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Resistance training is an important part of fitness routine, whether you want to gain muscle or lose weight. This is where you can maximize your efforts and allow the body to burn calories while enabling the muscle fibers to become thicker and stronger.
If you’ve never done resistance training, it’s important to consider adding it to your fitness routine. Here's everything you need to know about it.
What is Resistance Training?
This is a form of workout where you use external resistance apart from your bodyweight, such as weight plates, machines, etc. to develop your muscles and trigger fat loss.
It requires you to activate your muscles and joints and engage in several pull and push motions with your upper and lower body.
As these exercises are done with external resistance, the body needs to provide more energy than usual. To do that, the body will need to dip into stored calories and burn them to generate the required energy.
Meanwhile, resistance puts stress on the muscle fibers, which end up getting teared. During the rest/recovery period, the fibers repair themselves, making themselves thicker and stronger to withstand the external resistance. At this point, you add more resistance to the fibers to grow them further.
How to Start Resistance Training?
If you want to add resistance training to your routine, you need to begin with the basics. Every muscle group, such as the legs, chest, back, arms, core, etc. has basic movements you need to master.
To do that, you need to do exercises that replicate those moves.
For example: the chest will get worked if you use a push motion. To do so, you should start with push-ups, and move to exercises such as dumbbell presses. However, it’s ideal that you begin with bodyweight training. That's the first resistance you need to master before you move to external weights.
What's the Best Resistance Training?
Resistance training is usually divided as per body parts. These are known as workout splits.
A common workout split is the push, pull, and leg. In this split, you work your chest, triceps, and shoulders one day with push motion, work on your back, biceps, and rear delts on another day with pull motion, and dedicate an entire session to your legs.
Another split is the upper body and lower body. Here, you work on your upper body one day and lower body on another.
You will come across a bro-split too, where you focus on one muscle group per day.
It’s preferable to work on the muscle groups at least twice a week, and for that, you should work on more than one muscle group each session. Nevertheless, when it comes to resistance training, you need to pick what works best for you.
Examples of Resistance Training
The following are some of the exercises for each muscle group using external weights:
Chest - dumbbell press, incline press, cable flyes
Back - lat pull-down, dumbbell row, seated-cable row
Shoulders - overhead press, lateral raise, front raise
Rear delts - face pulls, reverse flyes
Biceps - dumbbell curl, hammer curl, cable curl
Triceps - cable pushdown, dumbbell extension, dips
Legs (quads) - leg extensions, squats, lunges
Legs (hamstrings) - leg curls, stiff-legged deadlifts, sumo squats
Legs (calves) - seated calf raise, standing calf raise, toe squats
Glutes - hip thrust, glute bridge
Core - crunches, sit-ups, twists
Bottom Line
Weight training, coupled with cardio, is the optimal way to lose weight while gaining muscle. In fact, you should add weight training to your routine even if you don’t want to lose weight. It helps with toning the muscles and defining them as you begin to reduce fat.
