Working out

[corvidae]

I just though I'd write about my recent experience with my gym regimen to see what people thought and if anyone has had a similar experience.

 

Just to give some background, I am a practitioner of mixed martial arts, based on stand-up and submission wrestling, and I very much wanted a gym regimen to compliment that.

 

I started back in November of last year with a mainly hypertrophic workout to try to get weight gains, and that was OK, but I found it left me slow and quite tired for a few days afterwards. The routine was given to me by a personal trainer, and involved a lot of free-weights, isolating specific limbs and muscle groups and doing medium reps with fairly heavy weights (but not maxing out).

 

I changed my routine around Feb of this year to include more holistic exercises (ones that got the body moving as a whole, rather than isolating muscle groups). More recently I went back and asked for a routine just focused on strength, and this time the routine involved a lot more isolation of muscle groups and a lot of machine work. This was the worst of all, as it caused problems with my joints and left me feeling drained the next day. I spent most of my time recovering!

 

In the past few weeks I've moved onto to a workout recommended by Frank Shamrock (from UFC and Pancrase) which uses a lot of body-weight exercises and emphasises breathing in a certain way (a bit like yoga). These exercises work the 'core' of the body more than anything else. I compliment this with some freeweights for the arms and shoulders. Anyway, I have noticed such a big difference with this workout! Instead of feeling drained afterwards, I feel energised! I'm leaner, more defined and much faster and more flexible.

 

It is amazing how a workout is not just a workout and how you need to find what works for you. I thought I'd just write this down in case anyone else is finding the same thing.

[Jetta]

Interesting to know. I'm going to look that up as I do need to stregthen my core body.