Understanding Body Types in Body Building
December 3, 2009
When you are at the gym lifting weights, you have many static posers around you, with bulging muscles that make you wonder if they have gulped down two moons full and a mars!
Are you the person who has trained and rained sweat at the gym to build mass, and still feel that results are just not showing up? Then, you need to train right, and that includes training for your body type.
So what is a body type?
A body type is basically a classification system to categorize a person according to the person’s body shape. This actually does a lot of help in identifying what works best for the person, which may relate to medicine, diet, or physical activities. Body type is also called constitution type.
There are three main body types:
- Fat and fit
This body type keeps trying hard to lose weight, or in other words, they put on weight easily. This happens because this body type has a low metabolism level or a low metabolic rate. This body type is called Endomorph. When people with this body type come to the gym to build muscle…they are perplexed at how their muscle does not ‘show up’.
The exercises for this kind of body type is based on more repetitions with lightweights, and less time between repetitions, so as to increase the heartbeat and along with it the metabolic rate.
Endomorphs are advised to avoid high-calorie food, as at any given opportunity their bodies store fat.
- The natural
The naturally fit people, who are predisposed to having a good body shape, are the mesomorphs. They don’t need much haggling over weight issues. They can do good long spells of strength training, but over-training should not be done. This is because the naturals try to become supernatural in a fortnight!
So the buzzword for the mesomorphs is – workout moderately.
- Lean and mean
This category is called the ectomorph. They have a problem with getting some weight on. They always look thin and fragile, and no matter how much they gorge on food, or train at the health club, the ‘pumped feeling’ just evades them.
People in this category can use heavy weights, with lesser repetitions (slow repetitions) to build muscle. High-calorie food is recommended, but only food with quality, not something that will cause the heart problems.
Exercises that increase the heartbeat should be kept at a minimum…say something like aerobics or sprinting.
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