Thursday, January 22, 2009

Strength Workouts - Don't Start One Until You Read This First!

When first starting with a strength workout there will be important things to consider to achieve success. When considering strength workouts, there is more to it than people usually realise.

So you need to find out a bit more before starting your workout.

The first consideration is that a strength workout should be part of a comprehensive health and fitness program. When this is not done people generally end up just giving up due to poor results.

So, if you want the best chance to reach your strength training goals, you have got to be clear what they really are. Better strength, obviously, but is it just strength or are you looking to build huge muscles? Or are you looking for the lean and ripped,modern look while still becoming stronger.

What about endurance and stamina? If you concentrate too hard on just building muscle, you may get bigger but suffer "burn out" quickly. Occasionally people build large muscles but have low stamina or muscle endurance.

If you are into martial arts, mma, boxing, ironman etc then your endurance will be vitally important as well as strength.

So you can see there quite a lot to think about when starting muscle building workouts.

Buidling up gradually and getting professional advice is best before starting to exercise. This is important with strength workouts to avoid injury, you will need to push your muscle hard to go beyond what they are normally used to. Rest periods, diet and nutrition all play an important part too. You need to ensure that your body has time to build and repair muscles and sufficient nutrients to do this to maintain progress.

Strength workouts will have a number of different exercises designed to work on various muscle groups. For example, chest workouts and abdominal workouts amongst others.

You should always start with a warm up, which may be some light cardio or small weights, then move on to the real strength exercises for the larger muscle groups first. Before finishing with a warm down you could target some specific smaller muscles groups.

Unless you are quite experienced in correct exercise techniques and how many reps, sets and how to choose the amount of weight, you will need expert guidance to get decent results.

The exercises will normally include lat pull downs, par bar dips, seated rows, bench presses, dumbbell presses and also dead lifts, these all require the use of some form of fitness equipment and could involve joining a gym or buying equipment for use in the home.

Push ups, lunges, squats and pull ups can all be completed without exercise equipment. These exercises are good for starting with but can only produce minimal results. Remember to get pro advice when starting.

Find out more about The Best Workouts Here

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