A Beginners Guide to Lifting Weights

I recently wrote a blog on how to build your confidence in the gym, if you haven’t read it yet you can check it out here. One of the steps I recommend to building more confidence in the gym is to go with a plan and start with the basics. So I thought I’d follow up for you with a beginners guide to lifting weights.

The weights zone; area, ‘testosterzone’, place where lots of grunting happens can be really intimidating if it’s new for you. It’s a place I used to be pretty afraid of too and is often perceived as the ‘man zone’ and a place females ‘shouldn’t’ be. That’s rubbish. Everyone is entitled to use every area of the gym. So hold your head high and strut into that zone!

First things first, you’ll want to start off with a full body program to target all your major muscle groups. You may have areas that you want to target more than others but trust me when I say doing hundreds of sit ups isn’t going to reduce belly fat (just an example but a very common mistake people make). Concentrate on nailing the basic movements and progress from there.

When you first start weight training you’re likely to experience those ‘newbie gains’ as a result of your body having to change and adapt to something new. This will eventually plateau out but that doesn’t mean you won’t benefit from continuing your training. You’ll need to start to apply progressive overload to your workouts and increase the intensity as you get stronger and adapt.

The Basic Movement Patterns

A full body workout should consist of each of the below movement patterns. It’s also recommended that you increase the pull movements to two to three in each workout for every push movement. When you’re starting out, focusing on the bigger compound movements is key compared to smaller isolation exercises. You get more bang for your buck!

You’ll need to think about the rep and set ranges to use as well. Depending on your goals, you’ll want to select the following:

Strength: Reps 3-6, Sets 5-8
Hypertrophy (muscle gain): Reps 8-12, Sets 3-5
Endurance: Reps 12-20, Sets 3-5

Most people benefit from a mixture of all three. Make sure to be really comfortable and confident in your technique before you load your body too much to avoid any injuries. Start with lower weights and build up slowly from there. You’re not likely to be lifting your bodyweight straight off. You want to build up to the exercises being challenging but manageable.

Squat
These are movements that are knee dominant - squats (goblet, barbell, front racked, single racked), lunges (reverse, walking, forward), step ups, split squats.

Hinge
These are movements that are hip dominant, think pushing your bum back and folding yourself in half at the hips - deadlifts (conventional, Romanian, suitcase, hexbar, single leg), kettlebell swings, hip thrusts, glute bridges, good mornings and pull throughs.

Vertical Push
These are movements where you push over head in a vertical movement - shoulder press, arnold press, push press, military press, landmine press.

Horizontal Push
These are movements where you push in a horizontal plane away from your chest - press ups, bench press, chest press (cable or dumbbells), chest flyes (cable or dumbbells), floor press

Vertical Pull
These are movements where you pull in a vertical plane - there are three main exercises pull ups, chin ups and lat pull down

Horizontal Pull
As you’ve probably guessed, these are movements where you pull in a horizontal plane - dumbbell prone rows, single arm rows, cable rows, inverted rows, cable face pulls, reverse flyes (cable or dumbbell)

These are your main components to your workout but if you do have time and want to add a little more, here are a some core focused movements. I’m not a fan of endless crunches and sit ups so these are more functional for everyday life.

Rotational Core Exercises
As the title suggest these are movements based around rotation - cable woodchops, cable pallof twists, russian twists, side plank rotations, windmills

Anti-rotational Core Exercises
These exercises are essential to help increase core stability, avoiding rotation through the torso and hips - plank variations, deadbugs, pallof press. bear crawl holds and drags, landmine around the worlds

This will give you the basis of a good full body workout to start your weight training off. If you’re still in need of some help and guidance please do get in touch. I have spaces available for Personal Training at David Lloyd Peterborough and in the comfort of your own home.