Today I will talk about strength training.
Strength training is type of exercise that causes your muscle to contract against outside resistance.
Outside resistance can be:
- Body weight
- Weight machines
- Weights
- Medicine ball
- Resistance bands
- Etc.
Benefits of strength training are numerous, and I will just name few of them:
- Help us to build our muscle mass
- Help us, as part of program, to lose or regulate weight
- Help us to strengthen our bones
- Enhance quality of our life, especially as we get older
- We feel better
- Improves our mood
- Etc
In strength training there are five basic moves:
- Squat
- Hinge
- Push
- Pull
- And core work.
And all of these moves have a lot of variations.
We can do strength training at home with body weight, and for beginners it is enough to do:
- Parallel squat
- Glute bridges
- Push ups
- Plank
- Good mornings
And we can add more as we are getting stronger.
Body weight exercises are convenient because we can do them always. When we are home, or when we are traveling, but they don’t have that fine tuning we can get in gym.
Advantage of going to the gym is that we can start, and improve easier because there is a lot of different weights.
For someone, especially if overweight, it can be very challenging to workout with his/hers own body weight.
And when we are in gym we have a lot of options.
We can do different presses, squats or leg press, dead lifts, yes we can do glute bridges but also we can do hip thrusts.
Also there are pull exercises like different rows, different lateral pull downs
And lot more for every type of movement.
But also beginners tend to avoid the gym.
They don’t, I didn’t like that too, like how some people are laughing on them. And it is even increased with those videos of some people filming other people and their workouts and posting that on social media.
Me, i am choosing gym that is not extremely popular in the not so popular hours (morning hours). So people that I met are just like me. They are interested only in what they need to do.
And they are happy to help if someone ask them.
And answer to one question that I get very often and which is:
- Do you recommend High volume or high intensity training?
The answer is easy:
If you are beginner it is high volume training.
Next question is
Do you recommend machines or free weights?
Answer:
For beginners machines until they learn motions of exercises, and later both. Machines and free weight are just tools we use to go for our goals.
Do I prefer High intensity or high volume training?
Answer:
Like nutrition trainings also are not system of belief and they don’t need system of belief. They are just a tool for us to use it. And we should do one we more enjoy.
Also for beginners is enough to have 2 to 3 strength trainings a week. And to have good rest in between.
Training is just initial spark, and our muscles recover and grow when we rest them.
I myself can not work with big weights because of my injuries, but I can adjust any type to myself.
Right now I am doing some kind of super slow time under tension high intensity training.
What does that mean:
Simply
I have warm up set and all in set for every exercise on training. All in is when I work till the failure.
Warm up set is normal set
And
All in set I do 10 seconds positive, 5 seconds hold, and 10 seconds negative.
And I do progressive overload.
So this is all for today.
Till the next week
And topic about rest and recovery
Have a great week folks
zlajafitcoach 