Prior to becoming a personal trainer I was a CPA mostly working for big financial companies. The change from an office in front of a computer all the day to a gym floor lugging dumbbells was drastic, but I expected that. One aspect my new career that I did not anticipate was the number of fitness-related questions I received outside of work (no one ever used to ask me about debits and credits!). Now that I publish a fitness website, I decided to put together a list of frequently asked questions and get some top fitness and nutrition experts to answer them in video clips. Here are a few:

There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend. No, not about stock or bonds, but about balance exercises and weight training – and their popularity. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120311084302572325.html?mod=weekend_leis...

Proper rest and recovery is needed between weight training sessions for maximizing results. There should be at least 48 hours of rest between sessions that use the same muscle group, so if you train on consecutive days just make sure to stress different muscles on the different days to avoid overtraining. Training different muscle groups on different days is called a split routine. At PhysicalFitnet there are a number of workout routines both full body using all major muscle groups in a session and split routines.

Larger Muscles First When Weight Training

The internet is so great for sharing information, but like anything else online – beware. I see workouts that are not in line with some basic principals of training. According to the American College of Sports Medicine the order of exercises in a workout affects the results. Among their recommendations is:

“large muscle group exercises before small muscle group exercises, multiple-joint exercises before singlejoint exercises, or rotation of upper and lower body exercises.”

There was an interesting article the other day in The New York Times about an often overlooked, but very important aspect of fitness – balance and stability:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/health/08brod.html?em&ex=1200114000&en=aee574c3d28fa9f6&ei=5087%0A.

Hi,