Why You Should Stretch

Flexibility exercises (Stretching) stretch your muscles and can help your body stay flexible. These exercises may not improve your endurance or strength, but being flexible gives you more freedom of movement for other exercise as well as for your everyday activities.
Stretching is a form of physical exercise in which a specific muscle or tendon is deliberately flexed or stretched in order to improve the muscle’s felt elasticity and achieve comfortable muscle tone. The result is a feeling of increased muscle control, flexibility, and range of motion.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?

  • Stress relief. If you’re not someone who works out very often, stretching can still help you ease any stress-related aches
  • Reduce anxiety
  • Relief from sore muscles
  • Improved posture
  • Less risk of injury
  • Better flexibility
  • Relief from back pain

Post-exhaust Strength Training

Post-exhaust training method basically involves a compound exercise followed by an isolation exercise.

An example of this is a chin up paired with a straight-arm press down (to further fatigue the lats) or biceps curl (to further fatigue the arms). The idea behind this method of training is to further fatigue the major or minor muscle group involved in the compound exercise.

Causing maximal temporary exhaustion in a muscle result in more muscle damage and the accumulation of more metabolic by-products, both of which are important in muscle building.

But be careful not to overdo it with this type of training. With this in mind, ease into this specific type of training method.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?

  • Muscle recruitment is being used maximally throughout the session
  • Increase muscle growth + strength
  • Adds variety to your training
  • Can help to burn fat
  • You are getting double the work on the big prime mover and only one set of work on the smaller synergist
  • The compound exercise requires more energy, so doing this first, whilst you are fresh my allow for more muscle recruitment
  • This is good to maintain core engagement if the compound movement has a higher risk of injury i.e. deadlift

Chest

The chest forms part of a larger group of “pushing” muscles in the upper body and is made up of three muscles: pectoralis major, minor and the serratus anterior.

PECTORALIS MAJOR

This is the larger of the chest muscles and is responsible for adduction of the arms, rotation of the arm forward and when the arms are raised in a fixed position (like you are wall climbing) it works with the teres major and the latissimus dorsi to pull your torso upwards.

PECTORALIS MINOR

This muscle sits below the pectoralis major and it attaches into the scapula. It is responsible for pulling the shoulder forward and down.

SERRATUS ANTERIOR

Also known as the “boxer’s muscle”. Although it might not be a true chest muscle, it is classed in this group because of its attachment on the ribs near the pectoral muscles.