Men's Fitness South Africa September - October 2021

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1) EZ-BAR CURL Sets: 3 Reps: 8–10 Rest: 60 sec Hold an EZ-curl bar with a shoulder-width grip. Keeping your upper arms against your sides, curl the bar until your biceps are fully contracted. 2) DUMBBELL HAMMER CURL Sets: 3 Reps: 10–12 Rest: 60 sec Hold a dumbbell in each hand with your palms facing your sides. Keeping your upper arms against your sides, curl the weights up. 3) EZ-BAR REVERSE CURL Sets: 3 Reps: Work for 60 sec. Rest: 60 sec Hold an EZ-curl bar with an overhand grip, hands spaced shoulder-width apart. Don’t allow your elbows to drift forward as you curl the bar. 4) TRICEPS PUSHDOWN Sets: 3 Reps: 12–15 Rest: 60 sec Attach a rope handle to the top pulley of a cable station and…

Morning guys get out at the butt crack of dawn. Day guys try to squeeze something in at lunch. (Good luck with that.) Late guys hit it once the work whistle blows. But it’s all good as long as the workouts are consistent, right? Maybe not. According to a new study out of Northwestern University USA, muscle tissue runs on the same circadian clock — the internal 24-hour timer that regulates cell functioning — that the rest of the body does. If true, that means there’s an optimal time for muscle cells to use oxygen to create energy and allow for better performance. The study found that when the muscles in mice were genetically altered to ignore the little rodents’ circadian clock, they lost their ability to use sugar for…

Think the whole “barefoot” sneaker trend is just for runners? Think again. According to researchers at Hong Kong’s Poly University, wearing minimalist shoes while exercising can make your legs and feet significantly stronger than wearing regular sneakers. The six-month study followed 18 runners in regular kicks and 20 runners in minimalist shoes (stretchy-fabric uppers, zero heel-to-toe drop, and a 3mm outer sole — no midsole cushioning or arch support). At the end, the regular-shoe wearers’ leg/foot muscles hadn’t grown — but the leg muscles of the barefoot-shoe folks had gone up in size by 7%, their foot muscles by 9%, forefoot muscles by 12%, and rear-foot muscles by 7%. And though the study was done on runners, researchers believe that wearing a similar shoe during other types of workouts, including…

Eating a big, healthy salad that’s chockfull of a variety of colourful veggies — kale, peppers, broccoli, tomatoes, carrots — for lunch is an easy way to get a wide range of essential daily nutrients. And a study from 2015 revealed that simply adding some eggs to your salad can bump up your body’s ability to absorb antioxidants called carotenoids by up to eight times. Now a follow-up study has found that tossing three cooked eggs into a salad can increase your absorption of vitamin E nearly sevenfold. Vitamin E — found mostly in leafy greens, oils, seeds, and nuts — has potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, supports the immune system, and may help prevent heart disease, so use this easy trick to up your levels without taking supplements. Curry…

Scratch most “regular exercisers” and underneath you’ll find someone who tried HIIT (high-intensity interval training) once and just couldn’t hack it — the short-but-extreme bursts of effort can be daunting for fitness pros and sweating-like-a-pig newbies alike. It’s a shame, because HIIT can boost your body’s fat-burning abilities and give you a time-efficient cardio and health strategy: Just 10 minutes, three times a week, can get you as healthy as the recommended 150 minutes a week of low-intensity exercise (see below). But there’s hope: Listening to music of any kind — as long as it’s your favourite tunes — during HIIT will make you not only enjoy it more but also look forward more to the next brutal session, says new research in the Journal of Sports Sciences. So pop…