I always tell my clients to first study and know what they are getting into. The why’s and what’s and how’s are pretty much an integral part of starting any workout regime, whether your goals are for weight loss or simply to get more strength and toned.
You must know the A,B and C’s of what you are getting into. Laying the foundation is important and it goes a long way to determine your success in your fitness journey.
By foundation I mean the basic movements and concepts of exercise, using which you can build your workout regimen in order to achieve your fitness goals.
These movements are pull, push and hold. The basic exercises are squats, pull-ups, push- ups, sit-ups, burpees, planks or bridge holds and lunges…
Everyone starts with these exercises, minus the barbells, dumb-bells, kettlebells or any other weight. Once you are convinced that your form is right, you can move on to adding weights to your exercise regimen.
Free-hand exercise is just as important as lifting weights: but sadly most trainers don’t take the pains to explain this simple truth to their clients.
The first and foremost requirement to succeed in your pursuit of getting a toned strong body is the PERFECT FORM.
How to plan your workout?
While planning your workout, no matter what the duration or intensity, you must design it in such a way that the major muscle groups in both the upper and lower body are engaged to a certain degree.
Just think of the time you hiked up a mountain. Though it was your legs and butt doing most of the work, without core strength and strong arms you probably wouldn’t have made it past that rock in the middle of your path that made you pull yourself up using your arms and engaging your shoulders.
Never do you do things with just one half of your body; it is always the complete body that is involved…
So, when you use your whole body for almost anything you do, why would you train just one half on a given day?
In our fast-paced lives, we need to make the most of whatever time we can manage after work, family time, social media and outings. So, when I plan an exercise routine for my clients or myself, I aim to get in a complete body workout, even if the focus is on one specific movement that engages a certain body part or muscle group more than others…
The strategy is to pick one exercise for the upper body, one for the lower body and one for the core.
So, in the initial weeks when you aren’t using weights, if you choose to do push-ups, it takes care of the upper body.
Then you could pick squats for the lower body and sit-ups for the core.
The next day it could be pushups or its variations (upper body), walking lunges or stationery lunges (lower body) and leg raises or a clam (core).
If you are a beginner in this fitness world then I would suggest you finally found start slow.
It is not etched in stone that you have to do ten repetitions of each of the three exercises you have chosen. If ten repetitions seem too easy for one exercise, go ahead and do twenty so that you feel your muscle groups getting engaged. This is frequently true of simple exercises such as jumping jacks, high knees, step-ups, etc. The important thing is to work up slowly your number of reps in good form.
On the opposite end of the exercise spectrum, you will find that you struggle with straight push-ups in good form (esp. women),. So, for this, do just five repetitions to start with.
Somewhere in between you will find movements like sit-ups and squats, for which ten reps are challenging enough, so stick to that number.
Slowly, over time, you will build on your fitness and your body will start getting used to the rigor of more strenuous workouts. To be able to get to that stage, you should look at adding two reps every week to each of the exercises you struggled with till you reach the count of ten.
For exercises that you find easy, try and get comfortable with performing thirty to forty reps.
Do twenty reps for exercises that you could hit the magic number of ten at the beginning.
If you have already done your math and see yourself reaching from ten to thirty straight push-ups in just a month or a little over that, reality is most likely to hit you.
Once you get to the stage where you can do twenty to thirty push-ups, progress will be slow. You might take two to three weeks to move forward. But don’t lose heart or be hard on yourself, this is normal.
Progress slows as you inch closer to the peak. Stick with it and slowly make an increment of 2 to 3 reps per day and you will soon find it easy. After you are confident about your body weight exercises .you can move to weight bearing exercises.
However, chances are that you would have already felt confident enough to start introducing weights for simpler movements. There is no harm if you have already done that. But, after you are at a level where you can do all weight-bearing exercises, make a conscious effort to work harder on the movements you were weaker in.
The load-bearing exercises that you ought to stick to for now are the simple ones, such as front and back squats, dead lifts, bench presses, shoulder/military presses, upright rows, bent-over rows and lunges.
For the next two to four weeks, follow the principle of progressive loading and gradually increase the weight you use for each exercise.
It is best to maintain a diary to record how many reps you manage at different weights. This will help you track progress.
The ideal number of reps during the initial stages of weight training is 10 per movement; you can progressively increase the load over the next six weeks or so.
By this time, you should be plateauing. You should start reducing the number of reps to seven while increasing the load. Continue increasing it till such time that you can do no more than five reps of each movement.
A note to remember here is that loading is the phase where you lift more weight by reducing reps this leads to hypertrophy of muscles, which means growth and increase of the size of muscle cells. So this is best suited for body building purpose. As for women who just want to tone down can continue with less weight and more reps.
Keep in mind that you may take a little more or less time than specified here, as everyone has different levels of fitness and takes to exercise at a different pace.
Once you introduce weights into your workouts, you could move to complex exercises such as squat cleans, thrusters, weighted squats, overhead squats, dead lifts, push press, clean and press, clean and jerk, kettlebell swings and snatches…
Almost all of these exercises engage muscle groups in both the upper and lower body. So, you could do a two-part workout, the first focusing on skill or strength, and the second to get your body working at an elevated heart rate over a certain period of time, or to exercise your entire body.
One last thing that you need to remember while planning a workout is rest. If your muscles do not recover and you still sweat it out in the gym or the park, all you would be doing is harming them, not building them.
You need to have one day of complete rest while another day has to be set aside for active recovery.
For those who are looking to lose weight must definitely not sleep it out the whole day but do some light cardio exercise such as walking, cycling or some aerobic dancing. Even yoga is good for muscle recovery and to avoid soreness.
Stretching must be a part of your daily routine. It is a must.
Also always remember to warm up every muscle group you intend to work and later cool them down with proper stretching. This little investment of time will help you immensely in this fitness journey of yours.
Thank you ! Hope this Article was helpful .
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