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 |
| |
leg kicks | 30 |
deadlifts/good mornings | 20 |
Arnold press | 10 |
| |
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.
