Health and Fitness Information

Hard work is a value needed to achieve success in any endeavor. However, when used alone in strength training, hard work often turns out to be counter-productive. You can train all you want, at anytime and support it with your preferred diet but this is simply not an effective way to train. Being smart about training is not optional but rather essential for success. Strength training is based on scientific knowledge and should be approached systematically. Equip yourself with the knowledge that you can use to train more effectively and efficiently by reading these tips:

Order of your exercises – the order of exercises you undertake is perhaps one of the most misunderstood concepts of bodybuilding and weight lifting training. You will need to warm up your core muscle groups first to increase circulation and get your body warmed up for the rest of the routine. According to James Stoppani, author of the book, “Encyclopedia of Muscle & Strength”, the best exercises to start your routine with are the bench press, deadlift and squat. After that, you should follow up with exercises that target the major muscle groups used in each of these exercises, and then continue by focusing on other muscle groups.

Keep an eye on resistance – Muscular strength will only develop if resistance is applied. To get the most out of your training, you would need to spend majority of your training time exerting 85 to 95 percent of your strength. It is important to assess what your current strength is so that you can make a point of reference on your current resistance threshold. This point of reference will then be used to set your targets for each training session. You can then log your resistance through this. You will need to update your point of reference as you develop and at the same time slowly increase resistance to get the most out of each training session.

Training volume – the amount of sets you complete in each session will help you gauge and monitor your fitness level, and also help you determine if you’re pushing yourself hard enough. If you’re training for strength, you’ll usually want to keep the amount of repetitions fairly low and increase resistance instead. If you’re training for endurance, you’ll want to lower resistance and increase repetitions. Make sure you understand the difference between these two types of exercises so you really are pushing yourself to your fullest potential and getting the results you want from your workout.

Eating right – Your eating habits should be changed to match your training goals. You can increase the effectiveness of your training by following proper diet and nutrition principles. Eating the right kind and amount of food is not enough. We all can do better by eating on the right time. Eating a combination of proteins and carbohydrates before training will help us maintain our energy level throughout a session. In addition, your muscles will grow and recuperate faster and better by eating lean protein after a solid training session. Sources of lean protein include chicken and turkey breasts, black beans, lentils, top round beef, scallop, shrimp and tuna. See a sports nutritionist for help in devising the proper diet to complement your training goals. Otherwise, you can construct your own by reading on the subject of diet and nutrition for athletes.

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