Beginner's Guide to Weight-Lifting

Finally, the post about workouts! To this point, I've posted a lot about healthy foods, and how to keep your health. This is because it's really important to know what food is good for you, before training your body.

For beginners in weight-lifting and bodybuilding (people usually call this as "fitness"), looking for workout programs on the internet, sports magazines, guidebooks, even asking the gym-instructors are the first things you have to do. Those experts and sources of information usually teach a lot of things, such as 4x10 bench press. But what does it mean? Does that mean 4 sets with 10 reps? It's not that simple.

Many people gives information that the right training is by lifting one weight in 4x10 count. But first, you have to know the goal of that training. To gain some muscle mass? To tone your body (usually women), or just a number to make us know an equipment and get used to use them before doing a more intensive training?

image credit to healthnutblogger.com

I will only give you one example, which is to gain some muscle mass. What you have to do is to reduce your reps from the 10 count, and making it 6 reps. In 6 reps, it means use the weight in which in the sixth rep you're unable to lift more. People stop at the sixth rep instead, when they usually can lift more. That means the weight you lift is not maximized for your muscle growth.

The weight you lift has to be as much as possible so that when you see 4x10, it means 4 sets, and with each set use the weight where in 10 reps you can't lift some more, instead of doing 4 sets and stops at the tenth rep. So, when your instructor tells you to lift 10 reps, it means you have to use the weight which you can't lift more on the tenth rep.

I repeated the explanation quite a lot, didn't I? It's because people still misunderstand on this. It's really important to understand before going further into your training.

For each training session, it's better if you don't train for more than an hour. Therefore, train intensively using the 6 reps knowledge that I told you about. The total set you have to do for each training is 9 to 12 sets, which means when you use 3 sets for each equipment, then that means it's better to just use 3 to 4 equipments.

It's also important to concentrate your training. It doesn't mean that when you want to gain some biceps mass you train it everyday. You won't get the results. You'll get the results outside of the gym, actually, especially when you sleep. In gyms, what we do is "destroying" our muscles. I will post more info about this

In conclusion, train as intensively as you can in the given time, go home, eat, and get some rest. I told you before, you can have the talk after the training, not in-between sets.

Good luck!