The Joy of Exercise

When a man tries to manage his weight, he must concentrate on two completely interconnected areas: nutrition and exercise. If you imagine your body as a machine, food is the fuel, and your muscles are the engines that drive everything.

The 40+ man should be most concerned about the loss of muscle mass and strength that comes with aging. This is the time to set into motion the habits that will keep the muscular structure sound for a lifetime.

There is no reason why a man who is 40+ can’t have the muscle tone of a much younger man. The catch is that the younger man might be able to take those muscles of his for granted, while the older man will have to work at his. But that’s a lot like the difference between money that’s given to you and money that you work hard to earn: If you look at it from the proper perspective, you’re bound to have greater appreciation for what your work has earned, and that will motivate further hard work that will create even more positive results; in other words, the work creates satisfaction and drives outcome.

In putting his FIT BODY on track, the 40+ man must first emphasize his muscular system. Building huge muscles is unnecessary; building desired strength and tone, on the other land, will drive the metabolism and—when it’s blended with good nutrition—help keep body fat, as well as premature aging and associated health problems, at bay. This is a fact that many men don’t understand. While the old mythology about unused muscles turning to flab is completely false—since muscle and fat are completely different chemical compounds, and one cannot become the other—muscular development will cause the body to more efficiently burn calories and therefore burn off fat. The complex reason for this can be explained in a simple way: Muscle burns more energy than does fat. The fatter you are, the more you store fat. The more muscular you are, the more fat you burn. The direct road to a better metabolism—and therefore less overall, long-term body fat—is through increased muscle mass.

You don’t need to become an obsessed gym-rat to benefit from this concept. Simply creating a system in which your muscles are stimulated and an environment for them to grow stronger is enough. But it is wise to begin by truly understanding how your muscles work.

Since we’re working with a machine (the body) comprised of numerous components (including the individual parts of the “engine,” your muscles), we should begin by looking at the body one component at a time. For the sake of simplicity, let’s categorize the individual muscle groups like this:

• Chest
• Back
• Shoulders
• Biceps
• Triceps
• Forearms
• Front Thighs
• Hamstrings
• Calves
• Abdominals

As I said earlier, most men grow up believing that all there is to muscle-building is going off to a gym and pumping as much weight as they can. This is the worst possible way for anyone, much less a 40+ man, to train. While developing muscles isn’t as complicated as, say, building a rocket ship, it does benefit a man to know what he’s doing, so that he can make his workouts more efficient and avoid injuries—both vitally important issues for the 40+ man.

When approaching exercise of any type, it’s good to understand that the components of your body (those individual muscle-groups listed earlier) function synergistically. In other words, the components are combined and become cooperative, and because of that, their combined output is greater than that of the sum of the parts. How does that apply to developing muscles? In the area of muscular strength, we can look at specific synergistic systems. The chest muscles, for example, require support muscles to work properly. If the chest is the primary (or targeted) muscle for an exercise, it is synergistically supported by the triceps, deltoids, and forearms, which not only play supportive roles, but also receive secondary benefit from the chest exercise. It is similar for every other body part as well. The body may be composed of individual muscles, but each of those is an important player in a larger system.

Just as the muscles are comprised of complementary, synergistic systems, so is the very means of building those muscles.

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Category: Bodybuilding, Equipment, Exercise, Fitness, Protein, Workout

Tags: all, body, building, chest, energy, environment, Exercise, food, health, individual, man, muscle, muscles, muscular, other, work