While I’m not a complete newbie to strength training I have not done it with any serious motivation, commitment or focus before so I figured that the best way to make strength training more fun was to create a similar type of journal as I did when I started running. This log will be used to keep track of strength gains and to build a sort of personalized catalog of exercises.
As always when I commit to a project I have started out with doing some quite extensive research and come to several conclusions:
Research suggest that no matter what I do, as a beginner, I should be able to increase my strength rapidly at first. So I should not have to worry about setting up a really fancy program as it simply won’t matter what exercises I do. Then it also makes sense to opt for the safest and simplest exercises I can think of. This is not only prudent but leaves room for future experimentation. This is important since it is considered beneficial to change exercise schedule roughly every 2 months. If you start out trying the fanciest most efficient exercises you have nothing left once you hit that infamous plateau. So keeping it to regular curls before switching to hammer curls would seem logical.
Research also suggest that the old saying of “less is more” also holds for the number of sets one should do. After the first set, you start getting diminished returns on every set that follows. I will obviously need more sets initially to find my starting weights, but I will eventually limit my exercise to a maximum of two sets of 8-12 repetitions per muscle.
When it comes to the choice between free weights and machines, I opt for starting out with machines since the motions are more isolated and thus safer. However since there are benefits to using free weights, I will move more towards that in the future.
At first when I started searching for good exercises to start out with I was quite overwhelmed by the huge amount of alternative exercises that you can potentially do for each muscle group. But one has to realize that it would be impractical to do all of those exercises all at once so one has to make a choice to narrow it down. So I figured, why not make this choice as limited as possible, choosing exactly one exercise per muscle. While this may mean that I might not be targeting all of my supporting muscles, I doubt anyone ever manages to target all muscles every week anyway. Also, it will certainly save me some time.
Another overwhelming factor is the amount of muscles that you need to work out. Even when you lump them together into “muscle groups” you end up with having to do eight or nine different exercises to target all of them. So to start out with I will do only chest, back, shoulders and arms, and then I can add the lower body workout to the routine once I start feeling a bit more comfortable with what I have.
With all of that said, I remind myself that “rules are meant to be broken” and set out to brake a few of the once I just set up. For instance, I will do two shoulder exercises instead of one and I do this simply because it feels like “the right thing to do” in my case considering my overly flexible shoulder joints. When I had picked my five exercises for my chest, back, shoulders, biceps and triceps, it felt sorta asymmetrical, so I added one more shoulder exercise to bring the number of exercises up to an even six, and so that there would be a symmetry between pushing and pulling type exercises.
Below you see the six exercises I have chosen to start out with.
| 1. Lever Chest Press |
2. Straight Back Seated Row |
 |
 |
| 3. Lever Shoulder Press |
4. Lever Lateral Raise |
 |
 |
| 5. Cable Pushdown |
6. Cable Curl |
 |
 |
Pictures taken from the exercise database at ExRx.net.
A complete workout would then sum up to a total of 12 sets, which I should be able to execute in as little as 20-25 minutes. With a 30 minute spinning session or alternatively a 15 minute warm-up on a treadmill and a post workout stretch this should feel about as efficient as any group training session. Once I add the leg-part to this it will obviously grow a bit, but probably not by a whole lot.
Finally, I should talk a little about goals. What exactly do I want to achieve? Well, first of all, I don’t want to build myself into a hulking monstrosity, neither do I believe that I have the genes for it. However, I’d be lying if I said I am not doing this based on a little bit of vanity. But then we have of course the health benefits. While I generally don’t do any kind of heavy lifting in my daily life to put that maximum strength to any practical use, the kind of strength you build at the gym is said to “last longer” compared to the endurance based strength you build in for instance Body Pump class. Increasing your muscle mass increases your metabolism as well, which I need to do in order to loose that last bit of fat that I have on my belly.
It will be interesting to see whether or not increasing maximum strength can help me increase the amount of weights I can take in Body Pump class. My hypotheses is that any cross over gains will be marginal at best.
