Today the Amazing Stickie is working on her amazing behind by doing dumbbell frog pumps.
She begins lying on her back with dumbbells held at her hips and her legs in butterfly position (feet together, knees out). From there, she lifts her hips toward the ceiling and lowers them.
A set of ten should be good.
It’s time to work the glutes! Among other things, of course. Three rounds.
step up (reverse lunge) | 30 |
deadlift/good morning | 20 |
donkey kick | 10 |
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1 arm clean and press | 30 |
rows | 20 |
bridge chest press | 10 |
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opposite knees | 30 |
kickbacks | 20 |
plank walk | 10 |
The Amazing Stickie has amazing hips and legs, natch. Today she is working on them by doing Cossack lunge. She begins standing up straight with her hands clasped in front of her chest. She takes a giant step out to one side, externally rotating both legs and bending the knee toward which she is stepping. (Most people should probably not go past the point where the thigh on the stepping leg is parallel to the floor, at first.) The foot on the the non-bent leg should be pointing up toward the ceiling (i.e., heel on the floor, toes up!).
If you have knee problems, this exercise is one to approach with caution. Don’t do it if it hurts.
Stickie does twenty or thirty for a set.
Today I’m going to share some of my very best advice on exercise and diet. Here we go: lie on the couch all day and eat cake.
April Fools!
(Seriously: move a little and eat a vegetable.)
We made it to the end of another month. Sadly, our prize is burpees. This is a short circuit, so try four rounds.
1 min cardio | |
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skier jumps | 30 |
bench press | 20 |
pushup renegade row | 10 |
flies | 20 |
burpees | 10 |
pretty princesses | 10 |
Stickie loves exercise variations. Today she is trying Alternating Crossbody Front Raise. She begins standing up tall holding some relatively light dumbbells. She lifts one of the dumbbells toward her opposite shoulder by bending her elbow. She lowers it back to start and then repeats on the other side.
A set of ten is good.
Plyometrics are good for most of us. A little impact with the ground helps keep our bones strong. However, if jumping is not indicated for you, please do the side lunges instead of the lateral bounds. Three rounds.
squat to leg lift | 30 |
bench press | 20 |
overhead press | 10 |
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lateral bound/side lunge | 30 |
flies | 20 |
upright row | 10 |
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woodchoppers | 30 |
skullcrushers | 20 |
Russian twist | 10 |
The Amazing Stickie loves a challenge, so today she is doing dumbbell pullover with bridge. She begins in bridge position with dumbbells in her hands on the floor over her head. From there, she will lift the dumbbells until they are directly over her shoulders. Then she will lower them close to but not touching the floor. She will not let the dumbbells touch the floor until the end of the set.
A set of ten should do it.
Yet another goal folks might have for their strength training is power. Power, in this context, is the ability to generate a lot of force fast.
To train for power, we want to use fairly heavy weights and work with a quick tempo. We also want to work on explosive movements (think plyometrics!).
Power training is not something we do every single workout. Most of the time, we want to work on max strength or hypertrophy or even cycle back through some endurance/stability work. Then we can spend a month or so doing power workouts.
Proper form is absolutely essential for power workouts. When we’re moving fast with heavy objects, we need to be sure that we are using our bodies well.
Go play.
Another possible goal that people might have for their strength training is… maximum strength. What maximum strength means is that we work to lift the most we possibly can one time, our one rep max.
To do this, not surprisingly, we lift heavy weights in short sets. For each exercise, we do a warm-up set of about ten reps at an easy weight. Then we increase the weight in increments of five to ten pounds, decreasing the reps. Eventually, we’ll be able to complete two or three reps. And then we’ll find the weight where we can only complete a single rep while maintaining good form. This kind of lifting requires longer rests between sets for best results, so it is another place where supersetting different muscle groups is a good plan (e.g., squats and bench press). It also takes a good amount of time to go from warm up to one rep max, so a workout might be two exercises, and that’s all right. We can do different exercises the next time.
One important safety note: heavy lifting is not something to do alone. Work with a buddy or a trainer or at the very least in a gym with other people there. Spotters are super useful.
The first set is all about weight bearing on the arms. If that is not appropriate for you, feel free to sub regular jacks and rows, saving your arms for the pushups. Three rounds.
plank jacks | 30 |
renegade rows | 20 |
pushups | 10 |
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leg kicks | 30 |
deadlifts/good mornings | 20 |
Arnold press | 10 |
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suitcase swing | 30 |
1 leg squat | 20 |
brains | 10 |
Today the Amazing Stickie is working on her amazing hips by doing side lying hip abduction. She begins in what looks like a fairly relaxed position, lying on her side on a bench, propped up on one elbow. Her bottom leg is bent a little and her top leg is long. She moves her top leg a little behind her, so that when she raises and lowers it, she can lower it past the level of the bench.
Sets of ten are good.
Once folks have built up some basic endurance and stability, the next step depends on what their goals are. One possible goal is hypertrophy. That’s a five-dollar word for building big muscles.
People working toward hypertrophy still need to work all their muscle groups, but the way we want to do it changes. We choose weights that are heavier and we do fewer reps. We want weights that allow us to complete only 6 to 12 reps at a time. Our tempo also changes a little, in that we lift the weight fairly quickly and lower it more slowly. We want to do two to three sets of each exercise with at least a 30 second rest between sets.
(This is why circuit training is so useful! We do one set of all our exercises and by the time we get back to the beginning, the first muscle group has had plenty of time to recover. We get out of the gym sooner!)
Next week, we’ll talk about two other possible goals.
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.
One of this week’s themes is posture. Holding the hands behind the head during squats helps ensure that the back stays nice and straight. Three rounds.
kb swings | 30 |
kb twist | 20 |
kb 8s | 10 |
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prisoner squat | 30 |
rows | 20 |
kickbacks | 10 |
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tap backs | 30 |
curls | 20 |
windscreen wiper | 10 |
Today the Amazing Stickie is working with her incline bench in a different way doing chest supported rows. She sits with the front of her upper body leaning on the inclined portion of the bench (n.b., this does not mean that she does not keep her abdominals active) holding dumbbells in her hands. Then she rows the dumbbells as she would do if she were standing.
Sets of ten to twenty are good, depending on the weight.
Yesterday we talked about endurance as a basis for our strength training program. The other base we need is stability. In other words, we need to work on balance.
There are, of course, lots of ways to work on balance. Perhaps the simplest way is to do something we normally do standing on both feet standing on one. Things like single leg squats, single leg deadlifts, and the like fall into this category.
Another way to work balance is to add an element of instability to our workout. This is where we get to use toys. A stability ball that we roll out on to do our bench press instead of lying on a bench is a good example. Anything we do with a BOSU is another good example. Many TRX exercises put us in positions where we have to stabilize while we work and thus improve our balance.
Yet another way is to do a bit of cross training with Pilates or yoga.
A word of caution: start small. Balance, like any other skill, is best built gradually and safely.
I’ve spent the last two months talking about why strength training is good for us. Now it’s time to talk about how. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of ways to go about strength training. It all depends on the goal.
When we first start out, we need to start by building some endurance and some stability. That means that, generally, we are going to be lifting relatively light weights in relatively long sets and we’re going to do some balance work. (I’ll talk about balance work tomorrow.)
Let’s define “relatively light weights.” Sort of. My relatively light weights are not anybody else’s. A relatively light weight is one that I can use to complete a set of twenty reps. This might take a bit of experimentation. I may optimistically select a five hundred pound weight (I am being ridiculous on purpose because people get weird about numbers sometimes) for my curls and discover that I can only do 10 reps. That is a perfectly respectable set, but I will want to choose a lighter weight for my next set.
A relatively long set is a little easier to define. It’s somewhere between 12 and 20 reps.
We combine the two things like this. I find a weight for which I can complete 12 reps. I keep using the same weight until I can complete more and more reps. When I can complete a set of 20, I increase the weight and drop back down to 12 reps. Lather, rinse, repeat. We do the same process for each exercise.
This week we’re doing Bulgarian split squats. People with troublesome knees can substitute either lunges (to reduce the load) or any other exercise they like. Three rounds.
mountain climbers | 30 |
bulgarian split squat | 20 |
farmer carry | 10 |
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squat raise | 30 |
bench press | 20 |
lateral raise | 10 |
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woodchoppers | 30 |
flies | 20 |
plank up down | 10 |
All right! We have made it to our final motivational reason to do strength training: It helps us prevent or control a bunch of chronic diseases. (Disclaimer: working out is no substitute for actual medical care! It is a useful adjunct to drugs and other treatments that your doctor can provide!)
Life is just better with less diabetes, coronary artery disease, arthritis, back pain, and depression. Lifting weights seems like a much easier option than dealing with all those other things.
Go lift already.
