Effective Strength Training For Beginners and Elite Lifters - PowerPoint Presentation

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Effective Strength Training For Beginners and Elite Lifters

Louis Moore, M.S.Slide2

“I don’t think a diet or training program produces weight loss, any more than a hammer produces a house. It’s the person. The best workout or nutrition plan in the world won’t work unless it’s used by someone who’s ready to recognize his or her life around the goal of losing weight. Even then, it’s almost never simple or straight-forward.”

Lou SchulerSlide3

Does this sound familiar?

You start working out great making gains for a month or two.

You stop making gains but continue for a few more weeks on the same program, perhaps adding sets or exercises to get things moving forward again.You don’t make any gains, and your motivation wavers. You start to backslide a bit.You discover a new workout technique, or some new exercises, and suddenly you’re motivated again and making new gains.Repeat as necessary.Slide4

Paradigm Shift

“Think of strength training in terms of how it changes your body’s abilities, as opposed to how it changes your body’s appearance.”Slide5

Do Something Active

The most important benefits of exercise accrue when a person goes from sedentary to moderately active, and stays active.

And when you go from sort-of-fit to really fit.Slide6

Do Something You LikeSlide7

The older you are, the more important it is to train

(time is no longer on your side)Slide8

The goal of training is to change something.

Physical Activity – everything you do when you aren’t at rest; basic movement with no goal beyond getting from one place to another.

Exercise – movement with a purpose, such as sports practice, jogging, Zumba, swimming, cycling, hiking, basketball, etc.Workout – an exercise session that’s planned and deliberately strenuous.Training – a system of workouts designed to achieve specific biological adaptations. Slide9

The goal of each workout is to set a record.

“You always want an improvement in something every workout.”Slide10

But, don’t beat the ___ out of yourself.Slide11

The best muscle-building exercises are the ones that use your muscles the way they’re designed to work.

During the millions of years of evolution, our bodies developed to do the following actions:

Running, jumping, climbing, throwing, hitting, twisting, pushing things away, pulling things closer, lifting things off the ground, squatting down, and lunging forward.Slide12

Exercises that use lots of muscles in coordinated action are better than those that force muscles to work in isolation.Slide13

To build size, you must build strength

Muscle growth through increased strength is always your goal in the studio or fitness center.

“Simply toning” implies you are just adding a bit more tension to your muscles than they have now. Yoga could accomplish this.All the main benefits from strength training come from building bigger, stronger, more powerful muscles, such as controlling your weight, injury protection, help you look younger, and gives you a body that performs as well as one twenty years younger or more.Slide14

To build size and strength, you must train hard but less frequently, with plenty of recovery time between workouts.Slide15

Basic Human Movement Patterns

Squat (bending at the knees and hips, as you would force a jump)

Hinge (bending at the hips to lift something from the floor)Push (pushing yourself off the floor, or pushing a weight away from the body)Pull (pulling yourself up to something, or pulling something toward you)Lunge (lifting your legs in a split stance and both feet on the floor)

Single-leg stance (variations on the squat, hinge, and lunge movements in which only one foot is on the floor)Twists (bending of the muscles of the waist)Walking and RunningSlide16
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Qualities needed to perform movement patterns safely, effectively, and productively:

Stability (through your shoulders, spine, and pelvis)

Mobility (in your hips, upper back, and shoulders)Balance (allows you to work in a variety of positions and postures)Strength (the ability to generate force)Power (the ability to generate force at maximum speed)

Endurance, or conditioning (the ability to repeat all of the movements, separately or in combination, often and vigorously enough to give your body the stimulus it needs to build strength, add muscle, and strip fat.Slide18

The weight you lift is a tool to reach your goals, not a goal by itself.

Workout with the weights that allow you to accomplish the goals of your workouts, no more and no less.

When doing new exercises or routines, it’s best to take your risks on the light side, and then use heavier weights as you learn the movements better.Slide19

The machines are limited (very)

Many machines force your joints onto unnatural ranges of motion, creating damage.

Most machines prevent your body from doing the most important and useful muscle-building movements.Slide20

A workout is only as good as the adaptations it produces.

“the older and more experienced you are, the faster you adapt. Conversely, the younger and less experienced you are, the longer you can stick with one program and still get benefits.”Slide21

Basics of strength training:

Repetitions –individual lifts –are the atoms of strength training.

Sets –combinations of repetitions—are the molecules.Exercises are the compounds—that is, they’re performed in sets of repetitions, and you can change the sets and reps around any number of ways to produce different compounds.Workouts are collections of exercises you decide to put together and perform in one session. At this point, you have something that you’d recognize as part of an organism.

That organism is your program.Slide22

Repetitions

Concentric or Positive Phase – the lifting portion of the repetition.

Eccentric or Negative Phase – the lowering part of the repetition.Isometric – the “pause” at the bottom, after lowering the weight to the starting position; and at the top, after you’ve lifted it and are about to start lowering.Note: the eccentric portion of a rep has been shown in some studies to produce more muscle growth and strength improvements than the concentric.Slide23

Sets

A group of reps that you perform one after another, usually without a break.

Twelve to Fifteen Reps: best for developing muscular endurance and learning the feeling of muscular exhaustion (MMF).Eight to Twelve Reps: best to gain muscular strength and size, and stimulating a hormonal response of testosterone and growth hormone.Three to Six Reps: best for building more muscle mass, faster, plus the hormonal response.Slide24

Exercises

Structural Exercises – involve coordinated movements that your body needs to be able to perform, such as the squat, hinge, push, pull, lunge, twist, and single-leg stance.

Assistance Exercises – help you get better at the structural exercises.Let’s say you do an upper-body workout that includes 4 structural exercises: chest press, row, shoulder press, and lat pulldowns. After doing those 4, you would finish up with lateral raises to strengthen your shoulders, along with some arm exercises.

You can build an entire workout around structural movements, but you shouldn’t build one around assistance exercises.Slide25

Workouts

Total-body workouts

Split Routines * Upper-Body/Lower Body * Push/Pull * 2-Day Split (Toning & Shaping) * 3-Day Split (Bodysculpting) * 4 – 5 Day Splits (Bodybuilding)Slide26

Programs (manipulations)

IntensityVolume

Rest IntervalEffortTempoFrequencyExercise Selection

Cross-TrainingSlide27

There is no magic system of exercises, sets, and reps.

Everything works.

Nothing works forever.Slide28

You’ll get better results working your but off on a bad program than you will loafing through a good program.

“Training hard and consistently is the key to making gains on a good or bad system. The difference is that a good program is “almost magical” when you put in the effort to make it work,”

says Alwyn Cosgrove, fitness author.Slide29

Fast lifting is not more dangerous than slow lifting.Slide30

Periodization

Planned changes in training programs in order to get steady improvements.Key Words: planned changes

steady improvementsSlide31

A well-designed workout program will . . .

start you off with higher-volume, lower-intensity, lower-skill workouts, then gradually push you toward heavier weights, lower repetitions, and exercises that require more skill. Slide32

Program Stages:

Anatomical Adaptation (general conditioning) – high volume of exercises, lighter weights; conditions muscles and strengthens ligaments and tendons.

Hypertrophy – heavier weights with fewer reps; increasing muscle size.Strength – still dropping reps, still increasing weights, while doing more sets to get stronger.Maximal Strength/Power - exercises with low reps, heavy weights, combined with fast movements. Enables you to do everyday activities with more strength, but faster.

Recovery – A week or two without training. Or it can be a month or two of mostly unstructured workouts.Slide33

Stretching is not a warm-up.

There is no evidence that pre-exercise static stretching prevents injuries or improves strength/power.

General Warm-ups – light walking, jogging, cycling, etc.Movement Prep – the idea is to put our muscles through a series of drills that challenge them to stretch and contract. They wake up the muscles and nerves so they’ll be better at those exercises when you get to them. They also warm your body in preparation for more intense exercise.Slide34

You don’t need to do endurance exercise to burn fat.

Strength training cranks up metabolism for up to two days after a hard strength/power workout; the effect is magnified by any additional muscle mass you build.

Endurance exercise doesn’t increase post-workout metabolism aside from a short period after you finish.Combining both strength training and cardio in the right amounts is optimal.Slide35

When you combine serious strength training with serious endurance exercise, your body will probably choose endurance over muscle and strength.Slide36
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Questions?Slide38

Thank you!