Having ran into injuries while strength training, I've focused more on muscle building and general health while still keeping strength, and possibly increasing strength. I've ran into recovery issues despite having a good recovery ability, and I devised a method to streamline a more consistent recovery, which allows you to keep lifting and progressing with less deloads (programmed rest weeks).
To establish an ideal intensity, it's necessary to base a routine off the 1 rep max for each lift. To calculate a percentage number (e.g. 70%) into your 1 rep max (e.g. 225lb bench press[102kg]), you can use a calculator, and type is '.7' multiplied by 225 equals 157.5lb[71kg]. So 70% of a 225lb bench press is 157.5lb.
The routine I made is a full body workout done 3x a week. It's 6 weeks long, and scales from 63-87% of your 1 rep max with sets of 5. Each workout day has the squat and bench press, and deadlifts are done 1x a week (or 1x every other week is recovery is too effected.) The deadlift sets are programmed with the squat and bench press percentages. This way the intensity is uniform across the big three lifts.
I only have 2 work sets for the three lifts, and 4 warm up sets in the same rep scheme (5). The first week, the first work set is 63% and the second set is 70%. Each following workout simply adds 1% to each set, and after 6 weeks (18 workouts), you end up at 80% and 87%, which are considerably challenging lifts, but far more doable after completing the first 5 weeks. The body works through periodization. After this routine, I'll maybe take a week off, and tweak the routine for a different rep scheme and adjust the percentages accordingly. Feel free to do other lifts while doing this routine as long as it doesn't annihilate recovery. I add dumbbell rows, calf raises, hanging knee raises, and weighted pull-ups.
Monday, July 28, 2014
Monday, July 21, 2014
Bench Press Technique
I've been having a lot of success in Bench Press the past few months, and want to share the technique I've been using. The first thing I realize when I lay down for a Bench Press is that my lower back isn't warmed up enough to execute a good back arch. Leg drive is done by pushing with your feet. I like to use a close grip, which is still at least 12 inches apart. Before beginning to press the bar, or unrack it, I will grab the bar and drag my body underneath it and pin my back with my scapulas as close together as possible. The two positions that make up the Bench Press are the tucked position with the barbell at your chest and the extended position where the barbell is pressed outwardly. More simply they are the up position and the down position.
What I have found recently to work efficiently is to exaggerate the difference between the up and down positions with two horizontal points. When you tuck your arms and bring the barbell to your chest, lower the bar down your body towards your navel, and press the bar, moving it horizontally upwards over your body closer to your eyes.
What I have found recently to work efficiently is to exaggerate the difference between the up and down positions with two horizontal points. When you tuck your arms and bring the barbell to your chest, lower the bar down your body towards your navel, and press the bar, moving it horizontally upwards over your body closer to your eyes.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
How To Start Lifting Weights
Lifting weights is a lifestyle. The three most common and important lifts are the Bench Press, the Squat, and the Deadlift. There are quite a few reasons why those lifts are held in high regard. They allow you to lift the most amount of weight in an effective manner to spur muscle increase, strength increase, and mobility increase. Each of those three lifts emphasize different muscles.
The Bench Press targets the chest, shoulders, and arms. You lay on a bench and unrack a barbell, lower it to your chest, and press the bar to full arm extension. The Squat targets the legs, thighs, glutes, and works the core. You use a squat rack so that you can unrack the barbell loaded with weight directly on to your traps or lower rear shoulders. You step back, sink into a crouch with your hips below your knees, and then stand up with full leg extension. The Deadlift targets the spinal muscles, traps, lats, glutes, lower back, and hamstrings. You set up a barbell on the floor with 45lb (20kg) plates on each side, stand in front of the barbell with your shins touching the bar, bend at the knees and hips, grab the bar, and stand up with your upper back and chest leading the way, and push your hips forward into extension.
So as you can see from above that the three main lifts will cover the shoulders, arms, legs, back, hips, core, and glutes. These are the more important muscles to target for overall strength. A few muscles left out of those three lifts are the biceps, calves, forearms, inner thighs (adductors), rear shoulders, and abs. Any muscle group you would like to devote more work to in an effort to create more development, can also be isolated outside of the main lifts.
The frequency you perform your workout routine with lifting weights will determine volume of reps and sets as well as the intensity of each lift (ability to generate power and closer to maximum strength). For example, if you worked out one day a week, you would need extremely high volume to compensate for the lack of frequency. The intensity will suffer from the amount of workload on that one day, meaning the lifts done at the end of that day will not be attacked with full strength and capability.
After having experienced working out from one day to six days a week, I have found that the less frequent you work out, the less discipline needed, the higher body fat I held, less injuries, and plenty of strength. The more frequent you work out, the more aesthetic you appear from lower body fat percentage, muscle tension, mobility, conditioning, increased skill/technique and increased general health although the disadvantage remains of weaker joints from the repetitive use and lack of recovery.
As for rep ranges, it's often listed at 3-5 reps for strength, 6-12 reps for muscle, but ultimately all rep ranges are important, and you could use lower reps while increasing muscle by increasing total sets and/or lifts. To become good at a rep range, you should keep it in your routine for at least 6 weeks or longer. An example of increasing weight from workout session to workout session is that if you were bench pressing 135lb for 5 sets of 3, you can increase the weight by 5lb each time you do the lift. So the next time it would be 140lb for 5 sets of 3, then 145lb. You keep climbing linearly until you fail/plateau. At that point you can either continue lifting near your highest weight or deload to a lower weight, and climb back up.
Additional tips are to record your workout routines so that you can visibly work towards progress. Good nutrition is to eat clean (low sodium, low fat, low calorie). If you want to increase muscle size, you have to eat in an excess of your total maintenance of calories. If you want to lose weight, you must eat less than your total maintenance of calories. A high protein diet is important in keeping lean, and helping muscles repair.
Working out creates micro tears in the muscle, and resting allows for the muscles to rebuild and recover. So adequate rest is essential, meaning you should try to sleep 7-8 hours a night. Food intake is also essential for recovery. High water intake is recommended for leanness and general health. Muscles may become tight and require stretching.
To achieve progress the quickest be it strength, muscle, or aesthetics, each of your muscles should be in a state of recovery at most times. Each time the muscle is worked by lifting weights, and then recovers by allowing for rest, the muscle is further developed. As you can imagine, if you try to keep your entire body in a constant state of recovery, you will face injuries from time to time. This occurs because high frequency wears down the joints, and without sufficient time to recovery, weak joints will lead to injury, especially when using heavier weights, but the same can be said for even body weight exercises like push-ups and pull-ups.
If an injury occurs in arm or shoulder, many exercises may be off limit, but squats for example could still be trained to fully utilize those micro damage/repair cycles on the muscle to develop it the fastest. Likewise, returning to the three main lifts (Bench Press, Squat, and Deadlift), as you progress in those lifts, the muscles will develop, and the joints will become stronger (Bench Press - Elbow joint, Squat - Knee joint, Deadlift - Hip joint). Making those joints stronger will generally lead to a higher quality of life - and a longer life, and will prevent injuries. So although isolation exercises like calf raises to develop the calves are important, the three main lifts should take presidency.
Your workout routine should feature the three main lifts, and should have isolation exercises, which can be for added work, muscle development, or to have any specialty lifts you would like to include - for instance, weighted pull-ups. Some people may wonder why training your legs is important. I would say knee health and mobility are high benefits.
Hip strength is important for overall power, and both Squats and Deadlifts develop hip strength. The shoulders require proportionate development to ensure no injuries occur. There are three outer parts of the shoulder - the frontal deltoids, the lateral deltoids, and the rear deltoids. It is very common for people to over develop just the frontal deltoids and to neglect the lateral (side) and rear. This is because the Bench Press targets the frontal deltoids, but the other lifts do not target the lateral and rear delts efficiently. For the lateral delts, you can do Lateral Raise, which are standing with a dumbbell, and raising your arm out lateral, leading with your pinky (smallest finger). The rear delts can be targeted in Face Pulls, which are done standing with a cable station, and using a rope attachment from the high pullet, and pulling it towards your face, and pull so that your elbow makes a 90 degree angle.
Another note on recovery is that because we want to optimize and sustain a constant recovery, it should be known that beginners to weight lifting will not be able to being muscles as close to failure, meaning they don't need as much recovery and can train more frequently. Additionally, when you are a beginner, you are lifting lighter weights, and lighter weights allow for faster recovery versus using heavier weights.
So ideally a beginner should use a full body routine multiple days a week (like 3). The high volume will also make for plentiful time to practice the techniques of the lifts. There are three ways to increase the amount of weight you are lifting, and that is by tweaking and improving your technique, building nervous system response to the muscle, or by increasing the muscle size. The easiest of those is to tweak your technique, followed by strength training, and the slowest and hardest way would be to increase muscle size.
This is why you should generally think about your technique in all of your lifts as to how you can improve them therein increasing the amount of weight you can lift, and progress faster. Heavy weight may sound intimidating, but it is the natural progression of increasing weight poundage over time. For example, 405lb may sound impossibly heavy, but imagine lifting 415lb. What is impossibly heavy plus 10lbs? It's not much heavier. The numbers don't matter. What they represent is your ability to display technique and leverage to lift any given weight. So although we think of someone who can lift heavy objects as 'strong' like in a natural power, but heavy objects are lifted through technique
Over time (years), as muscle development becomes more complete, heavier weight is necessary to spur a growth response in muscle and strength. This complicates things because that includes needing more recovery, having a higher chance of injury, and more complicated programming to break through plateaus.
The Bench Press targets the chest, shoulders, and arms. You lay on a bench and unrack a barbell, lower it to your chest, and press the bar to full arm extension. The Squat targets the legs, thighs, glutes, and works the core. You use a squat rack so that you can unrack the barbell loaded with weight directly on to your traps or lower rear shoulders. You step back, sink into a crouch with your hips below your knees, and then stand up with full leg extension. The Deadlift targets the spinal muscles, traps, lats, glutes, lower back, and hamstrings. You set up a barbell on the floor with 45lb (20kg) plates on each side, stand in front of the barbell with your shins touching the bar, bend at the knees and hips, grab the bar, and stand up with your upper back and chest leading the way, and push your hips forward into extension.
So as you can see from above that the three main lifts will cover the shoulders, arms, legs, back, hips, core, and glutes. These are the more important muscles to target for overall strength. A few muscles left out of those three lifts are the biceps, calves, forearms, inner thighs (adductors), rear shoulders, and abs. Any muscle group you would like to devote more work to in an effort to create more development, can also be isolated outside of the main lifts.
The frequency you perform your workout routine with lifting weights will determine volume of reps and sets as well as the intensity of each lift (ability to generate power and closer to maximum strength). For example, if you worked out one day a week, you would need extremely high volume to compensate for the lack of frequency. The intensity will suffer from the amount of workload on that one day, meaning the lifts done at the end of that day will not be attacked with full strength and capability.
After having experienced working out from one day to six days a week, I have found that the less frequent you work out, the less discipline needed, the higher body fat I held, less injuries, and plenty of strength. The more frequent you work out, the more aesthetic you appear from lower body fat percentage, muscle tension, mobility, conditioning, increased skill/technique and increased general health although the disadvantage remains of weaker joints from the repetitive use and lack of recovery.
As for rep ranges, it's often listed at 3-5 reps for strength, 6-12 reps for muscle, but ultimately all rep ranges are important, and you could use lower reps while increasing muscle by increasing total sets and/or lifts. To become good at a rep range, you should keep it in your routine for at least 6 weeks or longer. An example of increasing weight from workout session to workout session is that if you were bench pressing 135lb for 5 sets of 3, you can increase the weight by 5lb each time you do the lift. So the next time it would be 140lb for 5 sets of 3, then 145lb. You keep climbing linearly until you fail/plateau. At that point you can either continue lifting near your highest weight or deload to a lower weight, and climb back up.
Additional tips are to record your workout routines so that you can visibly work towards progress. Good nutrition is to eat clean (low sodium, low fat, low calorie). If you want to increase muscle size, you have to eat in an excess of your total maintenance of calories. If you want to lose weight, you must eat less than your total maintenance of calories. A high protein diet is important in keeping lean, and helping muscles repair.
Working out creates micro tears in the muscle, and resting allows for the muscles to rebuild and recover. So adequate rest is essential, meaning you should try to sleep 7-8 hours a night. Food intake is also essential for recovery. High water intake is recommended for leanness and general health. Muscles may become tight and require stretching.
To achieve progress the quickest be it strength, muscle, or aesthetics, each of your muscles should be in a state of recovery at most times. Each time the muscle is worked by lifting weights, and then recovers by allowing for rest, the muscle is further developed. As you can imagine, if you try to keep your entire body in a constant state of recovery, you will face injuries from time to time. This occurs because high frequency wears down the joints, and without sufficient time to recovery, weak joints will lead to injury, especially when using heavier weights, but the same can be said for even body weight exercises like push-ups and pull-ups.
If an injury occurs in arm or shoulder, many exercises may be off limit, but squats for example could still be trained to fully utilize those micro damage/repair cycles on the muscle to develop it the fastest. Likewise, returning to the three main lifts (Bench Press, Squat, and Deadlift), as you progress in those lifts, the muscles will develop, and the joints will become stronger (Bench Press - Elbow joint, Squat - Knee joint, Deadlift - Hip joint). Making those joints stronger will generally lead to a higher quality of life - and a longer life, and will prevent injuries. So although isolation exercises like calf raises to develop the calves are important, the three main lifts should take presidency.
Your workout routine should feature the three main lifts, and should have isolation exercises, which can be for added work, muscle development, or to have any specialty lifts you would like to include - for instance, weighted pull-ups. Some people may wonder why training your legs is important. I would say knee health and mobility are high benefits.
Hip strength is important for overall power, and both Squats and Deadlifts develop hip strength. The shoulders require proportionate development to ensure no injuries occur. There are three outer parts of the shoulder - the frontal deltoids, the lateral deltoids, and the rear deltoids. It is very common for people to over develop just the frontal deltoids and to neglect the lateral (side) and rear. This is because the Bench Press targets the frontal deltoids, but the other lifts do not target the lateral and rear delts efficiently. For the lateral delts, you can do Lateral Raise, which are standing with a dumbbell, and raising your arm out lateral, leading with your pinky (smallest finger). The rear delts can be targeted in Face Pulls, which are done standing with a cable station, and using a rope attachment from the high pullet, and pulling it towards your face, and pull so that your elbow makes a 90 degree angle.
Another note on recovery is that because we want to optimize and sustain a constant recovery, it should be known that beginners to weight lifting will not be able to being muscles as close to failure, meaning they don't need as much recovery and can train more frequently. Additionally, when you are a beginner, you are lifting lighter weights, and lighter weights allow for faster recovery versus using heavier weights.
So ideally a beginner should use a full body routine multiple days a week (like 3). The high volume will also make for plentiful time to practice the techniques of the lifts. There are three ways to increase the amount of weight you are lifting, and that is by tweaking and improving your technique, building nervous system response to the muscle, or by increasing the muscle size. The easiest of those is to tweak your technique, followed by strength training, and the slowest and hardest way would be to increase muscle size.
This is why you should generally think about your technique in all of your lifts as to how you can improve them therein increasing the amount of weight you can lift, and progress faster. Heavy weight may sound intimidating, but it is the natural progression of increasing weight poundage over time. For example, 405lb may sound impossibly heavy, but imagine lifting 415lb. What is impossibly heavy plus 10lbs? It's not much heavier. The numbers don't matter. What they represent is your ability to display technique and leverage to lift any given weight. So although we think of someone who can lift heavy objects as 'strong' like in a natural power, but heavy objects are lifted through technique
Over time (years), as muscle development becomes more complete, heavier weight is necessary to spur a growth response in muscle and strength. This complicates things because that includes needing more recovery, having a higher chance of injury, and more complicated programming to break through plateaus.
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