Kenneth Gardner
TO GET the most out of a weight-training programme, you should design the programme to gain maximum fitness benefits with a low risk of injury. Our muscles will get stronger if we make them work against resistance. Resistance can be provided by free weights, by our body weight or by exercise machines.
Exercise machines are preferred by most people because they are safe, convenient and easy to use. Machines make it easy to separate special muscles which can be given individual attention. You can increase your strength regardless of which method you use, the important thing is to work the muscles against a resistance.
A complete weight-training programme will work all the muscle groups. To achieve overall fitness you should include exercises for your neck, shoulders, upper back, arms, chest, abdomen, lower back, thighs, buttocks and calves. Exercises should be balanced between the muscles that move the joint in the different directions. When you do an exercise that move a joint in one direction, follow that exercise with one that moves the joint in the opposite direction. If you do an exercise that extends your knee to develop the muscles on the front of your thighs, follow up with an exercise that bends your knee to develop the muscles to the back of your thighs.
EXERCISE ORDER
The order of exercises is also very important. You should do exercises that work on the large muscles or muscle groups, or for more than one joint before you do exercises that use small muscle groups or single joints. This facilitates a more effective overload of the larger, more powerful muscle groups. The smaller muscles and muscle groups develop fatigue more easily than larger muscles. When the small muscles fatigue, they limit the capacity of overload of the larger muscles. An example is lateral raises which works the shoulder muscles - they should be performed after you do bench press which work the chest and arms in addition to the shoulders. If your shoulder muscles are fatigued because you did the lateral raises first you won't be able to lift as much weight and the muscle groups used for the bench press will experience fatigue more quickly.
CHOOSING WEIGHTS
The amount of weight or resistance that you lift in weight-training exercises should be equivalent to the intensity of your cardio-respiratory endurance training. It determines the way your body will adjust to weight training and how quickly these adjustments will occur. You should choose weights based on your current level of muscle fitness, and you should lift weights as heavy as 80 per cent of your maximum capacity, or the maximum amount of weight you can lift at once. If you are keener on building endurance, choose a lighter weight, maybe 40 to 60 per cent of your maximum capacity, and do more repetitions. For example, if your maximum capacity for leg press is 80 kilograms you could leg press 64 kilograms to build your strength and 30 kilograms to build endurance using weight in the middle of this range, 40 kilogram.
To improve your fitness you must do enough repetitions of each exercise to fatigue your muscles. The number of repetitions needed to cause fatigue depends on the amount of resistance; the heavier the weight, the fewer repetitions to reach fatigue. A heavy weight and a low number of repetitions of one to five build strength, a light weight and high number of repetitions of, say, 15 to 20 build endurance. In a general fitness programme, building strength and endurance would require about eight to 12 repetitions of each exercise.
Kenneth Gardner is an exercise physiologist at the G. C. Foster College of Physical Education; email: yourhealth@gleanerjm.com.
