How to Start Strength Training
Updated on July 28, 2007
Warm Up
Go for a walk, do some aerobics, do something to get the blood flowing through your body.
Stretch
After your warm up, stretch your muscles, putting special emphasis on the muscles you plan on using during your strength training portion of your workout. This will ensure that you are able to do the exercises through the full range of motion, helping you get more from your workout. It will also reduce injuries.
Exercise with Proper Form
When you are first starting your strength training routine, do not use any weights or resistance. Just go through the motions. Make sure your movements are slow and controlled. Focus on the muscle you are working.
If you are trying to do an exercise that uses your own body weight for resistance, try to do a modification of that exercise to make it easier and/or do an easy number of reps.
By going through the motions first, you are telling your body, "We will be doing these movements again in the future." Plus, it gives you the opportunity to focus more on proper form than resistance (because sometimes we let our ego get in the way of proper form and end up lifting too much weight and hurting ourselves).
Don't forget to practice good posture. This will help reduce back injuries and strengthen your abdominal muscles. Plus, it makes you look better than somebody who is slumped over.
Stretch Again
I know you feel like your workout session is finished, and you want to call it quits for the day, but you need to stretch again. You spent a lot of time contracting your muscles, now you need to stretch them out. This will help avoid injuries even when you aren't working out, improve your flexibility, and increase your range of motion.
Rest
Your body will need time to repair and build your muscles before your next workout, and to do that it needs to rest. You should have a minimum of one day of rest for a muscle group, but I actually prefer two days because sometimes the pain and stiffness can hit you on that second day.
To keep up your momentum and ensure that you aren't sore from head to toe every couple of days, work out sections of your body rather than your entire body during a workout. Do a different section every day, and never do the same section two days in a row. Some people like to break it up into upper body and lower body. I prefer to divide it into upper, middle, and lower. Some people get more specific by dividing it up into legs, hips and butt, abs and lower back, chest and upper back, arms and shoulders, etc. Get as specific or as broad as you like.
Adding Resistance
Start small. Just as you went through the motions with no weight, concentrating on proper form, you should add weight gradually, even if you know without a doubt that you can perform the exercise with that weight and not tire. This will further prepare your muscles for the more intense stuff.
Start with 3 to 5 lb. dumbbells (or even 1 lb. dumbbells if you find a 5 lb. set too heavy) or the weakest resistance band you can find. Then move up one level during every workout. Eventually you will get to a level where you feel your muscle working, and you will have had enough practice to ensure that you are doing the exercise correctly. You also avoid hurting yourself by lifting too much too soon.
Do not push your muscles more than a little at a time, or you will be in pain the next couple of days. You are not trying to be a body builder. You're improving your health, and your shouldn't have to hurt to get healthy. Take baby-steps.
Weight Lifting Accessories
During a recent trip to the sporting goods store, I noticed how there are so many gadgets designed to help you while you are weight lifting. Many of them are unnecessary, and some could actually do more harm that good.
Take weight lifting belts for example. They're excellent for people who are power lifters, people who are actively competing to lift the most weight (such as in the Olympics), but if you're strength training for health, they may actually make your back and abdominal muscles weaker by not working them effectively. They may also trick you into thinking that you can lift more weight than you actually should. If you're not power lifting, skip the weight belt.
Then there are the special bands that are supposed to help you lose more fat on a certain part of your body if you wear them while you workout. At best, they make the area appear as though it shrank, but this is usually cased by the displacement of water in the body. It will come back when you take the band off.
Please research weight lifting accessories before you buy or use them.
...by Feed