Being Fit: Training Principles

Training Principles

Principles:

Have a vision: Imaging your goal in next 6 months, if needed get the picture of your idol, paste your head/face on that picture and keep looking at it in each exercise session. This stimulates your brain to direct you muscle growth.

Connect mind to the muscle: One should feel the muscles getting impacted in every repetition. Concentrate on the muscle you are targeting in every rep. Doing each rep slowly helps you attain this easily.

Quality over Quantity: Always focus on Quality of each repetition not the number of reps you can perform in each set.

Consistent Range of Motion: The range of motion should be consistent for all repetitions in a set. No cheating please :)

Full Range of Motion: Make sure you perform each repetition for the full ROM.

Give 100% in Each Set: If you have planned to do 10 sets of an exercise, you should not worry about the reps you can perform in the tenth set while performing any of the earlier sets. All sets should be performed to 100%.

Warm up cool down: It is important to warm up before every session with dynamic stretching Flexible muscles are very important to lead and live a injury free life.

Shock the muscles: The human body is an intelligent machine. If you stick to the same routine the body adapts , it knows what is going to come and you hit a plateau. When you train, you need to shock the muscles, keep the body on its feet, that keeps it growing stronger, longer.

Progression:

Progression is very important to keep getting the gain, The exercise should keep getting tougher and tougher over a period of time. This can be achieved either by changing various factors like:

1. Weight being lifted: The more the weight you lift , the more difficult it becomes.
2. Number of Repetitions: If you are looking an enhancing muscle endurance then number of reps should be what you need to look at.
3. Angle: An incline push up is easier than a Decline push up ( though technically the muscles they impact may vary). A narrow grip pull up is easier than a wide grip.
4. Speed (Time per repetition): A rep exercise that is performed slowly is more difficult than a rep performed fast. A slow eccentric motion and explosive concentric motion or a slow eccentric motion and slow concentric motion, or a slow eccentric motion, A hold and then a slow concentric motion each have a diff difficulty level. Here comes the concept of time under tension. Research have proved that the a time under tension between 30 seconds to 72 seconds provide maximum Hypertrophy or muscle gain.
5. Stability: The more unstable the environment , the more muscles are recruited to first stabilize and then exercise. For example a normal push with one leg up in air will be more difficult that its base variation.

Start with these principles and progress using the above technique and reach your goal. All the best
remember "No Pain No Gain"

Terms:

Repetition(reps): One full range of motion of an exercise.

Set: Number of repetitions till failure repetitions ( or that is how it should be :P )

Range of Motion(ROM): The Range on motion over which the exercise is performed. For e.g the Range of motion for pull up is “from totally stretched hands to pulling up till the bar is chin height and back”.