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Q:Hey Mike. I do not have access to any kind of workout equipment at the moment and I'm afraid im going to lose my muscle mass prior to going to basic training. Is there anything that I can do -- like situps, pull ups, and pushups -- to keep my current mass and possibly even gain mass If so what kind of reps would you reccomend. Thanks

A:To minimize muscle loss while not exercising you first of all need to make sure that you don't lose weight. So eat enough to keep your weight stable. Secondly, as you said, you can do all sorts of calisthenic body-weight exercises. You want to keep these as intense as your regular weight-lifting would be, so you can use various techniques to keep the intensity up.

For pullups or chinups nothing special is needed usually for high intensity since few people can do more than 20 pullups in a row anyway. But if you can do them all day long and not get tired, then increase your intensity levels by holding some weight between your legs and/or lower yourself from the high point of the pullup very slowly.

You can increase intensity of squats by doing them one leg at a time -- this is also an excellent core stability builder. Either extend the other leg in front of you or bend it at the knee and go as deep as you can on one leg to do 10 reps to failure or so. Be careful to stretch and warm up well prior to doing this. You can also do regular squats and stay in the squatted position for five seconds in each rep before standing back up.

For situps, keep your legs in the air and do the situps very slowly, rolling up for a second or two, holding the contraction for a second or two, and lowering yourself down slowly.

For pushups, you can either keep your hands very close together to make the exercise very hard on your triceps and/or elevate your feet off the floor to stress your chest and shoulders more.

Your goal for all these exercises is to make them as intense as possible, 12 or fewer reps to failure (with situps/crunches being one possible exception).





Free Personalized Fitness Advice at wwwMikesFitnesscom