Our modern conveniences have altered human behavior in more ways than anyone could have predicted. While convenience and comfort have certainly increased, the toll on human health is far worse than many realize.

A sedentary lifestyle is crippling. A basic law of physics states, “A body in motion tends to stay in motion, a body at rest tends to stay at rest.” As our lives become more convenient, they also become dangerously sedentary. Obesity is not the only problem. A multitude of health complications occur when our muscles are not used.

Muscle Mass: Use It Or Lose It

If you do not use a muscle, it will atrophy, or waste away. If you exercise or use Whole body vibration, you develop muscle tissue and maintain your weight. If you stop exercising or using vibration equipment and continue the same diet, the muscles will atrophy and your body will begin to store the excess calories as fat.

Using your muscles through exercise and/or vibration equipment is the only way to stay strong and healthy. Using Whole body vibration stimulates your circulation. Activity and movement are necessary to good health. Whole body vibration is the latest scientific discovery aimed at assisting sedentary individuals to get the exercise they need.

Put Your Heart into Your Efforts toward Good Health

As a muscle, your heart also requires activity in the form of increased demand for blood. If you run around the block or use vibration equipment, your circulation will increase. Failing to take care of your heart, by living a sedentary life, can lead to coronary artery disease, stroke and hypertension.

Again, movement and activity are the keys. Sitting still really can kill you if you do it too much or for too long. Inactivity increases your body mass, or the ratio of fat to muscle within your body. Even simple, regular movement and muscle stimulation, such as is provided by whole body vibration, can provide your heart and other muscles with much needed activity.

Other Health Risks Of a Sedentary Life

Inactivity can lead to breast cancer, colon cancer, osteoporosis and Type 2 diabetes, among others. World Health Organization (WHO) statistics claim sedentary living will cause 17 million deaths due to cardiovascular disease and that diabetes deaths will increase 50% in 10 years unless changes are made. This can be avoided with whole body vibration and a healthy diet.

Current WHO projections tell us that one out of every three human beings is overweight and that one out of every ten is obese. These conditions can lead to serious health risks and death. Luckily, being obese or overweight is preventable and treatable, as are atrophied muscles.

Regular exercise or the use of Whole body vibration will help to restore your good health. Basic changes in eating habits, such as drinking more water and eliminating fats, sugars and highly processed foods will bring measurable results. In addition to dietary changes, individuals must participate in some kind of moderately intense physical activity for at least 30 minutes on most days. Whole body vibration requires only 10 minutes each day, making it a low stress, efficient way to good health. Moreover, research has proven that 10 minutes on a whole body vibration machine is equivalent to a 1 hour run.

Author is a freelance copywriter. For more information on body vibration, visit http://www.kwikfit4u.com/.

Bodybuilding is a new name for the exercises these days. However, building body’s strong and eyeful muscles aren’t that easy as it seems to be. There are several body building exercises that could help in achieving a fit and a healthy body.

Exercising is not just a process or a technique for building body but its something that would keep your body fit also keeps you in good health.

Which bodybuilding exercises can possibly produce quickest results? Does wide grip pull-down offer with same amounts of the gains as compared to the grip pull-up? Can leg press possibly substitute squat and yield out similar results.

These would be most common questions that arise when it comes to an important subject of the neuromuscular stimulation of every exercise.

There are several bodybuilding exercises that one can choose from in order to sculpt body.

The results in the bodybuilding exercises are mostly measured in the body composition changes- increased muscle tone or mass, depending on goals, along with the decreases in bodily fat.

The speed of the occurrence of the changes would fairly depend on your bodybuilding routine, diet plan and the amount of sleep that you get.

For the training protocol to work to its best efficiency not only it needs to be periodized or needs to be cycled but it needs to include exercises which would give most of stimulation in the least amounts of time. Various types of exercises would provide with varied levels of the stimulation.

Exercises like leg extensions, whilst the excellent for the sculpting lower parts of guadriceps, would produce less amounts of stimulating effects as compared to the exercises like squat.

The neuromuscular stimulation term describes amounts of involvement of the nervous system while you are performing bodybuilding exercises.

The more involvement of nervous system is involved is, more results could be achieved from exercising.

The free weight exercises like that of the squat provide with more of neuromuscular stimulation as compared to the leg press, as you need balancing the bar also move the bodyweight through the space.

For a leg press all you would require doing is pressing weight without having to balance it. Thus, less number of muscle fibres recruited by nervous system in order to move weight.

Therefore, whilst the leg press is a wonderful muscle building type of exercise, you would get less amount of result than the result that you would possibly get from the squats.

The same thing is true when it comes to the pull-ups vs. the pull downs. You are required to balance the body so also prevent from swinging.

Moreover, in order to stay lift it, the nervous system gets involved in recruits and the movement as several muscle fibres as required for performing any complicated type of tasks. In the pull-down, as the body remains little static, lesser amounts of muscle fibres are required.

Following a routine of bodybuilding exercises should surely bring out best of result. Choose the right type of bodybuilding exercises and stay fit and healthy.

John Goldman is one of the foremost advisors in matters relating to Health and Fitness.To learn more about Physical Fitness, visit our website at http://www.weightandfatloss.org

You know the pictures and the captions: From “scrawny to brawny,” are you a “hard gainer”? And my favorite “from this to this in 90 days”. It’s almost like magic they are so amazing. So, how do they do it? Well if you are the magician…you know the “magic”.

The first thing that I have to admit is that all of the before and after photo’s that I am aware of are in fact real. Not photo shopped, or altered to any great degree. The physical transformations that they represent did and do actually take place. It’s just not portrayed exactly as it happened.

Let’s start with the skinny guy transforming into an Adonis. The hard gainer. The facts are that when it comes to muscle building, we’re all hard gainers. You don’t add 30 lbs of muscle easily. No one does, or everybody would do it, wouldn’t they? Now some people’s genetic predisposition and body type makes it somewhat more difficult to add size, but everyone will, eventually. And therein lays the first trick.

The before and after photo’s of these fantastic transformations are taken YEARS apart. Not months, weeks or days. Years. If you notice the photos closely there will always be a difference in facial features, though they try to avoid direct straight on face shots. The hair style is different, often different color, shading and lighting will be changed and skin tone is usually darker in the after. These are all done to enhance the after, and it work’s, and to take your attention away from the fact that the skinny before photo is 5 or more years old.

News flash: Lift a lot of very heavy weight often, eat a lot of protein and work hard at it and in 5 years ANYBODY will pack on muscle. No miracle weight lifting routine here.

Then there’s the Doughboy before photo becoming Mr. Universe in the after, and doing it in 90 days. Well, this DOES happen. Have you ever seen what a professional lifter looks like if they go 30 days without lifting and add 15 lbs of blubber to their body? They look a LOT like the people in the before shots. Big, beefy, even chunky, very soft and smooth looking. But if you have ever had 3% body fat before, you can get back to this number 10 times faster than doing it for the first time. Same with muscle memory in lifting. It can take you years to get to a certain level of weight for bench or whatever, then injure yourself and have to take months off. When you hit the weights for the first time you might be able to handle 60-70% of what you were doing. But it comes back in just a few weeks. Same with fat loss. These before and after photo’s usually will be literally identical in every way. That’s because these will have been taken 60-90 days apart. But the before photo isn’t some schlub off the street. He’s a very muscular dude with 25 lbs of fat to drop. Been there, done that.

Lastly I have learned that the internet is loaded with useful, helpful FREE information. You just have to look for it. If you are too lazy to do that, and instead opt for some costly “program”, realize that buying it doesn’t make you NOT lazy anymore. Save your money.

Steve Robbins has been a fitness enthusiast his entire adult life. He can bench double his weight and run a marathon, all at 52. Editor and main contributor to http://www.muscleandhealth.org where Free weight lifting routines, beginner – advanced and muscle building supplements can be found.

Apparently there is much confusion amongst a lot of people over which builds muscle faster and “better”. When it comes to muscle building, for people like me, who have been weight lifting for 20 plus years, the answer is simple. And it’s not what you think.

I used to play a lot of golf. But I don’t anymore for two reasons. The first is I have gotten large in the chest and shoulder region and no longer have the ability to make a proper turn. The flexibility is still there, but the space isn’t.

The other reason I quit was because I was too cheap to hire the right kinds of people to teach me how to swing the club properly. I was always getting advice, but it was usually from people who swung the club not much differently then I did. They could tell me all kinds of things, but their swing proved to me that their advice was pretty much worthless.

Be careful whose advice you take.

You want to know how to build muscle? Join a gym and watch the biggest guys there. Do the types of things they do. Now, they are more advanced and further along in their weight lifting program than you, but you can still pick up many things. I try to take advice from people who can prove to me they know what they are talking about. When you can bench your body weight TIMES TWO, I’ll listen.

Free Weights or Machines? Makes no difference whatsoever!

People will say things like, “free weights work smaller muscles better” and “machines restrict the movement”. Okay, those are true, to some extent. But what about, “machines are much faster and more convenient so you can do more in less time” or “much more in the same time”. If machines don’t work, why is every Powerhouse and Gold’s in America filled with them? Do the guys in Gold’s and Powerhouse know anything about weight lifting?

The most common reason free weights are considered “better” is because using them requires the smaller, stabilizing muscles to have to work more. That is true. So let me ask all you free weight advocates, what builds muscle faster, having strong “small stabilizing muscles” or moving a lot of weight? Can you move a lot of weight on machines? You bet.

The point I am trying to make is that people that say you must use free weights to be successful are wrong. Even having the debate misses the real issue. It doesn’t ultimately matter how you move weight, just lift it. A lot of it. Often.

What really builds muscle faster and better? CONSISTENCY. Huge men use machines AND free weights. You may have preferences, and they may change depending on the exercise, but the most successful lifters you see use both. Did they get that big by wasting time using anything that didn’t work?

Steve Robbins has been a fitness enthusiast his entire adult life. He can bench double his weight and run a marathon, all at 52. Editor and main contributor to http://www.muscleandhealth.org where Free weight lifting routines, beginner – advanced and muscle building supplements can be found.

If you are serious about muscles then there is nothing as important to you as knowledge on how you can get big, faster and easily. It is more or less a reminder of the core components of successful muscle gain strategies. This article will give you hints on how to do just that. First, let us emphasize on the use of negatives in your training. You should use negatives to maximally stimulate your muscles to grow. There is a hullabaloo of scientific details in support of negative training but the basic point is that, lowering the eccentric phase of weight training further than conventional will put your muscles on the overdrive towards growth.

Besides adopting negative reps as a strategy to maximal hypertrophy, the next important thing to ensure so that progress in training is achieved is the rep speed. If you heave before lifting and drop the weights on the force of the load just like a falling stone, no gains will accrue. Stop wasting your precious time in the gym if you cannot control your movements to be gradual and intentional. All bodybuilding exercise require that you lower and raise the weight at a regular pace of three to four seconds making sure that the full load is carried by the target muscles.

And the training itself is not a leisure activity. Whenever you are inside the gym, hundreds of serious accidents and injuries can be suffered, the moment your mind shifts focus and looses concentration. To achieve maximal growth and to avoid the misery of injuries, ensure that you focus and keep your concentrate on the exercise. Focus on the weight and its impact on the target muscles. Keep domestics out of the gym and pick them up on your way out. Wherever in the gym, think the weights and the muscles and nothing else. And in weights and muscles, concentrate always on what is at hand not daydreams. The more you focus, the more weight you can lift and the better the exercises form you adopt and thus the higher the rate of growth.

Whatever you do, come to the gym without a concrete workout plan. When you wander in the gym and pick anything at random, chances are that you will either over train or under train. Under training leads to no growth, while overtraining severs the already attained growth. Each exercise done must be arranged before hand in the respective number of sets and reps for each set. A weekly workout schedule should be planned and even monthly in line of the training objectives. It is only a body builder without goals or who has no serious interest in growth, will just walk into a gym and start bouncing from this exercise to the next, just based on whims.

Spend the gym session accountably and use the one-hour duration to maximally stimulate growth. The gym is not a meeting hall top socialize and catch up with your chums. Each minute in the workout schedule is preciously worth a muscle or two, so get to the weight save time and stoop lazing around. Only losers will spend their time in the gym talking or waiting for the other guys to finish with their weights. Get serious and build muscles, you can catch up later.

Dane Fletcher is the world-wide authority on bodybuilding and steroids. He has coached countless athletes all over the world. To read more of his work, please visit either http://www.BodybuildingToday.com or http://www.SteroidsToday.com

The fastest way to look muscular is to get lean. People with average muscle mass look great if they are cut. But nothing looks better than seeing the clean lines of hard muscle. The number one most popular fitness goal is chiseled abs, but really everything looks better when you’re ripped. Here’s how to do it.

First, let’s define “ripped” in realistic terms. Anything at or less than 20% body fat will show definition very nicely. Doctors consider anything from 14-20% to be in the healthy range. But if you want abs to show through you have to be below 14%. I can tell you from experience the average, not obese person is between 25-30%, with fairly serious regular lifters in the 18-23% range, and serious ones in the 12-17% range. The real point here is that 5% one way or the other is a lot. Here’s why: a 200 lb guy with 25% body fat has 50 lbs of fat. To get down to 20% body fat he must lose 13 lbs of ALL fat. Now he weighs 187 lbs with 37 lbs of fat. If this 13 lb loss is half fat and half muscle your fat percent is still 23%. So as you can see a 5% body fat reduction is hard to come by, unless you are losing ONLY FAT. There’s the million dollar question. How do you lose only fat? Answer:

Very, very slowly.

They say you can lose two lbs a week of fat, without losing muscle mass. They are wrong. Millionaires with dieticians and chefs can. You and I can’t. Unless you are either a millionaire or a professional body builder your goal is a pound of fat a week. Now there are many who will tell you that you can cut in 6-8 weeks, and they are right. Just be prepared to lose 50/50 fat to muscle, and to only eat 1000-1300 calories a day. No thanks.

The healthy correct way is to drop 500 calories a day from your current intake. Have as many of these 500 calories as possible come from processed carbs and sugars. Spread your remaining calorie intake evenly through the day (though a higher percent in the AM verses the PM speeds up fat loss) and finally a slow release (not whey, but milk, egg or soy) protein shake an hour before bed. This results in a 2% body fat loss per month. In 3 months your muscle mass will be the same and your body fat percent will have dropped enough to show it off!

Steve Robbins has been a fitness enthusiast his entire adult life. He can bench double his weight and run a marathon, all at 52. Editor and main contributor to http://www.muscleandhealth.org where Free weight lifting routines, beginner – advanced and muscle building supplements can be found.