Student Fitness

By: Veljko Petranovic

Last week I was at the gym, getting used to the now world famous “300 workout”. It’s, for a lack of a better word, brutal. Try it sometimes. I was cowering in a corner after a 20-rep set of squats, holding back from puking, and then I noticed the two newcomers. Both were tall and slender as beanstalks, and of course, they were benching, doing maybe eight reps with 60 pounds.

No big deal there, everybody at my gym benches all the time, and we have a steady influx of newbies, but it was the way they were doing it that really rattled my nerves. Normally, I have this rule - don’t give advice unless you’re asked. But these guys were out to hurt themselves, so I told the receptionist about it. His words didn’t make an impact I hoped for.

Set after set, they laid on the bench at an angle, grabbed the bar unevenly and proceeded to raise it in the most crooked manner. At the top of the movement, the knuckles of their right hands were above the knuckles of their left, exceeding one another for about three inches. Obviously, they had a muscular imbalance - their left elbows didn’t lock out at the top (weaker left triceps), and as a result, they were doing something that resembled a circus balancing act - lift, compensate for the plates that began to slide off the bar, lower.

So, I told them about it, and promptly forgot about them. More recently, I was talking to a friend, who boasted about squatting some 300 pounds for eight reps on a fixed bar. I asked him how low he went, and found out that he’s doing quarter squats. He explained that it was because he “didn’t want to hurt his spine”. As a matter of fact, he defended his form quite vigorously. Yadda yadda yadda.

There are your two reasons for using improper form in the gym. One is a lack of knowledge, the other is ego. Let me tell you, most people don’t care how much you can lift unless you’re a powerlifter at a meet or a strongman competitor. It’s the way you look and perform in your sport that separates you from the average gym rat. Bad form will, in the long run, give you an injury, and that means time off training and lots and lots of pain. Depression is common when this happens. So it pays off to give proper form a bit of attention. Besides, lackluster form means utilizing less muscle fibers in your lift, targeting other muscles unintendedly which translates to little or no progress. Yikes!

Let’s examine some of the more common movements. You have your obligatory bicep curl. Stand in front of the bar, feet shoulder width apart. Grab the bar with the palms facing you, a bit wider than shoulder width. Some movement in the lower back while you curl is OK, but don’t swing like you’re doing a snatch - it’s best to keep the back rigid and let the biceps do the work. Also, try not to slouch your shoulders.

The militairy press is what most people choose when it comes to building the deltoids. Most don’t know that those muscles consist of three heads - the anterior, the lateral and the posterior. Each of these is trained with a different movement, but for some reason, a lot of guys do only the MP, which develops the front shoulder exclusively. Grip the bar in a manner that will allow your upper arms, upon lowering, to be parallel to the bar and perpendicular to your body. This means that the hands should be about three feet apart for the average height individual. Don’t curve your spine either way, keep it firm and in a neutral position. Also, don’t roll your tailbone if you’re sitting down and keep the feet firmly planted on the ground. If you’re standing up, avoid excessive back extension - this puts much stress on the spine’s discs. Lower the bar to your nose or to the atlas disc (the one that rotates the head) in your neck, depending on whether you’re lowering it to the front or the back of your head. Anything lower puts unnecessary strain on the rotator cuffs.

Deadlifting is easy to learn. The loaded bar is on the ground, and you just bend over and pick it up. The sumo variant demands that your legs be wide apart, while the conventional deadlift dictates that they should be kept narrower than the shoulders, so that your arms can grip the bar and remain “outside” of the knees when you go down. Use a mixed grip - one hand pronated, the other supinated, and switch hands at each set. KEEP THE BACK STRAIGHT. Also, there is no need to go down in a deep squat, the back should do most of the work and the majority of the movement happens at the hips, not the knees.

When squatting, think “heels” and think “butt”. Push with your heels and keep the butt back, don’t tuck it in. Go down as much as you can with no weight, keep the back neutral, and don’t let the knees travel much past your toes at the bottom. Don’t fall back on your ass now! Also, don’t let your knees wobble left or right - this is a sure sign that you’re using too much weight. Place the bar on the traps, just under the bone that sticks out, where the spine meets the neck. Hand placement depends on preference - me, I just “hug” the plates to keep them in place, arms spread. Breathe, but contract your abs at all points of the movement. Chest is kept up, eyes forward.

Parallel bar dips are another easy one - make sure that your biceps meet your forearms at the bottom, then extend. Tilt to the front to put more stress on the pecs, or keep your body straight to isolate the triceps. Legs are bent at the knee and crossed.

By: Veljko Petranovic

A lot of people I know have trouble when it comes to developing their legs to match their upper bodies. I am also one of those people. You see, legs aren?t ?show? muscles. So, if you happen to be lifting weights just for the sake of looking good, chances are that you?ve been neglecting your legs. No wonder. The first thing someone notices about your build is the shoulders. Arms are also a huge favorite. Hitting the beach? Don?t forget the abs. Just about everyone does the bench press often to get that impressive chest.

Meanwhile, the legs remain forgotten, ignored if you will, like a red-headed stepchild. In the long run, the result is a huge muscular imbalance, which not only looks funny, but can and will ultimately limit your overall growth. So, my first advice would be to start exercising your legs at least as much as you exercise the upper body. Your look will be complete, not half-assed.

That being said, legs are notoriously hard to train. Squats just might be the hardest movement you?ll ever try. They are not fun like it is to pump up your biceps on the Scott bench, named after the great Larry Scott, a bodybuilding champion from the past. Legs are also always in motion, as they propel you about on your daily business. This means that they are used to low intensity, high endurance work, and logic thus dictates that hey should not be trained in a similar fashion if your goal is muscular hypertrophy.

Using full range of motion and precise form is a must. Injury is not fun at all, take it from someone who has torn his vastus medialis muscle twice and has had numerous tendon pulls and countless joint inflammations. Going heavy is an option, but if you?re using a limited range of motion for the sake of hoisting more iron, you?re just stroking your ego and risking injury, time off of training, depression, fat gain, you name it. Not good. Besides, a quarter of a squat does very little in the way of growth.

High reps or low reps? My answer would be to do both, and switch often. A good leg workout will produce nausea and massive fatigue, so if you?re feeling like a million bucks after a workout, you?re doing it wrong, dummy. A reasonable set range for legs would be 15 to 20 total sets, divided over 3 to 8 different movements, hopefully including both the thighs and the calves.

Lots of trainers have trouble bringing their legs up to par due to ?genetic disadvantages?. While it?s true that those disadvantages do exist, they should not be used as an excuse to cop out on your training. Myself, I?ve had a lot of problems when it came to lower leg development. High insertions, few muscle fibers, whatever. The missing ingredient for me was frequency. I?ve found that I should work the calves three times a week, instead of just once or twice.

This brings us to the point of recovery. It?s necessary, yes, but seeing how the legs are used to constant stress, you will need much less than, say, a week or even 72 hours. 24 to 48 hours is what works for me, and you can only find out your what your own ?recovery zone? is by experimentation. I?ll outline a solid program which presumes you?ll be hitting the gym 4 times per week, one hour per training session. Remember though, this is just one way to skin a rabbit.

Monday:
Squats, 6 sets of 3 reps
Stiff legged deadlifts, 3 sets of 12 reps
Leg curls, 4 sets of 6 reps
Toe raises on the leg press, 6 sets of 20 reps
Abdominal work
Rest 3 minutes between sets

Tuesday: Upper body

Wednesday: Rest

Thursday:
Lunges, 2 sets of 15 reps for each leg
Dumbbell deadlifts, stiff legged, 4 sets of 20 reps
Leg press, 3 sets of 25 reps
Calf machine, 6 sets of 10 reps
Abdominal work
Rest 1 minute between sets

Friday: Upper body

Saturday, Sunday: Rest

Include sprints in your off days, to the effect of ten to fifteen 30-second full-out sprints, with a one minute pause between the sets.Train hard and be safe!

By: Joe Norton

College is busy. It’s tough to find time to go to the gym. What, with classes and meal periods, parties & homework… not nescessarily in that order but still - we can’t always find the time to go to the gym everytime we want to workout.

No worries! There are TONS of exercises that require little-to-no equipment that you can do anywhere, anytime. Including in your dorm room. You can work out most muscle groups using just your bodyweight, in the comfort of your own place.

Below I’ve listed some of the more beneficial dorm room exercises that will show you real results if you do them consistently.

Abs - Possibly the easiest muscle group to workout using just your bodyweight.

Abs are unlike the other muscle groups in
how they can be trained almost everyday of the week. That’s right, with abs you
don’t have to follow the “never 2 days in a row” rule. However you should make sure you don’t work them for extended periods of time
without rest. I recommend atleast 1 or 2 ab rest days every week. With that in mind, you can make working out your abs a nightly thing. Like just before bed everynight try and squeeze in a few minutes of abs and increasing the duration you work on them as you progress.

Pilates - These usually involve just your bodyweight (or if you care to invest, a contraption known as reformer which is one of those seats with the pully’s and whatnot) and an exercise ball. I won’t discuss any pilates exercises which require either form of equipment. All you need is you, and a floor - easy as that.

The Hundred - The most basic, and starter pilates exercise

The Postion: Lay on the floor, back on the ground. Keep your hands to your sides a few inches off the ground, palms down. Feet straight out 6 inches to a foot off the ground. Keep your head raised off the ground, this will pull more muscles into the exercise and cause more stress on them.
What to do: while in this position you are supposed to wave your hands up and down (like getting as close as an inch from the ground and as high as 6 inches perhaps). The reasoning is that this is to be done “one hundred” times per set. If you can’t do it 100 times then do as many as you can, or just time yourself. Might seem silly at first, but within 20 seconds it’s going to get more difficult.
Variation: While in the hundred position, move your feet in a up & down
motion like you are walking.
For a video demonstration, that is almost exactly how I described, check here.

Leg Raises - AWESOME exercise. It has become my “bread-n-butter” ab exercise. Way better than situps.

The Position: Lay on floor, back on the ground. Head raised off the floor. Arms at your side,
press against the floor to
support yourself while you do the exercise. Keep your legs straight out, I recommend
not letting them touch the ground
for added difficulty.
What you do: Raise legs, keeping them straight throughout, go pass the 90 degree mark just a bit till you feel the additional contraction of your top abs. Don’t go too far back, I find that having your legs past about 120 degrees to not really help much and instead it can just hurt your back.

Roll Up - Pretty good exercise. You can see serious advancement as your abs strengthen.

The Position: Lay on the floor, back on the ground. Arms stretched out past your head, palms facing the ceiling like you are trying to reach for something behind your head. Keep feet straight out, planted on the ground. I recommend putting a pillow behind your head for this one because when you end reps, without great technique, you might have the tendency to forcefully touch the ground and try to bounce your way back up. Do not do this. Remember that technique is everything. Your body dosen’t care how many exercises you do, just how much you stimulate your muscles.
What to do: Slowly and with control, raise your upper body off the ground while keeping your arms stretched out. The goal here is to raise your upper body off the ground, using only your abs, and then touch your toes with your arms and slowly, with control, lower your upper body back to the resting position. It can be difficult, but with time you will find you are able to do many more reps than when you first began. For a video demonstration, that is almost exactly the way I described, check here.

Do these 3 Pilates moves every other night and in no time you’ll be a situp machine.

Who says you need fancy smancy equipment to get a six pack… People who sell fancy smancy equipment…

By: Joe Norton 

1. Don’t just hope to find time for going to the gym. Take the time to plan it. The college lifestyle can be hectic and plans/entire courses of the day can be changed with a decision. When you have plans in advance you can build your day around your fitness lifestyle.

2. If lines at machines at the college gym are annoying you then you might want to try going earlier in the morning or later at night. College gyms tend to have very light traffic till just before lunch, it will get more busy throughout the day usually peaking by 5-8 and die off the closer you get to closing time. With this in mind, you can have the whole gym to yourself if you go at one of the less busy time periods.

3. Don’t forget about all the old school bodyweight exercises you know of. You know exactly what I’m talking about: The Push-up, the sit-up, the pull-up (if you have a chin up bar to use). These are compound bodyweight exercises that are the basis for many fitness routines and it’s because they are some of the most effective excercises we know about. Pushups and situps can be done anywhere, any time. Why not do a quick set of each during commercials?

4. Hoof it a bit. Walking is a great form of exercise. Try to plan your day to allow for a few strolls. Even though they require little physical effort they cause serious health benefits. Take every chance you can to get out of the cramped dorm room and take a look around on a walk. Why take the shuttle to save 10 minutes when you could have just added in 10 minutes of light exercise…

5. Moderate your alcohol consumption. Alcohol is not going to help any of your goals – unless your goal is to pass out. Alcohol causes a decrease in testosterone and will negatively impact your ability to grow muscle. Alcohol is also full of empty calories and simple carbs, plus – a lot of people eat seriously unhealthy food once they have had too much alcohol (this is where most of the fat for the beer belly comes form). Read more about “Alcohol In College”

6. Get enough sleep. Atleast 6 for most people, 8 is recommended. Lack of sleep can cause many things, the worst of which is psychosis (that’s right, a psycho), including decreased cognitive ability. It will also completely screw over any kind of lifting / fitness plan. Your body needs time to rest and repair, if you never give it time it can’t ever rest & repair. Read more about sleeping…

7. Avoid the buffet. It is scientifically proven now that when you go to a buffet you definitely eat more. We all knew it, no one doubted it, yet for some reason people still go to buffets which tend to have the worse food on campus. Bleh, boo this buffet! Read more about buffets…

8. Put some Pilates into your fitness plan! Pilates are those core based bodyweight exercises that seems kinda somewhat similar to yoga but its not. Yeah those, they are amazing for abs and can be done anywhere. I suggest the floor because it has no give and works good as support. However, you can even do them in bed. Things like “the hundred”, leg raises, the saw, v situps, are all Pilates moves and there are many more – check’em out.

9. Stay busy. Join an organization or professional development club and participate often. Not only will this help out your resume and your skills in the given area, but also it means you are busy more and less time to sit around. Stay moving, stay burning calories.

10. Join a team or club, or atleast start a recurring physical activity (like Sunday basketball games, Saturday morning football games, whatever). Add something to your life that is going to continually cause you to do activities that benefit your goal. Deciding to run a 5k or hell, even a marathon – is a gigantic example of starting a recurring activity that will actually guide you to your goal.

Keep these tips in mind this upcoming semester.

By: Joseph Norton

When I lost weight it wasn’t because I went on a diet. It was because I analyzed my habits and lifestyle - chose my goal of what habits and lifestyle I did want. Then I worked to become the new me. When I was doing all this I noticed that every problem area of my life that was causing me discomfort could usually be grouped into one of three categories. Together these 3 categories are the major areas where the college atmosphere influences students and makes them prone to weight gain:

Lifestyle

College is different than high school. It’s as simple as that. The primary areas of the typical college students lifestyle that are affected is the amount of free time they have, how they use their free time, how much you physically exert yourself (be that excercising, lifting, anything that is aerobic). Usually, this new free time is used in ways which are, although fun, not quite conducive to weight loss. Just think about how often you use your free time to work out physically?
Many high school athletes who managed to stay fit from practice do not compete in college. Inherently, the additional hours of free time will undoubtedly lead to increased sedentary activity.

This is why I was so shocked at my weight gain. Being a former athlete I felt immune to weight issues. It should have dawned on me that although I was a football player in the past, nothing about my current lifestyle includes any of the physical training from my football days. So what happen is I ate the same, and exercised less - big shock, I gained weight.

Even if you never played sports, its likely you still spent more time exerting yourself
during offhours in high school than you will in college. Also, take into account how much more downtime you really have. An average courseload being 15 credits, this means 45 hours of actual classtime per week.

College, technically speaking, takes up about as much time as a “full time” 40 - 50 hour workweek. Even being so, it’s not much time your actually in class.

Think about highschool and how it was typically 6 hours, 5 days a week. Well, for college the average schedule requires 3 hours, 5 days a week. Meaning college takes HALF as much time as high school. This is why moderating how you use your downtime is so vitally important.

Stress

College students are in a complex environment; surrounded by new people, learning new
concepts, and all while trying to maintain an active social life. It can get a little stressful. Stress causes all sorts of problems.

Stress can cause your immune system to get seriously bogged down, inviting illness.

Pair this with the fact that college is already a risky place for illness and you got a serious
threat of sickness Also note that stress causes higher cortisol levels, which directly increases abdominal fat.

Here are several strategies that can help you cope with stressful situations in college, according to the University of South Florida’s Counseling Center for Human Development:

Learn to manage your time wisely. Make and follow a daily schedule that includes time for classes, reading and writing assignments, exam preparation (don’t procrastinate!), healthy meals, exercise and a job.

Set priorities and make the most of your opportunities as a student. Write down the most important items and concentrate on those at the top of your list. Writing ideas down helps crystallize your thinking and reinforce important goals.

Learn to say “no” to some of the demands for your time. Protect your own best interests by refusing to allow yourself to become overstressed by taking on every request or opportunity that comes your way.

Make careful planning a basic part of your academic routine. In a student’s hectic world, poor planning often leads to crisis situations. And crisis almost always leads to stress.

Food

Far too many students come into school with the midnset that the meal plan will be there whenever they are hungry.

Only to realize that most meal plans only allow 2 meals a day on avg and definitely require additional supplementation.Without viable healthy alternatives to campus food, and with surrounding fast food, the convenience factor becomes overwhelming.

Students snack on candy bars and soda from the vending machines instead of buying fruit or juices to ease those late night cravings. With some planning and moderate discipline, students can learn that it is not terribly difficult to live a healthier lifestyle.

Upon entering college the average student’s life is dramatically altered in these three areas. Unfortunately for us with a naturally slow metabolism the impact of these three changes can lead to dramatic weight gain – The Freshman 15.
Together these factors tend to cause 3 significant changes in the fitness and nutrition of the college student.

1. Consume More Calories – poor food choices, to counteract stress

2. Burn Less Calories – from being less active

3. Start/Stop Metabolism – from missing meals, poor food choices

Another result of the lifestyle switch between high school and college is the proclivity of college students to live on a more nocturnal schedule.

This can cause problems especially given how the meal plans given out at colleges operate during day hours. This can lead to missing the “time zone” for a specific meal period. To avoid this you need to learn to work with your meal plan.
Another significant problem with the lifestyle inherited by the college student is frequency of meals. There is a significant problem with only eating 2 meals a day, and doing so crushes your metabolism.

By: Joe Norton 

There are many ways you can increase your metabolism, the best ways of which are to be active and to eat often. However, there are smaller, simpler things you can do to increase your metabolism a little. Every little bit helps.

Load up on hot sauce - capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot peppers, causes an increase in metabolism. Studies have found that capsaicin works in two ways to reduce cholesterol levels: it decreases cholesterol absorption by the body so that more is excreted in the feces; and it increases the enzymes responsible for fat metabolism in the liver, so that more triglycerides, the hard insoluble fat, are secreted by the liver rather than accumulated in the body.

Drink coffee -Anyone who’s had a few too many coffees and sufferred the shakes can tell you that caffeine is a serious stimulant that dosen’t get much negative press due to our cultures love of coffee. Just make sure to drink plenty of water (I drink a glass of water for every cup of coffee, in addition to my daily 64 daily ounces) to counteract the dehydrating effect of the caffeine.

Eat Some Ruffage – Celery is so fibrous that your stomach burns more calories digesting it than you gained by eating it. So what happens is a net change that is negative. You burn calories by eating stringy veggies like celery.

By: Joe Norton 

It’s called progressive overload.
It is the process of systematically causing your muscles to overload, to get max’d out, and thus they adapt to this stimulus and grow to handle the weight. Then you do this again.

Try to make a weekly target, like add at least 2.5 pounds per exercise per workout.
After a few weeks you have made substantial gains and all the while it will hardly seem difficult. This is how the professionals do it, it’s as simple as that: Progressive overload.

I highly suggest using a journal to record your exercises and to make sure you are slowly progressing. After a month you will wonder how you ever managed to keep track of your progress without it (and you’ll realize you actually didn’t) It wasn’t until I kept a journal that I made significant gains in strength in short spans of time.

 Finally some proven statistical data to back up what everyone has known. Buffets make you eat more.

In a publishment in the Journal of American Dietetic Association, Researchers from Rutgers University found that students dining at breakfast buffets served themselves, on average, 20% more cornflakes, 30% more milk, and 40% more orange juice than the original paticipants at non-buffet style cafeterias. Similar results were seen in other meals also.

What this means for you?

Avoid Buffet like the plague. It’s proven to cause you to eat more per sitting - which is the opposite of what you should do if you want to lose weight most effectively.

Source: Journal of American Dietetic Association, Sept. 2006