Do you ever ask your­self, can I ever get the physique that I’ve al­ways dreamed of? For many folks that is a mon­u­men­tal task that nev­er seems to be with­in their reach, re­gard­less of how hard they have tried. So the ques­tion is, “what are they do­ing wrong when it comes to their work­out rou­tine?”

Some folks have tried every sin­gle di­et fad they could put their hands on while oth­ers work­out nu­mer­ous hours every sin­gle day and still strug­gle to achieve that dream body. OK! Let’s start to put things in­to per­spec­tive. The quest to ac­quire a great physique is not hinged on an ex­cel­lent ex­er­cise rou­tine on­ly. There are a num­ber of el­e­ments that in­cludes the sci­ence of weight loss and build­ing qual­i­ty mus­cles that are nec­es­sary to un­der­stand and ap­ply in or­der to gain any mea­sure of suc­cess.

Un­der­stand­ing your body type is but one of the re­quire­ments for sculpt­ing that body to per­fec­tion. It is your guide to your train­ing reg­i­men and eat­ing habits that would work in tan­dem for your end re­sults. A good place to start is to ease your­self in­to your rou­tine by set­ting re­al­is­tic goals like a 30-day plan and jour­nalling your re­sults dur­ing that pe­ri­od in or­der to mea­sure your progress. This would re­quire you to em­ploy dis­ci­pline as your per­son­al coach.

It is im­por­tant to eval­u­ate your own physique, how lean, how heavy, how long would it take for you to gain the type of qual­i­ty mus­cles you de­sire; this can on­ly be mea­sured by know­ing the type of me­tab­o­lism you have to be, whether ec­to­moph­ic, en­do­mor­phic or mesamor­phic. Then you must fo­cus on the parts of your body you need to place em­pha­sis on. Hav­ing your goal in mind should keep you mo­ti­vat­ed at all times. Re­mem­ber a great look­ing body starts in the kitchen, so al­ways feed that body in­tel­li­gent­ly.

Pay­ing par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion to your form is one of the most im­por­tant com­po­nents in build­ing and main­tain­ing a healthy and in­jury free body. When you are work­ing out you should al­ways be con­scious of the way the mus­cles feel when ex­ert­ing them through each range of mo­tion which is re­ferred to as the “mind / mus­cle con­nec­tion.” The ba­sic prin­ci­ple is that the more you con­cen­trate on ac­tive­ly en­gag­ing the mus­cle through the range of mo­tion, the more you would get out of that spe­cif­ic mus­cle and there­fore the clos­er you get to sculpt­ing that body to per­fec­tion.

Do mix­tures of work­outs, body weight train­ing i.e. push ups, squats, pull ups, crunch­es and lunges to name a few. Body weight ex­er­cis­es work a lot of lat­er­al mus­cles and there­fore forces the body to be more sta­ble than it or­di­nar­i­ly would be and this of­fers a lot of mus­cle con­trol when lift­ing weights.

Let me state for the record, do not un­der­es­ti­mate the pow­er and im­por­tance of body­weight ex­er­cis­es / train­ing, as it is of­ten times a sav­ing grace for many per­sons who do not have ac­cess to gym equip­ment or with past in­juries that make ex­ces­sive weight-bear­ing move­ments dif­fi­cult to per­form. All you need is a lit­tle space in your home and the will to work­out.

The V-shape is not as far and hard as you may think; for more in­sight keep read­ing the Health Plus Mag­a­zine every Tues­day in your

Trinidad Guardian.