The BEST work-out!!!

[pioneer]

I really wish that people were using this post for workout log purposes only. Can you two please argue about running somewhere else or create a post for that?

[miles]

I really wish that people were using this post for workout log purposes only. Can you two please argue about running somewhere else or create a post for that?

Can a mod move the inappropriate posts into a new thread?

its all about the spring action. ... when you run properly ( like usain bolt ) you use your calf as a spring.

The tendons/ligaments are elastic bands, not springs, and elastic bands hold more energy the more they are stretched. The less energy is provided by the elastic band, the more has to be provided by the muscle. Relaxing the calf also allows the blood to flow in better.

[proteus]

yes mods please move us to another thread.

The tendons/ligaments are elastic bands, not springs, and elastic bands hold more energy the more they are stretched. The less energy is provided by the elastic band, the more has to be provided by the muscle. Relaxing the calf also allows the blood to flow in better.

this achilles tendon spring can only work if your heel is not on the ground

[miles]

yes mods please move us to another thread.

this achilles tendon spring can only work if your heel is not on the ground

That makes no sense.

[SkinnyDevil]

Figured I'd start this thread so everyone can argue about what is the BEST work-out and what exercises suck or are a waste of time. You know, so we don't clog up the "Today's Work-out" thread with arguments about each others' work-outs.

Does that work for everyone?

[SkinnyDevil]

Seriously....if we can all take the arguments about which workouts suck and which don't to the thread below, we can use this thread simply as a log of workouts to share what we ARE doing rather than arguing about what we OUGHT to be doing.

http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/exercisebodybuilding/the-best-work-out!!!/

Thanx in advance!

[SkinnyDevil]

And in that spirit....I don't find calf raises or push-ups or sit-ups to be a waste of time.

If you think they are a waste of time, my advice to you is simple: Don't do them.

Presumably you've come to the conclusion that certain exercises don't work through personal experience, which has not taught you what exercises are effective at all - only what exercise are and are not effective for you. So take that wisdom and use it to your advantage.

I'm all about sharing info, but making broad sweeping statements about the effectiveness of tried & true exercises with zero evidence to support one's assertions, and only a "I have no proof, but I know that I am right" is a bit, well....hasty.

Just my 2 cents, of course.

[achillezzz]

LOLOLOLOL....

Do your endurance routine and have fun dude..

[SkinnyDevil]

LOLOLOLOL....

Do your endurance routine and have fun dude..

Oh, yeah - I have a blast, man. Thanx!

I'm just responding to the rush of "you're wasting your time because (insert offensive exercise here) sucks. Do THIS instead, because it's soooo much better" stuff that was starting to clog up the other thread.

[djr_81]

Topic is split.

Play nice with each other.

[achillezzz]

Oh, yeah - I have a blast, man. Thanx!

I'm just responding to the rush of "you're wasting your time because (insert offensive exercise here) sucks. Do THIS instead, because it's soooo much better" stuff that was starting to clog up the other thread.

fuck them all its your body your mind

[proteus]

check this out:

http://gulfnews.com/gntv/news/frenchman-climbs-burj-khalifa-1.784902

6.5 hours.  good workout.  not as hardcore or paleo as sit-ups of course ...

[proteus]

That makes no sense.

can you be more specific ?

[pioneer]

Does anybody else like that RAW type of workout when you run barefoot through the woods stepping on prickers, sticks, rocks and in mud/dirt and get all dirty. Jumping over logs and climbing vines and shit. Straight up primal workout. I did one of these for the first time the other day and felt like a new man. My feet hurt from prickers and stepping on rocks, but not in a bad way. I felt tougher physically and mentally. Its cool not worrying about running through prickers and just letting yourself get cut up. That really makes me laugh at all the people who avoid prickers at all costs. I digress, anyway, this is a sick workout and its nice to get some fresh air and get all dirty outside once in a while.

[proteus]

Does anybody else like that RAW type of workout when you run barefoot through the woods stepping on prickers, sticks, rocks and in mud/dirt and get all dirty. Jumping over logs and climbing vines and shit. Straight up primal workout. I did one of these for the first time the other day and felt like a new man. My feet hurt from prickers and stepping on rocks, but not in a bad way. I felt tougher physically and mentally. Its cool not worrying about running through prickers and just letting yourself get cut up. That really makes me laugh at all the people who avoid prickers at all costs. I digress, anyway, this is a sick workout and its nice to get some fresh air and get all dirty outside once in a while.

why not wear something like vibram five fingers ?

i run on pavement for practical reasons - because if i ever have to run in real life it is likely to be on pavement.

[SkinnyDevil]

Does anybody else like that RAW type of workout when you run barefoot through the woods stepping on prickers, sticks, rocks and in mud/dirt and get all dirty....this is a sick workout and its nice to get some fresh air and get all dirty outside once in a while.

Hell yeah!

I love that sort of thing. Back in October, we got to go 2 weekends and hack our way thru a dense wooded area - machetes swinging, stomping around, throwing big logs off the make-shift trail we were clearing. It was a BLAST! The others were out there in sweaters and boot, but me in shorts (no shirt, no shoes,). BIG fun!

[pioneer]

why not wear something like vibram five fingers ?

i run on pavement for practical reasons - because if i ever have to run in real life it is likely to be on pavement.

Sometimes I do sometimes I dont, depends on how Im feeling. I like to do the barefoot thing sometimes to toughen up my feet more than vibrams would.

[cliff]

Swimming in cold water or better yet surfing in cold water

[SkinnyDevil]

Pioneer - yeah, I love doing the barefoot thing!

Cliff - swimming rocks!

[proteus]

what do you think of benching?

i started benching when i was 12 years old or so.  and i haven't done it even once in the past two years or so.

i think benching and dips are about equal - they have some cons and pros.  i prefer cable crossovers for chest exercise and standing presses for shoulders.  actually you get quite a bit of a chest workout from just chins/pullups.  i also get chest workout from swimming.  

bench press is of course easily THE most overrated exercise.  the reason everyone does it is two fold:

1 - it looks hardcore so its good as a mental masturbation
2 - it builds muscles closest to your face which is most important for people who spend their whole day looking in the mirror as most pretty boy bodybuilders do, so again - more masturbation

but of course to put bench press at the center of your training as most gym rats do - is misguided

the reason i don't do it AT ALL is because it relies on a BACK SUPPORT and i don't use ANY SUPPORTS on any exercises - and this includes no belt and no straps.  any support is a means of isolation which in a bodybuilders mind is a good thing - but in my mind is a source of weakness.

i used to be a HUGE fan of using staps back when i was into deadlifting and especially shrugging.  i couldn't hold as much weight in my hands as i could lift with my legs/lower back.  so i figured straps were allowing me to get a better workout - i was wrong.  straps were allowing me to get a workout i didn't need.  instead of deadlifting to build leg power i should have been running sprints.  instead of developing functional leg power i ended up developing nonfunctional power.  you only cheat yourself with any form of isolation training IMO.

you don't necessarily need to develop every muscle to its fullest potential - thats not a good goal even for a bodybuilder - and a very bad goal for a real athlete.  what you want is to develop your body as a machine that works as one.  if having a huge chest isn't making you run or swim or climb better - then you don't need a huge chest.  and if it does make you perform those tasks better - then you can build it up BY using those kinds of training.

when i used to be rather big i couldn't understand why i can barely keep up with girls in the swimming pool who are good swimmers.  my muscles were 5 times their size and i had fairly decent technique so i was supposed to be much faster ?  of course now i realize that they had the RIGHT muscles for swimming because they developed them BY swimming and i had the WRONG muscles for swimming because i developed them by benching.  and it was the same story with running and cycling.  being able to deadlift a couple hundred pounds did NOT make me any faster a runner or a cyclist - it was a total ripoff.  i put that stupidity behind me now.

i am tempted to say that i find bench press to be a worse than average exercise but it must be qualified.  it is certainly worse than an exercise average out of the ones i currently do.  but other people may do exercises far worse such as curls and crunches so for them it may be a very good exercise relative to what they do on average in the gym.

the good thing about bench press is that its a more or less free-weight exercise and one that allows a lot of weight to be used.  generally the more weight is being used the you are activating your body.  the bad things are:

1 - the back support, which is totally unnatural
2 - just as with dips the range of motion is not optimal. 

i had a friend with a torn pec from benching.  he never recovered from it - he has a hole in his chest.  chest is a relatively small muscle in a symmetrically developed physique.  people try to make it into a second ass and pay the price.

[proteus]

seeing as i seem to be saying every gym exercise is crap i thought for the sake of clarity i will mention some that i think are NOT crap:

* bent over barbell row
* power clean
* standing press
* lunges ( although frankly i never did them, but they make sense )

also for any exercise that can be performed unilaterally ( one side at a time ) you should occasionally do it that way.  for example you should sometimes row with just one hand ( but don't assume you can handle half the weight you do with both hands - as it becomes a completely different exercise - so start from a safe low weight ).

* one of my favorite gym exercises is something i have never seen anybody do except me.  it is a unilateral pull down.  if you were climbing a mountain you would essentially be doing chin ups unilaterally - one hand at a time.

[pioneer]

seeing as i seem to be saying every gym exercise is crap i thought for the sake of clarity i will mention some that i think are NOT crap:

* bent over barbell row
* power clean
* standing press
* lunges ( although frankly i never did them, but they make sense )

also for any exercise that can be performed unilaterally ( one side at a time ) you should occasionally do it that way.  for example you should sometimes row with just one hand ( but don't assume you can handle half the weight you do with both hands - as it becomes a completely different exercise - so start from a safe low weight ).

* one of my favorite gym exercises is something i have never seen anybody do except me.  it is a unilateral pull down.  if you were climbing a mountain you would essentially be doing chin ups unilaterally - one hand at a time.

You dont think squats and deads are functional???

[miles]

if you were climbing a mountain you would essentially be doing chin ups unilaterally - one hand at a time.

If you were climbing a mountain you're be doing pull-ups, not chin ups.

[KD]

you know, we had another guy similar to you who had been all drugged up and had  learned all the dark secrets of bodybuilding
and how everyone now had to do bike sprints or whatever.

you are still missing or fudging some fundamental things

for one, you can do bench press one day a week for 10 minutes and have better results than hours of swimming.

swimming is a refinement exercise. If you want a body like Iggy Pop, you swim in the ocean. Thats what he did, and it works. However it happens to be a tremendous amount of effort, time and energy that most people cannot afford.  swimming in a pool is probably the most diametrically opposite thing to healthful exercise I can possibly think of, so it doesn't even possibly qualify as a healthy substitute for anything - including nautilus machines - as there is only negative net health there.

all these other things similarly you are massively trading efficiency (power-lifting) for time and energy, which also means added calories. I personally do not have these to spare, therefore anything other than short spurts of speed and cardio worked into full body exercises like box jumping, lateral jumps, lunges and jump roping have any use for me.

This idea that being able to swim or run is somehow useful skills is just totally subjective.

My statistical guess is .05999 percent of people I have ever met....scratch that:looked in the eye have ever needed to swim, run, or fight for their life. 99.999999% of people that are involved in running, bodybuilding, crossfit, powerlifting are just trying to get the type of body that they find is ideal and to hopefully also increase their overall health.

So while essentially everything you happen to now prize as the highest echelons of 'paleo' health I see as useless, I do gauge that many people even on this site could not lift my Slankers order (60 lbs) up to my third floor apartment. To me this is something useful, as with similar uses of basic lifting augmented by strength training exercise.

Back to bench, you can get excellent results just doing burpees and dips but they don't yield the same specific result, so therefore there is 0 critical argument there, making the only plausible argument one of safety.

if you are lifting weights, its probably a safer bet to focus on functional strength rather than isolated exercises. This is pretty much the only 'truth' I can see. as for benching..virtually every member of Iron Addicts does bench press, and these guys are all competitive strength trainers and not bodybuilders. Some of these guys are in their 50's and 60's. Years not doing bench did nothing positive for me and had the obvious result.

---

the other things is this is a health forum thats unlike others in the sense that it promotes a diet which proves particularly cataboliizing for most folks (by this I mean muscle built from old materials, not muscle built on the diet.) making much of this irrelevant anyway.

Its possible you've radically re-examined your past errors or whatever but if you are interested in truly learning in clearing out old drugs, tissues, and then re-building muscles on a raw diet, perhaps you are still somewhat oversimplifying things.

[pioneer]

you know, we had another guy similar to you who had been all drugged up and had  learned all the dark secrets of bodybuilding
and how everyone now had to do bike sprints or whatever.

you are still missing or fudging some fundamental things

for one, you can do bench press one day a week for 10 minutes and have better results than hours of swimming.

swimming is a refinement exercise. If you want a body like Iggy Pop, you swim in the ocean. Thats what he did, and it works. However it happens to be a tremendous amount of effort, time and energy that most people cannot afford.  swimming in a pool is probably the most diametrically opposite thing to healthful exercise I can possibly think of, so it doesn't even possibly qualify as a healthy substitute for anything - including nautilus machines - as there is only negative net health there.

all these other things similarly you are massively trading efficiency (power-lifting) for time and energy, which also means added calories. I personally do not have these to spare, therefore anything other than short spurts of speed and cardio worked into full body exercises like box jumping, lateral jumps, lunges and jump roping have any use for me.

This idea that being able to swim or run is somehow useful skills is just totally subjective.

My statistical guess is .05999 percent of people I have ever met....scratch that:looked in the eye have ever needed to swim, run, or fight for their life. 99.999999% of people that are involved in running, bodybuilding, crossfit, powerlifting are just trying to get the type of body that they find is ideal and to hopefully also increase their overall health.

So while essentially everything you happen to now prize as the highest echelons of 'paleo' health I see as useless, I do gauge that many people even on this site could not lift my Slankers order (60 lbs) up to my third floor apartment. To me this is something useful, as with similar uses of basic lifting augmented by strength training exercise.

Back to bench, you can get excellent results just doing burpees and dips but they don't yield the same specific result, so therefore there is 0 critical argument there, making the only plausible argument one of safety.

if you are lifting weights, its probably a safer bet to focus on functional strength rather than isolated exercises. This is pretty much the only 'truth' I can see. as for benching..virtually every member of Iron Addicts does bench press, and these guys are all competitive strength trainers and not bodybuilders. Some of these guys are in their 50's and 60's. Years not doing bench did nothing positive for me and had the obvious result.

---

the other things is this is a health forum thats unlike others in the sense that it promotes a diet which proves particularly cataboliizing for most folks (by this I mean muscle built from old materials, not muscle built on the diet.) making much of this irrelevant anyway.

Its possible you've radically re-examined your past errors or whatever but if you are interested in truly learning in clearing out old drugs, tissues, and then re-building muscles on a raw diet, perhaps you are still somewhat oversimplifying things.

KD, I am just like you in your workout philosophy. What is functional in our every day lives is what promotes energy and vigor. I am interested in building a body that can set an example for others while also building functional muscles (instead of hypertrophy). A body that denotes power and athleticism is the true goal, while also being able to actually do the things you look like you can do (strength).

I for one also do not have the time to run marathons and swim laps, and personally it is boring for me. If one cannot gain both anerobic strength and increase aerobic capacity doing box jumps or sprints which may take 10-30 minutes as opposed to running miles that could take hours, there is something wrong. Also in the 21st century, we basically all have adrenal fatigue as a result of excess cortisol from exogenous environmental toxins, too much work, stress, relationship problems, and overtraining. Who really needs to be exercising more? Maybe if you are a sponsored bodybuilder who is being paid to train, eat, and sleep, but for the rest of us regular Joes who work and go to college like me, for those with kids, and stressful jobs, and a house to maintain, the last thing we need to do is exercise more, if anything we need more relaxation.

This premise is why I agree with KD, as the real goal in working out is getting the most benefit in the least amount time. Who really wants to be in the gym for hours?