Creating Balance

We all have muscular imbalances in our bodies. Everyone. Some of us are more flexible on one side than the other, or have one leg or arm that's stronger, and a lot of us even have tilted heads and shoulders. Exercising should work towards correcting these imbalances, not make them worse.

The solution is simple, shockingly simple: for every push, there should be a pull.

Examples:
For every push-up you do, you should be doing an equal amount of inverted rows.
For every overhead press you do, you should be doing an equal amount of pull-downs.
For every leg extension, a leg curl.
It goes on...

A majority of people organize their workouts according to body part--shoulders, chest, and triceps; back and biceps; lower body and core-- and that's fine and good, assuming you're training at equal intensity and load for each of those days. Personally, I find it easier to do upper body and lower body, so I can organize my pushes and pulls within the same workout.

This goes for flexibility, too. I always see people stretching their lower body thoroughly, but when I see people doing upper body stretches (more rare), they are short-lived and half-assed. Flexibility is equally as important everywhere on your body, so you should give equal time and attention to everything, which includes upper body stretches!

Hopefully this will help you organize your workouts. Feel free to comment if you have any questions.

3,000 Crunches: Completed!!!

I am so glad to be done with this experiment. I have results to share with you, and by "results" I mean none. I have seen no results from my 3,000 crunches. My abs look exactly the same. Logic would dictate that switching from working on abs once a week to five days a week would yield rewarding results: nope. In my once-a-week ab workouts I usually complete about 300 repetitions of various exercises, adding up to 300 total repetitions of functional ab exercises per week; whereas during this experiment I was doing 1,000 reps of crunches (and variations of crunches) per week. Again: no results. Not to mention I was never sore a single day during these past three weeks.

Here's the before and after:
               Before                                     

After

(Please note: this is not how I typically wear my work uniform)

During this experiment, I made a trip out to San Francisco to visit a friend of mine. Of course, I had to complete my crunches there as well. Since I missed my 200 crunches on the day I traveled out there, I had to do 400 the next day to make up for it. My friend decided to do the 400 crunches with me, saying that she would see how 400 crunches might affect someone who is not a "fitness freak" (her terminology) like me. So she did them, like a champ, and was not one bit sore the next day. However, two days later she competed in a hula-hoop contest and her abs were sore as all get-out from that. It just goes to show you how effective full-body movements are in training your core.

I will admit I did not design this experiment well (I was never that good at science). There was no control. I really should have trained my abs once a week as I did before, or had two people of the same fitness level train their abs my way and the crunch-way and observe the differences between the two different people. Also, 3 weeks really isn't much in terms of seeing any drastic results. But whatever, the most important thing to me right now is I can finally do a plank again! Yay! I have been craving planks like I crave chocolate once a month.

So now you might be asking, "Little Meat, how can I effectively train my abs once a week without the use of stupid-looking, ineffective crunches?" Well, do I have an answer for you, my friend! Here's a great 10 minute ab circuit of some of my favorite crunchless abs exercises. Enjoy!