Information On Weight Lifting

Weight lifting is the key ingredient to increasing muscle mass and strength. Although by a strict definition, weight lifting is a sport, the muscle building exercises are called ‘weight training'. Weight lifting exercises are different from the routine aerobic workouts. The basic concept behind weight training is to stimulate your muscles to grow both in mass as well as in strength. Let's talking about the basics of weight lifting and how you can get the most of the right exercise for you.

Weight lifting focuses on creating an anaerobic environment in which the body goes through a totally different and much more extreme synthesis of nutrients as well as muscle contraction then ever possible with aerobic workouts. When you lift weights, the set of reps that are the standard exercise format have a purpose to them. When you jog or swim, the point is to increase the heart rate ad then maintain it. These exercises are long and steady and try to get the blood to every pat of your body with a healthy supply of oxygen. Weight lifting or weight training is altogether a different picture. The weight lifting you do requires you to lift the maximum possible weight. This in turn causes the greatest contraction in the body muscles, as the muscles gather to lift the weight. The resulting intensity makes the muscle place a higher demand on the circulatory system for oxygenated blood then there is available. Thus the body goes in to an ‘oxygen deficit'. The body is programmed to work temporarily under anaerobic conditions by burning the stored glycogen and converting it into lactic acid. The lactic acid formation is what causes the burning sensation in the muscles. This is the body in emergency mode. The lactic acid causes a tear in the muscle; the muscle will now heal from this wound by growing stronger and greater in mass. Hence weight lifting is radically from the cardio and other aerobic workouts. The thing to remember is; you can only grow muscle if you weight train, aerobics are not for muscle building.

Now let's get to some basics about weight lifting;

1. Free Weights: when asked about the best way to weight lift and build muscle, free weights win, hands down. Any experienced and expert body builder will tell you that if you want real muscle you have to go for free weights. The weight lifting machines go only as far getting your body into the mood for muscle building. Beyond that it pretty much does nothing for strength development. Free weights train the body muscles naturally, distributing the weight evenly across the body and cause the maximum muscle contraction.

2. Short Training: as you've seen that anaerobic workouts call for you to lift heavy weights. The other side of this approach is that you can't carry on an exercise like that for longer periods of time. The reason is obvious, the anaerobic state your body is in causing minor muscle damage. Keep the body in this state too long and you'll have permanent muscle damage and loose muscle mass instead of building it. Your weight lifting routines should be short and intense.

3. Be Mindful of the secondary muscles: whenever you work a set of muscle, a set of secondary muscles get worked as well, every time you work your chest muscles or shoulder muscles, your triceps get a work out too. Similarly, every time you work your back muscles, your biceps get a workout. So you have to ensure that you don't overwork any one particular muscle set.

• Janny Raines
• 21/06/2009, 3:59 PM
• 0 Comments