Strength Training

Here are a Few Things You Should Know About Strength Training

Strength training is an extremely important part of physical fitness. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to end up being a bodybuilder or that you need to bench 315 lbs or even be able to do a bicep curl with a knuckle head kid who gets on your nerves! However, strength training is a crucial part of your overall physical fitness that needs to NOT be over-looked. To the body, if you don’t incorporate strength training into your workout program, it’s the equivalent to cooking a meal that needs 4 ingredients, but you choose to leave one out. If you overlook one of any of those ingredients, you shouldn’t wonder why the meal doesn’t tastes the way it should, should you? Same goes for training your body. FACT…we need cardio training, strength training & flexibility training. Not in this particular order, but these are the ingredients for a healthy body and a great look!

Here are some of the major benefits of strength training:

- Increase Lean Muscle Tone

- Tendon and Ligament Strength Increase

- Increased bone density

- Improved Joint Function

- Increase in Stamina

- Increase Metabolism

- Burn Calories

- Overall Good Feeling in Health

Before I go any further I need to get one thing straight with you…strength training is for everyone! Couldn’t you benefit from increased muscle tone, increased strength in your tendons & ligaments, improved bone density, increased stamina, increased metabolism and feeling better about your overall health? Yeah, I think we all could.

Supersets

Have you ever heard of the word “Superset”? Supersetting is a great way to maximize the amount of work performed for a one muscle group or opposing muscles groups. Don’t let the words confuse you, supersetting is 1) just a way to work 1 muscle even harder by performing more reps for that one muscle or 2) a way to maximize your overall workout by pushing two different muscle groups in one superset. Before I go any further, let me give you a couple of examples of different kinds of supersets:

Regular Superset –

A regular superset is done by performing 2 exercises in basically the same motion to the same muscle with no rest in between the 2 sets. So you would go from doing a set bench press directly to doing dumbbell press. Both exercises work the same area(s), the chest and the triceps.

You’ll notice that for almost all of the exercises you do, there will be a primary muscle that is worked and a secondary muscle that is worked. (But that’s for another article). So in affect you’re working the chest with the bench press then you immediately move right into dumbbell bench giving you an even deeper stretch allowing you to work the chest muscle even more!

Push/Pull Supersets –

A push/pull superset consists of one push exercise such as a squat or a shoulder press, then immediately following it up with a pull exercise such as a bicep curl of hamstring curl. In this case, you wouldn’t be working the same muscle with each exercise, you’d be working totally opposite muscles letting you push each set even harder, compared to a regular superset when you are really wearing out one muscle.

Let me give you my reasons why I love doing supersets:

- Doing supersets allows me to keep my heart rate up while doing strength exercises. This contributes to burning fat. You basically get 2 benefits for the price of 1.

- Supersets really lets me dig into the muscle working it from 2 different angles, really giving you that full muscle feeling

- Push/pull supersets allows me to work closer to my max effort because the muscle I work on the 2 part was not worked at all during the 1^st part. So theoretically I can go 100% while doing a squat and then 100% while doing bent over rows because the 2 muscles are totally separate.

At the end of the day, I feel like supersetting is a great way for me to jam more work into basically the same time frame, getting the most out of the work I perform!