workout – Fitness

Bodybuilding vs CrossFit vs powerlifting vs calisthenics

Hey guys I am back with march blog, and this time I am going to clear many doubts regarding the type of fitness training one should took up to achieve best out of his/her body. Now don’t expect me to tell you that one training method is superior to other, no raining is superior to other when it comes to achieve a respectable level of fitness, I might be helping those who are confused to choose among these training methods based on their body types and other factors.

Bodybuilding

Starting off with bodybuilding and for those who don’t know what it is you can search it on the web and the definition is as follows “ a sport involving strenuous physical exercise in order to strengthen and enlarge the muscles of the body”. Now as written in the definition itself it is a sport where one subjects his/her muscle to intense pain via various lifting methods to force it to grow in size, the only goal of this sport is not just to increase muscle size but to achieve a decent level of fat in body whereby each and every muscles can be seen clearly.

CrossFit

Talking about CrossFit , it is one of the most rigorous training you are ever going to do, after every session you are going to be lying on floor craving for breathe now you can ask its definition on google it show you following results CrossFit a high-intensity fitness programme incorporating elements from several sports and types of exercise. But this always need not be very high in intensity rather it can be done choosing some bodyweight and other exercises you are comfortable doing and doing it in high repetition maintaining high intensity instead of very high intensity.

Powerlifting

Powerlifting is a sport of maximal effort in one rep, the only thing you have got is a rep and you have to put on everything out of your body to lift that heavy ass weight against the gravity. And its definition is a form of competitive weightlifting in which contestants attempt three types of lift in a set sequence. Due to less work and less exercises doesn`t take away its intensity, lifting heavy weight all the time needs more energy and though it seems only three exercises that are to be tested but the training itself includes numerous assistance exercises.

Calisthenics

Now this is a sport for those who can just lift their bodies to like dummies. This sport requires less equipment as less as just a pull up bar. Apart from what you think about abs, for this sport you need to build it, not really the abs but the core strength. The definition would help and it is gymnastic exercises to achieve bodily fitness and grace of movement. This is really very hard, those athletes make it look easy as hell, but the fact is that it doesn`t happen, just believe me guys I have tried it multiples times but failed on many of them and still I am not able to do those movements.

That was all about these training methods now I am going to talk about who should choose which training style and why. And don`t get demotivated if in some way you do not fit into whatever you are doing. Just do whatever you like the most, do whatever you enjoy the most, your body type is not going to determine what you should be doing and what not. Now lets just start the comparison:

1.if your body type is ectomorph, you need to do hell of a hard work don`t lose motivation, the best training style that suits you would preferably calisthenics. Calisthenics is way to go for ectomorphs, the low bodyweight and skinny structure help them lift their bodies in any way they would like to. Building muscles to the frame has been a major issue to ectomorphs but still there are many pro bodybuilders in today`s date who have such body type, some of the greatest legendary bodybuilders like flex wheeler and frank zane were ectomorphs. So calisthenics is going to be easy for you while you will always have an edge over other body types in bodybuilding due to fact that you can eat like hell without getting fat.

2. Talking about mesomorphs, they have kind of body which enables them to take part in any sport. People with body type need not to think much about which sport to choose, you can excel in any sport, they can achieve extreme level of muscularity as compared to ectomorphs while still they can manage a lean body than those of endomorphs. I would prefer you choose any training you like. Being athletically elite among other body types, two sport that I would prefer would be CrossFit and bodybuilding.

3. now endomorphs, this body type is completely opposite of ectomorph. People with such body type don’t find it easy to loose fat, still they can have insane amount of muscles which makes them look quite bulky. This body type can easily excel in sports where winning and loosing completely depends on power such as powerlifting and strongman. So powerlifting is one sport for this body type while people with this body type can still excel in bodybuilding due to their huge structures if they manage to stay lean during their competitions.

So I don’t want any of my reader to leave their on going sport just because their body types did not matched with their sport, these are all theories developed over years after various researches but still no one knows the limit of human body. I still would love to see an ectomorph doing powerlifting and endomorph doing calisthenics, do challenge your body every training try to push yourself beyond your limits every time you enter the gym and that’s the only way.

Organizing your workout split

If you are studying this then you might have already started your fitness career or you might be thinking of joining gym for getting into shape getting a beach body. as a beginner a lot of question arises in everyone’s mind- “How to begin?”, “What should I eat? “, “How many days shall I be taking rest?” and they just keep on thinking this even after joining gym spending 2-3 months not even aware of what they are doing. They just do whatsoever told to them by their gym friends, owner of the gym etc. they just put everything they had in the gym everyday working out for about 2-3 hours. Even after so much of hardworking results doesn’t shows up. After 4-5 months of joining gym they feel like they are having relatively bad genetics or they start believing that medicines are necessary to build body and start losing all energy they had in the first couple of month.

The first and foremost thing you need to understand is that every individual is different and so their bodies and growth, everyone is special in some or other way. This also indicates that every individual must be trained differently according to their goals and body’s adaptation toward different training methods. Nowadays bro-split workout routine had replaced full body and other popular routines out there in industry. For those who don’t know what bro-split training is, it is the style of training one or two muscles a day and doing one muscle group only once a week. Basically, this style of training is followed by today’s top professional bodybuilding athletes in the industry. Copying that professional style of training in beginners has been the biggest cause that slows down their growth. The diet, rigorous and dedicated training, amount of rest, supplementations, years of hard work and patience is the recipe for making a great Greek god looking body. The professional athletes are called so because it’s their full-time career-long job, bodybuilding is their profession, they do it 24*7, it is not the gym where you build your body, a beautiful body is made in rest of 22-23 hours you spent out of the gym. Every time one goes to gym he/she destroy their muscles, but the work isn’t finished yet, here is the key you need to feed your muscles which are crying for growth you need to give them proper rest and nourishment to let them grow to their full potential. But that is not possible for most of us due to our daily schedules and work load. This indicates that bro=split might not be the optimum training split for everyone, except those who pursue fitness as their full time profession. So what might be the best split for those who want to seek some fitness and achieve relatively leaner muscles. There is another split called full body workout, in this workout split one works all major muscles on same day then have rest on following day and repeating this again. This sounds very simple, but again the role of goal comes, if one’s goal is to increase strength and put on some mass, this split will help achieve that but it somewhere compromises with the conditioning. But that issue can be resolved just by increasing number of days one train, but then rest will be compromised, so there is another split the son of full body workout the push-pull split. As sound from the name itself the workout has two major contents one being pull and other one being push. Now this type of training is very popular among the powerlifters, on the pull day they generally train their pulling muscle namely- back muscles, hamstrings, biceps, traps and glutes. and on push day pushing muscles namely- chest, quads, calves, triceps and shoulders are trained followed by a rest day. For some this workout routine might seem too long to be accomplished. But that’s not true it is quite less time consuming than a full body workout split and even bro-split if one exercise for every muscles is chosen wisely and moreover a push-pull split and full body workout split are generally based on compound movements for example one can do deadlifts on pull day hitting their back, hamstrings, traps and glutes all together. but still if one further want to train legs on other day so to target upper body and lower body differently can opt for an upper-lower body split. This split can help those people who are really in need of beefing their legs up. In this type of split one trains upper body on one day focusing on back, chest, shoulder and arms and trains lower body on another day with major work being done on quads, hams, glutes and calves followed by a rest day. Some people still might not happy with this split due its less emphasis on training major upper body muscles differently so there is another split named push-pull-leg now this split is the solution for those not being satisfied with full body, push-pull, upper-lower body splits. This split is a mixture of push-pull and upper-lower body splits.

This training split includes training upper body pushing muscles on one day that includes chest, shoulder and triceps then training upper body pulling muscles on another day that includes training back, biceps and trapezius muscles and on third day training legs as done in upper-lower body split followed by a rest day and. Now these were some of the splits one can chose instead of bro-split or as a change for their usual bro-split routines. Thes splits provide enough rest days along with increased frequency.

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