Squat and press: conditioning that’ll (nearly) blow your heart out!
Too many gymgoers still focus on isolation exercises: curls, leg extensions, pec deck fly’s.. exercises where you move only one joint. This may be good when you are a bodybuilder, trying to give the finishing touch to your peaked bicep, striated quadriceps or bulging chest, but most likely you don’t fall into that category. If you want to lose fat and/or build muscle, you need to do exercises where you move multiple joints at a time, like squats, presses, chinups, etc. If you have been doing these exercises for a while and want to kick it up a notch, you can combine these exercises and do them together.
A good example of this is the squat&press: hold a weight (a barbell, dumbells or kettlebells) in front of you. Then squat down as low as you can without rounding your back. When you come back up, you press the weight overhead and lock it out. Lower the weight to the starting position and then squat down again for the next repetition. Do this for anything above 6 reps with a reasonable weight and tell me it’s just the same as the leg extension machine..
Let’s just analyze the movement for the geeks under us: The squat portion involves the ankle, knee and hip joints. The pressing part involves the shoulder and elbow joints. A huge amount of muscles need to work to move all these joints: quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes are the prime movers in the squat. The shoulder muscles and triceps are the prime movers in the press. Then nearly every other muscle you have is used to stabilize the other joints: from the calves to the abdominals, lower back muscles, upper back muscles, chest, biceps and forearms.
Compare this to the aformentioned leg extension: just the knee joint moves, and just the quadriceps produce this movement. It shouldn’t be too hard to imagine that the squat and press places your body under much more (good) stress, causing your heart rate to go through the roof, pumping blood to all these working muscles at the same time. Your lungs have to provide the oxygen to make sure every muscle gets enough of that, too. After the workout is done and you go home to eat, all the carbohydrates you ingest will be used to replenish the lost energy in the muscles rather than be stored as fat. The protein from that nice juicy steak will be used to repair damaged muscle tissue and even build new fat-burning muscle, so you can handle the stress a little better next time you put your body through the torture of training, so you can do more reps and burn even more fat!
Warning: Because the stress combined exercises like the squat and press put on your body are pretty large, you shouldn’t do them every workout, or for a very long time. You can do them for a 3-4 week cycle, going all out with exercises like this 3 days a week, after which you take a ‘break’ and go back to more regular exercises (still no need for leg extensions though). Another way to do it is do them just once a week, doing other exercises during the other days. That way you can keep them in your training a little longer.
Whichever method you choose, stick to it and you will get results!
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.