Month: February 2021

Why You Should be Training and Not Just Exercising

Posted on by Bashir Murtaza

Training vs exercising is an important distinction that needs to be made especially if you’re trying to progress and move heavier weights or to meet body composition goals. 

A training program consists of exercises and workouts formulated and designed to meet your goals. For some, it’s fairly common to just go and want to exercise or to go and workout without any real structured program to follow. This is fine in some cases honestly. Maybe you’re just trying to get a little bit of extra work done or you’re looking to just burn some extra calories overall. There could be cases where you’re experimenting with exercises to follow a better training program. All of that is fine. However, exercising is just a means to burn calories, whereas training is to meet specific goals. 

No matter your goals, you should have a tailored training program to meet those goals. Let’s go over why you will make better progression with training than just exercising.

Progressive Overload

Progressive overload is one of the most important portions of a training program. Every good training program should have progressive overload included in it. It will allow you to progressively continue to get stronger throughout the program at a steady rate. This is very important considering the main purpose of training and working out is to get stronger or at a minimum maintain strength in general. You’re not training to get weaker.  Most people correlate strength to large muscle mass when this isn’t the case. There are plenty of freakishly strong people that don’t have the muscle tone or definition you might see on a bodybuilder.

If you’re just exercising or just working out, most likely you won’t be following the foundations of progressive overload which are critical to building strength. 

Implemented Deload Weeks

Resting and recovery are probably some of the more underrated portions when it comes to progressing and meeting your goals. Without adequate rest and recovery, you can easily burn yourself out, start to lose strength, and even risk injury as well.

This can cause issues for obvious reasons. A good training program has planned deload weeks implemented into it.  A deload week is meant to give your body time to recover during an active recovery week. You’ll still be training, but not to the same intensity that you normally would be. 

With this implemented portion into your training, you can easily continue to meet your goals but also take a scheduled ‘break’ to help ensure recovery and get you ready for the next block of training. 

Designed and Planned for Your Needs

What I love about training programs is that they’re tailored to meet your goals. You won’t be doing useless exercises and workouts that may not benefit you and what you’re trying to achieve. A training program can easily work on your weaknesses and also improve your strengths. It’s a blueprint to meet your goals. I’ve designed dozens of training programs for many clients. If you ever want one created, feel free to message me at contact@blobfitness.com

Final Thoughts

Training programs are an ideal way to meet your goals. If your goal was on building a home, you would follow a blueprint on how to do so. This is the same thing when it comes to meeting your physical goals. You have goals that need a proper plan to execute and for you to achieve those goals. If you’re just working out or exercising for the sake of doing so, it’s very easy to fall off or miss those goals considering there is no plan in place.

Again, I don’t believe just working out or exercising is a bad thing considering it’s for the right reasons. You can even find a workout generator that can be extremely beneficial in specific use cases. 

If you ever want a program created for you, feel free to message me at contact@blobfitness.com

As well, be on the lookout for a new product that will be giving you new weekly workouts that will be following the principles of a training program. Enter your email address below to keep up to date on when it’s released!

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Introducing the Workout Generator and How to Use It

Posted on by Bashir Murtaza

The Workout Generator is finally live! If you’ve been following me for some time, you will know I’ve been teasing this for a bit. I’m happy to say it’s finally complete!  

Since it’s finally released, I wanted to give a quick guide on who it’s for, how to use it, and make the best of it. As well as potential new features.

You can find the Workout Generator under Tools->Workout Generator

Who’s the Workout Generator For?

The Workout Generator can be used by anyone. Whether you’re a beginner or at a more advanced fitness level, you can still utilize the generated workout. This is a great tool if you’re looking for:

  • A new workout to follow
  • Discovering new exercises
  • Looking for a change of current workouts
  • On the go workout based on your available equipment

How to Use The Workout Generator?

The Workout Generator is fairly easy to use. Let’s go through a step by step process.

Choose Your Equipment

Your first portion is to choose your equipment. Here, you can select all the available equipment you may have. If you choose the ‘Gym/All Equipment’ selection, it will remove all other selections and give you a workout based on all equipment.

Besides that, you can choose any piece of equipment you may have.  

 

Choose Your Categories

Here, you can choose which body parts you want to workout. You can choose multiple categories easily, but it’s preferred to choose 2-3 categories. Reason for this is that the algorithm will try creating to split your categories up into exercises, and with too many categories you won’t get too much variety in each category. 

Choose Difficulty

Last but not least, you can choose your difficulty. The higher the difficulty, the more reps, sets, and exercises you get. As well, you’ll also get different exercises depending on your level. For example, you won’t get muscle-ups at the beginner level. You’ll get something like that at the more advanced level. 

If you choose the “End Me” option, we would love to see the time and completion of the exercise! Feel free to tag us on Instagram (@blob.fitness) with #blobwod and we’ll share it!

 

Submit and Enjoy Your Workout!

Once you’ve submitted it, you will get your newly generated workout! Now what’s awesome about this is that each workout has its own YouTube link on how to do the exercise. I’ve only used sources I personally use for form information.

If you enjoy the workout or want to save it, you can easily enter your email address below and you can get the workout emailed to you with all the videos linked to it as well! 

 

 

Final Thoughts

This is just the beginning of more functionality set to come in the future. If you have any feedback or issues using the tool, please email me at contact@blobfitness.com and I’ll make sure to get to it.

If you like your workout and enjoyed your workout, post it on social media and use #blobwod! I’ll share any posts/stories with that hashtag. I hope you enjoy your workout and be on the lookout for new features coming soon!

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Are There Any Benefits to Extreme Diets?

Posted on by Bashir Murtaza

Extreme diets tend to seem like it’s a fairly dominant within the fitness community. You’ll find someone who looks ‘healthy’ or is in good shape and plenty of times, they’re on a fad/extreme diet.  Usually, this correlation makes it very easy to see if you need to get in shape or be ‘healthy’ then you need to follow an extreme diet. 

First, let me define what is an extreme diet in this context. How I define an extreme diet is a diet that usually tends to cut out major macronutrients or food groups to be healthy. 

Now, we know this is simply not the case overall. We know you can create a perfect diet for yourself without going crazy and cutting out macronutrients or food groups.

Even with this knowledge, can extreme diets provide any real benefits? Or are they usually more harmful than good?

Appealing to People Who Want to Get into Fitness

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone who when they first started to diet or get into shape, didn’t try some type of extreme/fad diet. When I first started to work out and bulk, it had to be all ‘clean food’ and when I was cutting, it had to be low carbs.  From trial and error and plenty of research, I realized I didn’t have to do this anymore. 

There is something about extreme diets that bring in new people to get into shape. This is probably because most may think that extreme diet = extreme results. Again, we know that’s not true. Plenty of extreme diets can actually cause other issues down the line due to a lack of micronutrients. Unless you’re properly supplementing, most extreme diets can start causing some sort of deficiency. 

I will give credit that extreme diets tend to bring in new people which is always great. I do think though that newcomers should be educated though that extreme diets aren’t necessarily needed though.

Sustainability

To me, this is probably where extreme diets can either be truly beneficial or can lag your results and only make you frustrated through the process. 

People who are educated about extreme diets, sometimes know that it’s not needed for them to be healthy. Why do they keep doing it though? Simply because it’s sustainable for them. 

There are plenty of people that having the choice/option to eat whatever they want as long as it fits into their macros, which actually causes them to not sustain their diet because they easily go off the rails.  Extreme diets, tend to cut out a majority of the items you may normally binge on, so people who do follow an extreme diet, may find it more sustainable to follow.

Now, this can also cause issues too. I’ve noticed others who go on extreme diets simply can’t keep up with it for a couple of weeks and then start to binge. They feel guilty, go back on the extreme diet, and then again can’t keep up with it. This process is unsustainable and will leave a person feeling defeated. In this case, a more flexible diet might be a better approach. 

If you have trouble sustaining your diet due to too many choices of food items and having it be overwhelming, then an extreme diet may be more beneficial to you.

However, if you feel like you keep yo-yo dieting from an extreme diet, maybe you need to have a more flexible diet. 

I wrote this article on how to create a sustainable diet for you that goes over these concepts more. If you ever have trouble sustaining your weight loss, check out this article. 

Can be Useful for Specific Underlying Conditions

First, I’m not a doctor. You should consult your doctor if you plan on changing up your diet in any regards that can impact your health.

From what I’ve witnessed, extreme diets can sometimes be beneficial for underlying conditions coupled with a healthy supplementation and being at a healthy weight. For example, someone who is type 2 diabetic may be better off going on a more low carb diet/ keto diet. I’ve heard other stories of people who use the carnivore diet for their underlying conditions. 

I don’t wish to dwell on this subject too much as again I’m not a doctor and this isn’t my place to say whether an extreme diet can benefit you and your underlying condition.  These are just situations i’ve witnessed or heard from others. Again, if you have any underlying condition and plan on trying a more extreme diet, please consult your doctor. 

A Tool to Meet Your Goals

Even though you can probably achieve your goals without an extreme diet, that doesn’t mean you won’t get results from an extreme diet. You can see some great results and lose weight (specifically not saying fat because at first, most water weight sheds off first) fast in some cases. It can be a great tool to utilize to meet your goals and potentially help with sustainability or lose those last extra pounds fast. 

Final Thoughts

Extreme diets can have some benefits that can help you. The main issue is that too many people preach that it’s the only way to get results, which isn’t true. I do think it can potentially benefit you depending on if you have issues sustaining a more flexible diet. It also can help bring more people into the fitness community in general, which is always a good thing. However, more people should be aware of the potential side effects of extreme diets and the fact they’re not needed. They can be used as a tool to meet your goals, but there is no one diet to cure-all. If you plan on changing your diet and want to go on a more extreme diet, I would highly advise you to consult with your doctor first before making any changes.  

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