Use the right equipment

If you were digging a hole, and the spade you were using had a shaky handle and a broken blade, you would take a lot longer to dig that hole than a guy with a well-made, new spade. If you were trying to play a guitar and it only had five strings, then you would not get such a great sound out of it as a guy with a new Fender. So when it comes to body building, there is something to be said for using new, efficient equipment. It may cost more than second-hand, and you could buy some cheaper weights, but would the saving justify the use of the poorer equipment?

Badly designed weights can work muscles in the wrong way. The advantage that you gain with better equipment is that, for the same amount of work, they give you far more than basic or poor equipment. There is little point in cutting corners when it comes to training – all that will happen is that you will struggle at some point down the line and you will regret it. At that point you may decide to upgrade your equipment – and all you will have done is delay the spending, incurred some extra and held yourself back.

Instead of this, ask someone who knows you, and who knows training what kind of equipment you should go for. Working with the right equipment is worth the effort and the cost, and will save you money in the long run. There is no point at all in half-measures where training is concerned.

If You’re Injured, Find Something Else

Training to gain the shape that you have always wanted makes for an intensive regime of hard work and effort. You can never be in too good of a shape, so it is important to maintain a quality training regime, and it’s the word “quality” that is important. Quality wins out over quantity, every time. The key here is that if you get injured, you do not dwell on how it is keeping you from training. You have to accept that training must wait for a time when you can do it effectively, and in the mean time find something else to do.

If you are sitting about getting wound up about how you want to get back in the gym, then you will not be effective when you get back in there. All that will happen is you will take the first sign of recovery as a green light to get back in the gym and the training you will do once there will be a great deal less effective than it would be under normal circumstances. Efficiency and quality are the watchwords, remember. As much as you may want to get back in the game, realise that there is little point in training at half of your potential.

Find another way to fill your time – it doesn’t really matter what that is. It could be something slow paced like gardening, or anything else. Something that keeps your mind occupied is the key. If you are left idle, your mind will wander right back to the gym – and you will follow it there, which will not help.

Learn to Take a Break

Getting into the gym to work out and build one’s muscles up is a highlight of the week for many of us, no matter how many times a week we do it. It can allow us to work through the tension of the rest of the week, give us time to think things through while also expending some energy. It would not be going too far to suggest that there are many of us who view training as an indispensable part of our weekly routine. However, a training regime does need to have breaks built into it if it is ever going to be effective and worthwhile.

The benefits of training regularly are proven. It would be easy to conclude from this that any time spent training makes those benefits all the greater, and within a certain limit this is true. But for training to have the long term effect that we are looking for it will be necessary for you to take regular breaks in order to kick back and relax. Going at a hundred miles per hour all the time will have one result only – burn-out. The ill-effects of that are worse than not training at all.

If you simply live to train, you will miss the opportunity to get things out of life that effect you positively on a mental and physical front. When you are relaxed and happy, the body releases chemicals that you need in order to keep an upbeat mentality. Without that mentality, any setback in your training regime may well be met with resentment and anger, and the result will be poor or non-existent training sessions.

Don’t Get Carried Away

Enthusiasm is a valuable part of the body builder’s make up. There are times for all of us when going to the gym may feel like a hassle that we can do without, but in sticking to a regime that has been designed for a purpose, we get a lot closer to the purpose in question and benefit as a result. A stop-start regime will mean that you are always going back over old ground, and the first part of any training regime even post-warm up will be devoted to regaining muscle tone rather than adding it. So if you can motivate yourself to get in there and go for it, half the battle is won.

Equally it is important to bear in mind that enthusiasm can have its costs if it is unbridled. Spending time in the gym is vital for getting into shape, but it is equally true to say that you can spend too much time in the gym, or try to fit too much work into the time that you spend there. The effect of this is that they will cause themselves an injury, or at least make a continued regime a lot more difficult than it should have been. Having some mobility is important, and by building up too much muscle you can compromise your own mobility.

The answer is to design a routine with some space to relax written into it. On doing this, you will give yourself something realistic to stick to, with results you can monitor and learn from.

Steroids

Although illegal in athletic competition, the use of steroids is not illegal per se. Amateur body builders – and in some jurisdictions, the professionals too – are free to use whatever aids they need to use. That being the case, many people will have no qualms about reaching for the medicine cabinet to make things easier and even more efficient. There is no question, however, that steroids can only give so much because they borrow from what you already have. The damage that can result from this is a very good reason to think long and hard before deciding to use steroids.

One has only to look at the highly publicised cases of some high-profile individuals to see what damage steroids can do. More than one professional athlete has died as a result of the long-term effects of steroids, as the extra boost that they give can put an undue strain on the heart and other internal organs. Even upon retirement, the effects that the use of steroids can cause will mean that a user needs to be very careful with the effects of artificial help. And this is before we get to the famed effects of “roid rage”, which can turn an otherwise placid individual into a person given to bouts of unprovoked anger.

In the end, it is up to the individual if they want to use steroids to get the boost that takes their training to the next level. But ask any doctor and they will tell you that there are huge downsides to relying on the effects of steroids, against a short-term, superficial upside.

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