Q&A for: 26-Jan-06
1262. Q:
Reply to 1261, can you go into detail a little bit more? im kind of confused of what your saying. right now im going to the gym 4 hours a week, which would total 6 hours or so just doing the workout i previously posted.
A:
You have to tell me what you're trying to achieve before I can recommend a specific program. If your goal for now is to build muscle and burn fat, then just keep your existing program as is and maybe reduce number sets on most/all exercises to 3 from 4 (if you're worried about overtraining). Your existing program will also improve your muscle endurance somewhat. You can do some (1-2 hours per week) cardio as well.
If you want to specifically focus on muscle endurance for whatever exercise(s) -- pushups, situps, etc -- then I suggest you reduce your current weight program to 2-3 sets per exercise, and add 1-2 hours/week (10-15 minutes/day every day) of doing the specific muscle endurance exercise(s). Ideally you'd do muscle endurance exercises on days and times away from your main weight training, but it's not a big deal. And you can do cardio after with muscle endurance exercises, for example.
For example, suppose you want to increase the number of pushups you can do in a row... First you scale your 4 days/week weight program down to only do 2-3 sets on each exercise (instead of 4 sets you do now) -- keep number of sets low especially on exercise for chest, shoulders, and triceps (which are muscles involved in pushups). Then you allocate 10 minutes on 4-5 days/week to do pushups. In those 10 minutes time I recommend you do 3 to-failure pushup sets with 2-3 minutes rest in between. Then after the 10 minutes of pushups you could run or do some other cardio for another 15-30 minutes.
Oh and if I remember you still have that shoulder program -- if you do, then you probably do NOT want to do this pushup program till it heals since pushups will stress your shoulder quite a bit. But it should give you an idea of how to incorporate weight training with muscle endurance training. Hope that helps.
1263. Q:
Is it true that u should only do weight training for 45 mins or 1 hour MAX in order to get good results?Also,it is ok to train 2 body parts each time(different)?Problem is that if i do so i have to spent 1,5 hour or more to do all the exercises needed.If i do one part per day i leave one part of body untrained each week(i need to 5 days this way to do one part every day and i do 4,i have Sunday off and one day in the middle also off in order to rest more cause i tend to train as hard as i can).What is ur suggestion?Iam a little confused how i ll make my program.
A:
45-60 minutes per session is a good guideline in general. An even more useful guideline may be to keep weight training to 2-5 hours/week. Some people, especially younger guys, can benefit higher training load especially for short periods, but those two guidelines probably describe the optimal training load for most people. If you look at my weight training article I have a number of sample programs all of which satisfy these guidelines. Of course you can design your own as well. It is perfectly OK to train more than one bodypart per session and it need not be very many sets. Allowing 10 sets per bodypart (which is plenty) and 2 bodyparts/workout, that's still just 20 sets which you should finish in one hour or even less.
1264. Q:
How long should i keep my brake between sets of an exercise?I usually start with 30 mins or so in first 2 sets then as i go to the harder ones i go for 1 min to 1 and a half.Is it ok?
A:
Sounds about right. Check out Q&A #904 for general guidelines on how long to rest between sets.
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