Strength Training for Beginners: Where to Start

As a beginner you need a guide. You want to know what it takes to achieve your goal with strength training. You can take advice from advanced strength athletes, but the disadvantage is that you will probably get a flood of different advice that can even contradict each other. A starting strength training for a newbie athlete has little use of advanced techniques. Starting with the basics, that’s the motto! These are 6 basic strength training tips for beginners.

Frequency

To make the essential movement patterns your own, you need preferably need at-least two or three training days a week. During 6 weeks you should train the whole body in which almost every muscle group is covered during every training. After a few training sessions, you may feel the urge to step up the schedule out of enthusiasm, but try to resist that. Training more and heavier can even have the opposite effect, especially if you are just starting out.

Rest

A simple principle that looks difficult to many people is to understand what is happening here. Rest is just as important as training. Muscles do not grow during training: that is precisely where you initiate muscle growth. The muscle mass develops precisely when the muscles are inactive. During rest they can also recover and prepare for the next training. Not only your muscles need rest, but also your nervous system, bones, joints, tendons are linked with all.

Intensity

The intensity of an exercise is determined by the weight, rest periods between series, duration of the training and more. First of all, take a weight that allows you to complete at least 12 repetitions. The total training duration must not exceed 45 minutes. You can train longer, but the effectiveness decreases and it also increases the risk of overloading.

Progression

After 6 weeks of training, the body is sufficiently adapted to the resistance imposed to subsequently increase the amount of load. This does not always mean that you have to move more weight. The bottom line is that after 6-8 weeks you have to adjust the schedule to achieve further progression. The body needs new stimuli over time to promote muscle strength and muscle growth.

Muscle Failure

If you have ever stopped after 10 repetitions, while you could easily have added a few repetitions to it. Then you make minimal use of potential muscle growth and muscle strength. On the other hand, as a beginner it is not good to go to the extreme during every exercise. Choose a middle ground: it is important to feel clear muscle fatigue, but do not go so far as to compensate with other parts of the body to complete those final repetitions.

Exercise Selection

As we indicated earlier, movement paths are essential for beginners. It is preferable to use machines to train these patterns, but this is not always necessary. It is especially important that you have variation in your exercises with different materials. This gives you various training incentives, which is important for further progression.

Physique training

Let’s start with the good news right away. A starting physique training hardly has to wonder whether a certain training method or exercise is effective: if you are new to physique training, everything works! Your body knows how to adapt quickly to the load and you can make a lot of progress in a short time. Your muscle mass develops at a rapid pace and your strength increases even faster. Being a beginner in a gym is great. The rapidly increasing changes motivate and taste for more.

Train smarter now, better results tomorrow.

A training program aimed at perfecting fundamental movement patterns will help you long after you have passed the initial stage. It is therefore better to focus less on weight, but more on the motion paths that you perform under resistance. By teaching your brain and body certain movement patterns, you will achieve much better results in the longer term.