Weightlifting: a beginners guide
Many forms of exercise have some sort of stigma around them, as everyone believes they have found the ideal way to get healthy. Lifting and strength training is a perfect example of a type of exercise where misconceptions can get in the way of people finding a rewarding and extremely healthy hobby. When I have spoken with those who have never gotten into lifting I often hear things like “I don’t want to get hurt”, “I don't want to bulk up”, or “I don't want to be judged.” While these are valid fears, they don't represent the weight lifting experience as a whole. It can be really intimidating to the uninitiated, and it's not hard to see why: You walk into the gym and see a bunch of machines and exercises unfamiliar to you with people lifting huge amounts of weight.
The apprehensiveness around lifting obscures the benefits. There is the obvious and desirable benefit of building one's physique which leads to greater confidence and healthier habits. Walking around with a body that you’ve built through hard work and dedication is one of the most rewarding and transformative experiences, especially for those who have suffered from insecurity. We can all get there; it’s just a matter of consistency and the right approach.
On a physical level, weight lifting has been shown to burn more calories than cardio. This is due to a metabolic spike that lifting produces, which means that over the next 24 hours you end up burning more calories total despite burning fewer during the actual exercise. Lifting is also great for the bones and has been shown to even induce bone growth.
Furthermore, it’s the ideal fat burner, as it creates lean body mass which requires more calories, priming your body to burn fat. Even injury prevention can be improved through lifting due to its ability to strengthen supporting muscles and fix imbalances.
You can lift for any reason you choose. What’s important is how you start. On a basic level, there are two approaches to lifting: lifting for strength or lifting for size. Exercises are broken down by sets and repetitions, for example, a single curl would be one repetition and then five consecutive curls would be one set of five.
Three sets is a widely accepted standard. If you are going for strength you want to be doing sets of 5 or fewer repetitions, and if you want to get maximum muscle size you want to do 6 sets and up. You could alternate between the two, but it’s all down to preference. This is true for all exercises. Another general rule when starting out is to start with less weight than you think you should be doing to get a feel and moving up until your third set of that weight is fairly difficult – but not to the point where you sacrifice form.
People new to the gym are often drawn to the machines, which is a great way to isolate individual muscles. But in terms of being as balanced as possible, I highly recommend exercises that are more whole-body focused. This allows you to hit all sorts of stabilizer muscles that you would never activate on most machines. Some great ones I regularly do are back squat, Romanian deadlift, weighted lunges, pull-ups, push-ups, bent over rows, goblet squat, shoulder press, and lat pulldowns. These exercises will collectively work just about every muscle in your body.