start to feel more energetic – it is surprising how much of how much energy we feel we have comes from the strength of our legs. Even if we don’t realise it, we are on our feet for a lot of time every day – yes, even if you work in an office and drive to work – so strong leg muscles really can make a world of difference.

Should you use weights when you go to the gym? Posted on Selasa, 30 November 2010 | 0 komentar

In any gym, you are going to find that the main features are two things: weights and weight machines. This is because weight training is such an important part of going to the gym: it is one of the most energy-burning kinds of exercise you can do, and it builds strength and muscle. If you go to the gym and don’t lift any weights, then you might as well have not gone at all.

The simplest way to weight train is to simply get the weights and lift them up, crouching down, picking up the weight, and then trying to lean back and unbend your knees to get back to a starting position. While this is simple, you can keep on making it more difficult forever simply by adding more weights to your pole – it is not difficult to make a weight that even the world’s strongest man couldn’t lift.

However, this kind of exercise tends to only exercise the same few muscles of your body over and over again. To make sure that you build muscles and get stronger all over, it is better to use weight machines.

Weight machines work in all sorts of different ways, but generally use either fluid or springs to create the illusion of weight, and then a system of wheels and pulleys to bring that weight to you. These materials create resistance without necessarily needing large weights, so you can set the difficulty of using the machine to artificially create weight level you want.

Each different weight machine is designed to train a different set of muscles in your body, which means that doing them all in a circuit will give you an all-over workout. Even if you find one machine particularly difficult, you shouldn’t leave it out, as doing this will create a weak point in your muscles that could be dangerous for you.