Weight Training - Part 3

Weight training is a broad term that can refer to a variety of exercise types. Of course one would not say they are going to be weight training if they are talking about sweating their ass off doing a bikrim yoga class, a “Buns of Steel” workout or some good ol’ step aerobics. Those types of workouts can be categorized as a form of strength training, but when I speak about weight training I am referencing pumping iron and really getting after it in the gym. Your exercise selection and variations are limitless.
We briefly discussed the importance of creating a specific routine that is geared towards ones fitness goals, and now I would like to elaborate on what kind of routines you can incorporate. It is important that you are not going into the gym and following the same exact workout day after day. Variety is good so one doesn’t get bored, and it also keeps the body guessing. As long as we continue to change up our workout routine, our bodies won’t become stubborn and hit what is often called a plateau. Remember, the goal is to continue to make progress and get the result we want because that’s what is going to keep most people on course.

There are two keys terms that are often used when we talk about weight training, sets and reps. A repetition is just a repetitive movement that is performed more than once. We do our repetitions in sets, which in the gym can typically be anywhere from one to five on average. If you lost me already, then allow me to use an example. If one was to perform an exercise such as a bicep curl, then you would do a certain number of curls (repetitions) and you would repeat this exercise for a certain amount of times (sets) depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Regardless of what your specific goals are, I think it is fair to say that we are all going for one thing - muscular fatigue - the decline in muscular tension capacity with repeated stimulation. Let us get away from just going through the motions of working out and really breakdown that muscle. In order to stimulate some kind of change we need to put some work into it, because after all, it is called “working out”.

There are so many different ways to perform your sets and breakdown the muscle. What better way to teach this than to watch a demonstration. The first technique I’ll be showing you will be the very simple super-set.