When first going into the gym and the world of resistance training it’s good to have an idea of how best to approach things, to have some guiding principles. So, here are my top 5 tips for resistance training.
Tip 1. Warm up and Cool down.
A very important part of training is warming up. Get the muscles ready to prevent injury, that's the key thing you’ve got to do to make sure that everything is ready, all the muscles and joints are moving well and are flexible. Make sure we're not going to get any injuries or certainly we're going to prevent injuries that's vitally important. It's no good going straight in with cold muscles and end up straining or even tearing a muscle and your training goes to pot.
Tip 2. Quality not Quantity.
You’ve probably heard this expression used many times for different scenarios in life. In training this is very much the same thing. It’s no good trying to do too many reparations and doing them poorly, you're better off doing fewer and make sure they're really good quality repetitions.
You've probably seen it yourselves in the gym, you see somebody doing let’s say bicep curls for example. They're curling with a bar, but are using too heavy a bar and after a few reps they start leaning forward and rocking back, putting strain on the lower back and not actually working the bicep anymore, you’ll get to a point and you’ll see the elbow isn't actually lengthening or shortening. It's no longer working the intended muscle, you're not actually getting what you want out of the exercise. You're much better off lowering the weight and perform quality reps than you are trying to go heavy and fail miserably.
Tip 3. Compound lifts first, Isolate after.
The first thing to know is the difference between compound lifts and isolating lifts. A compound exercise is one which requires more than1 joint to move during the exercise (sometimes called multi-joint exercise),such as Bench press, Shoulder press and Squats. Whereas Isolation exercises require only 1 joint to be active during the exercise, examples include leg extension, leg curls, bicep curls.
So, with that in mind it doesn’t serve much purpose going into the gym, working on let's use biceps again as an example, completing 12reps for three sets on curls, push them into a state where they are starting to fatigue, and then try and going to a back exercise after. If the biceps are too fatigued, they can no longer help when performing the compound exercise as well as they should. When you want to perform something such as a Bent over row or Lateral pull downs. These pull exercises need help from the bicep muscle to succeed. So, let's get the big multi-joint exercise done first, and then we can do the single joint muscle exercises later – biceps, triceps, Calves, leave them till last towards the end of the sessions.
Tip 4. Balance your focus.
What I mean by balance your focus is that every muscle wants and needs to be worked and worked just as hard as the next one. There are occasions when some people can be guilty of only training what they can see when looking in the mirror, Chest, Abs, Biceps, etc. or the more offend guilty occurrence – skipping their least favourite session! But the ones we can’t see directly or don’t enjoy training need just as much attention because when you work all of them together, they will help push the other muscles along, so if you want to perform Deadlifts well the Glutes and Hamstrings are playing the biggest roll but the Quadriceps are important as well. You want to squat? The Quads are the prime mover, but again, the Glutes and Hamstrings are needed to help achieve success which is why it is important to balance the focus and get everything working together.
Tip 5. Keep challenging yourself.
One of the big things about training is that at times it’s going to take you out of your comfort zone, and that's nothing to be afraid of.Let's do that! Let's get out of our comfort zone. Let's push ourselves. Let's keep challenging. You've succeeded this week on exercise, lifted a decent amount of weight. So, next week go again, let's increase the weight 5%. Let's make you work a little bit harder because if you start to settle at some point you will plateau. And the progression will stop altogether. You will then start to wonder why you’re now struggling to reach your goals. So, keep challenging.keep pushing yourself, keep working hard, progress on to other exercise, more difficult movements you haven't done yet.
A little bonus tip for you, more like a rule actually!
No phones allowed! Make that rule for yourself, either put on aeroplane mode, putting in the locker, leave it in the gym bag. Just leave it out of sight, out of mind.
Let's give that hour or however long you spend in the gym, you full attention, because your health and fitness is important to you. So, make sure the time is well spent, and give it the attention you deserve. The truth is you can sit on your phone at any time before or after your workout. We should be able to just pull that phone aside, leave it alone, and just focus solely on your training for an hour. I have actually seen on occasion when someone has been in the gym for more than 2 hours and every time I’ve glanced over they were sat on their phone.
