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How To Begin Weight Training

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Beginning Weight Training

A lot of my posts so far on this site have been motivational in nature, after reading thru them a few times I feel like I really need to write something that is more instructive and more useful. Hopefully this will be the first of many posts that will give beginning weight trainers the info they need to get started, stick with it and progress.

So on the the meat of the issue, you want to start lifting weights to get stronger, get buff, build confidence, impress members of the opposite sex, perform better at sports or some combination of all of the above. The first step is going to be actually lifting some weights. Luckily for me my dad had been lifting weights his whole life so I had access to his free weights and some machines early on in my training so it was pretty easy for me to get to it. Also luckily for me, in my opinion, is that I can’t ever remember my dad ever giving me any real instruction on the matter. He had tons of books on the subject and magazines and he left me to my own devices as far as researching how to progress and what exercises to do. This helped ingrain a sense of self reliance that became valuable when I picked up BMX riding and later in other endeavors later in my life. He was always there to encourage or lend a spot but never to preach or make me conform to his own ideas. His main advice was always get stronger and stay consistent, and frankly if you only listen to those pieces of advice you will make it pretty damn far.

Not everyone has a parent or older brother to help them so hopefully in this aspect I can be of assistance. If you don’t have access to some free weights at your home the next best option is to see what your high school has available. My high school actually had a really good weight room and strength training program that was part of the regular PE curriculum, but many schools have an afternoon weight lifting program as well.  I would consider something like this to be your best option however I would still encourage you to research the proper methods as high school weight training today is not what it used to be. Do not even consider a program that leaves out heavy squats.

Another option would be to look into joining a local gym or YMCA depending on your age and driver’s license status. If this isn’t an option the last option is to buy some weights and equipment of your own. For less then 700 bucks you can acquire all the basics that you will need to carry you forward. I would suggest trying to find a way to earn the money somehow yourself as opposed to just asking your parents for it. Even if you have to do work around the house for your parents this is the best option as it shows you are serious and more importantly it will convince yourself that you are serious about pursuing this. The basic equipment you will need will be an olympic bar with 300 pounds of weights, a squat stand, and a bench. Shopping around online you may be able to obtain these items fairly cheaply.

What routine should you do once you’ve obtained these items? Although I started with a different routine I would suggest a simple full body style 5×5 routine. Something along the lines of a Starting Strength plan or a Bill Starr 5×5 will work very well for you. If for some reason you can’t afford those books or you are adamant about doing something different the basic exercises you should be doing will be the same. The meat of your training should be made up of squats, over head press and or bench press, deadlifts and or rows, and an olympic lift variation like power cleans. You can also throw in some barbell curls and close grip bench presses to hit the arms. These are the big basics that will suit you well for a long time. While I never did power cleans as a kid, mostly because I was never taught why they were beneficial; the power clean teaches you to apply the strength that you have built with the deadlift, quickly. It teaches you to turn on and accelerate the weight in a way that the deadlift cannot. This helps build athleticism and power, and power is basically strength displayed quickly as Mark Rippetoe says.

The two routines I mentioned above will show you the proper loading that you will need and what days you should lift. In an effort to not plagiarize their work I will recommend that you look those programs up to find out more about them. The absolute most important aspect of any of these plans will be adding weight each workout or each week. This increase in weight is what is going to drive your progress. Do not get mixed up in a lot of bodybuilding magazine info about advanced techniques that allow you to get a burn with lighter weights. There may come a time when stuff like that can be helpful but that is very far down the road. You will not maximize your ability to grow and get stronger using techniques like that as a beginner.

It will be important to leave your ego out of the equation and don’t waste time with a lot of one rep max attempts. You will just be wasting your training time. Instead focus on between 8 and 5 reps for everything and focus on increasing the weight you use for these reps. There will come a time when you will need or want to know your one rep max but again, this is not the time for that. You will not be skilled enough in the lifts to be able to demonstrate an efficient one rep max attempt and you certainly won’t be impressing anyone. Also, except on the arm exercises it will be best to stick to 8 reps or less because in beginning lifters their form tends to break down dramatically after 8 reps. Between 5 and 8 reps should provide all the strength and muscle gains you will need.

The last main point will be to resist adding more and more exercises to your routine. At best these will be a distraction and at worse they may shortcut your gains in the bigger lifts and hinder your ability to recover from workout to workout. A lot of the fluff exercises like flyes, and tons of variations of arm curls and things like that are basically a way to achieve a certain muscular look in the short term at the expense of serious strength and muscle growth in the long term. For beginners these are methods to create a small visual increase in muscle size to impress nonlifters and an excuse to not strive to lift heavier and heavier weights. Build up to a 150% bodyweight bench press, and double bodyweight squat and deadlift and a bodyweight overhead press and you will have much bigger muscles then a guy who spent his time doing shit loads of arm curls and chest flyes. Every kid’s favorite muscle hero spent the time to get big and strong at these basics long before they switched to more isolation, bodybuilding style exercises. Every one of them!

As you can see I’ve left out any mention of nutrition, as that can be an entire article on it’s own. Meat, vegetables and carbs like rice or beans are your friends and I would encourage you to eat lots of these things. If you start to become unable to progress each week then eat more, if you start to become a lot fatter then you intended then cut back on some of the carbs. Do not be obsessed with having abs or staying too lean as these things will hinder progress. If you are fat and wish to lose a lot of weight I would suggest doing that first and then begin training with the weights. Muscle burns fat so an increase in muscle mass will help you lose fat but if you are at an unhealthy weight and believe me you do know if you are or not then I would lose the weight first.

Those points above are all the basics that you need to get bigger and stronger. Be patient and consistent and the gains will come. Things may seem slow at first but in fairly short order the gains will come and they will be dramatic. Resist the urge to over complicate or change the program and continue it until it stops working.

 

Below are some helpful links. These are not affiliate links.

Squat Stand: http://www.mensfitness.com/life/gearandtech/21-things-add-your-home-gym-2015/slide/20

Bench: http://www.elitefts.com/flat-bench-white.html

Power Clean How To: https://youtu.be/mPsxlNjv7Aw

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A case Against Dumbells

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A Case Against Dumbells

The title of this post is actually a bit of a paradox for me as in many ways I am actually a big fan of dumbells for certain things. I was very fond of dumbells during my college years. The dumbell bench press and dumbell shoulder press were staples of my routine for probably 10 years or so.

I used dumbells to great effect to build some pretty impressive shoulders as well as rehabbing those shoulders from various injuries I sustained thru bmx riding over the years. While I am very fond of dumbells due to a few favorable experiences with them, I would have trained differently had I known what I know now.

Everyone has read about the various upsides of dumbells, they let you isolate a muscle better, they can increase the range of motion in exercises like the bench press, they allow you to work the bicep thru it’s fullest range of motion which includes supination which can not be achieved using a barbell, and they are pretty easily found in most gyms. There are even whole workout plans and books out there devoted only to dumbell training. We’ve all seen articles in bodybuilding magazines where some huge guy advocates using dumbell bench press as his primary chest exercise, and hell I even followed that myself for a very long time and I was happy with the results-at the time.

There is however a very dark side to dumbells.

It’s actually not that dark of a side, so far there have been no studies released (yet) that link dumbell use to colon cancer or something else terrible but the best way to put it is that dumbells are not the most effective tools for you to base a training program around.

Dumbell exercises should not make up the bulk of your training ever! They can be acceptable if you absolutely have no other option. They are better then sitting on the couch anyday.

Why is this? What is wrong with dumbells?

The main reason that dumbell exercises should not make up the bulk of your training is actually very simple, they are not scale-able. Unlike the main barbell exercises, the squat, bench press, overhead press, and deadlift, dumbell versions of these exercises can not be scaled up for a very long time. You can always add weight to the bar in the main barbell exercises but the point of diminishing returns and risk of injury arrives very quickly with dumbells.

Any guy who has progressed past the 100 pound dumbells for bench or shoulder presses starts to see this very quickly. How exactly are you going to safely get 120 pound dumbells into position for the bench press? Have you ever seen this procedure before? It either involves multiple people to help steady and hold the dumbells in place and then spot them, or it involves some half ass dumbell power clean, to box squat position then you have to lay down, under control backwards holding 240 pounds in your hands. All this is before you have even done a rep yet. And then what happens when your done? How do you set down in a safe and controlled manner two dumbells that were almost too heavy to pick up in the first place? Have you ever seen someone get “out of the groove” when doing heavy dumbell bench presses? Imagine dropping that 120 pound dumbell square onto your face.

At some point dumbells heavy enough to effectively create a training stimulus become extremely difficult to handle safely. Here in lies the next problem, if we are substituting dumbells for major barbell exercises, how exactly are we going to create an effective training stimulus while at the same time minimizing our risk of injury? Lets just say you’re a bodybuilder (a natural one) with a 300 pound max bench press, your best weight to stimulate the most muscle growth is about 75% of that, that roughly works out to about 225 pounds. We will probably have to round down and we get 110 pound dumbells needed to create an effective training response. The problem just gets worse if we decide focus more on strength.

Even if you can handle those 110 pound dumbells, how exactly are you going to increase weight from week to week? Most dumbells only come in 5 pound increments, but lots of research has shown that for upper body lifts, gains of 5 pounds per week are too high to sustain for long. Most dumbells that big aren’t modular, so we cannot use micro plates to make smaller jumps in weight as we do with the barbell. So what are we left with? Adding more reps, more sets? At some point you will reach a point of diminishing returns and you wont have the time or recovery ability to do enough volume with those weights to create a training response.

Do we even have to cover the two biggest lifts-the squat and deadlift and talk about how useless dumbells are for those? The limiting factor for weight used for either of those variations is your grip, or your arms. How exactly are you going to do goblet squats with a weight heavy enough to create a strength stimulus? If you think front squats are awkward to hold in the racked position try doing the goblet squat with a 100 pound dumbell. Split Squats or lunges become problematic as well. Even when using straps to take your grip out of the equation, you will still get to a point where getting into the proper position for these exercises with a heavy enough weight puts you in a very awkward and potentially dangerous situation.

Dumbells definitely do have a place in your gym bag, just not as your primary exercise. Dumbells are better suited for lighter exercises after the muscles have been pre-fatigued by a large compound movement. They can effectively be used to rehab an injury when the range of motion is so limited that a barbell cannot be used. Even then the point is to get back to a real barbell as soon as possible and continue the rehab. The problem with all the exercises that actually work well with dumbells is that none of them utilize a large enough amount of muscle mass or exhibit significant progress potential to warrant using them as a primary training movement. Those exercises are what they call accessory movements and you just can not base an effective program around them.

Despite all of this it isn’t impossible to see significant gains using only dumbells for certain exercises. I found the seated dumbell shoulder press to be a very good exercise back in my college years. I also thought I had great success with regular and incline dumbell bench press. I didn’t actually get to compare though so its possible I made shitty progress and didn’t even know it. I did eventually hit a plateau training that way and it is a 100% certainty that using the barbell bench press and overhead press as my staples during that time would have increased my progress dramatically.