'Working Out'

I am just going to randomly throw ideas into this post. Let's see what happens. I suppose it will probably start off bad... like with stuff about me. But I bet it will turn into some interesting discussion or other.

Well. Let's see.

I will probably be up realy late today, cause I have to finish up my school before I leave for Oklahoma city on Tuesday. My little brother is in gymnastics (he' prettiy good too), and this year he's a level nine. That's where national competition begins.

Speaking of gymnastics, I think I found my topic. It takes immense amounts of strength and time to be a competetive gymnast. And boy, gymnastics is *really* tough on your body. I've decided that working out on machines or lifting weights does not really help you in any practical way. You see, when you do those types of excercises, you're isolating one muscle, and working that muscle only. Now think about this. You have 650 skelatal muscles in your body. That's a lot of muscles. And when you're doing anything that has any practical value at all, you're not going to be using one muscle, you're going to be using lots.

For example, say you wanted to be able to lift heavy things. So, you go to the gym every day and do biceps and triceps machines. Now, even if lifting things took only your arms (I'll discuss that in a second), you'd still not be helping yourself at all by just excercising biceps and triceps. Check out this diagram:

http://www4.nau.edu/biology/bio201/images/arm1.gif

That is a lot of muscles. 24 to be exact. And when you lift something heavy, you're not just going to be using your arms. You're going to be using many of the muscles in your chest, legs, abs, and back.

doing things like pushups are much better to develop your muscles. This way you're using all of the muscles in your arms and some of the ones in your chest. Now you may say, 'but I'm basically doing pushups on machines' but that is not true at all; when your'e on a machine, the gosh darn thing even TRIES to isolate muscles. Yup.

Now I do my pushups and sit-up varieties and pull-up varieties, and running, and I'm in pretty good shape. Another thing I do is a little bit of acrobatics. Like flips and stuff on the ground (i.e. backflips, frontflips, sideflips, backhandsprings, fronthalves, backhaves... you get the point). I would like to say that this stuff is also really good for muscle development... but I think it's a bit hard on like your joints and stuff. But hey, it's fun. And it looks cool. heh.