Getting A Great Weight Lifting Program 101

By Emmanuel Palmer


Creating a body worthy of an Olympic champion is the offshoot of a solid weight lifting program that transforms the body's weight to massive muscles and strength. What makes the bodybuilding workouts that comprise it effective? These workouts are always intense, progressive and specific to your body type.

High-intensity training works well for people who are aiming to gain significant body mass in a relatively short time. Some might prefer to build up on strength and endurance over a period of two to three months which is also fine. You will probably need a hybrid of the two methods; find the best one suited for your body. What is important is you give each session your all.

Even if you are in a hurry to get big, refrain from the urge to train every single day for a few weeks-this will do you more harm than good. You need to get quality sleep between the days you workout so your body can repair the muscle tissues torn during exercise. With proper rest, these will develop into bigger and much stronger muscles. An effective strategy is to split your weight lifting program into muscle groups that you can work on specific days.

A three day split workout will give you something like this: 1st day - chest, arms and stomach 2nd day - back, shoulders and stomach 3rd day - legs If you prefer to spread your workouts into the week you can also try this five day split plan: 1st day - legs 2nd day - shoulders 3rd day - back and stomach 4th day - shoulders and arms 5th day - chest and stomach Concentrate on getting good food and sleep especially the rest days in between training.

You don't really need a lot of fancy machines to have a successful workout. Even if you only have several weights of dumbbells, cables and a bench you have a whole catalog of drills you can base a program on. For the upper body try the bicep and triceps curl, dumbbell shrugs, lat pull downs and triceps kickbacks. Use the squats, calf raises, leg raises and squats for your lower body. Crunches will always be a staple that will work for anybody, but even then, you need to vary all these drills ever couple of weeks or so to challenge and push your body to its maximum potential.

When you start training, you will initially use lower weights. As your strength grows, so will the weight loads that you will be lifting-this will ensure that your muscles are consistently challenged, thus develop faster. For bodybuilding objectives, use weights that will enable you to do 7 to 12 repetitions until failure.

Lastly, do not forget to stretch well before starting your exercises and even between sets. Stretching raises your body's temperature level and makes you more flexible; both of which contribute to favorable physical conditions for training.

Only the persevering and patient individual can see his bodybuilding workouts come to fruition. Exercise care in your training even as you give it all you've got. There is no room for less for the champion that is inside you.




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