Free Strength Training Exercises Metabolic Benefits of Strength Training
Strength training exercises create a metabolic furnace. You can transform your body with these free fat-burning programs!
Our free programs are suitable for everyone from beginners to those who are more advanced. This type of training will achieve lasting natural weight loss and allow you to eat more food! Young or old, male or female, everyone can experience the health benefits of weight training and lose body fat.
Make a commitment to strength training exercises for fat loss. If you let go of fears and excuses, you will soon feel as if there were unseen forces coming to your aid.
Going at whatever pace suits you best, just keep putting one foot in front of the other. If you do, lasting natural weight loss will be only one of the many health benefits.
In this strength training exercises section of our website we have pages on:
Exercising Safely During Strength Training
Strength Training Orientation
Weightlifting Tips, Part 1
Weightlifting Tips, Part 2
Workout Shakes.
In the Weightlifting for Fat Loss section [listed on the navigation buttons], we have pages on:
Weightlifting for All
Weightlifting Program: Beginners
Weightlifting Routines: Intermediates.
sidebar quotation from Roshi Shunryu Suzuki: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."
In case you may think that there are other options than strength training for permanent weight loss, there aren't.
You might lose weight without strength training exercises but you won't keep the weight off. Diets without exercise (and an ongoing healthy diet) don't result in permanent weight loss.
As you may already have learned for yourself, programs for permanent weight loss that are not centered on strength training exercises don't work.
We discuss elsewhere the benefits of training. To learn about this, see our web page:
We also discuss elsewhere the principles for training safely. See our web page: Exercising Safely for Strength Training. You will find the link to that page listed at the bottom of this page.
We also discuss elsewhere how to structure your overall physical training program, including frequency of training. See our web page:
In addition, it is advisable to get your physician's approval before beginning any exercise program.
Becoming good at strength training requires practice. If you are serious about achieving permanent weight loss, then commit yourself wholeheartedly to strength training exercises.
You may have decided that you don't like exercise. However, strength training will enable to lose far more body fat and it will stop the fat from returning!
Simply decide to get all your "buts" out of the way and commit to strength training by resolving to make whatever effort is required.
sidebar quotation from Andrew Weil, M.D.: "[S]keletal muscles constitute a metabolic furnace . . . Anyone wanting to lose or control weight should, in addition to eating less and exercising more, try to increase lean body mass--by weight training, for example--in order to keep the metabolic furnace burning bright."
Strength training exercises
How to Begin
There is no one best way to begin.
Perhaps the best way to begin would be to find a master/expert willing to train you.
How, though, if you are not a master, would you recognize a master? Someone who is big and strong might just be that way genetically, or even a drug abuser.
Some personal trainers are excellent. Other personal trainers, however, may not understand enough about what they recommend, despite seemingly impressive credentials.
sidebar quotation from Charles Poliquin: "Most personal trainers affiliated with corporate gyms are hired because they possess two things: a pulse and the age of majority. In other words, they have the two essential requirements for getting another adult to sign a contract."
An excellent way to start is to improve your own understanding and get advice from multiple sources. Keep reading, watching, listening, testing, and thinking for yourself. After all, who knows your body better than you do?
If you challenge yourself mentally as well as physically, it will make your training more interesting and, over time, more effective. Your body changes as it ages, and your training should change as well.
The chief purpose of the ideas in this section is to stimulate your thinking about training. If you are already a strength-training master, you probably won't learn anything on this page. Even intermediate trainers may not learn much on this page.
However, if you are a beginner, then we hope that you'll find these ideas very useful.
Benefits of strength training exercises
Training for Beginners
If you are a beginner and don't know what you are doing, strength training is a good way to injure yourself. Just walking into a gym for the first time is intimidating!
Well, such fear is normal. If you are stuck on it, you'll never become strong. The key to overcoming a fear of injuring yourself through training is to realize that, done correctly, strength training is very safe.
Especially when you avoid the quick, difficult lifts such as the Olympic lifts (that are avoided on all the routines recommended here), there is never any reason to injure yourself seriously during training.
Major injuries are avoidable if you use the rules for training safely that we articulate. If you follow those rules and pay attention to what you are doing, your workouts will be quite safe.
If you break any of those rules or become distracted, you may injure yourself. So, really, whether or not you get injured is up to you.
There's no substitute for your own judgment. Approach training with an open mind; give up attachments to your ego as well as to your physique ideals.
Your body is what it is. Nurture it. Don't fight it or try to force it to do something impossible. Resolve to work with it.
Always use impeccable exercise form and controlled rep speed (without momentum). Keep complete written records. The central idea is progressive resistance: increase your intensity a little each workout.
Sufficient small steps in the right direction will eventually result in impressive strength gains.
Those strength gains correlate with increased lean muscle mass, which replaces body fat. Keep focused on making strength gains by training well.
As you do, your body composition will improve. As you keep training and eating correctly, you will become trim. Why not make permanent fat loss a reality in your life?
The initial workouts recommended later in this section are full-body routines that are appropriate for beginners. Remember, if you have been doing strength training regularly for less than a year, you are a beginner.
In case you find an exercise unusually painful, difficult, or impossible to do, we also provide some alternative exercises. We also mention some important safety precautions with respect to certain exercises.
There are also some recommendations (including workouts) for intermediate trainees. For example, we explain how to determine the most effective number of reps for you per body part.
It is beyond the scope of this website to provide guidance on how to perform all the various exercises properly. By far, the best books on this critical topic are Stuart McRobert's THE INSIDER'S TELL-ALL HANDBOOK ON WEIGHT-TRAINING TECHNIQUE and his more recent BUILD MUSCLE LOSE FAT LOOK GREAT.
We use McRobert's terminology.
Even if you think you have a knowledgeable coach, we strongly encourage you to study one of his books. If you purchase a copy, you can even carry it to the gym with you to consult as you work your way through a routine.
If you are a beginner, perform exercises the way that McRobert teaches and don't do any exercise that isn't in one of McRobert's books.
Think of it this way: you will be unable to make good progress if you are injured. Yes, you may be able to do some training around an injury, but, surely, it's much better not to get injured in the first place.
McRobert emphasizes SAFETY, and that's a big reason why we recommend his book. It's much easier and less painful to learn from the mistakes of others than to make your own, right?
The best exercises for achieving permanent weight loss are the ones that build the most muscle mass.
These are the "compound" exercises that involve more than one joint (as opposed to "isolation" exercises that involve just one joint).
In general, beginners should do whole body routines that use basic, compound exercises such as squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, dips, and pull-ups or pull-downs.
It's great to be able to do strength training intensely, in other words, with a heavy load, which is the amount of weight moved against resistance. If you are a beginner, you haven't yet conditioned your body to train intensely. If you nevertheless begin by training intensely, you'll hurt yourself.
In practice, everyone seems to understand this; beginners are, in fact, reluctant to train intensely—with good reason.
If you are a beginner, it will take some months before you are able to train intensely.
There's no rush.
Begin properly by using a light load with impeccable form and perfect reps. This is much more important than the volume (the number of reps and sets) you do.
Please be patient: you are laying a foundation for a lifetime of beneficial training. Your training (and the correct diet) is the central to achieving permanent weight loss. Please nurture your enthusiasm for it!
We suggest that you look at the above listed pages before going on to training exercises and routines in the Weightlifting for Fat Loss section [listed on the navigation buttons].
In weightlifting for fat loss, we have pages on:
Weightlifting for All
Weightlifting Program: Beginners
Weightlifting Routines: Intermediates.
Alternatively, are you looking for something in particular? You can now FAST SEARCH our website or the World Wide Web.
