Before going to the gym

Being eager to hit the gym for the first time and the last think that you might expect is not to go straight, but to wait until you are prepared?
Well, that's true - it's essential to be in good shape prior entering the gym, otherwise your dream training might turn into a slightly bad experience. But, don't worry I'll reveal you how to avoid such situations with a few exercises that will prepare you for the bigger challenge.

The following program is designed to show and improve your current fitness level. It consists of indoor and outdoor training without using any weights. Here are the exercises:

1. Chin up

Grab the bar firmly at the shoulder width, cross your legs and start rising your body up. Try to keep your elbows perpendicular to the floor.

2. Dips

Go to the parallel bar and rise until your hands are straight. Then flex your elbows and go down until your elbow and upper arm are perpendicular. Raise again to the initial position.

3. Inverted parallel row

Use the parallel bar to place your feet on the two separate bars and let your body sink. Grab the handles and start flexing up. This exercise is a sort of inverted push up.

4. One leg Bulgarian squat
4.1 Start sitting and standing up on one leg from a chair. The other leg stays straight forward. Repeat until you can make the move without the chair.

4.2 Place your right leg foot parallel on a chair. From that position start squatting. Keep your posture straight during the exercise.

4.3 Take a smaller chair and start climbing up and lowering down while alternating your legs.

5. Hanging leg rise
Grab the bar with arms and hang. Then slowly rise your legs until your ankles reach you chest. Make a short pause and continue.

6. Vertical leg crunch

Lay on your back with hands close to your body. Start raising your legs to the chest until they are perpendicular to the floor. Next lower them slowly till they are 5inches from floor. Don't bend your lower back during the exercise!

7. The plank

Take a push up position, but with your elbows on the floor. Try to hold for a 120 seconds.

8. Push up

Start from a normal push up position with palms and toes on the ground, and keeping a straight line from your heels to shoulders, place your legs on a chair or swiss ball. From that position bend your elbows down until your chest reach the floor. Then quickly go up into a initial position.

The preparatory exercises are designed to be used with 3 sets by 8 repetitions or 3x12reps. Know that you are ready for the gym when they cause you no huge effort.

Cheers!

by Nevyan Neykov

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Quickly shrink the belly fat

The theory
There are two types of fat in our body: subcutaneous and visceral. The first one is located beneath the skin and can usually be seen. The Visceral fat on the other side resides deep within the torso, wrapping itself around the heart, liver and other major organs thus remains unseen. It’s referred as "hidden" or “deadly” belly fat. You can actually measure your waist line, be within limits (40inches for men and 35inches for women) and still have too much of visceral fat.
Here are some advices that will help you to limit and reduce those dangerous fats. Choose what method suits you best and do it!

The exercises
• vigorously exercise and stay active, even at a low level! (no exercise increases visceral fat by about 1%/month)
• do the most effective ab exercises: the plank and bicycle do 6-8 sets x 12reps., but not everyday, because abs need time to recover. Remember that 1% body fat loss shrinks 3% of visceral fat
• walk 20 minutes/day to shrink your waistline by an inch for a month

The diet
• consume monounsaturated fatty acids: from almonds, avocados; dark bitter chocolate, stirred flaxseed oil and almonds
• substitute coffee with green tea
• when you’ve finished eating take fish oil up to 2grams/day.
• eat more fiber – this will slow down the release of insulin hormone thus lowering the visceral fat storage.
• limit the sweeteners, use honey instead. Try to resist when you have sugar cravings!
• try limiting your refined carbohydrate intake, and eat fruits with high-glycemic index early in the morning
• prior meals drink a shake made from the juice of 1 ripe lemon, 2 tbsp. apple cider vinegar, 1/2tbsp. cinnamon and 1tbsp honey mixed with warm water. by Nevyan Neykov

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Advanced hard drive partition and geometry recovery

Here is the story: After running several Scandisk tests my brother’s 160GB hard drive failed to show at BIOS system report on reboot. The hard drive was NFTS formatted so I thought that the recovery process should go easy.

I ran my favorite recovery software R-Studio, FileScavenger etc… but they didn’t recognize the hard drive at all. It appeared that drive’s geometry (heads,sectors,cylinders) information was also incorrect. So no matter how many file recovery applications I was running the result was the same: unrecognized file system or misplaced file information.

I looked at the hard drive’s sticker and noticed the Cylinders Heads Sectors values (information that could also be found in drive's service manual). Then loaded up the free testdisk program and carefully entered those numbers in the Geomety section. But the 160GB hard drive now appeared as 37GB… - what was happening? In order to allocate and handle bigger hard drives sizes engineers have invented: 2 types of addressing: logical and physical - physical were the ones that I found on the drive’s cover. The logical CHS values are chosen by the operating system.

Indeed testdisk needs one more value: the sector size (512, 1024, 2048 or 4092). So I just started the format dialogue in windows and noticed that the default 'sector size' value was 512. Next searched Google for my hard drive’s serial number and found the logical CHS values in postings from linux 'dmesg' command and other diagnostic tools.

I loaded testdisk’s Geometry with those new numbers, then run Analyse to rescan the hard drive for partitions and they showed up, Write followed and after the reboot the hard drive finally showed in BIOS system report. Windows also recognized the drive but the information was still inaccessible.

So I run Filescavenger and restored the information to a blank hard drive. Then reformatted the first one and moved back the recovered information.
Cheers!

by Nevyan Neykov

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