Posted by azngeek at June 17th, 2007

I used to be a huge huge advocate of fitness. You know. The body is a temple bull shit. And like. Going gaga over muscle bound men, and going, why don’t I have a body of a Greek God such as that. And then crying myself to sleep. Then I had a vision. You know. Working towards the goal of achieving that dream.

And then uni came into the picture. Many sleepless nights. Cancelled gym membership. And the rest of the things came tumbling down. I was becoming fat again. Actually. I am fat fat again. (fat-fat, like malay, gemuk-gemuk. The malay language seems to have an affinity for repeating adjectives to a) rub it in, and b) to place emphasis)

So now that I’m on holis again. Back back to the hard grind. Had a one an a half hour workout today. I can’t run nearly half as far as I could towards the beginning of summer, last year in December-ish. I can’t lift half as much as I could from the mid of last year. From benching 140. I’m now reduced to benching something like 70 kgs on machine. From my 140 kgs. I can’t even run 2ks without feeling like crap and having severe and highly chronic chest pains. I blame it on the monster called uni. And plus my crappy eating habits of having a pack of chips and other junk while watching every single movie. Which would be a lot of calories. A LOT. I was fine with it while I was still keeping up with the physical aspect of fitness. But now. Yea. I can’t do it anymore. In the eternal words of that Star Trek alien scottish dude. ” I just can’t do it captain.”

So why is this article called. Fitness 101.

As some of you people would know. I used to swear by isolation training. Training each individual muscle group. At a given time. Maxing each individual muscle to failure. Yes sure. That’s a good method of training. But I guess, isolation training as such, helps build mass, and individual muscle strength. Eg. bicep curls and other bicep related strain. That builds up the mass of your biceps. And it builds the strength of the individual muscle. Key word. Strength of the individual muscle. It strengthens the function of one particular movement. And how did I stumble upon this.

Well. I could out do a friend in weights with pretty much every single exercise. But I realized my friend could still throw further. And all that jazz.

The key to strengthening muscles more for motion? It’s not isolation. You have to place resistance on the motion you desire to gain strength in. I would get into more detail. But i’m bored with this article now.

So signing off.

Unfit Azngeek