Let me start with an example. When you burn your fingers, you feel the burn in your fingers. However, if you stop the nerves from sending the signals from your fingers to your brain, you will not feel the pain.

Pain is really felt in the brain. This is true for most of our sensations.

A clear signal to and from your brain will increase or decrease the impact of your exercise. This is one reason that it takes a lot of repetitions to master a technique. Talent accounts for how fast or how slow you can master something. But it does not eliminate the need for repetition.

Repetition with correct form is essential in getting results from your exercise activities. Learning correct form however is not for the weekend warriors and casual fitness enthusiasts. This is the realm of true athletes.

If you want to have the body of an athlete, you need to act like an athlete. Master the correct form.

Part of this mastery is clearing, priming and developing the pathways between your brain and your muscles. Some call this developing muscle memory. Since your brain works with images, the clearer the image, the easier for the brain to send the correct signal to your muscles. The result of a clear image is crisp movements.

Clear and crisp images have many parts. One part is defined edges. This is not the time for artistic blurs and softening filters. You need a crystal clear image with well defined edges of the exercise established in your brain.

What does this mean precisely?

You need to understand and control the beginning and ending of the movements related to each exercise, precisely. Your movements need to be crisp. Remember crisp is not fast. But we talk about that later.

In a bench press, with your elbows directly underneath your hands, when the bar touches your chest, your elbows are slightly lower than your shoulder. This position activates your pecs. Your brain sends the signal to your pecs to get ready for the lift.

With a barbell, you cannot lower your hands anymore since the bar touches your chest. But with dumbbells you can go too low and transfer the load to your deltoids and over stretch your pecs. Your brain can actually send a signal to your pecs to relax which is the opposite of what you want.

At the top of the movement, as long as you keep your chest up and shoulder blades retracted, you will reach a full pec contraction when you straighten your elbows out. However, most people have a wobbly end in their bench press. They keep pressing the bar as far as they can by hollowing their chest and allowing the shoulder blades to separate. This wobbly end, not only reduces the pec contraction but also creates an instability and risks shoulder injury. The crisp end is when your elbow straightens but your shoulder blades remain back. When you follow this step, your bench press always end at the same spot.

Holding an image of a crisp beginning and ending in your mind will increase the impact of the exercise and the results you will get. It will increase your strength and it will reduce the chance of injury. What more can you ask for?

© 2010 Vishy Dadsestan – X5Fitness.com

Escondido Personal Trainer | Vista Personal Trainer

Random Movements Keep Your Amazing Abs Away

I often see people who go through various and often difficult exercises which they assume to be functional, abs, or total body workouts.

When you step back you notice these are really not routines at all but random movements which really waste time and keep you away from routines that work.

You need to recognize the difference between random activities and parts of an exercise routine. Think of it like a football game. Can you imagine a football game that some players run laps around the field? Others do push-ups and the rest just kick the ball around?

They are active but they are not playing football. At the end of the day they are tired without having anything to show for it.

When it comes to abs workout, an effective routine has 15 elements you need to follow in precise order and in specific combination.

There are ways to recognize random movements. Visit the link below for more details.

How To Get Your Six Pack Abs With Amazing Abs Routines

Call me at (760) 302-7658

Vishy Dadsetan is a NSCA-Certified Personal Trainer (NSCA-CPT) in Escondido, California.

• San Marcos Personal Trainer
• Escondido Personal Trainer

One of my websites, myabstrainer.com developed a bug and I had to take it down. In the middle I lost the Internet connection and computer crashed. At the same time as the warm weather arrived with a vengeance our air-conditioning stopped working. So, I missed my workout trying to deal with these.

The stress carried through the night. It showed up in bad dreams, tossing and turning followed by getting up with a slightly pinched nerve and leg cramps. Then the day got real exciting. My keyboard stopped working, followed by the word processer and my mouse. The air-conditioning was not still fixed.

Around 3 PM. I stopped the negative cycle. Since I work for myself, I asked me the permission to go to the gym. And I reluctantly gave me the go ahead. You know what I mean. How often you don’t give yourself the permission to be happy, to do the right thing.

My heart wasn’t in the workout, so I began with mental exercises to focus and began a slow and methodical process of warming up. Ten minutes later, I was more focused, perspiring and relaxed. So I moved it up a notch and went from there. Half an hour later all that mattered was the next rep and beyond that the next set.

It was a great workout as workouts usually are if done correctly. I left my personal gym with an entirely different outlook. My mind cleared, I could prioritize better and see solutions that I could not see before, all because of exercise and all the wonderful hormonal changes that it brings.

Many people never experience this simply because they don’t know how to exercise or they have not exercised consistently enough for their body to respond at their command. Let me tell you, it is fantastic.

I really hope that you can experience this.

Call me at at (760) 302-7658 or use Contact Form

Vishy Dadsetan is a NSCA-Certified Personal Trainer (NSCA-CPT) in Escondido, California. Personal Training Area Includes Carlsbad, Escondido, San Marcos & Rancho Bernardo.

Escondido Personal Trainer

Tired of endless and boring aerobics that get you nowhere slow?

Body composition is one of four major elements in fitness. Getting into that tinsy winsy pink bikini or showing off your six pack abs like Taylor Lautner in The Twilight Saga are parts of body composition. In fact most of the weight loss, diet goals as well as muscle building goals are oriented toward body composition which is how much fat vs how much lean muscle mass we carry.

So most people go in search of the best way to burn fat and they fall into a trap with aerobic exercises, misconceptions and overuse.

Others go the other way and start high intensity interval training. The video below discusses one difference in the type of fuel your body uses .

Best Regards,

Vishy Dadsetan is a NSCA-Certified Personal Trainer (NSCA-CPT) in Escondido, California.

Personal Training Area Includes Escondido, San Marcos & Rancho Bernardo.

In July 2009 Issue of Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research titled “Tae Kwon Do: Physiological Responses and Match Analysis”.

Part of the observation was that winners in general used fewer techniques in each match than those who did not win.

Less techniques, more wins!

In your personal fitness training, you may want to focus and master few effective techniques that some athletes call “bread and butter” techniques to win your match to gain muscle or lose fat. But choose these techniques carefully and based on their effectiveness and not flare.

Watch the video below for more details and learn about the contest I am running.

Vishy Dadsetan is a NSCA-Certified Personal Trainer (NSCA-CPT) in Escondido, California.

Serving Escondido, San Marcos & Rancho Bernardo

Women are from Venus may be true beyond communication and relationships. The term quadriceps dominant for women signifies how women use their leg muscles to perform activities such as jumping. And this different way of using their legs may create a leg muscle imbalance which usually shows up in knee and hip pain.

Some studies show that women tend to rely more heavily on their quadriceps and less on their hamstring during same exercises than men. The best women workout require a different workout routine that emphasizes hamstrings such as Romanian dead-lift or hamstring specific hyper extension.

Remember that the point is balance. More you work the front of your legs, more you need to work the hamstring. Also since squats and lunges really contract the quads and make them tighter, the stretching protocol needs to emphasize the quads more than the hamstrings.

So, the simplified approach to balance quadriceps dominance is to:

1. Ease up on exercises that emphasize the front of the legs like squats and leg extensions.
2. Stretch the quads and hip flexors.
3. Step up the hamstring workouts like Romanian dead-lift.