Strength training fundamentals

Fire Within Nutrition and Fitness

Many people, women especially, feel that weight training will cause them to bulk up and look like their muscles have muscles instead of tone. There are no accidental bodybuilders walking around who after a couple of trips to the gym find themselves with the physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger. That is a myth. Moderate strength training can be one of the most effective ways to increase your cardio, lean muscle, and ability to lose weight rapidly.

You want to work your largest muscle groups, which is your legs, they are going to give you the most progress. Those are your largest muscle groups, so you're going to be tearing more muscle fiber, which will build up stronger and have more impact on your metabolism.

We also discuss the myth that by working out you can now eat unhealthily because your hard work will cancel out any poor decisions of the day. The reality is that when you work out you create microtears in your muscle fiber that are healed and grow back stronger by maintaining a combination of healthy nutrition, rest. and sleep.

What we want to do through strength training is create a moderate amount of stress, enough to signal that increase in strength in your body, but not so much that you get injured. You've got to find a balance. You can overdo it and get injured. But if we do the right amount, which is that usually that eight to 12 rep range for most people finding a weight that fatigues them in that rep range is going to be pretty safe.

We also discuss neuromuscular facilitation. In other words, getting more efficient at firing the right types of muscles in the right order. How does muscle confusion work? And what does muscle confusion look like in your workouts?

On choosing the right weight: So what you'll do is your guesstimate, what you think you can do eight to 12 reps with, with perfect form. That's a really important caveat. It's not just moving the weight from point A to point B eight to 12 reps. It's how many of those can you do with perfect form?

Warm-up: I would always recommend some sort of warmup. And the warmup for me is just three to five minutes of cardio, maybe some very brief stretching. You don't need a half-hour warm-up routine with foam rolling and all this other nonsense. First of all, if you stretch too much before exercise, your muscles, fibers are elongated to an unnatural position they're not familiar with.

So you're more likely to get injured. so I think a little bit of stretching, dynamic stretching three to five-second holds is good. but you don't need this big elaborate 30 to 45-minute routine.

We talk about corrective exercises to help prevent injury. These are typically 12-15 reps with lighter weight, focusing on perfect form. Correctives basically keep you in the game longer so you can keep exercising.

We discuss the signs and symptoms of overtraining.

Also mentioned in this episode

• P90X
• Show Her Off dance course
• Jeff Cavaliere Athlean X
• The National Academy of Sports Medicine