Workouts

Tales of an Insane Superwoman

What you do in the gym today cannot be redone so make it count

Workouts are serious business. I see so many people working out but not getting any results because they don't put the right amount of concentration or intensity toward their goals. I truly don't believe most of them are trying to better what they did the day before.

The body is so amazing in that it adapts so quickly to whatever it is forced to do. This is not such a good thing with workouts. As intense as you might think your workouts are now, in a few weeks you will adapt to them and have to do something different. However that adaptation usually brings with it extra muscle and endurance so it's not all bad.

My own workout is made up of a four day split. Shoulders and abs on Monday, legs on Tuesday, biceps, triceps and abs Wednesday, chest and back Thursday, abs and shoulders on Friday. Shoulders are my lagging bodypart because I wasn't blessed with long collarbones. I have to work extra hard to get a really wide upper body because of this. I usually do five to six sets of any four of the following exercises:

seated Arnold presses

seated lateral raises

bent over lateral raises

seated overhead presses

standing overhead presses

cable lateral raises

It is most important to work all three heads of your deltoid. So many people end up looking like gorillas because they overdevelop the front deltoid(anterior head) and neglect both the median and posterior heads. Shoulder exercises are not as exciting as doing bicep curls or bench presses for those signature muscles that always get noticed on the beach. But no bodybuilding contest was ever won with wimpy deltoids and personally I think the most attractive feature on either a man or a woman is a well developed set of shoulders.

free bar squats-my absolute favorite exercise of all

one legged leg presses

calf presses on the leg press machine

calf lifts with dumbbells(like a ballerina, who else has the best calves in the business?)

dumbbell deadlifts

hamstring curls

dumbbell lunges

leg extensions

Squats come as close to providing a total body workout as anything. They incorporate most muscle groups in the body, and since such large muscle groups are involved this exercise also provides a major fat burning bonus as well.

BICEPS & TRICEPS:

dumbbell curls

ez bar curls(21s)

concentration curls

incline bench curls

preacher curls

French presses(skullcrushers)

triceps extensions behind the head using dumbbell

cable pressdowns

incline bench presses

pec deck presses

bent over rows

one arm dumbbell bent rows

seated pulley rows

lat machine front pulldowns

stiff arm lat pulldowns

standard crunches

incline leg raises

hanging leg raises

knee ups or V ups

pulley crunches

decline crunches

The trick for ab workouts is to do the exercises slowly and not allow momentum to help out. Abs are so rapidly reoxygenating that they really have to be blasted and abused before they will respond.

I prefer to run outdoors for cardio but weather does not always permit. Indoors I usually use the stair climber. Cardio is done with such intensity that I often feel close to throwing up. Cardio is never leisurely and most of the time I cannot carry on a conversation during it. Usually it is done in intervals of sprinting and resting although the resting only lasts long enough for me to catch my breath then I'm off and sprinting again. This type of cardio provides fat burning for many hours afterward. Lowered intensity might provide more fat burning during the workout but it is afterward that I want the fat burning to really occur. I usually do cardio 3 hours after my last meal or first thing in the morning. Cardio is done on weight days, before doing the weights. There are a lot of arguments about whether this is practical because cardio is supposed to detract from a subsequent weightlifting session. In my case it does not. It does provide adequate muscle warmup. I could not do satisfactory cardio after a weight session because weightlifting so zaps me that sometimes I can barely find my way to the door much less a cardio machine or the street. What helps is that I have a meal replacement shake after cardio and before the weightlifting. I don't worry too much about this after cardio eating because plenty of fat still burns just because of the cardio intensity. All the eating does is replace some of the glycogen that the cardio session itself burned. I don't want to "bonk" during the weightlifting.

Even though workouts are critical for the purpose of adequate muscle fiber damage to provoke growth response, 80% of all bodybuilding success comes from eating.