Strength Elements: Fitness Articles

4/1/2014 0 Comments

Simple and effective exercises for a pain-free wrist

Recently, I gave some advice to a guy who appears to have a chronic wrist injury due to his bboying activity. My advice apart from him seeking medical advice (which he probably will ignore till it gets worse), was for him to strengthen his wrist and forearm while avoiding movements that aggravate his injury.

Exercises such as squeezing a tennis ball or wringing the water out of a wet towel are convenient and easy to perform. Just wring your wet clothes or towel during a bath. You don't even have to sweat to have a good wrist and forearm workout!

0 Comments

4/1/2014 0 Comments

Online courses

If any of you are interested in taking online courses from reputable institutions for free, check out https://www.coursera.org/. From the info on the website, Coursera is an education company that partners with the top universities and organizations in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.

I took a course on “Exercise Physiology: Understanding the Athlete Within” by Mark Hargreaves (University of Melbourne). On my own, I find reading up on this subject challenging from a recreational reader’s point of view. Either the reads contain too much info or they are too specific. However, this course allows me learn specifically on key topics/issues such as fuels, heat and fluids.

Hope you guys find something that interests you in there!

0 Comments

4/1/2014 0 Comments

Designing an exercise regimen in year 2014

Designing an exercise regimen

Design your workouts around your schedule

An exercise regimen should be a life-long process. Hence, it is crucial to develop your workouts to suit your schedule and not the other way round

For e.g., supposed an office worker with long irregular hours, it would be difficult to train everyday. Although it’s said that anything is possible if you have the passion, this belief unfortunately may hold true for some extraordinary people but for regular people (who represent the majority); they cannot keep up with this kind of training. The main obstacle towards persistent exercising is that people give up after a while as they cannot balance between work-life schedule and their workouts.
A workout regimen for a professional athlete, student or worker would tend to be different due to our daily priorities.
Therefore, how to plan your workouts is an utmost importance. Ask yourself this question and reply truthfully. “How much time can I give to my workouts in order for it to be sustainable?” Let’s say you would want to workout during your lunch hour on weekdays only and you have only 45 minutes to workout. Then you design a 45 minutes workout, 5 days a week
Having adequate rest and recovery are crucial to sustain your passion and achieve your goals.

2. Prioritize your goals and objectives
Let’s use the same example again. Your frequency is 5 times/week and duration is 45 minutes. Now ask yourself: “what do you hope to achieve within these constraints?” “Are you a recreational sports athlete or you merely to improve your fitness and physique?”
Train towards your goals and not away from it. The problem faced by people is that they want to achieve everything in their workout. They want to train on their muscular strength, endurance, stamina, speed, power all at the same time and also look like a bodybuilder. This would not be realistic.
Therefore, prioritizing your goals is very important. What do you hope to achieve in a particular workout? If you want to improve your stamina, the emphasis should be on cardiovascular exercises. You won’t want to lift weights for 40 minutes and go for a 5 min run.
Know what you want to achieve and work towards that.

3. Specifically and functionality

Train specifically to your goals. If you want to be good at basketball, do what basketball players do. Do not train like a bodybuilder. Likewise, a bodybuilder doesn't care how fast he runs or how high he jumps. As long as he looks good, then he had fulfilled his goals.
Having said that, I believe that for personal health and fitness reasons, you should include functional training to your workouts. A good cardiovascular endurance has many health benefits. Imagine a bodybuilder who would struggle up a flight of stairs. His body is not functional to serve his lifestyle needs. Learn to use good posture to walk or sit and good techniques to pick up objects from the floor etc. A strong and stable core, joints and muscles is useful for all sports and also reduce risks of injuries and other health risks such as osteoarthritis etc.

0 Comments

4/1/2014 0 Comments

An alternative to the Valslide

Some of you may have heard or seen the Valslide and the exercises that can be performed with it. For those who are keen to purchase one but find the prices to be unfriendly on your budget like me, you may consider using furniture sliders instead. They function similarly to the Valslide and only cost a fraction of its price.

I have been using the Supersliders By Waxman and it works fine with me (though I have never use the Valslide before). To make some money to realize my dream of having my own training facility, I am selling the sliders for SGD 6/piece, meaning it will cost you $12 if you want to own a pair (to dummy proof your understanding).

It will be featured in the store section in time to come. Meanwhile, pop me an email if you are interested. Happy Sliding! Here is a picture of the one that I'm currently using.

0 Comments

Terms of use

All information presented on this site is meant for general purposes. It is not meant to replace health and medical advice from healthcare professionals.

YOUR CART

Simple and effective exercises for a pain-free wrist

Online courses

Designing an exercise regimen in year 2014

An alternative to the Valslide

Terms of use

Categories

Archives