Onto Resistance Training

I advise most beginners not to start with weight lifting. Weight lifting done improperly can be damaging to your health.  What I will be covering in this post is something known as strength training.

Strength training comes in two forms: isometric and isotonic.   In short, isometric is any exercise where your body is holding still against a force. Isotonic exercise involves moving against the force. So an example of an isotonic exercise is a push up and an isometric activity is holding a weight at arm’s length. Both types of strength training will strengthen and tone muscles as well as increase bone mass.

Now to cover how to incorporate strength training into your workout and why. Here’s a few reasons why you should:

1. By building muscle, you not only will look better but enable your body to burn more calories while being stationary
2. You strengthen your body so you can help move that heavy box for the cute girl next door.
3. You can prevent harm dealt to your body, like throwing your back out.

Beginners:

**Before you do any sort of exercise, remember to warm up and stretch.  You don’t want to pull a muscle before you even start.**

When constructing a workout, you should make sure to do compound exercises.  What do I mean by compound?  Compound exercises are any type of exercise that involves more than one body part.  For example, the push up not only works your triceps but also your chest and back.  Remember to work out all parts of your body and not just one specific area.  “Spot reduction” is a common myth that exercising one particular area will cause you to lose fat there.  This is untrue, when you do lose fat the body as a whole will lose fat and not in one particular area.  Although, when you gain weight it always seems to be the middle section (inner thighs and stomach) that acquire fat first.

Here are sample exercises that target your entire body: (Body weight only exercises)

• Upper body exercises: Push ups: wide-grip, close-grip, knuckle (done with the bottom three, with your hands placed vertically under your shoulders), triangle
• Abs: Crunches, sit ups, flutter kicks, Russian twists, bicycles, the plank(isometric)
• Lower back: superman, TYI’s, leg ups
• Squats: 1) done with your back held straight throughout the exercise and 2) done with your back learning forward as you lower your thighs; lunges,

Helpful advice on how to organize your workout.

• Do each exercise in sets and slowly increase the number of sets.  For example, start out with 1 set of 10 push ups and as you become more able upgrade to 2 sets of 10 and so on.
• Don’t always work your muscles to failure.  If you work them to failure, they’ll need more time to recover and that might mean waiting a day or two before you can use it again.
• Keep a small log of your progress, so that you can judge accordingly when to increase the number of sets.
• Remember after you finish your work out session to stretch out your muscles.  I promise you, they’ll appreciate the way you take care of them.

Hopefully, you’ll find these exercises helpful for introducing you into the world of strength training.