Strength Training: Muscle Groups

Another important thing to consider when we begin strength training is that we need to work our whole bodies.  We do this by targeting different muscle groups with different exercises.  One way to think about this is to recognize that some muscles bend our joints and other muscles straighten them back out.

For example, our biceps and its helpers on one side of our arms bend our elbows.  Our triceps and its helpers straighten our elbows.  If we only do bicep curls, we are not building strength for extending our elbows and we end up, at the extreme, looking funny and not working too well.

 

So:  we need to work on bending and extending, front and back, lateral movements, twisting movements, pushing and pulling.  We will find that we like some of those more than others.  It is tempting to skip the ones we don’t like, but it’s pretty important that we don’t.  Having strong muscles on every side of our joints (looking at you, knees) helps keep them functional in all our activities.