I need advice and answers

[Gt105]

Hi. I'm a 18 year old male weighing about 140 pounds and i'm ready to begin strength training. I want to build up some muscles and abs. I've been recently gaining more weight because I was a bit skinny, but now i'm more bulkier. I have been doing push-ups every day for the last few months and now i'm ready for strength training.

I have some questions though...

1. Is it better to eat a meal before working out or after? Do I need to eat a lot of protein? What should be in my diet? and what should not be?

2. My stomach has a lot of fat. Can I just go straight into doing daily crunches to gain abs? Or do I need to lose the fat in my stomach first?

3. Is it better to work out every other day? Will 20-30 minutes of strength training be enough to build up muscle? I plan to jump rope on the days when i'm not strength training is this a good idea?

 

[Danger_Dave]

1. Is it better to eat a meal before working out or after? Do I need to eat a lot of protein? What should be in my diet? and what should not be?

2. My stomach has a lot of fat. Can I just go straight into doing daily crunches to gain abs? Or do I need to lose the fat in my stomach first?

3. Is it better to work out every other day? Will 20-30 minutes of strength training be enough to build up muscle? I plan to jump rope on the days when i'm not strength training is this a good idea?

I'm not experienced to the point where I can answer all of your questiosn thoroughly, but I have some extra time so I'll try to help

1If you eat before working out, I'd make it about an hour before working out. I read somewhere that if you want to gain muscle, you should be eating 1g of protein for every pound of body weight. I can't verify this though. I would eat in 5 small meals a day thats what I do. I'm trying ot put on my muscle now and my first meal is breakfast which is just some cereal and a multivitamin, and then each other meal consists of lean meat and some green vegetables of some kind. Most of your calories should come from carbs and protein while a few of them can come from fat. I'm not too informed about the whole diet thing though. As a general rule, junk food/fast food is bad.

2 You probably already have abs if you do crunches with each of your exercise days. The way you see definition or "tone" in your abs, is by losing fat. I think that when you first start lifting you lose fat and gain muscle at the same time becuase lifting is new to your body. But I'm pretty sure after a bit you have to choose one or the other (gain muscle, lose fat) to go with as you can't do both at the same time anymore.

3 Every other day is fine. Someone will probably comment and tell you to do 3 full body workouts a week every other day. They'll be right, or at least I was convinced so. I'm not sure about the time, my workout is usually 45 minute sto an hour though. Dunno about the jump rope, I can't see how it hurts though.

There ya go. Sorry if I'm mistaken about anything in the diet section or elsewhere.

 

[Gt105]

Thanks for the info, dave. I did my cardio workout yesterday by jump rope and jogging. Today, i'm going to start my strength training.

 

[Danger_Dave]

Thanks for the info, dave. I did my cardio workout yesterday by jump rope and jogging. Today, i'm going to start my strength training.

Hey, no problem.

Did you already find a full body workout to do online? I figured that someone else more experienced would post one for you to do. But if you need one, I'll find you a basic one in about 30 minutes. I g2g from this computer for a little bit. Good luck.

 

[Danger_Dave]

Ok buddy, heres what I think you should do. I got this from Jonathan Fass in his article in Men's Fitness. I'm gonna change it just slightly for you.

Workout A
Squat
Chinup
Romanian deadlift
Dip

Workout B
Deadlift
Incline dumbbell press
Squat
Bentover row

I just had you do squat in each of those workout as I tihnk it will help more in the beginning than dmbbell stepups.

He had suggested doing these in super sets in which you take two excersizes and do your sets of them in a row and then take a break. Sometimes it takes a while to change the weights on bars, or maybe you can't have two things of equipment at once. Etiher way, I tihnk it would be better if you took these one at a time since you're just starting.

If you can't do chinups or dips, I would replace chinups with the lat pulldown machine, and dips with bench press. Do these each with 3 sets of 10 with 1 min 30 seconds to 2 minutes of break.

The original article is here


If you ahve any questions, feel free to ask. You can ask someone at your gym, or go to youtube.com to findo ut how to do these exercises.


Edit:
I forgot to say 3 times a week a day break for cardio inbetween. You might need 2 days break when you first start this, but you'll be fine with 1 after that.