Effective Strength Training Workout - It's About Good Techniques, Sets, Reps, Weights And Frequency

You want an effective strength training workout? In fact all of us want it because an effective one really promotes strength and muscle growth, which are precious 'ingredients" to health and well-being.

I'm focusing here on the aspects of training technique; sets, repetitions (reps); weights and training frequency.

1. Training Technique

Don't use too heavy a weight as it results in poor form and decreases your ability to get results, increases your risk of injury and results in your blood not get sent to the working muscle.

Do each exercise through a full range of motion; advantageous for strengthening the muscles directly trained in the exercise, e.g. the triceps in tricep extension. When you do a full range, it's also beneficial to your muscles that act in opposition in the exercise.

Do at least 1 exercise for each major muscle group to promote well-balanced muscle development. If you just train a few selective muscle groups or train only 1 muscle group, it increases your risk of injury.

Your exercise sequence is important too. You should start exercising from the larger muscle groups to the smaller muscle groups as this offers you optimal performance of the most demanding exercises when fatigue levels are at the lowest and you're at your strongest, energy wise.

2. Sets

A set is the number of successive reps done without resting.

How many sets per exercise you wanna do is a matter of your choice, goal and interest.

I suggest you treat the first set of 12-15 reps (with light weight) as a warm up.

After this, you can do either 1 or 2 sets, for the first exercise for a particular muscle group.

When doing the second exercise, you can do either 2 or 3 sets since the muscle is already warmed-up from the first exercise. Regardless of the number of sets done, you should do each set and each rep in proper form and under control.

Don't do too many sets per exercise, and/or do too many exercises per muscle group. It could bring you more harm than good.

For large muscle groups (such as back, chest, shoulders), 2 to 4 exercises for each muscle is enough.

For smaller muscle groups (such as biceps, calves, trapezius), 1 to 3 exercises are enough.

3. Reps

It's good for you to understand the inverse relationship between resistance and reps. It's like these:

When you exercise to the point of muscle fatigue, you can do about 6 reps with 85% of maximum resistance

P/S: Maximum resistance is the most weight you can lift one time, in good form

In most cases, you can do 8 reps with 80% of maximum resistance, 10 reps with 75% of maximum resistance and 12 reps with 70% of maximum resistance

I would say in most of the cases, 8-12 reps with 70-80% of maximum resistance is already a sound training for your strength and muscle development.

4. Weights

How do you gauge how much weight you should use? Well, make your best conservative guess.

After you've warmed up using a light weight and doing 12-15 reps; in your next set, get a weight that'll challenge you for your targeted reps. If you aren't sure what that weight should be, get a weight that's likely to be lighter, rather than a weight that's heavier (that with it you find hard to do your targeted reps).

Get a weight for each set that can challenge your muscle and that can allow you to do your targeted reps, say 6, 8, 10, 12 or 15 reps.

If you get a weight that's too heavy and you won't be able to do all the targeted reps in good form, do as many as you can. For the next set, get a lighter weight.

As your muscles get used to a given weight, you must gradually increase the weight to stimulate further gains.

Your key to strength and muscle development is that you increase weight progressively. You do it by gradually and continually adding weight to the exercise, over time, when the previous weights become too easy for you to lift. You do this to continuously force your muscles to work harder, to increase your muscle growth and strength.

However, I would like to stress here that you increase the weight only if the previous weight is too light. If you increase the weight just to push yourself harder, you may end up in poor form and increase your risk of injury.

One more thing to note - an increase in reps is an increase in strength too contrary to the belief that only an increase in weight is an increase in strength. This is especially true when you've increased the reps and can do the exercise with good form.

5. Don't Over Train

Over train here means:

-You feel tired, sored or weak, after each workout

-You don't let your muscle have enough rest

-You train the wrong muscle groups on consecutive days

-You do too many exercises and too many sets for each muscle group

You shouldn't train the same muscle groups on 2 or more days in a row (Note: your abs is the only exception).

For instance, you would do chest, shoulders, triceps, and abs on Monday; train your legs, back, biceps and abs on Tuesday; then take Wednesday off to let all your muscle groups rest; on Thursday you'd do chest, shoulders, triceps and abs again and on Friday legs, back, biceps, and abs again.

Train like this, you allow 2 days of rest for each muscle between training days.

By: Cecelia Yap

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Cecelia Yap is an avid exerciser and author of the popular exercise website: perfect-body-toning.com - a web site born out of her passion which she successfully turns into a profitable business. Perhaps you have a passion or hobby you'd like to write about. Find out how you too can turn it into a profitable business like Cecelia does, here: www.perfect-body-toning.com/my-passion.html