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Fitness Weight Training
Fitness weight training is the process of exercising muscles against resistance. The contracting muscle is then strengthened and endurance is increased. Muscle building exercises can be in the form of dumbbell exercises, barbell exercises, weight machines, or your own bodyweight exercises. The benefits of weight training include: √ Look younger √ Feel stronger √ Better posture √ More energy √ Increased metabolic rate (allows you to burn more calories even while you sleep) √ Fights age-related muscle loss √ Reduces risk of injury ( 4out of 5 Americans have low-back discomfort. 80% of these problems are muscular and many can be prevented by strengthening the low-back muscles.) You may have started a fitness weight training program in the past. Many programs are short-lived due to injury or frustration because of poor results. Here are some guidelines that will help you maintain a safe, effective, and efficient fitness weight training program for achieving high levels of strength fitness. 1. Select exercises for all the major muscle groups. For example, be sure to balance your chest exercises with back muscle exercises. You could include the following dumbbell exercises to accomplish this: dumbbell chest press & dumbbell one-arm rows. Your bicep exercises such as bicep curls need to be balanced with tricep exercises such as tricep kick-backs. 2. Perform your exercises in the proper sequence. Always move from large muscle groups to small muscle groups. For example, do your chest exercises before doing your tricep exercises. This allows you to do the most demanding exercises while less fatigued. 3. Perform your exercises at the proper speed. You can go in any gym or health club and see this guideline violated many times by people jerking weights around at a fast pace. Most all of the benefits of weight training are lost and injuries are likely. Fast lifting places a great deal of stress on the muscles and connective tissue to begin the movement. The muscle group is more effectively contracted with a slow, controlled movement. 4. Perform your exercises at the proper resistance. Training above 85% of maximum resistance increases your risk of injury. Conversely, training below 65% of maximum resistance will yield little results. 5. Perform your exercises the proper number of repetitions. The best number of repetitions is 8-12 when done in a controlled manner. When you can perform 12 repetitions easily you need to increase the resistance approximately 5%. 6. Always warm-up prior to your fitness weight training session. I prefer to warm-up using at least 10 minutes of light aerobic activity. Follow this with some light stretching of the major muscle groups. 7. Conclude your fitness weight training session with a cool-down period. After a vigorous exercise session, blood tends to accumulate in the lower body. With this decreased blood return, there is less cardiac output. The result of this is light-headedness. A cool-down period will help keep blood flowing back to the heart adequately and prevent this light-headedness.
The following dumbbell exercises can be included in your fitness weight training program:
Body weight exercises such as push-ups, squats, crunches, and planks can also be used very effectively in obtaining all the benefits of weight training. Muscle building exercises need not make you so sore that you can't move the next day. You should a have a kind of tightness in your muscles that actually makes you feel fit, not fatigued. Return from Fitness Weight Training to Elite Fitness
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