Lifting tips for beginners
Follow my lifting tips for beginners if you are starting out (even if you aren’t a beginner a lot of these will apply to you), get into good habits early, and accelerate your strength and body composition results.
Lifting weights is different from typical cardio style training. The objective is to use the sessions to get stronger, and build your muscles over time. Not focusing on how fast your heart is beating, or how sweaty you can get.
If you lift with intent, using a weight that challenges you, you’ll naturally get those feelings of working hard.
Always lift the weight with good form, using a full range of motion, and under control at all times.
As you would clench your fist, start contracting your muscles in the same way when you are performing each rep. To begin with you won’t feel much. But if you practice and stick at it, eventually you will build up that mind-muscle connection, and be able to contract harder and harder.
Calf raises is a fantastic exercise to practice contracting your muscles and truly feeling what it’s like to engage your muscles in that way. Your challenge is to learn how to do that all over your body.
No ego lifting and swinging the weight around. If you cant control the weight perfectly, take it down.
Focus on quality over quantity. You don’t need more than 6 exercises in each session to begin with.
Sessions should last no more than 45-60 minutes.
You will naturally get stronger from lifting weights. You don’t need to have a specific ‘strength phase’ or go below 8 reps in your first year of lifting.
Rest times will range between 45-90 seconds depending on the exercise.
Perform exercises one at a time to begin with. You need to master form and technique. Treat it as a learning process.
If you are training 3 x per week, perform full body session to maximise your time and results.
If you are training 4 x per week, split your training into 2 x lower body, and 2 x upper body.
Training each muscle group 2-3 x per week gets better, faster results than training them 1 x per week.
Write down your workouts and keep a log of what you are lifting.
Starting out, machines for the most part will preferable over dumbbells or bodyweight, as they allow you to work your muscles in a stable, fixed position, moving the weight from A to B.
Start with smaller, isolation exercises before you move onto bigger exercises. You need to master the basics and learn how to contract your muscles. If you cannot contract your quads on the leg extension, you have no right back squatting.
Always drive your feet into the floor on an exercise. You cannot fire a canon from a canoe!
‘Chest up, shoulders back’ is a coaching tip that will apply to most exercises.
You won’t build muscle or get strong in two weeks. Be consistent and be impatiently patient.
If you found my tips useful, you can put them into action and follow my online, app-based training programme and see results faster. Click Here to view the programme.