When was the last time you lifted weights? Do you ever wonder what are the key important points to be focused on when lifting weights or do you just lift weight to show people around you how strong you are.
We see people in gym lifting heavy weight then what their body normally can bear and end up hitting wrong muscles or leading to injuries. People try to replicate what professional body builder say or do on social media and as a beginner most fail to learn the techniques of lifting weights.
Below are the 5 main points what one should focus on when lifting weights.
1. Posture:
When it comes to lifting weights most people give less importance for posture to be maintained while performing particular exercise and end up doing exercise in wrong posture which leads to injury or not working on muscles that needs to be targeted.
For eg; While performing biceps curls, most people involve their knees, lower back, shoulders, hips to perform this exercise. This is because of either selecting heavy weight or not performing it with a right posture.
The right posture to perform biceps curl is to keep your legs hips width apart, knees slightly bend, keeping core tight and shoulders locked. This way you maintain your body in one position and only move your elbow letting your bicep muscle contract.
Any exercise performed in right form or posture with right selection of weights will help you to get good contraction on the muscles for which particular exercise is performed.
2. Breathing:
This is something what everyone should give priority on while performing any exercise like yoga, running, swimming, or even when lifting weights. Unfortunately most people give less or no importance to breathing especially while performing weight training.
Proper inhale and exhale while lifting weights shall help you to lift heavy and contract particular muscle for which the exercise is designed for.
3. Muscle and Mind Connection:
It is another important point which most are not exposed to when it comes to lifting weights. We normally see people talking to one another or thinking about something else when doing squats or any other exercise.
Having a proper muscle and mind connection is the ability to focus, the tension you create during exercise on a specific muscle or region of muscles in the body, which is the difference between passively and actively moving the weights.
Research has found that when individual employs an external focus of attention during a physical movement, this allows them to achieve greater maximum force production, greater performance on test of athletic ability, and more reps in tests of muscular endurance.
4. Range of Motion and Tempo:
When it comes to performing particular exercise for a given number of sets and reps. Most people just do ego lifting or do it with in a faster phase just to finish the sets. Any weight lifting exercise when done in slow motion or in proper range of motion in respect to build strength and increase muscle hypertrophy gives maximum tension to your muscles.
Range of motion can increase movement of joints and its functioning leading to improve movement efficiency.
5. Progressive Overload:
This principle involve continually increasing the demands on the musculoskeletal system to continuously make gains in muscle size, strength and endurance. Simply put, in order to get bigger and stronger, you must continuously make your muscles work harder than they are used to.
The progressive overload principle doesn’t apply just too lifting weights to increase muscle growth and strength, it can also be applied to cardiovascular fitness programs, creating physiological changes that affect aerobic metabolism and the cardiorespiratory system.
Now that you have understood the 5 main important points to be kept in mind while performing weight training, make sure to implement it in your routine along with proper diet, good sleep and better stress control, to see good progress in your level of fitness.
