Vaguely valid advice to prospective weight trainers

Yes...I'm a hideous meathead. You can be too. Muscles in no way invalidate your touching, sensitive, poetry spouting tree-licking side. The information herein is an amalgam of once relentlessly gleaned knowledge, and personal experience. In the end I found experience won.

First, ask yourself why you want to do it. In and of itself, lifting weights is a sometimes rewarding, oftentimes hideously boring activity. If you want to improve your self-image, feel stronger, do some ancillary training for other sports, then it could be just the ticket. If you want to be become the destructotron mega-overlord girl/boymaster5000 that lays waste to entire biker bars and then scores with anyone still standing; umm......get some help, buy a gun or drink soy or something.

Always warm up. Read weight lifting safety tips, and Geek's Guide to Working Out and Weight lifting metanode for good advice on this topic. Read them also for the reason that I'll probably introduce terminology here that those writeups define (and I don't), and this being a quasi-practical advice piece gives me the license to leave stuff out at will.

Working out with weights is supposed to be an effortful activity. Start out light by all means, but once you've gained some basic coordination (most of your initial strength gains will be coordination based), increase the damn weights. You are supposed to sweat and strain, your muscles are supposed to burn. Stop short of popping capilliaries in your eyeballs, but work damn you, work! Please don't make too many freaking grunting and screaming noises. Everybody knows those guys are cocks. Nor should you be injuring yourself by throwing around weights that are too heavy for you, using improper form. Form is of absolute importance unless you have a penchant for joint destruction and torn muscles. You really need a knowledgeable instructor to guide you through this...I don't think descriptions are sufficient.

Don't fuck around. By fucking around, I don't mean being a total dick and doing your zany Terrance and Phillip impressions and having fun, you're supposed to do that if that's what you're into. What I mean is do not go to the gym just because you like to watch yourself work out. Total waste of time. If you're there, you should be there for a purpose. Sure, sometimes a few light sets can actually help you recuperate if your muscles are having a hard time recovering from a previous workout (see Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness)...but unless you're undergoing some sort of rehabilitation programme..there is just no point to regularly doing half-assed minimal effort workouts. You'll just make yourself sick of being in the gym, and you'll quickly tire of the grunting of the meathead gym-herd. The last few repetitions in your sets should be hard! Sure, do a few warm up sets that you can complete with relative ease, but those last sets should involve some very near maximal effort. However, and this is a big however, don't train to failure; you should always be able to complete that last rep...you're not practising to fail, you're practising to succeed. Knowing whether you can or can't do another rep is part of the self-knowledge that you'll acquire if you do things right.

Stick with the basics. Like basic everything elses, they're basic because they're necessary. Many is the lifter that I've observed doing seventeen different wanky exercises for biceps, spending hours on the pec-dec machine, madly flapping their arms in the cable cross-over machine, and never doing a single bench-press, squat, or indeed any other compound exercise. Waste of time, and it shows. Compound exercises are your friend: bench press (with dumbells or bar), squats, any variation of pressing from the shoulder (with dumbells] or a bar), lat pulldowns, chin-ups, bent over rows (with dumbells or bar), deadlifts, any freaking exercise that strongly activates more than a single muscle group. Isolation exercises have their place, and competitive body builders (read freaks...ok...harsh....but hey) swear by them. I use them also, but not at the expense of the basic strength building exercises. Which leads me to mixing it up.

Discipline is a great thing. I don't have any. Mix stuff up in the gym to keep it happy and fresh. Change the order of your exercises. Try a few weeks of 6 repetition maximum sets (probably the best rep range for raw power), then give that a rest and have a few weeks of 8-10 repetition sets (good for hypertrophy and strength). Use only a bar. Use only dumbells. Wear all pink. Read Mills and Boon romance novels between sets. Whatever makes it fun to keep going to the gym. You can get very complicated in your use of cyclic training (regimented changes in repitition per set used across a period of weeks), but I always get entirely unenthused about that whole idea. If you're going hard, and covering all the body bits every week...you'll get results. You're better off having fun in the long haul with slightly lowered efficiency, than burning out on some anal-land routine that requires you to keep a 1000 page journal documenting each millisecond of gym time. Unless you like that.

Eat. Eat a lot. No...not a raw cow placenta milk-shake every 10 minutes or some other weird shit. We're not getting fat here...so don't just triple your McDonald's intake. Eat more normal food. I am vegetarian, so I end up eating lots of the same vegetarian stuff I would eat if I didn't do gym stuff. Supplements are expensive. I am 'not down' with the supplements. Maybe I would get better results from a more careful diet plan, with a well thought out, backed by the latest market research driven scientific findings, regimen of supplements with cool names. I choose to spend that money on beer, which also comes in cool name varieties.

Please...for the love of muscular Jesus and pumped to the max Mary, work your legs!! Nothing looks funnier than some person built like a He-Man figurine torso stuck on Barbie legs. It's just fuck-off stupid. Besides which, you'll get better results if you are one of the brave few who can bring themselves to do the ultimate in all strength/power/size building exercises: the squat. Sure, gains are for the most part targetted to the areas that you exercise - but the *major* exercises are the ones you really need for that wondrous influx of hormones and transmitters and other juicy shit that causes you to achieve an anabolic state. Yes, I realize I'm falling amazingly short of baffling you with hard facts and ultra-technical scientific data here...but trust me. It's just true.

You'll notice a distinct lack of *actual* numbers of sets, days per week, exercise combinations etc. etc. in this massy diatribe of mine. There is no right answer, but there are plenty of sources all too willing to give it to you. If your muscles have fully recovered from your last workout .... it's time to stress them again. This means your muscles should not be sore, and should have lost that tight, slightly fatigued feeling, before you even consider working them. Some people find that with big muscle groups like those found in the legs and bootal region, once a week is enough, and that once a week might comprise 2 or three warmup sets, and 2 or three maximal effort sets of an exercise like squats, combined with some sets of leg-curls or stiff-legged deadlifts. Others get better results from twice a week, with far more sets, and far more exercises. Age, your basic constitutional aptitude (I probably made that term up), and your current level of strength related fitness will all affect these sort of determinations. You need to find your own balance between recovery and and over-long layoff. It's a learning thing. Don't jump into the latest 5 times a week, double-split, synergistic hormone release maximizing workout as featured in Big Fucking Meaty Guys magazine or some such: most times it's waaaay too much, waaay too soon, and your being on a hefty steroid stack for it to work is pretty much assumed.

Finally..(whew)..this sort of activity is something you need to keep doing. Some people get great results fast, others have to work harder for less. It's a progression of incremental benefits. There will be no long term gain if you stop and start...it's not a skill based activity like Tennis or Line-Dancing. You're forcing your body to undertake structural changes, and it won't do that if you don't keep asking it to. I have fun asking that question. You might too.

I train to failure, especially on the last set of any given exercise. It's been my philosophy that if you're not "leaving it all out on the field," as we Ultimate players put it, you're doing yourself an injustice. Now, maybe if you're just starting out, you want to stick to what you're sure you can do for a while train to success, not failure and all that. But half the fun of lifting for me is not quite being sure if I can squeeze out one more rep, trying it, and finally finishing that last rep after a massive struggle. You against gravity, baby. Note that I am not advocating the use of improper form just to get a final rep in - training with improper form invariably does more harm than good. If you can't finish the rep, don't - there's no shame in stopping halfway, if you're completely pumped out. I, personally, like to hold the weight up as long as I can, even if I can't make it go any further, just to feel that sweet, sweet burning of lactic acid. Once it starts to hurt, rather than just burn, I let the weight slowly back down, and I am finished with that set. Note that pain is not good. Burning is good, but if you feel any sort of sharp pain, or anything that's more than vaguely localized, put the weight down and figure out what's wrong!

I like to keep a weightlifting journal. It says things like "Oct. 23: Leg press. 280: 10 reps, 260: 10 reps, 260: 8.5 reps. Leg extension..." and so on. It's a neat way to keep track of your progress, and it definitely helps you make sure you get in all the muscle groups you're aiming for. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest a pretty basic training schedule that's done very well for me. This one assumes you have time to work out 6 days a week... I'll tell you how to shuffle it around into 3 days in a minute.

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are lower body days. Warm up with a brief jog (you don't want to tire out your legs completely before you start lifting; I usually make this a 2-3 mile run) and stretch. Then get a thorough lower body workout in - you want to do squats, leg extensions, calf raises, all those lovely exercises that make your legs strong. Cool down and stretch. Stretching is important, 'cause it helps prevent delayed onset muscle soreness, and also because as your muscles get stronger, they will tend to tighten up.

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday are upper body days. I usually do a more strenuous warmup run on these days - 5-6 miles at an 8-minute pace is about right for me. This gets the blood flowing, helps work out the soreness from the previous day's lower body workout, and improves your aerobic condition. Of course you should scale the warmups to what suits your current level of conditioning... if 10 miles is a warmup to you, then go for it (but you probably didn't need my advice anyway); if walking a mile leaves you gasping for air, give it 10 minutes on the treadmill. The point is to get the blood flowing, get the muscles warm. Stretch, then go for a variety of shoulder, chest, arm, abdominal, and lower back exercises (if you prefer, you can work abs and low back on your lower body days). Cool down and stretch again.

Sundays I like to go for a nice long run... this is optional, but it helps me get rid of soreness, and I just like to run.

If you can only get 3 gym days a week, for whatever reason, shorten the warmup run to about 10 minutes, and work both upper and lower body. Make sure to go for a jog or something on your non gym days.

Weight training has been really rewarding for me... recently I've cut down on my lifting time to work on plyometrics and other forms of exercise that really don't become options until you're in good enough shape to do them correctly, but I still try to get down to the weight room a couple of times a week to keep up my basic strength. I enjoy lifting, and I believe most people can too, once they get the hang of it.