Firefighters must remain in excellent physical condition to perform their job well.
Firefighters are often required to perform physical feats during their work. They need strength to break through barriers to get to a fire source, protect citizens and ultimately extinguish a fire with powerful water hoses. Firefighters need to prepare for their work and stay in good shape by building muscle and endurance with workouts in their off hours. This is done through a fitness plan that includes strength training and cardiovascular exercise.
Instructions
Building Muscle
1. Monitor your diet on a daily basis, keeping a journal of what you have eaten and its calorie count. Ask your doctor how many calories you should eat each day for your body type to prevent obesity. Include in your diet foods that represent all food groups, including high-protein foods that will help your body burn fat during a workout.
2. Create a workout schedule that will help you stay focused, on task and motivated during the week. Block out specific times to exercise, including time for stretching, warm-up and cool-down exercises. Make a note every time you follow through with your planned exercise routine, to determine whether you have been keeping up with your goals. Use this schedule also as a journal where you can record the number of repetitions and the weights you have been using in your workouts.
3. Perform resistance exercises in your workout using dumbbells and free weights. Do arm curls to increase bicep muscles. Bench presses work the biceps and triceps. Perform leg presses to increase strength in your thighs and buttocks. Do at least four to seven repetitions of each exercise in each set, with at least three sets of the exercise at each workout. Weights should be heavy enough to provide resistance, making the exercise challenging to complete, but not so heavy that you lose control of the dumbbell, risking injury. Increase the weight of the dumbbells over time to produce maximum muscle building.
4. Do exercises that use your body weight as resistance instead, and incorporate free weights into your routine. These exercises include squats, push-ups and pull-ups. Hold extra free weights while performing squats. Use ankle weights to add resistance when doing pull-ups, and place extra weight on your back when doing push-ups. Increase the weight over time. At first you will be able to perform fewer repetitions when more weight is added, so add weight only when you are able to easily perform the same number of reps that you could with less weight.
5. Alternate exercises you perform from one day to the next to allow overworked muscles to strengthen and grow as they rest. Focus on two muscle groups a day, such as pairing arms and abs, legs and abs, or arms and legs.
Building Endurance
6. Lighten the weights of the dumbbells used to build muscle in Section 1. Repeat the same exercises, including arm curls, bench presses and leg presses, but do these with free weights that are 50 percent or less of the weight you were previously doing. Endurance is about the length of time, or number of repetitions, you can perform before tiring. Double the number of repetitions you did in Section 1 for these exercises, completing at least eight to 14 reps in one set and six sets per workout.
7. Repeat the body exercises from Section 1, adding no additional weight to your body. A reasonably fit body is already in relative proportion with itself, providing a excellent easy range of weight training exercises. Increase the number of repetitions of each exercise, keeping track of the maximum number in your workout journal. Add at least one more repetition of each exercise to your workout daily.
8. Jog regularly at a slow pace. Sprinting will leave you breathless sooner than a brisk jog, a pace at which you can run for miles. Breathe in through your nose and exhale through your mouth, allowing the maximum amount of oxygen to reach your lungs with every breath. Jog on your first day as far as your body will allow without your becoming too fatigued. Record this distance or time in your journal, and push yourself daily to jog just a little farther than the previous day.
9. Exercise continuously during the endurance workout. Resting for longer than a few minutes will slow your metabolism, causing your body to work harder to reach its maximum functioning point again.
Tags: your body, free weights, number repetitions, each exercise, your workout, arms legs