Starting with lighter weights

If you’re planning to do more than one set of an exercise, start by performing eight to ten repetitions with a light weight. A warm-up set is like a dress rehearsal for the real thing — a way of reminding your muscles to hit their marks when you go live. Even monstrous bodybuilders do warm-up sets. Sometimes you’ll see a human hunk of muscle bench-pressing with just the 45-pound bar. Just as you’re thinking, “What a wimp,” he piles on so many weight plates that the bar starts groaning. Then you realize that the first set was just his warm-up.

If you get too cocky and head straight for the heavy weights, you risk injuring yourself. With weights that are too heavy for you, you’re playing with some risky behaviors.

• Losing control of the weight
• Dropping the weight on yourself or on someone else
• Straining so hard to lift the weight that you tear a muscle
• Ending up so sore that you can barely lift your feet up high enough to climb stairs.

One or a combination of these accidents can cause a lapse in your workout as you may have to take time off to recover. Be smart and start with lighter weights — weights that you can lift for more reps before you reach fatigue. Then challenge your body by increasing the weight over time. A personal trainer at the gym can also help you target a starting weight for your repetitions.

Lifting weights too quickly doesn’t challenge muscles effectively and is a pretty reliable way to injure yourself. When you’re pressing, pushing, lifting, or extending at the speed of a greyhound, you can’t stop mid-rep if weight plates come loose, you’re positioned incorrectly, or something just doesn’t feel right. So take at least two seconds to lift a weight and two to four seconds to lower it. Some experts feel that you should move even slower than that. If you’re banging and clanging, slow down your pace.

Warming up before you lift

Before you start your training session, warm up your body with at least five minutes of easy aerobic exercise (see below for suggestions). Your warm-up increases circulation to and the temperature of your working muscles, making them more pliable and less susceptible to injury. Your warm-up also lubricates your joints. The pumping action of your bones at the joints stimulates the release of synovial fluid, which bathes your joint and keeps it moving smoothly, as if you’re oiling a mechanical joint. If you have a particularly heavy-weight workout planned, warm up for ten minutes. Warm up your muscles by using Active isolated stretching (AI). AI involves tightening the muscle opposite to the one that you’re planning to stretch and then stretching the target muscle for two seconds. You repeat this process 8 to 12 times before going on to the next stretch.
Walking, jogging, stairclimbing, and stationary biking are also excellent aerobic warm-up activities for the muscles south of your waistline. But to prepare your upper body muscles, you need to add extra arm movements to these activities.

• Vigorously swing your arms as you walk, jog, or use the stairclimber.
• When you ride the stationary bike, gently roll your shoulders, circle your arms, and reach across the center of your body.
• Use an aerobic machine that exercises your entire body, such as a rower, cross-country ski machine, or stationary bike with arm handles. (Many gyms have the Cybex Upper Body Ergometer [UBE]; ask a trainer where you can find the UBE.)

Weight Training Safety

Forget what your Grandma told you. Truth is — there’s nothing inherently unsafe about weight machines or barbells. It’s what you do with these contraptions that can leave you with smashed toes, ripped hamstrings, and torn tendons. If you pay attention, use proper form, and don’t get too macho about how much weight you lift, you can go for years without even a minor injury. In fact, one of the best reasons to lift weights in the first place is to reduce your risk of injury in daily life by strengthening your muscles and bones.
Follow the safety tips in this chapter, and you’ll walk out of the weight room the same way you entered it: in one piece and under your own power. We said that weight training is safe and that you can go a lifetime without a minor injury, but with that said, you may feel occasional muscle soreness —especially if you’re new to the game or haven’t worked out in a while. A little bit of post-workout soreness is okay; chances are, you’ll feel tightness or achiness 24 to 48 hours after your workout, rather than right away. (This postponed period is called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, for those of you who feel more comfortable when your pain has a name.) But there are ways to reduce your amount of discomfort so you can be a normal, functioning human being after your workout. The following guidelines can help you keep this soreness to a minimum.

Lifting your body weight

Why is it that certain exercises can be quite challenging even though you’re not holding any weights or using a machine. In these cases, you’re not lifting zero weight; you’re lifting your body weight. With a number of exercises, moving your own body weight offers plenty of resistance, especially for beginners. The effectiveness of an exercise without equipment depends on how much of your weight you actually have to move and how hard you have to work to overcome the force of gravity. In the military version of the push-up, you have to push your entire body upward, directly against the force of gravity. The modified push-up, where you’re balanced on your knees rather than your toes, factors out the weight of your legs so the exercise is easier. Neither exercise requires you to hold a weight, but both versions can be tough.

Buckling Down on Bands and Tubing

Giant rubber bands and rubber tubes provide a muscle resistance workout for just pennies. These inexpensive items can’t make you as strong or measure your progress as precisely as machines and free weights, but bands do challenge your muscles in different and effective ways. For example, because bands don’t rely on weight or gravity for resistance, bands provide a challenge during both the up and down motions of an exercise. With most free weight and weight machine exercises, on the other hand, you typically feel most of the resistance during the lifting portion of the exercise, because gravity assists in the lowering portion.
Rubber bands and tubes are also convenient and portable. (You can’t exactly pack dumbbells in your overnight bag.) If you don’t have access to machines, bands are a great supplement to free weights because they allow you to do exercises that aren’t possible with dumbbells and bars.

Coming to grips with cable attachments

At most gyms, you see a large heap of metal bars and handles sitting in a plastic container or milk crate. This pile may look like junk but, actually, it’s more like a treasure chest. By attaching these handles to a cable pulley, you create an unlimited variety of exercises.

Some people are afraid to go near this pile, so they simply use whatever bar happens to already be attached to the cable. But if you frequently switch the handles, your workout can be more fun. Here’s a rundown of the most popular cable attachments:

• Ankle collar: You clip this wide leather ankle bracelet to the pulley to perform exercises such as leg lifts, back kicks, and leg curls. The ankle collar can strengthen your inner and outer thighs while you’re standing. We don’t use the ankle collar in this book, but a trainer can fill you in on the details.
• Curved short bar: Some of these are U-shaped and some are V-shaped. Both varieties are used almost exclusively for triceps exercises, such as the triceps pushdown.
• Long bar: These bars come in various lengths and are commonly used for back exercises that involve pulling the bar to your chest. You can pull these bars with an underhand or overhand grip, and you can place your hands as far apart or as close together as you like.
• Rope: This attachment is most commonly used for triceps exercises such as the triceps pushdown.
• Straight short bar: This bar is used in triceps exercises, biceps curls, and rows. We especially like to use this bar for the triceps pushdown and the seated cable row.

Smith machines and power cages

The Smith machine: The Smith machine —named for an influential 1970s fitness figure named Randy Smith — features a regular free-weight bar trapped inside a track so that the bar must travel straight up and down. The Smith machine increases the safety of exercises such as bench presses, overhead lifts, and squats because you don’t have to worry about the bar wobbling or slipping from your grip. At the same time, the machine retains the feel of free weights. Many Smith machines possess another safety feature: self-spotting pins jutting out from the frame. These pins prevent the bar from being lowered below a certain point, so there’s no chance you’ll get crushed under the bar if the weight is too heavy. Smith machines use a traditional 45-pound bar, but in some cases, the bar balances on springs to negate most or all of its weight. The purpose is to add smoothness to the movement. Many lifters don’t like this feature because it takes away from the macho spirit of weight lifting. Also, the movement is a bit too smooth, removing all the coordination and extra muscle usage associated with lifting free weights.


The power cage: A power cage is a large steel frame with a series of stanchions affixed to the sides. You stand in the center of the cage and place your bar on the stanchions that are at the right height for your lift. A power cage doesn’t offer as much safety as a Smith machine because after you lift the bar from the stanchions, you’re on your own. Still, the cage does offer an extra measure of protection during heavy lifts or lifts that require a lot of balance. And if your muscles give out, the stanchions catch the weight before it crashes to the floor.