Strength training has many benefits, beyond just making you stronger or more muscular. Working your muscles against resistance improves balance and coordination, posture, joint flexibility, and mobility, and even helps with weight control. It also helps preserve and even build bone density. Benefits like these are especially important later in life. But there’s more. Strength training may also lower the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. Sounds like a good investment of your time, right?
To get the most health and fitness benefits from every workout, you need to be efficient. Let’s look at some tips to improve your strength-training performance and make your workouts more efficient and effective.
Breathe Properly
Breathing is an aspect of strength training that people don’t focus on enough. Before beginning a strength-training workout, take a few deep breaths to relax your body and focus your mind on your upcoming workout. Breathe deeply through your nose (you can also breathe in through your mouth if it’s easier) and hold the breath for two to three seconds before exhaling slowly through pursed lips. This helps slow your heart rate before the heavy lifting.
The proper way to breathe during strength training is to exhale during the concentric portion of the exercise, when you contract your muscles, and inhale as you relax or extend your muscles. The worst thing you can do is hold your breath during a lift. Doing this increases pressure inside your abdominal cavity and reduces blood flow back to your heart. When you do this, your upper body, including your brain, gets less oxygen. This can lead to lightheadedness and a rise in blood pressure as your vessels constrict. If it’s too difficult to breathe while working out, it might be a sign that you’re pushing too hard or using weights that are too heavy.
Focusing on breathing also serves a psychological purpose – it keeps your mind off discomfort and fatigue, so you can concentrate on performing the movement correctly. If you hold your breath or breathe shallowly, you might tense up and limit your range of motion, which reduces the effectiveness of the movement. By taking slow, deep breaths, you keep the oxygen flowing and keep your muscles loose for the most effective performance.
Keep Your Strength Training Workout Balanced
Keep your workout balanced by doing as many pushing exercises as pulling exercises. Let’s use an upper body workout as an example. Pushing exercises for the upper body build strength in your chest, shoulders, and triceps and include bench presses, military press, overhead presses, and push-ups. Pull-ups, chin-ups, bent-over rows, inverted rows, and cable rowing movements are pulling movements that target the back muscles, including the rhomboids and trapezius. Why is this important? When you target one muscle group and don’t work the opposing muscle group as hard, it creates muscle imbalances that can lead to injury.
Focus on Compound Movements
Here’s another efficiency tip. Focus on compound movements with free weights, rather than isolation exercises with machines. These exercises engage multiple muscle groups simultaneously and help increase your strength training efficiency. You’ll get more in less time, and compound movements have the added advantage of building functional strength that improves the movements you do every day. Compound exercises include squats, deadlifts, lunges, push-ups, pull-ups, dips, bench presses, and bent-over rows.
Vary the Intensity of Your Strength Training Workouts
You might enjoy lifting lighter weights and doing more reps, but that approach is best for building muscle endurance, rather than strength and size. If you want to build strength, you’ll need to do high intensity lifting, heavier weights, and lower repetitions. To boost strength gains, use a weight you can lift for three to five repetitions before your muscles are exhausted. This maximizes the recruitment of fast-twitch muscle fibers designed for strength. Don’t use this approach every time you train, since it’s too fatiguing. Have days where you lift heavy, and days where you use lighter weights and higher reps.
Include Power Moves, Too
Building muscle power is important too. Power is the ability to generate force quickly. You generate power every time you swing a tennis racket or golf club and even when you push yourself out of a chair. To build muscle power, increase the tempo with which you contract muscle. You can do this with weights by moving the weight explosively through space. Kettlebell swings are an excellent approach to increasing upper-body muscle power. An equipment-free way to boost muscle power is jump training. Start with a simple exercise, like squat jumps, and work up to harder movements, like platform jumps, as you build lower body strength and power.
Choose Your Workout Time Wisely
The morning might be the best time to do an aerobic workout, but you may get more benefits from strength training if you do it in the early evening. That’s when your core body temperature is highest and your muscles are most flexible. But also consider the rest of your lifestyle. If you come home from work exhausted every day, strength training in the evening might not work as well as lifting earlier.
Don’t Assume More is Better
Strength and muscle gains occur during the rest period between workouts. Make sure you’re giving your muscles enough time to repair and rebuild. Avoid working the same muscle groups more often than every 48 hours, especially if you used heavy weights. For example, if you trained your shoulders, wait at least two days before working them again. The harder you worked your muscles, the more important a sustained rest period is. If you really blitzed them, a three-day rest may be more appropriate.
The Bottom Line
Hopefully, these strength-training hacks will help you get more out of your workouts. Know that you’re doing something good for yourself too. Strength training is effective for more than just bulking up your muscles. It will improve your performance in all types of activities, from playing your favorite sport to completing everyday tasks with ease. Every time you lift weights, you’re building strength that transfers to all aspects of your life.
References:
- Westcott WL. Resistance training is medicine: effects of strength training on health. Curr Sports Med Rep. 2012 Jul-Aug;11(4):209-16. doi: 10.1249/JSR.0b013e31825dabb8. PMID: 22777332.
- Mayer F, Scharhag-Rosenberger F, Carlsohn A, Cassel M, Müller S, Scharhag J. The intensity and effects of strength training in the elderly. Dtsch Arztebl Int. 2011 May;108(21):359-64. doi: 10.3238/arztebl.2011.0359. Epub 2011 May 27. PMID: 21691559; PMCID: PMC3117172.
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