Tip: Work the BIG muscles first

Look, I KNOW you want to get tight abs and toned arms, but doing 1 000 crunches and 200 bicep curls with a little pink dumbbell is NOT going to get you there very fast.

THERE IS A BETTER WAY!

What you really need to do if you want your body to change is to exercise the muscles that would cause the body to release the most hormones, and cause the most dramatic response to the exercise stimulus. You see, your bicep muscles are relatively small, so when you train them your body is stressed, but not too stressed.

Compare that to training your quads and hamstrings (your upper leg muscles) with squats.

Your bicep muscles are relatively small, so when you train them your body is stressed, but not too stressed.

The amount of muscle mass in your upper leg is probably ten times (or more) the muscle mass in your bicep. So your body has a much more extreme training response to squats than it does to pink dumbbell bicep curls.

The result of this training response is that your body releases all the right stuff to make your leg muscles stronger for the next time you train them, but because the stress is so great, in such a large muscle group, the body also ramps up the strength of all your other muscle groups a bit too.

This means you are getting 'more than what you pay for' when you train your larger muscles.

My recommendation is that your typical training session should consist of at least one (hard) exercise for each of the following muscle-groups:

• legs (barbell squats)
• back (deadlifts/pull-ups/inverted rows)
• chest (push-ups)
• shoulders (standing press)

ALL of these exercises work your abs, and some of them work your arms. If, after a tough workout of the above, you still want to do crunches and curls, add a few sets of those. Just make sure you are doing the important stuff first.

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