Are you a person? If so, you should strength train. You don’t have to do it all the time or anything, but consistently, yes. The Department of Health and Human Services recommends getting at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity, or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week, or a combination of moderate and vigorous activity. It’s important to include strength training exercises in your workout for all major muscle groups at least two times a week.
Strength training isn’t just about lifting the heaviest weights at the gym. In fact, you don’t need weights or the gym, but depending on the person and their goals, they can be helpful. Most of my clients train in-home, so no gym, ever, although I do use weights with all of them. However, strength training can be done with a person’s own bodyweight if preferred or if nothing else is available. Bodyweight exercises include but certainly are not limited to squats, crunches, planks, push-ups, jumping jacks, burpees, lunges, bear crawls, oh my. Resistance bands are another effective way of strength training without weights, as is TRX and pilates. Most of us are familiar with the idea of machines or free weights, but maybe not so much HOW we should use them. My goal here is to inform you of the different ways you can go about strength training, so you can find what works best for you. In a perfect world, you would combine a variety of these methods, but let’s start somewhere. Let’s start here, and let’s begin with bodyweight exercises.
Bodyweight exercises have the potential of being the easiest and therefore most consistent ways to strength train. You don’t need equipment, and you really don’t need to do it anywhere in particular, unless you are doing step-ups or pull-ups or something of the like. What you do need is a plan of sorts. You want to make sure you hit all of the major muscle groups and you want to make sure you’re doing it safely. If you only work the upper body, you will have a weaker lower body, and vice versa. If you ignore the core, you’re really missing out. Training to avoid these kinds of muscular imbalances is important for any and all kinds of training. What’s important to keep in mind for any kind of strength training, are smooth and controlled movements. You can keep your repetitions between 12 and 15 and work on two sets of everything to start. Modify exercises if needed so that you can do them with less risk of injury, and work toward making them more challenging over time. For example, doing a plank on your knees as opposed to your toes. This gives you the opportunity to really focus on the abdominal muscles without putting as much stress on the rest of the body or the mind. Do this long enough and often enough, and you will surely build sustainable strength.
The next strength training tool I’d like to discuss are resistance bands. Resistance bands are the next best thing to bodyweight exercises when it comes to convenience. They are often inexpensive and can be easily transported. If you’re the kind of person who hates the gym, but wants to get a good strength training workout in at home without spending a lot of money on free weights and kettlebells, these are for you. So, what about the workout? Can you really, truly get an effective workout with resistance bands? YES. The bands test your muscles throughout the entire exercise. Unlike free weights where most of the load is on the flexion or otherwise known as concentric portion of the movement, resistance bands force you to control on the eccentric portion of the movement, also known as the extension. In other words, your muscles are working under tension for the entire movement. More bang for the buck! Another advantage of resistance bands is that they offer more flexibility for functional movement. We have the ability to move in ways that we move in life. Bending, squatting, turning, twisting, etc. With machines you are moving in one set plane of motion, but with resistance bands, you can twist and turn and push and pull in any and all directions. What’s so great about this tool, is that it’s safe. You are in control the entire time. The bands also make it difficult to cheat. You have to do the work to get the workout. I believe resistance bands are a wonderful way to get started with strength training, whether you’re starting out or starting over.
Free Weights are probably the most popular and widely known way of strength training. Dumbbells and Kettlebells are far less expensive than machines, but a lot pricier than resistance bands. Using free weights vs. machines gives you the ability to perform the movements more functionally, and require you to have more control while performing them. Working with free weights helps with balance and coordination as well, and have been shown to trigger a greater hormonal response than machines, which determines how your muscles rebuild and grow after you train.
Machines are one of the easiest, most mindless, and if done properly, can be the safest way to strength train. The caveat is that most of us would have to do this at the gym. Gyms are great, don’t get me wrong. But for the majority of the population, they offer many obstacles that keep us from being consistent. What’s great about machines is that you can relax the body more while working on a particular muscle group. You sit comfortably in most of them and besides stabilizing your core, which you should always do anyway, you work your quadriceps or your hamstrings, or your triceps or your lats, the list goes on. I recommend machines for strength training if you are just starting out and want to feel the muscles doing the work, because of the isolation factor. If you are able to picture the muscles doing the work, you get more out of it. This is not something that is easy to teach, so machines help with that. With a leg curl for instance, you feel that in your quadriceps. There’s no getting away from that, same with a hip adduction. When you perform these exercises on machines, that is where you feel it. No doubt about it. Machines are also helpful if you are recovering from an injury and need to protect the body while focusing on specific areas. As I said, it can be more mindless, but it’s always important to focus on your breathing, as well as how the body feels while performing the exercise. This goes for any method. Always listen to the body’s cues.
I mentioned TRX and pilates. TRX is bodyweight training with anchored straps. This is a highly effective way to get a good workout done in a short amount of time. While there’s almost always ways to modify the difficulty factor in an exercise, a lot of the moves do require significant strength and limited restrictions. Risk for injury can be higher if you aren’t sure what you’re doing. Pilates increases core strength and flexibility. It’s fairly low impact and can be modified to meet your needs. Pilates is actually what helped me recover from a pretty serious back injury in my twenties. I believe it’s what helped me take the next steps to become a Personal Trainer and to help others. Thanks, pilates!
The thing to keep in mind with any type of training, is that it won’t work if you don’t do it. You have to be consistent. No one’s life has ever been changed by that amazing workout they had that one time. Find what works for you. Try your best to enjoy it. Work out with a buddy. Put together a playlist that makes you want to move. Remind yourself why you are doing it and what you want out of it. It’s one hour or less of the 24 hours in your day. Move your body. Challenge it. And if you need help getting started, let me know. Peace, love, and strength.
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