Depending on where you decide to work out, your equipment choices will vary, but the general choices include:. Once you have your equipment ready, choose eight to 10 exercises about one exercise per muscle group.
For smaller muscle groups like the biceps and triceps, you can do one exercise per weight training session. For larger muscle groups, like the chest, back, and legs, you can usually do more than one exercise. These involve a variety of equipment, so you can choose based on what you have available. Even if your focus is on a particular body part, say getting flat abs or losing fat around the hips, it's important to work all your muscle groups.
What does work is building more lean muscle tissue and burning more calories. Most experts recommend starting with your larger muscle groups and then proceeding to the smaller ones. But don't feel limited by that.
You can do your exercises in any order you like, and changing the order is a great way to challenge yourself in different ways. You've figured out the exercises you should be doing, but what about the number of sets and repetitions? Your decision should be based on your goals.
The American College of Sports Medicine recommends 4 to 6 repetitions with heavier weight for hypertrophy increased muscle size , 8 to 12 repetitions for muscular strength and 10 to 15 reps for muscular endurance. In general:. Choosing how much weight to lift is often based on how many reps and sets you're doing.
The general rule is to lift enough weight that you can only complete the desired number of reps. In other words, you want that last rep to be the very last rep you can do with good form. However, if you're a beginner or if you have medical or health conditions, you may need to avoid complete fatigue and just find a weight that challenges you at a level you can handle.
So, how do you know how much weight you need to challenge your body? Every day is different. Some days you'll lift more weight than others. Listen to your body.
Another important part of training is resting between the exercises. So, if you're doing 15 reps, you might rest about 30 to 60 seconds between exercises. If you're lifting very heavy, say 4 to 6 reps, you may need up to two or more minutes. When lifting to complete fatigue, it takes an average of two to five minutes for your muscles to rest for the next set. When using lighter weight and more repetitions, it takes between 30 seconds and a minute for your muscles to rest.
For beginners, working to fatigue isn't necessary, and starting out too strong can lead to too much post-exercise soreness. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends training each muscle group two to three times a week. In order for muscles to repair and grow, you'll need about 48 hours of rest between workout sessions. If you're training at a high intensity , take a longer rest. Throughout your workouts, keep these important principles in mind. Your first step in setting up a routine is to choose exercises to target all of your muscle groups and, of course, set up some kind of program.
You have plenty of great options:. For beginners , you want to choose about exercises, which comes out to about one exercise per muscle group. The list below offers some examples. Choose at least one exercise per muscle group to start.
For the larger muscles, like the chest, back, and legs, you can usually do more than one exercise. Or try these ready-made workouts. Worthington said that performing 12 to 15 reps with a moderate weight is likely to provide the sweet spot for hypertrophy. For building endurance, I would be saying focus on strength to give you the robustness to build your endurance in your actual event. If you're an experienced weightlifter, you may look back longingly at your early days in the gym and dream of having those so-called newbie gains again.
When you're new to resistance training, your body responds well, and you can make impressive progress in strength and muscle growth quickly. That's a neural adaptation, your body getting used to being able to use those motor units," Bishop said.
While this does slow down, you can mimic the effect, to an extent, by changing your usual rep range. If strength is your goal, Bishop recommends training in the classic strength and hypertrophy rep ranges. So I advocate a mix of the two. That's the whole point of what we call 'periodization of training,' which is training different things at different times to be able to focus on that end goal.
People should be training through a lot of the rep schemes. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.
Get the Insider App. Look around any gym, and you'll see people committing various training mistakes—a guy on the bench press bouncing the bar off his chest, someone doing curls with more motion in his hips than his biceps, another person pressing her flyes. These visual blunders can hamper your training progress, to be sure, but they're not the only thing you need to worry about.
What about the mistakes you don't see? None of those mistakes will undermine your training efforts as much as confusing hard training with smart training. Training hard is easy, but training smart gets you closer to your goals. For example, let's say you want to build muscle. You can choose a light weight and rep it times, or grab a heavier weight and push it maybe 10 times.
Both examples are hard, but one method is superior for building muscle. Effort is important, but it has to be applied correctly. To optimize your effort in the gym, you need to understand which specific rep ranges can best help you reach your goals.
Thankfully, researchers have already weighed in on the topic. Here are the basic rules of choosing the right reps per set for your fitness needs! If you're training for muscle size, choose a weight at which you reach muscle failure in the rep range. In other words, after your warm-up sets—which are never taken to failure—you should select a load with which you can complete at least 8 reps but not more than That means if you can do only reps, the weight is too heavy, so reduce it on subsequent sets.
It also means that if you can do more than 12 reps, but simply stop at 12, that's not a "true" set. A true set is one in which you fail—the point at which you can't do another rep with good form on your own—within the target rep range of If you can easily do more than 12, add weight on your next set so that you're failing in the target range. Choosing the right load for your muscle-building goal effectively targets the fast-twitch muscle fibers, which are more prone to growing bigger and stronger in response to resistance training, with enough volume to stimulate growth.
Of course, the guy who is bouncing the bar off his chest and the one who is using every lower-body muscle group to heave up a set of curls are using bad form.
If you're exercising with poor form, the weight is probably too heavy, regardless of when you're failing. Learn and practice textbook technique. However, these fibers fatigue fairly quickly, which is why you can't lift a very heavy weight very many times.
Train like a bodybuilder: If you're looking to maximize muscle size, target reps per set on average and choose multijoint movements like the bench press, squat, overhead press, bent-over row, and deadlift, which recruit more total muscle mass than single-joint moves, thus allowing you to lift heavier weights. Hit a target muscle from multiple angles with high volume sets and reps to stimulate growth.
In general, your rest periods should be in the 1- to 2-minute range. Already have a Bodybuilding. Sign In. Don't risk doing a workout improperly!
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