Weight Training – How to Get Started
So, what comes to mind when anyone mentions weight training? Does it scare you? Make you nervous? Well, you know that it shouldn’t, right? Weight training, or resistance training, (although I know of no one who calls it that), can take many forms. It’s certainly not necessary for you to go to the expense of buying a weight training gym for your home, whether or not you can afford to. When you start out weight training, there’s nothing wrong with getting a little inventive. A 2-litre bottle of water weighs about 2kg, so a couple of these would be ideal. Need something lighter, try a couple of 1-litre bottles instead! In fact, whatever amount of resistance you need to exercise with, just a little ingenuity will serve you well to find something that will fit the bill without all the initial expense. After all, it seems to me that going to all that expense if you decide at some point early on that you don’t wish to continue to use that route to fitness.
If you intend to use weights to enhance your workout routines, then you should start out gently. Ease your body into it, perhaps employ a couple of tins of fruit or something as your weights. If that feels ok to you after a couple of days or so then push yourself a little more rather than immediately upping the weight. This in turn helps you to burn off more fat as your metabolism rises. It would also be a good idea to form a schedule that ensures you don’t weight train too often, and when you train, you train well. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays – weight train. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday are cardio days, and Sunday can be your day off! That’s just an example of course. After you have worked your muscles hard, they need time to recover, which encourages their growth.
Push-ups are a great way to tone up the triceps and the arms in general. But for those of us who have not engaged in any real physical exercise in so long, if ever, are not going to find that easy to do, but it’s not impossible. An example of an easy way to do a push-up is to use a set of stairs. Just use the highest step you feel comfortable with to perform your push-ups. Over time, as these types of push-ups get easier for you, use the next step down and practice your push-ups from there, keeping your body as straight as you can each time – the aim is simply to work your way down to the floor. Even easier – and nothing wrong with doing these, is to do vertical push-ups, a little contradictory in terms I know, but still valid. Stand facing a wall and place your palms flat against it. Position yourself so that both arms are slightly bent, making sure your feet are shoulder-width apart and parallel to each other. Now you are in a great position to begin your press-ups, touching your nose to the wall on each count. I recommend non-stop press-ups for thirty seconds in this case. Remember, this is not a race, just a nice steady pace, but sustained for half a minute; you can easily gauge yourself from there. If you find it relatively easy for you, then increase the time by 10 seconds, if you find it a struggle, then decrease by 10 seconds.
You can also start exercising your biceps. Remember that you don’t need to buy weight sets to get started. A couple of bottles of water would suffice. For exercising the legs, you can improvise by adding extra weight to help with those too, but I would recommend breaking the no-spend rules here.
Ankle weights are perfect and less cumbersome and, in my view, more comfortable and so allow you to train with more confidence. So, if you’re able, invest in some ankle weights, they aren’t too expensive nowadays, and you don’t need to buy high-end, high-priced stuff. Look around and buy within your budget. At the time of writing this, you can pick up a pair of ankle weights for a tenner. I would also recommend you buy the type that can be adjusted, not just in fit, but in weight – that’s likely to up the price tag a little, but not much. I wouldn’t spend more than £15 – £20 at this point to ensure I have anklets that fit me correctly and I can remove or add weight to suit. And as an added bonus, most can also double up as wrist weights, so wins all around!
The thing to remember is that you’re never too old to keep fit – or to start to get fit. None of us, as much as we’d like it to be, are getting any younger, so as we age, it’s very important to keep our muscles in good shape to maintain their strength and health, and in return maintain our skeletal structure and help with overall health. Inactivity allows the muscles and connective tissues to shrink as the body feels there’s no need for solid muscles anymore, so this type of training is perfect.
Again, I reiterate, when you’re starting out on the fitness trail, start slowly, this is just as important with weight training, even more so. Use what weights feel comfortable to you; never overdo it. The weights involved may seem light or inconsequential, but after a few repetitions, it’s surprising just how much they affect you. Your aim is to move the weight 10 times through a given distance, slowly and with control, then a repeat 10 after say ten seconds of rest. You might find you can do this twice or maybe three times before you really begin to feel it. If not, do a little more until you do. That is the time to stop, take note of that and use it as your base point. Let’s say you managed 5 repetitions of ten – then 4 sets of ten is what you’ll do each session from now on until you find it easy to do. At this point you have two choices, you can either add another repetition to your workout (5 sets of 10), or add a little more weight, (but don’t go wild here), and maintain the number of repetitions.
Patience is a keyword here. Wonderful things don’t happen overnight. It’ll take time to see the results from your commitment to weight training. Depending on your body condition at the start, you can expect to notice a difference anywhere from 5 to 12 weeks of exercising. So keep going, keep track of your progress, your weight, your measurements – and your feel-good factor!
See you in Part 6
