The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Weightlifting: Building Strength and Confidence
The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Weightlifting: Building Strength and Confidence
Introduction
Definition of weightlifting
The way I would define weight lifting is the act or sport of lifting, picking up, or moving any object, whether a barbell, dumbbell or even a rock, with the purpose of measuring one's own physical capability and actively working toward increasing the resistance of said object for one's personal development or pleasure.
Benefits of weightlifting for beginners
There are numerous benefits to weightlifting, most notably increasing one's physical power, Improving your mental health and self-image, having more energy for everyday activities so you won't feel exhausted, and being able to accomplish more in life, another benefit and probably the most sought after effect of weight lifting is increasing one's muscle size or decreasing their body fat to achieve a toned, peeled or ripped body so you can sport an aesthetic physique on the beach or show off to your friends and family the hard work you have put in.
Importance of proper form and technique
Executing exercises with proper form is the most crucial thing that can be done when lifting weights because it prevents injury. Most importantly, it also allows you to work the muscle by contracting the proper muscle fibers, which will help achieve a mind-muscle connection. Having the correct form will allow you to recruit the intended muscle group you seek to develop and allow it to grow. Suppose you do not target the specific muscle and instead use other groups because of improper form. In that case, you may slow down your progress or even create muscle imbalances from overcompensating due to an unaligned frame, and the resistance from the weight is being handled by other parts of the body.
Getting Started
Assessing your current fitness level
Establishing a base of where you currently stand as far as physical fitness can be done by examining your history and asking yourself what experiences you may have, for instance, what kind of jobs you work, have you played any sports in the past, or do you routinely walk or cycle to work. Depending on your lifestyle or the work you undertake in a day, an individual can be put at different levels. For example, someone who works for a kayaking company and spends most of their time hauling heavy boats or paddling around the water will have a different foundation from someone who may work in an office and file papers. Another example is that someone who does masonry and hauls around heavy bags of cement all day would have a better strength base than someone who works as a barista in a coffee shop. Understanding that we all have undergone different experiences will also help you establish your goals and give you a better understanding of how long it will take you to reach them.
Setting realistic goals
Giving yourself a destination to travel towards is always a good idea, which is why setting goals is crucial. However, setting the right goals for you can rely on factors like your current fitness level or genetics. It is unreasonable for me personally to think I could be a strong man as I weigh nowhere close to 200 pounds, let alone 400 pounds, and with my current build, it is just physically impossible for me to ever get to that weight as I do not have the bone structure to support such size. This is why it is also essential to find people around your similar build to look up to to get a better idea of what you may achieve. Especially in the age we live in now with social media, it is easy to find people who look like Greek gods on the internet, but in person, they look nothing like what you may see on the phone due to editing and lighting. Trying to resemble someone who is putting on a show and faking the progress they have made can damage one's self-esteem and discourage someone because they may not be achieving the look they are after or reaching their milestones as quickly as someone else.
Choosing the right gym or home setup
Depending on your fitness goals, you may require different equipment. For example, if I just want to lose a few extra calories, I may only need to go for a walk. Still, if I am trying to be a powerlifter and push myself to see how much weight I can lift in this lifetime, It would be helpful to have a squat rack with a pin for safety. This way, I don't try to pick up the kitchen fridge in an attempt to set a new PR and turn myself into homemade flap jacks, if you catch my drift.
Essential Equipment
Free weights vs. machines
Free weights and Machines are both effective ways to train and provide yourself with the stimuli to grow. It is essential to keep in mind when choosing which one is best for you that free weights will activate stabilizer muscles you may not be incorporating with a machine like the name implies; your body is also free to move about space when using a dumbbell for instance rather than being locked into a set range of motion. This is why, for an absolute beginner, I recommend learning techniques on a machine where proper safety measures are put into place in case of an accident to build your form and muscle memory, then switching over to free weights. One of the cons of machines, though, is that you isolate one muscle group most of the time, and you will get more bang for your buck if you use free weights, which act as a compound movement utilizing more muscles at once.
Types of barbells and dumbbells
When it comes to barbells and dumbbells, there are a wide variety of different kinds, including deadlifting bars that don't have neural in the center. This way, you won't scrape your shins when deadlifting off a sandpaper life surface meant to be used for grip. Deadlift bars also tend to be more flexible, which is why you might opt for a bench bar; they are more rigid. When doing a squat, for example, it can be dangerous to use a deadlift bar because there is no grip at the center. The bar can slide down your back while also being more flexible and easier to bend when putting on a high amount of weight. The bar can whip on the way down into the squat position, which can throw your balance off, causing you to fall over or tweak your back due to the violent wave-like motion the bar can make when thrashing around; there are also bench press-specific bars with this grip in the center of the bar to aid in the grip on a squat. There are also different squat bars specific for front squats or trap bars for deadlifting, which allow you to stand in the center of the weight as opposed to standing behind it. To continue on different types of barbells, there can be shoulder press-specific bars like logs that are used to train shoulder pressing for strongmen.
Dumbbells can be homemade out of cinder blocks and concrete or even wooden like outdoor beach gyms. You may also find adjustable dumbbells, which are perfect for someone with a home gym like myself and a limited amount of weight to use. I can load up all my plates onto one dumbbell and use it for different exercises.
Importance of proper footwear and clothing
Using proper footwear and caring for your feet in the gym can make or break your day. I don't know how many times I have come to crush my toes by dropping a bar or dumbbell and have been saved by my shoes. This is also important to keep any germs off of your feet that may be in the gym, like other people's sweat. Depending on how you plan to exercise, you should invest in squat shoes or running shoes. This will protect you in the long run by helping you keep proper form and add weight to your lifts with the squat shoes or the running shoes. This will save on your joints and the impact undertaken by your bones and cartilage, allowing you to train harder and for longer. Other types of clothing that can help are lifting belts to help keep your core stable and protect your spine.
Fundamental Weightlifting Exercises
Squat
Deadlift
Bench press
Overhead press
Row
Proper Form and Technique
Importance of correct posture
Having the correct posture can literally make or break you. This will help you lift more weight by putting your body into the correct position to transfer the force to and through the bar or dumbbell.
Breathing techniques
When doing exercise, it is important to brace yourself and make yourself rigid in some sense so the weight doesn't fold you like a lawn chair. This is done by taking a deep breath, exhaling slightly, and holding your breath while contracting your core. This will stabilize you in the lift. Don't forget to breathe. It is important to time your breathing with the lift, breathing in on the way down and out on the way up, for instance, a squat before you descend, breathing in, squeezing your core, reaching the bottom of the squat, and breathing out on the way up or with the bench press when your arms are an extended breath in lower the weight to your chest and while pushing the weight upward exhale and breath out.
Common mistakes to avoid
The most common mistake is assuming you already know what you are doing and stagnating your education in fitness it is crucial to always stay up to date as people are always finding new techniques or ways to perform exercise to help you achieve muscle hypertrophy.
Creating a Beginner's Workout Plan
Frequency of workouts
In the beginning, it is important to start light and slow this way; you do not bite off more than you can chew, injure yourself with excessive weight, or train for too long, burning yourself out or overtraining. This way, I would recommend beginning with a full-body workout routine every other day, starting with only four days a week with one day or rest between as you progress; you can increase the frequency of training from Monday to Friday and even go up to six days a week if you would like to train that often but is not completely necessary to achieve the goals for most people.
Sets and repetitions
When creating a beginner routine, I personally started with the class with three sets of twelve repetitions. This is great to start, but you may plateau fast if you keep this same rep and set scheme for all of your exercises. That is why it is vital to increase your repetitions as you progress. A simple way to plan this into your first program can be the first week to start with a whole body routine on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, where you start with two sets of ten reps and continue this for two weeks, then increase your reps to twelve while maintaining the same amount of weight continue this for another two weeks and work up to fifteen reps. Once this is finished in the next two weeks, you can increase your sets to three and start back at ten reps by going through a similar process. Eventually, you will follow the same type of progression, this time with a higher weight.
Rest periods between sets and workouts
The best amount of time between sets is around 1-3 minutes when going for volume as opposed to a more extended rest period for more strength-specific exercise, where I would spend much longer, say 4-6 minutes, between sets. The strategic purpose behind resting for this amount of time is to keep tension on the muscle when doing volume to achieve hypertrophy. Still, when you are training specifically for strength and keeping your sets higher with lower repetition but a higher weight, you will need to take into account more time to allow your nervous system to rest from the high amount of excursions you undergo when lifting heavy.
Progressive Overload
Definition and importance
The quick and simple definition of progressive overload is a training technique to gradually increase the intensity of your workout over time to achieve the desired muscle stimuli to trigger the growth of the muscle. The importance of overloading the muscle is to trigger a growth response to stress by working your muscle to exhaustion. This tells the brain you need to have a larger and stronger muscle to put up with more, hence triggering it to grow. This is why progressive overload is so important; it is what causes you to get bigger and stronger.
How to implement progressive overload safely
To incorporate overload into your training, you can set dates to increase your weight on the exercises or the repetitions you perform. As you train more, your body will adapt, and what caused you to struggle at one point in time will eventually become easier. This is when you will need to increase the intensity because you have now found your new baseline, and in order to not plateau, you must go over this baseline.
Tracking progress
Tracking your fitness progress is how you will know it is time to increase the intensity by keeping a log book of your workouts, documenting the sets, reps, and weight, along with the exercise type and rest in between sets. These are all critical data that you can look at and adjust to achieve progressive overload by keeping the muscle guessing. Your body won't be able to get used to any specific stress keeping you moving forward and progressing in your journey.
Nutrition for Weightlifting Beginners
Importance of protein intake
Protein is the most essential macronutrient you will consume as it is the building block for your muscles. Without it, you will not grow. This is why your progress depends on it. I will use an analogy to explain. Imagine you are trying to build a house without 2x4’, the exact material you will need to frame the house. Without them, you will get nowhere and just be left with nails. This will not be sufficient. This is why ensuring you eat high-protein meals with ingredients like spinach, Potatoes, Oatmeal, Eggs, or meat, a few examples of foods high in protein, is so important to your progression.
Balanced macronutrients
Your body needs all the necessary components to rebuild itself, so having the correct ratio and inventory of supplies is a must. Without protein, fats, and carbohydrates, your body will be missing the material you need to build and grow. The most common ratios for macronutrients are 50% protein, 35% carbohydrates, and 15% fats. These percentages can be adjusted based on personal preference; however, it is most common to have a higher amount of protein than any other.
Pre and post-workout nutrition
It is sometimes said that there is an anabolic window when your body is at its most opportune to build. In my experience, I have not found this to be all that important. However, it is still important to provide your body with the needed fuel before and after the gym. This way, you have energy going into your workout and don't find yourself getting light-headed and overly exhausted.
Recovery and Rest
Importance of adequate sleep
Sleep is when the most recovery is done in the body. Resting not only the muscles but also the mind will allow you to continue achieving that much-needed progressive overload and hypertrophy. The best rest can be done in a colder room, which allows the body to slip into a sleep state much more manageable. Being in a cold environment will also aid in reducing inflammation from tense and sore muscles, which is why you may have heard of ice baths, where people submerge themselves into cold water to kickstart this recovery and fat burning.
Active recovery techniques
Some examples of active recovery are foam rolling and stretching. These can be done almost anywhere, especially stretching, where you only need your body. They can be done in virtually any position, whether sitting down, standing, or even lying down.
Dealing with muscle soreness
Muscle soreness is a telltale sign that you are working hard in the gym and getting the correct stimuli to grow. It can be a pain sometimes to deal with, especially if the muscles are extremely tight and almost unable to move. This is another reason stretching is so important. Soreness will go away with time and as you get farther into your training program, you will begin not even to notice the soreness and will be working through it. A few methods to alleviate this pain include stretching, foam rolling, and heat or cold treatment.
Safety Precautions
Proper warm-up routines
A proper warm-up is vital to your longevity in training. This is to ensure you do not pull or tear any muscles and will actually help you perform exercises faster with better form and under more weight. This is because a proper warm-up will heat the body temperature, getting the muscles loose and ready to move. While also engaging the muscle groups you plan to work in that day, when you get around to the central portion of the lift, your muscles will already be booted up, and you will be ready for action.
Using a spotter when necessary
Spotting is its art form. Knowing when to and when not to touch the bar or weight has its learning curve. Spotters can also help you achieve forced repetitions when working your muscles beyond failure. When going for a one-rep max or a new personal record, it is always recommended to have a spotter on standby to make sure you stay as safe as possible and don't end up on a gym meme page trapped under a barbell. Trust me, I've been there.
Listening to your body and avoiding overtraining
The mind-muscle connection you achieve from lifting weights will also help you understand your limits by feeling when and in what ways you are sore. You will know whether or not it is time to take a break. If anything is stiff to the point where you can't use the muscle or is so weak you cannot perform even simple daily tasks, you will know you have pushed it too far. I have had this happen to me after a leg day when I would get out of bed, and my quads and calves would be so tight I couldn't stand up straight. This is when I knew I had gone a little too far.
Common Myths and Misconceptions
"Weightlifting makes women bulky."
This is one of the most common myths I have heard, and my response is that if it were so easy to put on muscle, then everyone would be a bodybuilder. But simply, it takes a while to build muscle. People will see images of a Mrs. Olympia and assume because she looks that way, their workout will look that way, but more often than not, the average person is not willing to put in the amount of time it would take to get that type of look along with having the proper genetics and being willing to take performance-enhancing drugs if necessary.
"You need to feel sore after every workout."
The need to feel sore after each and every single training session is something I fell victim to when I first started and that is why I thought I wasn't progressing. This is just flat-out wrong because what contributes to a lot of muscle soreness is the breakdown of muscle fibers, and as your body adapts, you will become accustomed to these micro tears and won't notice them, but you will still be there. Another reason for the muscle soreness is lactic acid. The material left over after exerting your muscle can cause this feeling, and as you progress, your body will get better at flushing this out, and you won't be as sore.
"More is always better."
If you set out to always do more each and every day, you will eventually run yourself into the ground. The biggest reason it is hard to build muscle is because of the time it takes to recover. It is easy to break the muscle but hard to rebuild. This is why people use steroids to increase the speed it takes to recover. If you set out to always do more, you will overtrain yourself and get burnt out, which may cause you to quit entirely or stop for months at a time and lose the progress you have made. That is why the perspective of this is a marathon, not a sprint, is the right attitude to take the race against the hare and the turtle. Slow and steady wins the race each and every time.
Motivation and Consistency
Setting short-term and long-term goals
Consistency is the most important attribute one can have in anything because motivation will fade. This is why a strong hold on discipline is the key to success. Having goals and milestones to achieve will help with this discipline, acting as road signs if you will be along your path and showing you that you are still making progress.
Finding a workout buddy or community
Having a gym partner is a fantastic opportunity to bridge your social life with your long-term life goals. By helping each other achieve their goals, you will build long-lasting friendships and lifelong memories that you will cherish for the rest of your life. The gym community has always been extremely welcoming to me and everyone that I know. It is one of the best atmospheres to be in, surrounded by individuals all in the same frame of mind, just trying to be better than they were yesterday. This is why getting into a gym can be so helpful: knowing on a day when you just feel like going, you can rely on your gym buddy for the extra push or knowing you can rely on that stranger in the gym still putting in the work can propel you to give it one more shot.
Celebrating small victories
Small victories are what will keep you going, and this is why setting goals is essential. One of the goals I set is the number of days I have trained in a row. Acknowledging this can give you that extra motivation to get to the gym on those hard days.
Conclusion
Recap of key points
The main point in this article about the ultimate beginner guide to weight lifting is Getting started without starting; you will never see progress. This is why you must try even if you're afraid. Remember, no one is perfect, and you will always benefit more from putting in even the smallest amount of effort as opposed to none. The following key takes away proper form and being safe. Exercise is meant to help you and improve your quality of life, not diminish it. Make sure to keep proper form and technique. Now, what you need is a workout plan, and you must make the decision to start. Tell yourself when you will train after focusing on progressively overloading the muscle to achieve your goals of growth—next, nutrition. Remember to eat correctly. Treat the body as a sacred temple that will take care of you. Consistency: you may work out all day for one day, but it still won't be as effective as someone who makes small steps each day.
Encouragement for beginners to start their weightlifting journey
Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither were you. If it may have taken God six days to create what we all know and love, then don't allow yourself to get discouraged if you don't see progress tomorrow. The best things in life come through struggle. This journey won't be easy, but I promise you it will be worth it. If you have found this article helpful and would like to read more fitness tips and information feel free to enter your email into the newsletter to be notified when a new fitness article has been posted. I want to thank you for reading all the way to the end, and I wish you the best of luck on your fitness journey.
