10 Tips For Weight Training
Tip 1 - Warm-Up

Before beginning any type of athletic activity, you should raise the peripheral body temperature. Get your heart beating and increase the blood flow to your extremities by participating in five minutes of a low intensity cardiovascular activity. Following your warm-up, stretch your muscles gradually to a point of mild discomfort, not a full-blown pain. Never bounce. Instead, hold stretched positions for about 20 seconds. Rather than limiting your self to a pre-stretched, you should try to remember to stretch throughout your workout, even between each set. By stretching you increase the flow of blood to the muscle and help remove waste products like lactic acid.

Tip 2 – Concentrate

Your workout is not the place to hang out, play, and have conversations with other two members. To be effective, it is a careful orchestration of the human body. By the way, you are in charge of it. Learn to isolate specific muscles. Steady, controlled movements are the key to learning what it feels like to work a specific muscle or muscle group. It takes about three weeks for the novice to maximize the neuro muscular coordination necessary to identify fully recruit muscle fibers from individual muscle groups. When you achieve a mental connection with your muscles you will be able to more efficiently target these groups and minimize the assistance given by the sympathetic muscle groups. This also allows you to safely use equipment and even invent your own exercises simply by duplicating that “feel” in the muscle.

Tip 3 – Keep Proper Form

If you've heard it once you've heard million times, movements should be performed with strict attention to form in order to achieve maximum benefit with minimal risk of injury. When lifting heavier weight remember to avoid sharp or jerky movements and the use of momentum during the lift. These cheating tactics will not make you grow any faster or become any stronger, but they will place harmful stress on the joints and connective tissue. It is suggested to hold the full contraction for short pause to accentuate the pump. Concentrate and focus on both the eccentric and concentric phase of the contraction to maximize every repetition.

Tip 4 – Push The Limits

Many people approach and exercise and sent to with a preconceived notion of the exact number repetitions they are going to perform. This is a mistake. The poor souls who limit itself to this preconceived number will never reach their full potential or see the results they are looking for. You should he constantly pushing your limits. Your goal is to completely fatigued and shock the muscle group. This is what sends the request to the body to “improve and strengthen”. Don be afraid to add a protein supplement to help recover faster.

Tip 5 – Do you have a Split?

If you've never trained with weights, or taken a significant break from weights, I do not recommend training at maximum intensity right away. Training to failure during the first crucial workouts will result in tremendous muscle soreness and you may never come back to the gym. Start slowly by doing a full body workout consisting of three or four sets for each major muscle group. After this you are ready to begin a split system. A training split is how you split your body more workout purposes.

Tip 6 – Train Each Muscle Group Once Per Week

With the exception of absent, directly training a body part with high intensity more than once a week is usually over training. If you are striving for maximum string and, power, and muscular growth, high intensity translates to lower reps and heavyweight. Three or four sets of three or four exercises have long been a rule by many.

Tip 7 – What the Big Picture

Design your training regiment to conform to your overall objectives. Many people cycle their training year-round. Certainly fighters and boxers alter their training during the year to peak at certain times, everyone should follow a similar path or at least learn from this. You need to know what your goal is in order to reach it -- sounds silly, but it is very true.

Tip 8 – No One Like the Same Thing

Maximize your body's response with new challenges. Even the most brilliantly designed training program will gradually lose if it's efficacy. Your body is too smart for its own good. Your body will set plateaus as you become more and more adept at performing a particular movement of you do not constantly makes things up. Every workout shoes different exercises. Every month or so change your training split. I urge you to constantly try new exercises. Look around the gym, watch people who look like you want to look. Talk to people. Consult magazines. Experiment on your own. Change angles. Alter foot stances - grips. Super sets and strip sets… and the list go on and on.

Tip 9 – Avoid Over-Training

Pay attention to your body. Next to bad form, overtraining its most common mistake I see in the gym. If you find you are losing your enthusiasm for workouts, if you are constantly tired, if your progress has slowed or stopped, its time for a break. If you're consistently training I recommend a week off every three months. You will return to the gym reinvigorated, renewed and rested.

Tip 10 – Be Patient

I didn't want to hear it when I stepped to the gym as an ectomorphic 13 year old. However, I learned the lessons and so will you. Persistence is the only thing you can control. No two physiques are exactly the same you should not measure your progress against someone else's. Almost everyone is frustrated by the difficulty they encounter trying to lose those last few pounds. Lean people are discouraged by how long it takes them to put on weight. Body builders are constantly balancing the task of building muscle, while at the same time achieving definition and leanness. It all takes time.