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Designing Resistance Training Workouts

By John Preston

Incorporating resistance training into your overall workout plan will make all the difference in the world. Many people are intimidated when it comes to beginning a new workout routine. Typically this intimidation is related to concerns over beginning a resistance training program. Think about it, most people are totally comfortable with working out on an exercise bike or treadmill, but a 30 pound dumbbell can be very intimidating to a beginning exerciser.

In other articles I have discussed setting goals and establishing a timeline to reach those goals. I also began to talk about how to make changes to your workout to avoid becoming board and to avoid a plateau. All of the information in those articles has been related to cardiovascular exercise. While there is still more to address regarding cardiovascular exercise, this article will focus on integrating resistance training into your workout.

If you’ve begun exercising in the past couple months, you should already be feeling more energy and your weight should be beginning to drop. These are two very important results of cardiovascular exercise. But if you really want to look your best you will need to incorporate resistance training into your routine. Resistance training will help to increase lean muscle, improve posture, firm your body, and allow you to focus on changing the shape of specific areas of your body.

There are an endless number of resistance exercises. I wish I could present them all to you but that will fill up an entire text book and then someone would create a new one. So I will discuss other resistance training variables that will help you to design an effective routine. Those variables are repetitions, sets, load, rest periods, and tempo.

Repetitions or reps are the number of times you perform an exercise in succession. When you stop performing an exercise you have completed one set. Load is the amount of weight or resistance you use during a given exercise set. Tempo is the speed in which the exercise is performed. Rest periods are the time between each set. Rest periods are necessary to allow for muscle recovery. Without resting you will not be able to perform the next set properly.

If you’ve never participated in a resistance training program, start slow. Perform one set for each major muscle group with a light load (weight). To start out the set should consist of about 15 reps and the tempo should be moderate (1 to 2 seconds in each direction). You should rest about one minute between each set. Rest the next day and monitor how you feel. If you experience mild or no soreness or fatigue, add a set to the next workout. Always allow a day of rest between resistance training workouts, this will allow for muscle recovery. Eventually work up to three sets, and then begin to increase the load (weight). You will see results for several weeks with this approach. Then things will get a little more complicated. In future articles I will discuss each variable in more detail and how changing each variable will affect the others. Once you understand each resistance training variable you will know how to periodically manipulate each variable. This will help you to continue to see results all the way to your goals.

I want to discuss the importance of technique and exercise selection. If you don’t know what your major muscle groups are, or you know your triceps but haven’t a clue which exercise will strengthen them; please seek out an exercise specialist in your area. First, some exercises performed incorrectly can lead to injury. If you are hurt you can’t workout and if you can’t workout you will never reach your goals. Second, exercises performed with bad technique are not as effective and ultimately can lead to muscular imbalances, pain and injury. If you establish bad technique early on it will be very hard to correct it later. Movement patterns become efficient in as little as 300 repetitions. So if you perform an exercise wrong 300 times it is ingrained and will be very difficult to correct. In fact it can take up to 5000 repetitions to reeducate a new movement pattern. So learning how to do it correctly now will save you years of frustration in the future.

About the Author:

John Preston is a Certified Pesonal Trainer with 14 years of experience. He holds certifications from both the American Council on Exercise (ACE), and The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), as well as a B.A. in Kinesiology for Long Beach State. His website is http://www.johnprestonfitness.com