Pull-ups are a great upper body
resistance exercise.
(AP Photo/Channi Anand)
What resistance training is
Resistance training involves using your muscles to overcome a resistance. The resistance might be weights, your body weight, gravity, medicine balls, grocery bags, furniture, etc. If you understand this idea, that anything that makes it more difficult for you to perform a movement is resistance, than you are more likely to believe me later when I tell you that you don't need to go to a gym with lots of fancy equipment and matching dumbbells and barbells to get a well-rounded resistance workout. Resistance training has classically been referred to as "weight training" or "strength training". Let's scrap those terms now and the sometimes foreboding, sweaty-gym, grunting-muscle-head images they conjure up.
Why you should do it
Resting metabolic rate is the amount of energy expended by your body while it is in a quiet, resting state. It is the number of calories your body burns to sustain itself and perform its most basic functions, like breathing, circulating blood, repairing tissue, and so on. Believe it or not, if you are not Joe Olympian, this how the majority of your calories are burned every day. This is awesome. These are calories you burn when you are just hanging out. The higher your resting metabolic rate is, the more calories you burn. Sound good? You know it does. So, how do you amp up your metabolism?
Muscle mass accounts for more than 20% of your resting metabolic rate. Muscle burns calories. The more muscle you have, the harder your body has to work to maintain it, leading to more calories burned at rest. So, how do you get more muscle? Resistance training. Maintaining and elevating your resting metabolic rate isn't the only benefit of resistance training either. Resistance training maintains and builds muscle which also helps you to work out harder and burn more calories during activity. After the workout is over, the benefits keep coming. Your body burns more fat after a resistance workout because it uses carbohydrates to replenish your muscles' depleted fuel stores. Also, your metabolism becomes supercharged following a resistance workout. The harder you work, the greater and longer lasting the supercharge will be. This is because the harder you work, the longer your body takes to recover to a resting state and the longer it takes to adapt itself to the exercise just performed. Simply put, a resistance workout is a gift that keeps on giving. Cardiovascular workouts, unless they are super-high intensity, don't have the after-burn potential of a resistance workout.
On a sadder note, muscle's effect on resting metabolic rate runs both ways. When you lose muscle, your metabolic rate can take a dive. Typically you lose muscle when you restrict calories. Unfortunately, when you diet and your body is reluctantly burning itself up to sustain your functions and activities, it is readily sacrificing your muscle along with the fat. This is a phenomenon that can set you up for long-term weight loss failure. You cut calories to lose weight, and in doing so reduce your body's calorie-burning power. This can take an especially ugly turn when you stop dieting. With a loss of muscle resulting in a lower resting metabolism, you may find that you put on fat more easily than before you dieted. That sucks. So how do you prevent or at least reduce the loss of your muscle? Resistance training. Resistance training can help you maintain or even increase your muscle mass while you are dieting, thereby helping to keep your resting metabolic rate elevated when it would otherwise fall.
There was one simple point repeated throughout this section that I just want to say yet again: resistance training builds (or at least maintains) muscle. We know that muscle is good for burning calories and fat. Fine. Great. That's what pretty much what I've been yapping about for the last 3 paragraphs. But, you know what else it's good for? Looking dead sexy. Resistance training helps you to look good naked. Muscle is hot, and not just because it makes you skinnier. Muscle gives you the shape and definition that you want to see, and that you want other people to see when they look at you. Losing fat is important because it brings your muscles to the surface, so to speak. Resistance training, as discussed in this section, can help you lose fat. Cardiovascular exercise can help you lose fat. But, if you don't have the muscle to show, resistance training is your express ticket to building it.
How often you should do it
You should make every effort to work your whole body 2 times a week if you are actively trying to change your body and attain a goal. If you reach your goal and all you need is maintenance, working your whole body once a week may be enough. It may be enough.
As you become more experienced your training volume should increase if you are still actively working towards your goal(s). Most likely, to reach increasing training volume, the frequency of your workouts will have to increase. If this doesn't make sense, don't worry, I 've got your back. I will discuss frequency and training volume in more detail a little later.
What you should work
You don't want to be one of those guys or girls that is way out of proportion, do you? I can't speak for you, but let's talk about what I want for a second. I want to be stacked from head to toe. No less stacked one place than some other place. You too? Well, to do that you need to try to work all of your major muscle groups. A well-rounded resistance program will include at least one exercise for the following body parts:
- Upper legs
* Front: Quads
* Back: Hamstrings
- Calves
- Chest
- Upper Back
- Shoulders
- Arms
* Front: Biceps
* Back: Triceps
- Core
* Front (and sides): Abs
* Back: Low Back
Exercises specifically for the italicized body parts are optional because these body parts are typically involved in the performance of basic exercises for the non-italicized body parts. If your time permits, or if you have a goal involving one of the italicized body parts, by all means, work it. Using a split workout is a good idea when you want to focus on and really develop certain muscle groups or body parts as you will typically want to do multiple exercises for those areas. A whole body routine with multiple exercises for your parts can make for a really long workout. The split is one of the variables in resistance training that I will talk about more specifically next article.
Goals for resistance training
How you construct your resistance workouts will depend on your goal(s). Some of the more common goals people hope to achieve with resistance training are listed below.
Build muscle endurance. This is improving the ability of the muscle to repeatedly generate force.
Build muscle. This involves increasing muscle mass (getting bigger muscles).
Lose weight. This refers to dropping pounds. And, I mean from your body, not on or around it.
Get stronger. This involves improving your muscles capability to move more weight or generate more force.
Develop power. This is improving your body's ability to generate force quickly. I think of power as moving heavy stuff fast.
Training volume
In resistance training, Training Volume = Number of Repetitions x Number of Sets x Resistance.
Training volume is a pretty easy way to gauge and quantify your effort in resistance training. As the days and weeks and months pass, training volume is what you are looking to increase to keep the fire of change lit. Compare apples to apples though. When you look at the volume of your workouts, if you do workouts for strength as well as workouts for muscle building and weight loss, only compare workouts directed at the same goal. The goal of a workout dictates certain variable choices, namely number of repetitions and resistance, that will affect the overall training volume of that workout.
Next article, we will discuss the variables of a resistance training program. I mentioned frequency and split in this article. These are variables I will explain in more detail next article, along with 6 other variables you can manipulate to customize your workout to accommodate your goals, preferences, and schedule.
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