There is a world of difference between dealing with a sore back or sore muscles every now and again and living in the prison of pain that is fibromyalgia.
Unfortunately, according to information published by the British Medical Journal, a considerable amount of people every single year are going to be diagnosed with this debilitating condition – and it’s going to change their lives forever.
A pretty common muscular and skeletal pain disease that is going to impact your muscles, your ligaments, your tendons, and even your bones, fibromyalgia is going to leave you feeling exhausted, worn out, worn down, and in pain 99.99% of the time.
Pain levels can range from relatively mild to tremendously severe
It’s impossible to know exactly how painful fibromyalgia is going to be commented not only because the disease impacts everyone differently but also because everyone has a different pain threshold than everyone else.
Some are going to be able to fight through the chronic pain that fibromyalgia causes with nothing more than a bit of exercise, stretching, and over-the-counter medications whereas others are going to require very powerful and very potent prescription drugs to get the job done.
Fibromyalgia conditions usually get worse over time, which is why you’ll want to make sure that you are doing everything you can to effectively manage pain in the early stages so that things don’t get far worse later down the line. This often means prescription strength painkillers. Codeine medications can be bought online legally in the UK and they are very effective as they change the body’s response to pain.
Symptoms to be on the lookout for
You are almost instantly going to notice fibromyalgia pain right off the bat, simply because it will be a pain that doesn’t leave your body without some serious intervention.
You’ll feel pain deep in your muscles, and aching, burning, stabbing, and shooting pain that gets worse as the day goes on until you almost find it challenging just to move and brief.
You’ll also begin to notice that your sleep patterns are all over the place and that it’s impossible to get a truly restful sleep no matter how long you stay in bed.
Of course, to really understand exactly what you’re up against you’ll need to speak with a trained medical professional and move through a legitimate diagnosis. But once they know exactly what you were contending with they’ll be able to prescribe you powerful prescription grade pain killers that manage the pain more effectively than most anything else ever could. Cocodamol 500/30 (sometimes referred to as cocodamol 30/500) combines two painkillers in one. You get all the power of 500mg of paracetamol along with 30mg of codeine. Utilize these pain pills as directed and you’ll be able to lead the same kind of active and pain-free lifestyle you’d always expected to.
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Can you really get much stronger in half the time?
We’ve all seen muscle magazines that promise incredible results in record time, guaranteeing that even the scrawniest can turn into the brawniest assist with just a few minutes a day.
But almost all of us also know that a lot of that is little more than modern day snake oil being peddled by less than ethical marketers hoping to cash in on the desperation of people that are at wits end with getting fit.
On the other hand, you shouldn’t completely give up on the idea of building a tremendous amount of muscle mass in a hurry. There are quite a few different things you can do to overhaul your body, to add pound after pound of lean muscle mass in record time, and to develop your body to your fullest genetic potential far faster than you ever would have been able to using more traditional workout methods.
The secret is simple, straightforward, but still pretty elusive.
We’re talking of course about changing things up and using “super sets”.
What are super sets and how do they work?
If you are really looking to blast your body, build your muscles, and develop the kind of musculature that top athletes and bodybuilders enjoy without having to spend hours and hours in the gym for years on and you’re going to want to fall in love with everything that super sets have to offer.
What you’ll basically do is combine two noncompetitive exercises back to back with absolutely no rest whatsoever in between the movements.
A lot of people decide to do a pushing movement (like bench pressing) with a pulling movement (like rowing) and stack them one right after another with absolutely no rest in between, and the results your body is able to enjoy are nothing short of spectacular.
Exhausting workouts for sure, super sets produce results
There are a couple of different reasons behind why super sets are so productive at packing on lean muscle mass faster than most anything else, but the most important distinction is that it works to not only fatigue the active muscles that are working out during a movement but they also fatigue complementary muscles at the same time.
When you hit major muscle groups (your chest and your back combine to make up the overwhelming majority of muscles in your upper body) you are really going to tax your central nervous system, and that’s when more growth hormone is released in your results shoot through the roof.
Running and lifting will strengthen your muscles, bones, and heart
As we get older our body stops repairing our muscles and our bones as efficiently as it used to in the past, and our muscles atrophy while our bones become more brittle and susceptible to a significant injury.
This is why falling down late in life and breaking a hip is such a disastrous occasion. It may never heal again because of the body’s inability to repair and replace the bone, and on top of that it will cut down on your mobility significantly.
For quite a while doctors, researchers, medical experts and those in the fitness community have tried to figure out how to strengthen bone with similar approaches to strengthening muscle – never really realizing that the process may be identical!
Researchers now believe that it’s possible to strengthen bone while working out and strengthening your muscles
Though your body isn’t going to be able to regenerate new bone on demand the same way that you’re able to when you regenerate new muscle through working out (or else you’d see people with much, much larger – and much longer – bones on a regular basis), the force that you put on your skeleton is going to definitely increase the density of your bones.
While your body continues to grow bone mass until your early 30s or so, almost as soon as your bone stops growing it begins to get brittle.
By exercising – especially with heavyweights in a power lifting style and keeping the intensity high at the same time – you are going to be able to increase the bone density which makes your skeleton a lot more resistant to damage, fracture, but also allows you to recover from injury a lot faster as well.
There are no exercises that build bone specifically but compound less work wonders to get the job done
Remember to keep the weight high (you want to max out at four or five repetitions and that’s it) and hold the lifts at the bottom in the top of the movement to really put as much stress and pressure as you can on your skeletal structure.
You aren’t ever going to find any exercises that specifically work your skeleton and not your muscle groups, but when you do compound lifts – squats, deadlifts, clean and jerks, and the bench press – you’re going to be able to tax your skeletal structure and your central nervous system a lot more than you would have with isolation exercises only. When you add running to this program, you really get the complete workout.
Running adds cardio to this workout to keep your heart strong and ward off cardiovascular disease. This is not only a big risk to your health but is directly connected to your longevity. Keeping arteries clean of fatty build-up has other advantages too.
Simple gym hacks that help you maximize your workouts
The only real secret behind maximizing all of the time that you spend exercising and working out is keeping a consistent program and moving through the motions regularly.
This kind of singular minded focus will always produce results, though they may not come along quite as quickly or as impressively as you had hoped.
At the same time, there are definitely things you’re going to be able to do to dramatically improve the results that you get from each and every one of your exercise sessions. Utilize the tips and tricks that we’ve included below and you will be able to supercharge all of the results you get from your time spent in the gym.
Warm-up for 10 minutes before you hit the weights
The majority of people that work out grab a hunk of iron and just start getting right after things the moment that they step into the gym, but that’s a perfect way to invite injury and to stress your body far more than you should be.
What you want to do instead is warm-up for about 10 minutes – preparing your muscles for the high intensity that they are about to go through – and you’ll be able to injury proof your body much more effectively than if you skipped this 10 minute warm-up.
Knockout large major muscle groups first
While this approach might mean that you have to wait a little bit to get into the swing of things – especially if people are packing your gym when you arrive – you want to be sure that you don’t focus on overtaxing your smaller muscle groups over there are your biceps, your forearms, your shoulders, etc. – if you’re going to be working on your larger muscle groups.
When you work out your chest, for example (very much a major muscle group) you are also going to be taxing supporting muscles along the way in your forearms, in your biceps, in your shoulders, and in your core.
If you focus on these smaller muscle groups first before you get around to working out your chest you’re going to find that your small muscle groups fatigue much faster and you’ve never get to really blessed those major muscle groups the way you would have been able to otherwise.
Always make sure that you were to act the largest muscle group of the day the moment that you walk into the gym and then move down until you get to the smallest muscle groups that should already be pretty fatigued and ready to be blasted.
How safe is expired protein powder to use?
Protein powder isn’t exactly the cheapest bodybuilding supplement on the planet, though it is often one of the cheapest sources of effortlessly digestible protein. This is why so many people are going to use protein powder long after its expiration date.
And while they’re usually aren’t going to be too terribly many negative side effects on your health from using protein powder that has previously expired over there outside of lessened results noticed by you), the truth of the matter is it may not be all that smart to use this kind of protein powder – especially if it’s little more than empty calories at that point in time.
Protein powder doesn’t spoil the way that traditional protein sources can
The first thing that you’re going to notice is that protein powder doesn’t spoil the way than traditional protein sources will. That’s because it has already been dried to its greatest extent, and bacteria requires some kind of moisture to grow.
This is also why jerky is so resistant to spoilage, and why salted and cured meats were capable of resisting spoilage for extended amounts of time before refrigeration came along.
You are going to notice that your muscle building results diminish as time goes on
Even though you are still going to be able to get pretty reliable results from your protein powder up to after a single month has passed over the expiration date on the bottle or bag, you are going to notice deeply diminished returns on your investment in consuming this protein powder over time.
You may be able to squeeze six weeks of results out of protein powder past the expiration date, but go any longer than that and you are pretty much wasting your time. Protein powder is going to start to taste like cardboard, and eventually you’re going to be doing nothing but consuming a flavoring agent that includes almost no real protein boosting properties whatsoever.
This is why you’ll want to be smart about purchasing an intelligent quantity of protein powder every time you order supplements. Order a 10 pound bag and you may be able to save quite a bit of money, but if the expiration date is coming up on that bag and you won’t be able to use it all you’ll essentially be throwing money right at the window anyway.
It’s definitely something that you’ll want to consider going forward.
Finding the sweet spot for how often you should be working out every week
A lot of fitness enthusiasts understand that one of the most significant dangers to building the kind of body you’ve always dreamed of – the kind of body that wouldn’t look at all out of place on a fitness magazine cover – is overtraining, or hitting the gym WAY too often and putting your body through too much stress and pressure that it isn’t able to repair before your next workout.
At the same time, a lot of people are working out a lot less than they probably could be and that’s crippling their ability to generate real and measurable results as well.
Researchers in Australia have been looking for ways to scientifically prove just how frequently people should be hitting the gym, and though they struggled initially to find an appropriate answer that was as close to a “one-size-fits-all” solution, they’ve recently had a major breakthrough in the rest of the scientific community confirms the study.
The sweet spot is working out your muscle groups twice a week and no more often than that
If you want to generate the most impressive and impactful results while working out you are going to want to spend your time in the gym hitting specific muscle groups twice a week with two or three days of rest in between these sessions.
The researchers in Australia discovered that your muscles will grow considerably faster and become a lot stronger if you take this approach as opposed to working out muscle groups once a week and allowing them to rest for six days or overtaxing your muscles with three times time a week sessions.
Obviously, you’ll want to tinker with this information to find your sweet spot
While this information is definitely going to help people reach their fitness goals a lot faster than they might have been able to otherwise you are certainly going to want to tinker with these results to find a solution that best suits your needs.
Everybody reacts to stimulus differently, and some people are going to be genetically predisposed to recover a lot faster – or genetically predisposed to recover a lot slower.
Start off with twice a week training solutions to see whether or not it works for you and after a month or so over there while recording your results) you’ll want to begin to tinker with different approaches and see if they have a beneficial impact.
Easy ways to release muscles that are tight
Most everyone is dealing with a considerable amount of muscle tightness on a day to day basis – with many of these individuals not even realizing that their muscles are so supertight to begin with.
And we are not just talking about folks that are unhealthy or those that lead sedentary lifestyles, either.
Sure, those people aren’t doing their body any favors (and it’s likely that their muscles are stiffening up while atrophying at the same time, a pretty dangerous “one-two” combination that should be avoided for sure), but even those that lead active lifestyles and those that exercise every single day have muscles that are far tighter than they should be.
You see, those people hit the gym every day and move through the same kind of training program, specifically targeting the same kind of muscle groups over and over and over again. This means that muscles get stronger “along the same grain” while other areas of those muscle groups grow weak, tightening muscles along the way.
You’ll want to release your muscles so that you can enjoy incredible flexibility, dexterity, and injury proof your body as much as humanly possible.
Here are a couple of methods to help you do exactly that.
Fall in love with kettlebell swings
An exercise instrument that used to be a big favorite with Russian Olympic athletes and Russian Special Forces, today people all over the world are falling in love with this “cannonball with a handle” called a kettlebell.
The simplest and most straightforward exercise with the kettlebell is called the swing, and it’s one of the best ways to release tight muscle groups throughout your body without causing any damage along the way.
Just be sure that you are using a lighter weight kettlebell then you would when your strength training and you’ll be just fine!
Foam rolling is for real
At first blush foam rollers really don’t look like all that much, and really there is not much to them. A compact section of incredibly strong PVC pipe wrapped with high density foam isn’t going to impress too terribly many people.
But these tools have long been the favorites of physical therapists and elite athletes all over the world, and they are capable of producing a top-notch massage and muscle release that you’d struggle to get from any but the very best professional masseuses around the world.
Get your hands on one of these and use it every night and your flexibility will shoot through the roof!