Fitness and a Healthy Lifestyle Personal Project 2017

Fitness and
a Healthy
Lifestyle
A Guide to Fitness and a Healthy Lifestyle
By: Yannick Riad

What is this Guide about?
This guide will be about fitness, types of exercises and how to do them, diets and foods and
some Recommendations from me about these topics and different workouts which I will
introduce.
So what Is fitness? Well, fitness as many people see it would be something like being able
to swim a for a mile or being able to do 50 push-ups but these things just focus on one
component on fitness, obviously these are all important but fitness is much more, the
United States Department of Health and Human Services categorizes Fitness into five
categories, these are Cardiorespiratory Fitness, Muscular Strength, Muscular Endurance,
Body Composition and Flexibility. In this guide I will not be looking at all of these categories,
I will be looking at Muscular Strength and Endurance to be precise, the reason for this being
that those are the two most people see when they hear the term Fitness, as well as the fact
that these two are the largest components of fitness.
What types of exercises will I find in this guide? This guide will be focusing on something
called home workouts, which basically means fitness and workout without equipment. This
is becoming a very popular type of workout because more and more people are finding
time to go to the gym and exercise there. These workouts are mainly focused on things like
push-ups, sit-ups squats etc.
What is diets and foods about? Well believe it or not the way we eat makes a major
influence on the way our body develops. That is why you might hear the saying “The body is
made in the Kitchen” when it comes to fitness gurus. This statement does have a lot of
meaning because it is true to an extent, yes you can influence muscle building through your
diet and yes it does make it more affective, but you can’t just eat and expect to build up
your muscles, or lose weight. It has to be a good balance between both, exercise and diet.
What kind of recommendations will I expect? The recommendation section of this report
will come from me personally, that is the section where I will talk about all the exercises
that have had the most effect on me personally, by this I mean that these exercises will be
the ones where my muscle growth was the highest and where I had the most success out of

them. I will also talk about some workout routines which I have enjoyed the most and were
successful at the same time. The reason I say “enjoyed” is because if you don’t enjoy your
workout, because it’s too long, it’s too hard etc. you won’t stay motivated to continue
working and will stop, that’s a shame because it is important to stay physically active and fit
to live a healthy lifestyle.
Exercises
In this guide I will be focusing on four different major muscles, these will be the chest. The
bicep, the triceps and the abdominal/abs.
Terminology:
Set: a set is a series of repetitions (reps) of any given exercise
10 Bicep and Triceps exercises
1. Tight Push-Ups
2. Diamond Push-Ups
3. Dips
4. Dumbbell Curls
5. Floor Bench Presses
6. Plank Rows
7. Dumbbell Shoulder Presses
8. Chin Ups
9. Inverted Row
10. Resistance Band Curls
7 Chest exercises
1. Wide Push-Ups

2. Single Leg Push-Up
3. Narrow Push-Up
4. Floor Bench Press
5. Raised Legs Push-Up
6. Chin Ups
7. Wide Pull-Ups
10 Abs exercises
1. Leg Raises
2. Crunches
3. Sit-Ups
4. Russian Twist
5. Crisscross Crunch
6. Flutter kicks
7. Jack-knife
8. Spiderman Plank Crunch
9. Bicycle Crunch
10. Hanging Leg Raises
Diets and Foods
The way you eat plays a major role in how fast your muscles develop, the reason for this lies
in what your muscles are made up of. Your muscles are made up of 25% protein and 75%
water and carbohydrates(carbs). Therefore, if you adjust your diet to have a larger intake of
these components then your muscle growth will spurn and promise more results sooner. So
how much would I have to eat? Well its rather simple, firstly it is recommended to drink 2L
of water daily, that is not just important for your muscles but for your whole body too. The
American Dietic Association (RDA) suggests that a person who does not workout should
have a daily intake of 0.36 g for every pound of bodyweight, therefore an average 180 lb

(81kg) person should really be consuming about 65 g of protein per day to live healthy. If
you are looking to increase muscle size and you are an athlete then the National Strength
and Conditioning Association (NSCA) recommends that you have a daily intake of protein of
0.4 g-0.6 g of protein per pound of bodyweight. So an average 80kg athlete/sports
interested person would have an intake of about 90 g of protein per day. But do not believe
that the rule the more the better applies here because at an protein intake of 1.1 g per
pound our body considers it as excess protein and does not use it anymore. As you can see
the maximum amount of protein which are body excepts is quite a bit above what is
recommended so you don’t always have to stick to the recommended amount, if your meal
happens to have more protein, don’t worry and just enjoy it. The last component of the
three is carbohydrates, your daily intake of carbs should be about your bodyweight in
grams, this is because it accounts for about 35% of your muscles and therefore has to
supplement more than the proteins.
10 Protein rich foods:
1. Eggs, 6g per 1 egg
2. Milk, 8g per 1 cup
3. Steak, 23g per 3oz (85g)
4. Pork Chops (boneless), 26g per 3oz (85g)
5. Chicken Breast (boneless, skinless), 24g per 3oz (85g)
6. Yellowfin Tuna, 25g per 3oz (85g)
7. Sockeye Salmon, 23g per 3oz (85g)
8. Anchovies, 24g per 3oz (85g)
9. Beans, 20g per 1 cup
10. Dried Lentils, 13g per ¼ of a cup
10 Carbs rich foods:
1. Sugars, per 100g, 100g of carbs

2. Candies, 98.1g per 100g
3. Cereals, 91.3g per 100g
4. Fat free potato chips, 83.3g per 100g
5. Fortune Cookies, 84g per 100g
6. Flour, 76.3g per 100g
7. Jams, 68.8g per 100g
8. Bread, 59.3g per 100g
9. Potatoes, 35.1g per 100g
10. Soft drinks, 10.6g per 100ml
Recommendations
Some Nuts and Bolts:
• Once you have a selection of exercises which you want to do and you have planned
and have executed a routine for a couple of weeks you will notice how much easier it
is to do the routine. The reason for this lies in the word itself, “routine”, after doing
the same routine for a number of weeks with the same amount of sets and reps each
day, then your body “turns on” something called muscle memory. This basically
means the muscles which are used in these exercises are used to the exercises and
now just work as a well-oiled machine not using up the same energy levels as when
you started the exercises or the routine. This also means the routine doesn’t have the
same effect on you anymore and therefore is less effective until it becomes a waste
of time. Three easy ways to change this are: doing the routine backwards or just
randomly mixing the exercises. Sounds simple right? Secondly, applying a weekly
overdose, this means that every day OR week OR month you increase the amount of
reps and/or sets. This is a very effective method because it really brings the best out
of your workout because your muscle will never be able to adjust because it just
keeps getting more and more. Thirdly you can do each exercise slower, for example,
when doing sit-ups decrease the speed at which you lift and lower your body. This

increases difficulty and also allows you to do less reps because your muscles are
constantly working and they are working longer every exercise.
• Never do an exercise if you don’t know how. The risk of a serious injury when doing
workouts (especially in the gym) is extremely high, and most of these injuries come
from people doing exercises but not knowing how to actually doing them.
• Don’t give up because you are not seeing results after one week. Workouts and
building muscles take a long time until they start showing their effect, muscles are
something you work hard and therefore you should give it time, don’t expect to have
a six-pack after one week of training, even a month is too little sometimes.
• Some people prefer to do exercises by time, for example 30 seconds of push ups. I
would advise you not to do that because simply, you can cheat yourself. It’s much
more effective doing 30 Push-Ups without a time frame then doing maybe 10 Push-
Ups in 30 seconds. Obviously there are some exercises like the Plank where there is
no measure of quantity, in these cases you should obviously set yourself a time frame
for the exercise but I would not recommend it for exercise with quantity.
• You don’t have to work out every day of the week. Yes, this might sound weird but it
is actually important you don’t work out every day. The reason for this lies in how
you build up muscles, to make a muscle look buff or big what happens is, while you
work out you rip your muscles, this is only a small rip but it forces the muscle to grow
back together just stronger. Therefore, it is important for you to give for body and
muscles some time to rest and rebuild.
Favourites:
My favourite exercise would probably be the Push-Up; this is because if you start practising
it then it will become rather easy but you will still get very positive outcomes never the less.
I would also recommend, if you can, Pull-Ups. Pull-Ups are a great exercise which really
work out the whole body, except for the legs. Arms, chest and even six pack is all covered
by the Pull-Up, and if you want to go even further you can work out your whole body on
just the Pull-Up Bar, the only piece of equipment you will ever need. I got my Pull-Up Bar

about 1 year ago and have tried to work out various muscle groups, upper and lower body
with success. So no surprise that my favourite routine includes the Pull-Up Bar.
1. 1 set of 25 Pull-Ups
2. 1 set 50 Push-Ups
3. Front Box Jumps 50
4. Jackknife Sit-Ups 50
5. 1 set of 25 Pull-Ups
Obviously this is a quite challenging routine, especially for beginners which included me
when I first started it. So what I did is I subtracted 10 reps of each set, this allowed me and
my body to start of easy, throughout time I then started to do a weekly overload of +3 of
each exercise. This always sets me up for a new challenge every week, but not too extreme
of a challenge where my body gives up halfway through the work out, something you
should remember.
I hope you enjoyed this guide and it helped you