Consumers Digest

Fitness and Diet question?

I'm 16 years old (boy) and I want to spend some time working on making some muscles and a nice body. I wanted to ask what would be some exercises I can do at home, equipment I can buy (weights etc) and what I should eat? I'm looking mainly for building the muscles on my arms, chest, and abdomen. Also, I'm hearing that there is a limit in the weights I should lift for my age. Having had tae-kwon-do classes until last year I am in a pretty good shape, but I lost my elasticity and strength, and want to rebuild it. Notice that proposing that I should take things like proteins or other supplements without the traditional way of eating them, will just result in a thumbs down.

Public Comments

1. You should look into "clean eating" sites for food and excersizes for your arms are bench dips, lat raises & chest presses, also for your chest. Abdomen exersizes are t-bar stands, lying leg lifts, reg. crunches and the bicycle. Go to bodybuilding.com for more help. They have muscular charts, step by step lifting techniques, forums, etc.
2. if you are young and in shape, then the only 2 things i would suggest for your diet are 1 - sufficient lean meat, like deli turkey and baked chicken and good lean cuts of tender steak, and 2 - avoid excess refined carbs like white flour and sugar ... for fitness, swim if you can and get some kick-box aerobics and start with hand weights, 5 and 10 lbs to start, then 15 as you can do more weight for more reps ... shoot for feeling the burn at about 15 reps and repeat at least 3 times ... you should feel jello-ee and fatigued afterwards ... next try to join a gym and get the trainers to show you how to do the weight machines that work more than 1 muscle group at a time ... do that for a while and you can figure out what kind of equipment works for you ...