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Weight Lifting RoutinesThe right weight lifting routines are essential for anyone looking to make progress with their training. It's pretty obvious that you can’t just show up and do what you feel. A few curls here, a few crunches there? – nope, thats not going to cut it; your body doesn't work that way. Sure, it’s better than nothing - but if you want to make real, tangible gains, you need to train smart and get yourself on the right program. If you’re serious about getting big, lean, strong, or fast - and whether you're a complete beginner or pro-athlete - you'll find the right routine for you at Real Weight Lifting.
The Principle of Overload The most important concept in any weight lifting routine is the principle of progressive overload. The body adapts to stresses placed upon it. If you go from a sedentary lifestyle to lifting weights twice per week, the increased stress on the body stimulates changes – muscle fibres will grow, making you bigger, and neural pathways will strengthen, making you stronger. However, if, after a few weeks, you are still doing the same exercises, with the same weight and number of reps - you will stop gaining. Your training will come to a standstill. Why? Because your body has already adapted to the demands of your routine! When your muscles are big enough and strong enough to handle the workout comfortably, your body has no need to grow. So to keep gaining continuously, you need to progressively overload your body – and that’s exactly what any good weight lifting routine is designed to do. There are a few basic ways to implement the overload principle in your workouts. For example:
Most people are also interested in maximising their gains, i.e. reaching their fitness goals sooner rather than later. Once you know what you’re training for (General fitness? Gaining Muscle Mass? Strength and Power?), you can pick the right weight lifting routine. For, some it’s not only about progressive overload, but utilising a fine-tuned weight lifting routine that ensures they develop the right components of fitness in the right order, and peak at the right time. Bodybuilders, for example, usually aim to add as much mass as possible most of the year, then cut the fat, while sparing muscle, in the weeks leading up to contest. Sprinters, on the other hand, alter their weight lifting as their focus of training shifts -– they may spend a few weeks doing Olympic lifts for explosiveness off the blocks, a few weeks of lifting for core stability and posture, then a period of adding muscle mass. Their lifting also has to be finely-tuned to ensure their fitness peaks in time for a major competition. Advanced trainees and athletes experience diminishing returns with their training. That means that for an Olympic athlete, it may take a year to add 10lbs to his clean-and-jerk, or shave .05 seconds off his 100m sprint. If you’ve been training for size, after a few years, you’ll have to work harder and harder for those few extra pounds of muscle. Making changes to your weight lifting routine and switching it up may be exactly what you need to bust through a plateau and kickstart your gains.
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