Could someone please provide me with a good workout routine. My goals are to gain a little bit of muscle and to get lean. Please tell me what you've had success with and what other programs didn't work so well. Some of the things I'm curious about are # of reps, # of sets, frequency, should I concentrate on compound movements, how much cardio??? Thanks to anyone that can help me out. Mike

My personal suggestion is to go look at http://www.ultimate-exercise.com. Read the info' and, if it makes sense to you, give it a try for two months. Assess your results and decide whether to continue. It worked really well for me and for every client I had who wanted to try it. It sounds too good to be true, but in my particular case I found the results to be just what Dr. McGuff said to expect, i.e. improvement in every exercise, every workout for almost a year. At that point I went to a maintenance system as I am as strong as I feel a need to be. Fair winds and happy bytes, Dave Flory

If your goal is to improve body composition (deacrease fat mass while maintaining or increasing muscle mass), then I reccommend a weight training program that focuses on inducing metabolic fatigue rather than overcoming a large resistance. You want to raise lactate levels as much as possible in order to stimulate a large post-exercise elavation of metabolism. Basically, this involves keeping your repetitions high (8-12 reps/set) and your rest periods between sets short (varies depending on workout format). There are several ways to do this; the simplest being to perform one exercise at a time in an interval-like fashion alternating periods of work and rest. Another (harder) way is a method called supersetting, in which you move directly from one exercise to the next with no rest in between. I reccommend using 3-5 compound exercises performed back-to-back with 60-90 seconds recovery between circuits. Chose at least one exercise each for pushing, pulling, and lower body extension movements. Example: 1) parallel squat 2) pushup or bench press 3) pullup or pulldown 4) deadlift 1:20 rest REPEAT Use a weight slightly heavier than you can handle for the whole unit of work, so that you reach failure on the last set. To make it more intense, you can add an additional set to failure at the end. For example: four sets is a good place to start, so if you were doing four sets you would either a) use a weight that allowed you to complete the first three, becoming progressively more fatigured until you failed on the fourth; or b) use a weight that allowed you to complete the first two, fail and on the third, and then add a fourth set to failure. Increase the number of sets/circuits as your fitness improves. While type of program will increase strength and muscle mass in a relative beginner, it's not true strength training because the loading is relatively low. Remember that the goal is to induce fatigue rather than cause large amounts of muscle damange that will take a long time to recover from. It will still cause moderate levels of damage, but you should be able to repeat this workout every other day or so with sufficient recovery. The drawback to this type of training is that it genrerally has a short shelf life (4-8 weeks) before your body adapts. So, if you want to lose fat with this type of training, you definitely need to have your diet in order from the time you start or you will miss out on the window of opportunity. As for cardio: if your goal is simply improved body composition, then you don't have to do any. In fact, adding cardio may interfere with recovery from the weight training and thus compromise results. If you want to burn more calories, consider simply adding a 3-4 mile walk every day or on non-weight training days as that is not stressful enough to compromise recovery.

Or, if you want a program that combines weight training with moderate amounts of cardio, check out the Body for Life program (www.bodyforlife.com). Not a true fitness program in my opinion, as it mainly focuses on body composition, but people do get results with it.........

Thanks for the info guys. Brian, do you follow the zone diet? If not, what type of diet plan do you follow? Mike

I follow the Zone diet loosely, adhering to the basic principals and using the "eyeball" method to balance meals. However, I don't count "blocks" and I sometimes eat small amounts of low-glycemic carbs (i.e. pieces of fruit) by themselves for snacks.