Core strength is essential for all athletes and your core generally refers to your abdominal and oblique muscles. All athletes should build a strong core because it is the epicenter of your overall strength and having a strong core will improve your ability to perform many exercises and sports. Most people tend to think crunches are the only way to build up your abdominals but there are many other exercises that are just as effective, if not better, at working your core.
If you have ever wondered how many calories are burned in various sports then this list should help you out. All physical activity is good both for your physical and mental well being and you can have a lot of fun playing any of these sports. This list shows you approximately how many calories are burned per hour performing various sporting activities and exercises.
In this article we are going to be talking about something that affects almost every athlete at some stage or other, overtraining syndrome. Overtraining is something that many athletes choose to ignore but it can be one of the major factors in determining your long term success and ability to perform at a high level. Overtraining is a very common problem for people involved in weight training, but it can also happen to experienced athletes in any sport. It is only in recent years that we have really begun to hear more about the effects of overtraining in athletes. Overtraining can sometimes be so serious that an athlete is forced to retire from his or her sport and can take months to recover from.
Many people hear an awful lot about bodybuilding but very few people know much about the sport of powerlifting. Powerlifting is a form of weight lifting in which athletes compete to see who can lift the most weight in three exercises and it can be seen as a kind of cross between bodybuilding and weight lifting. It is not the athletes physique that is tested in powerlifting but their overall strength in each exercise.
Powerlifting involves testing your strength in three big exercises, the squat, deadlift and bench press. These are the three most important exercises for all sports because they work almost every muscle in the body and are brutally difficult. The training and nutrition regimes of powerlifters and bodybuilders tend to be very different. While bodybuilders must work on building muscle mass and keeping their body fat levels as low as possible, a powerlifter is only concerned with developing strength and subsequently they focus on performing low reps with heavy weights and following a very high calorie diet. Although they try to keep their body fat levels down, a powerlifters diet will generally be much less strict compared with that of a bodybuilder.
