While I’m not a professional body builder by any stretch of the imagination I have weight-lifted for many years.
As it is with anything I am involved in I don’t just dive in and do it without any thought. I’ve researched and tested a few approaches to weightlifting.
I’ve found what works well for me and learned to avoid very common mistakes that weightlifters seem to run into over and over again.
I’d like to address a few misconception about weightlifting the following bullet list are things commonly thought about weightlifting :
- It isn’t possible to get large muscles and develop a good physique with weightlifting naturally, without taking steroids.
- If you work out and weight-lift you should eat as much of everything as possible and you can eat anything you want.
- If you stop weightlifting it all turns to fat.
- You can work off fat through weightlifting
- Weightlifting makes you muscle bound you will be slow and have no flexibility
- Weightlifting should be painful, no pain no gain
- To continue to grow you have to continually add more weight to your workouts.
Let’s address these in order of the numbered list. The first thing anyone says when some guy walks by with a huge muscular physique is that it must be steroids. Sure sometimes it is, but these guys are usually very noticeable because they are incredibly huge and only been working out a short time.
But, it is very possible to get very large through weightlifting naturally. The key two keys are a workout that progressively challenges the muscles so they grow and a healthy diet loaded with protein.
Which leads to number two. I can’t count the number of guys at the gym that have said this to me. “If you want to get big work out a lot/heavy and eat a whole lot.”
Well, those guys may have been big muscularly, but they also had gigantic guts. Who wants to look like that. What’s the point of having muscles if they are buried under fat.
The real key to weightlifting is the diet. If you talked to an all natural body builder, he would tell you that the diet is, as important, if no more-so than the actual workout.
The workout breaks down and challenges the muscles. The diet and rest is what builds it back up and makes it larger. Recovery makes you bigger. What you are telling your body with weightlifting is that you are going to be going through repeated stress and need to build up stronger. The body will make you stronger very quickly, but it will only develop larger muscles if you give it enough protein through diet to build with.
You can work out all you want. If your diet isn’t right you will grow very little.
#3: If you stop weightlifting it all turns to fat. This simply is not true. Muscle does not turn to fat and fat does not turn to muscle. People think this because some lifters who eat a lot and burn off their meals are not smart enough to cut down their meals if they decide to take a break from lifting.
So, they gain a lot of fat because they are not longer burning off through exercise.
#4 If you are fat you can weight-lift and gain a bunch of muscle and the fat will melt off. This is a misconception that is propagated by companies like bo flex.
You would lose a little fat by working out, but the fat would not melt off. In fact what happens to most people who try this is that they actually gain weight because they are now muscular with fat on top of it.
Most people actually tend to eat more when they lift because lifting makes you hungry.
Weightlifting, coupled with a diet that has you eating a small but healthy meal every 2.5 to 3 hours will however result in much fat loss. The problem comes when a lifter thinks because they lift weights they can eat whatever they want as much as they want.
#5. Weightlifting only makes you inflexible if you lift heavy and don’t ever stretch. I found in myself and other people I know the lifting increases muscle twitch and will make you faster for activities like punching and kicking. If you stretch it also improves flexibility beyond what you could achieve without lifting. This is because there is more fiber to stretch.
#6 If it hurts, you are lifting to heavy and headed for injury. Most weightlifting pain is due to the lifter not performing any warm up sets and just going straight for the heaviest lift. To prevent pain and injury when lifting heavy, a lifter should do at least three warm-up sets to get blood flowing to the muscles. Warm up sets should gradually build up to about 75% of the workout weight.
Another overlooked thing is warm down sets. A good work out should look like a hill if put on a graph. 3 sets to warm up, 3 -5 sets heavy and three warm down sets gradually building down to the warm-up weight.
#7 is what causes most injuries with free weights. Most lifters assume that in order to grow they have to lift as much as they possibly can, and when they can lift that add more.
So, what do you do when you simply can’t lift anymore?
The whole point of weightlifting is to challenge the muscle which may cause it to grow in response to repeated stress.
What often happens is that you plateau. You may be working on your bench press, maybe you get it up to 250 and just can’t get past. You try adding more weight and pushing through, which of course doesnt work. You try adding more sets, which doesn’t work by itself.
The answer to this is to cycle the amount of sets you do and the amount of reps. You can do variation of this but this is what I have found make me gain muscle quickly when coupled with the right diet:
- week one you perform on 2 sets of 8-11. With a light weight, that is no more than %80 percent of maximum. This will let you ease in to lifting without hurting yourself. You workout five days a week. Day one is chest and legs, Day two is biceps and triceps, day three is back and shoulders. On day four you go back to day one and continue until Friday, Saturday and Sunday are rest days. Doing this you give a muscle group a good workout and enough time to rest.
- Week two and three you do 3 sets of 4-7 reps with a heavy weight. You should be failing at 7 reps with good form. Failing means you can no longer complete the rep. Good form means doing the movement properly without cheating with your back or pushing it. Also you should not be throwing the weights around. If you do you are using inertia to lift. You need to lift moderately slow and controlled. Whipping weights around is likely to tear muscles and create damage to your joints. A good rule of thumb is to count 2 seconds up three seconds down.
- Week 4 and 5 you will be doing five sets with a weight that you fail at 8-11 reps.
- On week six you start over on week one.
- Following a routine similar to this will help a lifter avoid injury and a plateauing. It will also help them to continually grow. As in the reset week you will not lose strength even though you took down the amount of sets and weight, since you did not stop all together. Then you will gradually build up the amount of weight and sets again. This will make the routine new to body. So, it will see it as new stress that it has to adjust to. This is the reason you will not grow if you continually do the same amount of reps/sets/weight for year straight. Once the body thinks it is strong enough to do the job it doesnt need a reason to grow anymore.
Some have called the above approach, “muscle confusion,” I’ve seen this in the xp90 commercials. This is only partially true. You don’t need to do a ton of different exercises. In fact doing a lot of different exercises can be dangerous as when lifting you have to learn good form for every exercise. You can do the same exercises with the same form and, “confuse the muscles,” provided you change up the: Sets/reps/amount of weight, and put it into a routine that gradually builds/ changes these up and then allows for a reset week.
With the above approach and a healthy diet you should find it easy to gain muscle with weight lifting.
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