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Developing a Weight Training Program

Strength training is part art, part science, and part luck. The science is how to lift and when. On the physiological front, we know a lot about what happens when you follow specific training guidelines. The art is applying this knowledge to your body. For example: How hard do you lift? Are you able to back off when you're tired and push harder when you're stuck at a plateau? Does your diet complement your fitness goals or sabotage them? And there are a host of other factors that govern the way one progresses in the game of fitness. The luck part revolves around one word: genetics.

In other words, there are a lot of variables that surround a lifting program – some you can obviously control, some you can't. We'll discuss the various x-factors involved so that you have a better understanding of how you can best progress in the gym. For example, here's a question that continually stumps people: Why will two people who work out together, doing virtually the same routines, progress at different rates? Read on.

That Was Intense!
Having said that, of all the variables in your lifting program, how hard you work – let's call it the intensity factor – is the single most important one that you can control. We'll give you plenty of tips on how to safely increase this intensity factor so that you get better results faster.

Of course, there are the variables that aren't under your control: age, gender, muscle fiber types, and a few other genetically determined variables that play a major role in your strength development. We'll talk about what they are and how you can work with them instead of getting frustrated and giving up.

Here's the how and the why.

It's Quality, Not Quantity
There are no real differences between the muscle fibers of men and those of women. On a pound-for-pound basis, women are capable of becoming as strong as men. (When Deidre competed as a powerlifter, on a pound-for-pound scale she routinely outlifted most of the men at the meets.) However, because men tend to be larger and have a greater percentage of lean tissue (lower percentage of body fat), men generally have greater strength potential. Dr. Wayne Westcott put it best: Men are stronger than women due to muscle quantity, not muscle quality. While there are differences between the sexes, the methods used to train women need not be any different than those used for men. And in fact, the glut of women's exercise programs arises more from a marketing angle than from genuine need.

How Long?
Consider this scenario: Tim and Tom, identical twins, are seated on opposite sides of a seesaw. If Tim sits all the way at the end while Tom sits three feet from the end, Tom will be airborne despite the fact that they are exactly the same size. It's an issue of simple physics.

Now picture two workout partners who have been training together for one year. Let's say they're doing biceps curls. If both lifters are using the same weight and lifting with the same intensity, one may outlift the other by a substantial margin. Why? Again, it's physics, because the lifter with the shorter arms will have much less work to do. Clearly, there's no reason for the longer-armed lifter to alter his training program – and reducing your arm length is far too drastic a course to follow – but it would explain why the shorter-armed chap is progressing at a faster rate.

Now here's one you've probably not spent a lot of time pondering: tendon length. Re-member that tendons attach muscle to bone. Let's consider the biceps curl again to show how tendon length can affect strength. The biceps muscle runs from the shoulder to a point just below the elbow. Sparing you the physiological details, you might be interested to know that if your tendon attaches farther from the elbow, it's analogous to being at the far end of the seesaw. Similarly, an attachment closer to the joint is analogous to being in the middle.

Of course, there's nothing you can do about where your tendons attach to the bones; however, this will help you understand why you and your training partners don't always progress at the same rate. Because many people get discouraged when their partners progress faster, it's good to know why not all arms were created equal. Other than the fact that everyone is different, here's the good news: Lift diligently and intelligently and you'll get stronger. In short, you'll be building the body that you've always dreamed about.

Fiber Types
If you went to the lab to construct the perfect weight lifter, you'd use lots of fast-twitch muscle fibers (they're the kind that are capable of the greatest gains in size and strength), short arms and legs, and long tendons. When six-footer Jonathan accompanied Deidre to her powerlifting meets, he felt like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at a jockey convention. At a bicycle race he looks like one of the herd. (This may explain why he went into bicycle racing rather than competitive lifting.) Nevertheless, he lifts diligently in order to improve his cycling performance. On the other hand, Deidre, who carries 122 pounds of sculpted muscle on her 5-foot, 3-inch frame, has the ideal muscle type and body for hoisting prodigious amounts of weight. Did she have to train like a Trojan to become a world champion? Definitively yes. Could she have been a comparatively good cyclist or basketball player? Smart money says no.

Your next question might be: If you can't change these things, why even bother discussing them? For the simple fact that knowing about these variables can help prevent unnecessary frustration in the weight room. As we mentioned earlier, everyone can get stronger from weight lifting, but each person responds differently even if the stimulus is the same. Now that you know about some of the things we can't alter, let's talk about some of the things we can. Luckily, no matter what your genetics, height, or body type are, the body is an amazing machine that adapts beautifully when called upon. If you run a lot, your legs will respond; if you swim or kayak a lot, the upper body snaps to attention. The same is true of lifting weights: lift right, lift often, and the gains are there to be had.

Get With the Program
While there are unyielding universal truths when it comes to developing a strength-training program, it's just common sense to tailor your routine to you – and not some prototypical lifter who may have different goals, time constraints, and so forth.

Starting in the next chapter, we give you a variety of exercises to work all of your major muscle groups. Don't know how to awaken your dormant latissimus dorsi? No problem – we offer step-by-step instructions. And later on we give you suggestions about which exercises are most appropriate for you given your specific goals. After all, if you want to improve your 10K running time, buffing up your biceps isn't time well spent. Strong hamstrings – well, that's a muscle of a different color.

For now, let's go over some of the fundamental aspects of a sound training routine.

What to Do?
For virtually every body part we'll discuss, we'll show you a few exercises. For every exercise that we show you, there are usually at least two or three more – some good, some not so good – that you could do instead. In most cases these exercises are interchangeable. They're not really all that different. The most important thing to do is to make sure that you train all your major muscle groups and that you train them in the right order. Right order? Yes. As we mentioned earlier, if, for example, you train your biceps first, your arms are likely to be too tired to offer proper assistance when you work your back or shoulders. As a rule, it's best to work the larger muscles first and work in descending size order. This means that if you were going to hit all your major muscle groups on a particular day, you'd start with, say, your hips and legs and move down the list as we suggest below:

• Hips and legs
• Back
• Chest
• Shoulders
• Biceps
• Triceps
• Abdominals

No, that's not written in stone – for instance, there's no real problem with switching chest and back or biceps and triceps – but it's a good guideline.

Schedule
When it comes to weight lifting, more is not always better. For instance, while your initial temptation may be to take your ambitious mind and eager muscles to the gym as often as possible, that strategy can actually work against you. Again, one essential key is to know when to work out and when to rest. Too much of one or the other and you've upset the apple cart.

Keep in mind that as you lift, you're actually fatiguing and wearing down the muscle tissue. It's during the recovery process that your muscles actually grow bigger and stronger. So as you can see, you should never train the same muscles on consecutive days because it's actually counterproductive.

That's where a split routine comes in. This is a program in which you train different muscles on different days. So while you might lift on consecutive days – chest, shoulders, and triceps on Monday; legs, back, and biceps on Tuesday – you'll be using different muscles each day. Not only does this allow ample time for your muscles to recover, it means you'll be doing fewer exercises on any given day. This prevents burnout, allows you to spend less time lifting on each visit, and means you'll be able to work more intensely on the exercises that you will do.

At the other end of the "too many" spectrum, if you train too infrequently, the strength gains you made in one session will be lost by the next. That means even if you do the best routine in the world on January 1 and little or no training until February 1, the result would be minimal at best in the strength gains department. That should come as no surprise, but we hear people who lift twice a month lament the fact that they're not making much progress.

So what is the ideal frequency? That varies from individual to individual and has a lot to do with how hard each training session is. Here's another immutable rule to note: A hard workout will require more recovery time than an easy one.

Individual strengths and weaknesses aside, two workouts per week is good; three may be better. Whenever possible, we advise beginners to aim for three workouts. If you manage to do two, fine; however, if you're shooting for two, the tendency is that you miss one and compromise your gains. There's another reason why three sessions may be better than two. Early in your workout life, one of our primary goals is to get your brain and body used to the exercises. At this stage we're less concerned with intensity than frequency. So don't worry about your body's ability to tolerate three workouts a week. Once you make going to the gym a regular part of your life – when your weight-lifting workout becomes part of your regular routine – we'll up the intensity and really start to see significant gains.

Reps
The repetition, or rep, is the basic unit of any weight-lifting program. Think of each rep as the nails that a carpenter uses to hammer the studs of a house. While you need to know the big picture, the walls will fall down if you don't pay proper attention to which nail goes where. The point is that unless we first focus on each and every rep, other variables like how many reps per set, how many sets per exercise, and the choice of exercise don't really matter.

How Fast?
Because it's quite important that each and every rep be performed with proper technique, let's do a quick rep check review.

A good guideline to follow while you're performing that perfect rep is to count to three during the positive or concentric phase, hold for a count of one, and count to three for the negative or eccentric phase. By controlling the speed, you accomplish a couple of productive things:

• First (and foremost), you maximize your safety and minimize the stress on your joints.
• You also ensure that momentum is a non-factor, which means that you stress the muscles as much as possible and get the best bang for your buck.
• Finally, by keeping constant form for every rep of every workout, you're able to measure your progress.

For those of us who are goal-oriented (which tends to be just about everyone who works out regularly) or for those who just like to know that something is working, doing each rep as we just described is vital.

Consider the following scenario. On Jan-uary 1, you do a biceps curl with 15-pound dumbbells and are able to do 11 repetitions in a 3-1-3 cadence with textbook-perfect form. If by March 1 you're up to 13 reps, with the same weight and form, clearly you have made progress. On the other hand, if you never pay any attention to anything other than how much weight you hoist and how many reps you've done, an increase in how many reps you do could be due to changes in form rather than strength gains. This type of approach highlights our "lift to gain strength, not demonstrate strength" philosophy. While it's not the best way to impress your musclehead friends in the gym, it's a great way to get strong and healthy while staying injury-free.

How Many Reps?
Now that we've established how you should perform each rep, let's examine how many reps you should do in each set. Walking around your local gym, you're likely to hear all sorts of different theories. Odds are that few, if any, are based on fact. Many will be based on refined analytical thinking that goes something like this: Big Bob does sets of 25 for each exercise and he's bigger than anybody else in the joint. That must be the way to go. Or: I read a bodybuilding magazine that said Ms. Olympia never does more than five reps per set, so that's what I do. Again, how big and strong you get is largely a factor of genetics. Just because Bob the Bruiser is as broad as a barn door doesn't mean that you will be, too. In fact, there are guys out there who get big just by looking at a dumbbell rack.

Wander around the gym a little longer and you're also likely to hear another bit of misinformation that goes something like this: Using high weight with low reps builds bulk, but low weight and high reps helps build definition. Sometimes people will even tell you that lifting like that will actually elongate the muscle. Not so!

Here's the scoop. First of all, your muscle isn't going to get any longer by lifting weights – it attaches to a tendon, which attaches to a bone, and that's that. As for the notion that high reps will define or tone your muscles any more than low reps, wrong again. There are just no medical facts to substantiate such a statement. Too many other factors like genetics and nutrition come into play; and besides, it's intensity, not the number of reps, that makes most of the difference.

Where this supposedly correct fact came from, we don't know. Perhaps it derives from the fact that a long set often produces a burning sensation in your muscles – flashback to Jane Fonda in a leotard encouraging you to "feel the burn" – but that's just due to an increase in the lactic acid in your bloodstream, and doesn't indicate that fat is being burned. Muscles look defined when there's a minimal layer of fat covering them. It's as simple as that. So the question remains: How many reps should you do? For most exercises, a range of 10 to 12 repetitions at a three-second, pause, three-second cadence is appropriate. When you can perform more than 12 well-executed reps at a given weight, it's time to up the weight by about 5 percent. The last rep of the set should always be a challenge – a noble effort we refer to as elegant failure.

How Many Sets?
Once again, ask five different so-called experts about the optimal number of reps to do and you're likely to get five different answers. In fact, this question produces quite a bit of controversy; controversy we must add that is based on fiction rather than on fact.

Traditionally, lifters have performed two or three sets per exercise, though often you hear about people doing as many as five or six. However, if you read the copious number of studies on the subject, most of them seem to indicate that one set (yes, one set!) can be just as effective as and far more efficient than doing multiple sets. By effective, we mean that you can get every bit as strong. By efficient, we mean that you can gain that strength in a fraction of the time. If you use that extra time to do your cardiovascular training, to stretch, or to practice your sport, you're upping your fitness quotient twofold.

When Jonathan played junior varsity basketball at Hunter College, he observed many of the varsity players spending several hours a day in the weight room. While they got plenty strong, they also shot a measly 65 percent from the foul line. Those players probably would have been much better served by cutting their lifting time in half and practicing their shooting.

Now, we're not saying that you can't or won't get strong from two, three, or more sets per exercise – of course you will – just that you can probably get as strong from one set, too. Again, whether you do 1 set or 10, the most important thing to keep in mind is that the last repetition of any set should be difficult. That's why it's important to avoid what we call the magic number syndrome. This occurs when people stop at a given number of reps (usually 10, 12, or 15) even though they've got a lot of gas left in the tank. If you reach your tenth rep and you can do another rep or two without sacrificing form or safety, do it. Remember that you're not a Swiss watch but an evolving work-in-progress.

How Much Weight?
The question of how much weight to lift is probably asked more than any other question in weight lifting.

Now that we've established that a range of 10 to 12 reps is ideal for most exercises, we need to find the weight that will allow you to do that many without compromising your form. As we said before, early on your goal is to learn to do the exercises with the proper technique. In this initial phase of your lifting life, you should err on the side of caution when picking a weight to start with. A rule of thumb to keep in mind is that generally, the larger the muscle, the more weight you can handle. And as you'll quickly learn, you can move more weight with your legs than with your arms.

In the next chapter, we begin to give you step-by-step instructions on how to actually perform these exercises. When you get started with each of them, begin with the lightest weight possible. If it's a machine, set it to one plate to get the feel for it and then add a little more. Right now we want you to focus on technique without worrying about completing the lift. For exercises that require dumbbells, use relatively light ones to accomplish the same aim. And for exercises with a barbell, try using the Olympic bar without weight, or even a lighter one if necessary.

In any event, be sure not to strain or push too hard during your first few workouts. Once you get the feel of things, you can gradually start to increase the weight during the next few workouts. Be patient. Increase the weight a little each time until you find a weight that will be challenging by the tenth or eleventh rep. Once you've found that weight, stay with it until you can do 12 good reps. When you can do 12 solid reps without straining a vital organ, it's time to increase the weight. When you bump up the weight, try for about a 5 percent increase. Adding that extra weight should make reaching 10 a challenge again.

Here's another issue to keep in mind. If you've been lifting for six months and find you're unable to perform 12 reps even though you did so last week, don't worry. The key is form, concentration, and intensity. As long as you reach elegant failure on your ninth, tenth, or eleventh rep, you've making progress. Lack of sleep, stress, and a myriad of other factors will impact on how you feel on any given day, so cut yourself some slack as long as you're working hard.

How Much Rest?
The amount of rest to take between exercises is as fundamental a concern as any other, but for some reason it is the one issue that is often overlooked. For example, most gym veterans can tell you how much weight they use and how many reps they do for any exercise, but few pay much attention to how much rest they take between sets.

From a physiological point of view, there's no real reason to take more than three minutes between sets. By that time, your ATP (remember, ATP is your body's source of immediate energy) is about 99 percent replenished and your body is as ready as it's going to be. From a practical point of view, there's no reason for a beginning lifter to wait that long between sets. Two minutes allows your muscles ample time to recover and gives a workout partner time to change the weight and do a set, without wasting undue time.

While we don't want to make working out into a stressful bit of time management, you should be aware that when you're not thinking about time, two minutes flies by. In fact, very often people have brief chats between sets that last anywhere from 4 to 15 minutes. Ask them how long they take between sets and they assume it's only a few minutes. Before you know it, the workout that should take you 45 minutes to an hour has stretched to 11/2 hours. As a result, it's good to time yourself between sets early on. Once you find a rhythm, your body will know the appropriate amount of rest to take.

For certain advanced programs like circuit training, supersets, bodybuilding, or powerlifting, we will vary the rest interval that we recommend. But for now let's stick with two minutes.

Spotter, Please
Remember, a spotter is someone who is ready to help the lifter in case he or she can't complete a lift. As someone who has chosen to lift a heavy object – often over your precious head or neck – it's your responsibility to make sure you have a spotter whenever you're doing an exercise that may jeopardize your health and welfare. Probably the two most important exercises to have a spotter for when you're using freeweights are the squat or bench press, but they're not the only ones. Again, if you can't lift the weight, you're in serious trouble.

Even when you're using a machine or doing freeweight exercises where your safety isn't jeopardized by the absence of a spotter, a helping hand can help you get more out of an exercise in two ways.

How? Everyone has exercises that he or she finds particularly difficult. Let's say for you it's shoulder presses. Oftentimes, just having someone stand next to you provides the extra motivation to focus and finish the set with good form and maximum effort. Second, a spotter can help you get a few extra reps out of any exercise by offering the barest assistance. We've had spotters who nudged the weight with two fingers who provided invaluable help.

As the lifter, it's your responsibility to tell the spotter what you're going to do. Let him or her know how many reps you're hoping to do, if you want a spot on the lift off (when you first pick the weight off the stand), and so on. It's also your job to never give up on a lift. Jonathan has helped spot powerlifters bench pressing over 400 pounds. While he couldn't lift close to that much by himself, as long as the lifter doesn't bail out on him, he'll never have to. In fact, even if the bruising powerlifter can't moose out that last rep, as long as he gives it his best effort, Jonathan only has to help out with the last few pounds.

Sooner or later, you'll be asked to switch places and act as a spotter. In that case, it's your job to ensure the lifter's safety. Here's the key: Never agree to do something you can't. And if you're not sure what's expected of you, ask. A good spotter is like a good baseball umpire – as unobtrusive as possible. Aside from an inattentive one, an overanxious spotter is the next biggest sinner. Once you've ensured that the lifter doesn't drop 200 pounds on his esophagus, the spotter's job is to make sure that the weight keeps moving with as little assistance as possible. Remember, you're doing the lifter a disservice if you provide too much assistance.

If you see the weight stop moving, give it a little nudge. (On most exercises that use a barbell, you're usually best off by lifting the bar itself. In the case of exercises that use dumbbells, it's usually preferable to nudge the lifter's elbows.) Once you've done it a few times, you'll get the hang of it. The most important things to keep in mind are to always pay attention, don't jump in too soon, and stay close enough to the lifter to help out whenever needed.

Now that you understand the various x-factors of weight training, let's move on and teach some specific exercises to you.

The Least You Need to Know

• Understanding why no two different lifters are alike should clear up a lot of questions as well as potential frustration you may feel.
• The anatomy of a repetition is of the utmost importance.
• The nitty-gritty of a strength-training program: how many reps, how many sets, and how much weight?
• Offering assistance to your fellow lifters is a standard part of gym etiquette.