Monday 18 February 2013

Ways To Maximize Your Weight Lifting

By Trevor Johnson


Ever taken a look round your gymnasium to see what the people around you are doing?

Do you wonder if the workout they do will help you get to your own physical goals quicker?

Those are a small number of questions to ponder as you keep reading this, but the fact of the matter is there is always a 'better ' lift to do than the majority of the lifts that you see people performing at your gymnasium.

For instance, today a couple in my own gymnasium took it upon themselves to do a range of exercises working their body from head to toe, or that's what they thought.

Their workout started with some dumbbell shoulder shrugs. That exercise targets the trapezius muscles that, if big enough, might make you look like you haven't got any neck.

On the surface of things that would seem to be a handy exercise to do, but if you dig a bit deeper you'll find that exercise does little in the way of helping you burn even the most minute of calories.

Let us look at it mathematically. The amount of work done is equal to the force times the distance that you are moving that force and the amount of times that you're moving that force. As an example, if you were to use 30-pound dumbbells you might move that weight an overall total of three inches maximum. The trapezius muscles aren't that big therefore do not have the range the larger muscle groupings do.

So that 30-pound weight moved 3 inches, 10 times, gives us a bunch of 900. The unit of measure at this point is irrelevant.

Now lets take a look at an alternative exercise, the army press. This exercise is done with an Olympic bar pressing it from about your jaw all of the way above your head till your arms about completely extended.

For this exercise we only utilised the weight of the bar which is 45-pounds. If you make the motion as if you were performing the exercise you might notice that the distance that bar is going to travel is around 24 inches or more dependent on your size, and that was done for an overall total of 10 repetitions. So 45-pounds, times 24-inches, times ten repetitions gives us a number of 10,800- again the unit of measure is unimportant. It only becomes relevant if we were to work out that number into calories burned.

On the surface, doing the military press was twelve times better than doing a dumbbell shrug, and that was with only the 45-pound bar.

This is only one example of a way to see if you are getting the most out of your exercise session. Many of us are insensible to some of the exercises that they opt to do and just do anything that comes to mind. You only have so much energy when you hit the gymnasium floor, make it count and put it toward exercises which will give you the bang for you buck.




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