Introduction to Strength Training
Learn How to Start Building Strength At Home
When some people hear “strength training”, they think of people in strong man competitions lifting thousands of pounds with ease. They think if they add strength training to their fitness routine, they’ll get “too bulky”. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, some strength training workouts involve lifting weights, and of course weights or resistance bands help, but you can also achieve the same results without any additional equipment.
Below, we cover the basics of what makes a workout a strength training workout, the benefits of strength training, the different types, how to perform a good strength training workout, and then cover the different gear and equipment that can help once you get more experienced.
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Strength Training Table of Contents
What is Strength Training?
Strength training, which some refer to as “resistance training” or “weight training”, exercises are exercises where you exert resistance on your muscles. For example, when you lift something up, the weight of the object is exerting resistance against the muscles you’re using to lift it up. Another example could be when you do a pull up, your arm and back muscles are fighting against the resistance that is made up of gravity trying to pull you back down.
Those who practice strength training may be working towards different goals. Some strength training routines can be geared towards lifting a very heavy weight only once or twice. Other routines could be focused on increasing the size of your muscles. And even other routines can strive for building general strength throughout the body to reduce the risk of injury. But in all cases, the goal of strength training is to build muscle mass.
Strength training exercises build muscle mass when a resistance exerts enough stress on your muscles, the resistance creates microscopic tears in your muscle fibers. Don’t worry! This is all part of the process! Because when you rest after the workout, your body begins to repair those tears, which ends up making the muscles stronger, increasing muscle mass and strength over time. This process of creating tears and repairing them is known as “hypertrophy”, and it’s the foundation of strength training and why you want to always gradually increase the difficulty of your workouts, either by increasing weight or repetitions. But we’ll go more into that when we explain how to do a strength training workout.
Benefits of Strength Training
The benefit of strength training that gets the most spotlight is the obvious increase in muscle mass, which improves your appearance and makes any physical work you do outside of exercising even easier. But by adding strength training workouts to your routine, you can unlock even more benefits.
Improved Bone Health
Strength training builds your muscles, but did you know it also helps build bone density as well? Similar to how hypertrophy involves repair tears in muscles when working out, the process of “bone remodeling” works the same way: when stress is placed on your bones, a process of “resorption” removes the old bone tissue and the process of “ossification” creates new bone tissue to replace it, making the bone stronger. The goal of bone remodeling is to increase bony density in the area receiving the stress, which helps your body better support the new load on the bones.
Boosted Metabolism and Fat Loss
Another popular benefit of strength training is how it affects your body’s ability to increase metabolism and burn fat. Because muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue, the more muscle tissue you have, the calories you burn even when you’re not exercising. Yes, that means you can burn fat when you’re working out and when you’re resting. Strength training then continues to improve this process because as you practice strength training and build more muscle mass, you’re creating more muscle tissue that is burning more fat.
Reduced Risk of Injury and Better Posture and Balance
We already mentioned how strength training improves bone health, but by strengthening the muscles around your joints, you improve the stability of your joints and reduce the risk of sprains, strains, or even tears.
Another way strength training reduces the risk of injury is by improving your posture and balance. When you strengthen your core and muscles around your joints, your body’s posture improves along with your balance, which in turn reduces the risk of falls or injuries, a great benefit as we get older.
Better Mood, Mental Health, and Energy Levels
As we mentioned in our Introduction to Cardio, exercise of any kind releases endorphins, which are hormones that act as natural pain relievers and are often called the “feel-good” chemicals because they make you feel better and improve your mood.
Hormones aside, simply seeing the results of your strength training after a few months is a way of crushing any self conscious feelings you may have about your body.
Finally, simply by practicing strength training on a regular basis, you will start to see your energy levels increase as your feelings of fatigue start to reduce.
Types of Strength Training Exercises
Like we said above, strength training requires a resistance to exert an opposing force against your muscles. But how you create the resistance, what equipment you use, and how you perform the exercise creates a good variety of strength training exercises.
Bodyweight Exercises
If you’re incline to stop reading right now and try strength training, you can right now simply by performing body weight exercises. These are exercises that use your own body weight as the resistance. Some examples include push-ups, pullups, squats, lunges, and planks. Because you don’t need any additional equipment, these are great for beginners to start with, but are also good for experienced strength training practitioners to sprinkle into their workouts as well.
Resistance Bands
Once you’re ready to start adding some additional resistance to your workouts but not sure what weights you want to use, resistance bands are an affordable, flexible, and portable option to try. Resistance bands are large elastic bands that increase their resistance the more they’re stretched, similar to a rubberband. Because resistance bands are essentially formless, you can use them to add resistance to any strength training exercise you want to do.
Free Weights
When you’re ready to try an even higher range of weights, free weights are your next best bet. Because you can add or remove weights, you can set the weight to a level of resistance challenging enough for your muscles. With either a set of free weight dumbbells or barbells, you can perform almost any strength training exercise you can think of.
Functional Training
Functional training refers to strength training exercises that mimic movements in everyday life. For example, if you travel up and down stairs frequently day-to-day, lunges may be a good functional training exercise as it mimics the movements of your legs as you go up stairs.
In general, functional training improves strength, balance, and coordination, which helps with everyday life, your athletic abilities, and an overall reduction in the risk of injury.
Isometric Training
Isometric exercises are a bit different from other strength training exercises. In an isometric exercise, your muscles contact against a fixed resistance, meaning the resistance doesn’t move. This provides a different way to challenge your muscles, but it also provides a way to exercise muscles in a rehabilitation setting. Some examples of isometric exercises include planks for core strength, wall sits for leg strength, and static holds where you hold a weight in a fixed position.
Plyometrics
Lastly, plyometric exercises focus on snap movements to help practice your power and agility. Some plyometric exercises include jump squats, box jumps, and burpees. Plyometrics are great for everyone, but can be considered mandatory for athletes seeking to improve any explosive movements required in their sport, such as jumping and sprinting.
How to Do a Strength Training Workout
Before just jumping into our strength training workout, let’s cover the main steps first.
Safety First
Of course, safety is important for anything we do, but with strength training, proper form and safety is absolutely critical to not only protecting against injury, but to ensure we workout our muscles effectively.
Also, although we will not be working up a sweat when strength training as compared to cardio, it’s still important to stay hydrated before, during, and after a workout.
And don’t forget to complete your warm-up and cooldown stretches to ensure your muscles are loose and ready to undergo the strain of the upcoming strength training workout.
Finally, remember to listen to your body and consult a healthcare professional if certain aches or pains persist.
Set Your Goal and Choose the Right Exercise
Next on the list is deciding on the goal of the workout. Do you want to grow your muscles? Are you building strength to perform better in sports and everyday life? Is being able to deadlift a car something that appeals to you? Whatever your goal is, it’s important to clearly define it so you can structure the rest of your workout properly.
For beginners, splitting up your workouts between push, pull, and leg days is a great starting point. On push days, you perform exercises like bench press, shoulder press, or pushups. On pull days, you perform exercises like rows, pullups, or pulldowns. On leg days, you perform exercises like squats, lunges, or leg curls.
For each exercise on each of these days, a popular choice for the sets and reps is to perform each exercise for 3 sets of 12 repetitions and resting 60-90 seconds between sets. As you continue to progress, you can deviate from the exercises you do in a workout, how many sets and reps you choose to do, or make the resting periods shorter or longer. Again, it all depends on your goal.
And don’t worry if you don’t feel like you’re making progress in the first few weeks. It can take months, or even years to achieve your goal. But don’t let that intimidate you! Set milestones for yourself to celebrate your progress, trust the process, and keep moving forward.
Warm-Up
Once you have your exercise plan set, the next step is to warm up to prevent any injury or strain on your muscles.
To warm-up, like warming up for a cardio workout, you can do either a single or set of exercises for 5 to 10 minutes at a lower intensity, such as jumping rope or a light jog, to start to increase your heart rate and loosen your muscles. But for strength training, it’s a good practice to also do a couple sets of lighter weight on the first exercise of your workout to warm-up your target muscles directly.
Ready, Set, Exercise!
After you’ve warmed up, you’re ready to begin your strength training workout.
Unless you’re doing a circuit training workout, where you perform strength training exercises one after another with little to no rest, you shouldn’t need to worry about your heart rate as much as you do with cardio. But if you do feel you’re struggling to keep up with the workout, you can reduce the weight, reduce the reps, or increase the rest period between sets.
As we mentioned above, we cannot stress enough the importance of proper form and safety. Never lift a weight you can’t lift with good form. Sure, you can swing the weights to get subpar reps, but you’re opening yourself up to the risk of injury and your workout won’t be as effective at building muscle. Don’t be ashamed if you have to use a lighter weight: all that matters if you’re exerting a challenging resistance on your muscles to help build their strength.
Also, don’t forget to stay hydrated before, during, and after your cardio exercise!
Cool Down Stretch
As with any workout, we stretch after the workout to help our body cooldown and reduce muscle soreness later on. This is a big help with strength training workouts, as once you start a new workout routine and challenge your muscles in a different way, you will still experience some level of soreness.
A good rule of thumb is to stretch the primary muscles used in the workout for about 10-15 seconds per stretch.
As with any workout, we stretch after the workout to help our body cooldown and reduce muscle soreness later on. This is a big help with strength training workouts, as once you start a new workout routine and challenge your muscles in a different way, you will still experience some level of soreness.
A good rule of thumb is to stretch the primary muscles used in the workout for about 10-15 seconds per stretch.
Track Your Progress
Either during or after your workout, you will want to track your progress. You can track your progress either in a journal or an app, but the point is you want to track your sets, reps, and weights on certain exercises. This will help you in two ways.
One way tracking your progress helps you can add more sets, reps, or weight to gradually increase the difficulty of the workout until you’re not able to increase the difficulty without sacrificing form. The other way is you will be able to see your progress over time.
The other way tracking your progress helps is you can see your progress over time. Because we only see ourselves in day-to-day glances, we can miss the progress we make over weeks, months, and years. Track your progress so you can celebrate your own personal successes.
Strength Training Gear
Strength training, at least initially, can be done without any extra equipment. By using your own bodyweight as your resistance, you can do pushups, sit ups, lunges, and pullups to perform strength training exercises for your full body. Even when starting out and early into using external resistances, some strength training gear can help
Footwear and Clothing
As with any exercise, you want to make sure you’re wearing the proper footwear and clothing for your activity. If you’re performing push or pull exercises, you may not want to wear something that restricts your movements. If you’re performing leg exercises like squats or lunges, you may want to avoid wearing sandals that put you at risk of injury.
Water Bottle
Remember, priority number one is safety, and part of safety when exercising is staying hydrated. Finding a water bottle that is durable, refillable, and easy to carry will help you stay hydrated while working out.
Music Player
As with most workouts, they can feel like they drag on and on, but by listening to music, you can make the workout more enjoyable and help you stay motivated. You can also multitask: workout while listening to podcasts or eBooks to learn something new while working out.
Ideally, a smartphone with wireless headphones works best so you don’t have the hassle of any headphone wires.
Gloves
For exercises that require you to grip a bar, workout gloves can help improve your grip along with helping you avoid developing any hard callouses on your hands as well.
Strength Training Equipment For Your Home
With only a few pieces of equipment for your home gym, you can unlock the possibility of performing full strength training workouts from home. A few popular options are:
Dumbbells
Dumbbells are handheld weights where the weight is even on both sides of the handle and can be used on any muscle group. This makes dumbbells one of the most useful pieces of equipment in your home gym.
Another great benefit of dumbbells is they allow for “unilateral training”, which means they train the side of the body lifting the dumbbell. This helps resolve any muscle imbalances where one side of the body is stronger than the other.
Kettlebells
Kettlebells, like dumbbells, have the user hold onto a handle, the handle is above the weight. Dumbbells are better for beginners, but kettlebells are great home gym additions as one gains more experience. By helping improve grip strength, stability, and coordination, kettlebells are a great tool for full-body workouts and functional training.
Barbells
Barbells, like dumbbells, have the weight evenly distributed on both sides of the bar, but the bar itself can be up to 5 or 6 feet in length. Also unlike dumbbells, you can add more weight to barbells and lift heavier weights to perform compound exercises like bench presses, squats, and deadlifts. Barbells are a great way to build strength and muscle mass.
Dumbbells, kettlebells, and free weights, despite having a wide array of uses in different exercises, all provide a way for you to build muscle through strength exercises from home!
Strength Training Summary
Strength training workouts can cover a wide range of exercises, goals, and equipment. But at the end of the day, the goal is to help build muscle through the workout to unlock the various benefits of strength training. As you progress in your fitness journey, you can learn more about other types of strength training workouts and try them out.
But with nearly every workout, the process is the same: safety first, set your goal, warmup, exercise with proper form, cooldown, and track your progress. Also, along your journey, as you begin to try new workouts, you can add new strength training gear and equipment to your home gym.
Now it’s up to you to decide what type of strength training workouts you want to do, set your personal goals, and always keep learning more.
We hope this guide helps set a good foundation for you if you plan to pursue strength training. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to Contact Us so we can continue to help!