Benefits Of Strength Training

Resistance or strength training is governed by exercises that use a weight or other form of resistance to cause the muscles to contract. As a result, the muscles become stronger and grow, your body becomes toned, and you burn more fat because of more muscle mass. With increasing muscle mass your body will naturally use more calories because it takes a lot more energy for your body to maintain muscle mass than fat. That being said, it is clear that if you are on a quick weight loss program, weight training will be beneficial to you.

What benefits do you get from weight training? It adds lean muscle, strength, reduces blood pressure and fights osteoporosis, for starters. Compare this to what cardiovascular training or aerobics does. Cardiovascular training improves your circulation and lung capacity along with promoting cardiac health.

Both forms of exercise, as well as a healthy diet, are important, and can help you lose weight and burn fat. Each week include all three elements in your overall weight loss and fat burning program. By engaging in both of these types of exercise and eating sensibly, you will be far along the road to realizing rapid weight loss.

In order to benefit from strength training, you need to find a routine that uses all of your muscle groups. To begin, you should choose two exercises for each muscle group, and do two sets of ten to twelve repetitions for each exercise.

Always warm up for five to ten minutes before you begin. Some stretching and cardiovascular exercise are good ways to warm up. In addition, confer with your medical practitioner prior to commencing with a resistance training regimen.

The following are some exercises tailored to specific muscle groups.

For your chest chest do push ups, and bench presses.

To strengthen your back do dumbbell rows and lat pull downs.

For your shoulders, you can do seated and standing overhead dumbbell presses. To exercise your biceps you can do standing curls with a barbell and seated concentration curls with dumbbells. To exercise your triceps, you can do reverse extensions with dumbbells and barbell presses with your hands gripping the bar close together. For your lower body do squats, and lunges. Lastly, for your abdomen do sit ups and crunches.

Rest at least one day between workouts. On days when you are not doing weight training you can do some cardiovascular exercise. Concentrate on form. Have a friend or a trainer watch you and correct any alignment problems you may have when you first start out. As you progress, increase the repetitions each week or add more weight. Once you get to about fourteen repetitions, it's time to increase the weight. When you can comfortably do sixteen reps, increase your weights.

After you have done this routine for six weeks, alter it with a variation of this routine. Try not to rest for more than one minute between sets, this will help you burn fat.

This should be enough to get you off on the right food to increased muscle mass and a lower fat compositon.