Site Search

The Weight Training Mind Set

By Ben Longley

The other day I was talking to someone about their gym routine and like most young males, their program resembled a typical body building style, body part split routine utilising a lot of isolation exercises. This person was quite new to weight training, and as always, the go to exercises of choice were the bench press,. Bicep curls, triceps extensions…..you get the picture!

In this article I’m going to relay a lot of what I said to this person who was asking me for training advice, as I think it is something which needs to be said to the majority of gym goers. The fact is most males mindlessly follow these bodybuilding routines because they have been embedded in the psyche of young males who want to look huge and ripped like the guys in the magazines.

Unless you actually want to be a bodybuilder, and that is your chosen sport, then most of the time I see no need to train like one. If I asked you in the clear light of day which you would prefer –

a) To look huge and ripped, but not actually be that strong, athletic or fit and to have constant aches and pains in your body every day.

b) To look huge, ripped, athletic, to actually be strong, athletic and fit, and have this carry over to sport and every day life and become much more resistant to injury and pain free for the most part.

Now I’m not saying that I have a fool proof method of turning you in to a superman all of a sudden, no magical program like that exists, but I am saying that if you chose (b) like most people would, then you would want the type of training you do to reflect this, and train in a way which will produce those qualities as best you can.

Look at it this way, if you’re going to dedicate 3-4 hours per week to your training, you may as well train and make your body more functional and better able to perform than less functional and less able to perform. Body building style training, by definition, is training purely for aesthetic purposes, it is training to look a certain way. But it is training done by people whose genetics don’t represent 99.9% percent of the population, so this is a lot of the reason these guys get success with this type of training, and even having said this it can be argued that bodybuilders would get even better results if they made a few changes to their training anyway.

Just think for a moment, about the human body – how we move, how we evolved and why we are put together like we are. The body has basic primal movement patterns which can be divided in to pushing, pulling, squatting, lunging, rotation and the gait cycle (walking) ………………all these movement all contribute to a perfectly synchronized unit. The body works together to produce movement which is conducive to being able to run, jump, pull yourself up on to things, push things around, lift things up, carry objects around, and do it with agility and efficiency.

We have hundreds of muscles all working together to produce movement across hundreds of different joints made from hundreds of different bones attached with thousands of ligaments and tendons. Somehow everything seems to work effortlessly in an extraordinary piece of engineering - to produce movement,

From the moment you wake up in the morning to the time you go to bed (in fact even when you are in bed…so 24 hours a day) for every day you have ever existed and ever will, there is not one movement you make which only involves one muscle. In fact even when we talk about isolation exercises in body building there are in fact many muscles working together still

So why do we have this obsession with going to the gym and trying to isolate muscles by doing totally unnatural movements, utilising the body in a completely different way in which we actually should move, and make our selves less efficient at moving properly. That’s cool if you want to just look muscle bound but not be able to sprint 100m cause you’ll pull your hamstring, assuming you can build up to a substantial enough pace to even pull a muscle.

Stabilising yourself in a machine and moving a weight through a fixed line of motion, and isolating muscle groups is a totally unnatural way to train your body and will actually promote faulty muscle recruitment patterns and leave a lot of stabiliser muscled weak and untrained. This increases your chance of injury and will also lead you to a plateau much quicker.

Not only that, but you don’t even get superior aesthetic results, so what is the point? It is mind boggling that in this day and age this is still how most people train..

For the average weekend warrior, the majority of your training should be based around big compound movements like the squat, deadlift, single leg variations, various pushing and pulling exercises and some core stabiliy work. Try to train standing up as much as you can. These exercises all train the basic human movement patterns and will grow muscle, strength, and depending on your programming goals can get you very fit and ripped. Not only that but this type of training will carry over to performance on the sporting field or just in everyday life – carrying the shopping, pushing a car, picking up the kids etc These basic movements all utilise a lot of different muscles at the same time and will definitely give you the biggest bang for your buck for the time you spend at the gym.

About the Author:

Ben Longley is a personal trainer in St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia. He specialieses in fat loss and general strength and conditioning for everyday people. His website is StKildaFitnessTrainer.com