Sweat!
Weight-Training 101
by Tam Thompson
The next time you’re up early on a January morning, take a look around the neighborhood streets. See all the New Year’s resolution runners, and the this-is-the-year-I’ll-get-in-shape walkers brandishing their hand-held weights like trophies of 10 pounds lost? Wave to them now because, come Feb. 1, nine out of 10 of them will have given up, according to the International Sports Sciences Association. The same goes for new gym members; in early January, they stand around gym equipment five deep. By the next week, they’ve dropped out of sight.

What makes the difference between a “January warrior statistic,” as American College of Sports Medicine (A.C.S.M.)-certified fitness trainer Margo Kamin of One-on-One Fitness Training calls them, and the one person out of 10 who manages to turn a resolution into a personal revolution?

“It’s because they try to go from zero to 90 overnight,” Kamin says. “People think they can go from doing nothing to training six times a week. After a week or two, they drop out because they’ve overtrained to the point that they’re sick and injured. They’ve set themselves up for failure.”

Building up an exercise program is just that: building it up. Beginners shouldn’t expect to be able to copy a top athlete’s program. “Beginners should only commit themselves to one or two exercise sessions per week during January, and consider anything more to be a cherry on top of the whipped cream,” Kamin recommends. “If they’ll do that, then their chances of doing more — and still being in the game — in February will be exponentially better, and their chances of making exercise a permanent lifestyle will also be greatly increased.”

Any fitness program should contain a few basic components: cardiovascular/aerobic exercise to burn body fat and condition the heart and lungs, weight-training to strengthen muscles and bones, and flexibility work to keep muscles limber. For some reason, weight training has generated more myths and misconceptions than cardio and flexibility training combined.

1 “There’s a fear unique to women,” Kamin says, “of bulking up and getting too huge. This fear is unfounded for 95 percent of the population. In general, women just don’t have the testosterone nor the physiology to build big muscles. Go into any health club, and look around at a hundred different women there. Count how many of them you think are more muscular than you think you’d like to be. It’s not going to be many.”

To allay fears, Kamin suggests, “If you happen to find yourself in the small fraction that does start bulking up, stop using big weights. Increase your volume, use smaller weights and do more repetitions and the problem will take care of itself.” However, everyone should consider his or her own body type.

2 Another myth Kamin dispels is “the notion that there’s ‘toning,’ ‘firming’ and ‘sculpting.’ There’s no difference between any of that and bodybuilding. It’s all working against resistance, which strengthens and tones your muscles.”

3 The concept of spot reducing — the idea that you can obsessively exercise one area of the body to lose fat in that particular location — is another myth. Fat doesn’t exist in isolated pockets; doing 1,000 crunches daily won’t cause you to lose that stubborn belly fat. Running and/or other forms of cardio training are the recommended activities for fat-burning.

Subcutaneous (below the skin) fat is a continuous layer that surrounds you like a head-to-toe blanket. When you lose fat, the entire layer shrinks, although it does seem to diminish more quickly from the places on your body where it appeared last.

“You cannot spot reduce, but you can spot tone,” says Kamin, meaning that it is possible to tone up one single muscle group by isolating it. That rock-hard six-pack you’ve been doing all those crunches to get? It’s there, it’s just buried under the layer of fat.

4 Not everyone trains with weights merely for general fitness and weight-loss, however. Many athletes and casual sports participants use weight-training to improve their performance. (Many compete in weight-lifting sports such as powerlifting, weightlifting and bodybuilding.) Chandler Collins is a U.S.A. Triathlon- and U.S. Rowing-certified coach. He believes, “Endurance athletes definitely benefit from weights, in terms of building strength, shoring up stabilizer muscles and preventing injury.”

The message is the same for fitness as well as sports: weights are good. But the application differs. “It’s one thing to build raw muscle mass; weights do that, and they make you strong,” Collins explains. “It’s another thing to learn how to apply that strength to your specific sport.”

So how do you do that? “Well, for instance,” Collins says, “in cycling, I’ll have my athletes do some one-legged cycling.

They’ll do each leg for, say, 30 seconds, in a very easy gear, at about 80 to 90 rpm. Then they’ll take an active rest with some Spinning and do three or four more sets. When it becomes easy, we increase the time or the gear. One-legged cycling helps develop more efficient neuromuscular pathways.”

5 More is not necessarily better, especially for multisport athletes. When asked if he thinks triathletes do too much weight training, Collins chuckles. “Definitely, and it’s usually in the form of too much intensity. They need to back off on using heavy weights or they’ll overtrain.”

6 As Kamin pointed out, the most likely thing that will happen to a “January warrior” is that they’ll become a drop-out statistic.

To avoid this, Collins suggests, “Beginners who want to start a weight-training program should probably stick with machines at first. Machines are safer and the movements are more controlled. If you want to train with free weights, you need a trainer or coach to show you proper form. Learning proper form is one of the top two ‘must-do’s’ of weight training.

7 The other is to avoid doing too much, too soon.So how do you know if you’re overdoing it, particularly if you’re just starting out and you’ve never worked out with weights before?

Allan Besselink of Smart Sport International suggests doing one set of eight to 12 reps until failure of each exercise, and one exercise per body part. He adds that big muscle groups should be worked once a week, and smaller muscles such as calves and stomach, can be worked twice weekly. Most trainers agree that most of the muscles should have two days of rest in between weight training sessions.

“Before you get sick or injured, heed the warning signs,” Collins says. “If you suddenly feel unmotivated or stressed-out, or if you’re fatigued before you’ve even begun your workout, you might be overtrained.” Other symptoms include an elevated resting heart rate (10 percent or more above normal) or more aches and pains than usual and a generalized feeling of “I’m coming down with something.”

When things reach that point, “you should absolutely take a day off,” Collins says. “On rest days, your body recovers and adapts to the training load. So, rest with confidence, knowing that you don’t improve when you train, only when you rest.”

Don’t think that as a beginner you need to jump in hard and fast. “It’s a myth that you must always train at high intensity,” Collins warns. “For a beginner, low- to medium-intensity training will produce results. The
first thing you need to do is to build your endurance base, and you can do that without the increased risk of illness or injury that high-intensity training brings. And be very careful with increasing your training volume (how much weight lifted). This will keep you from getting burned out and dropping the program.”
To sum it all up, it’s great to take those bold first steps toward a new you in 2004. But it won’t be fun to hit February with sore muscles and a demoralized attitude and have to tell your friends you quit the program. Break your workouts into bite-sized chunks that your body can digest; don’t try to do too much, too soon, and by Valentine’s Day, you’ll be well on your way to a buff bod!