Sep 39 min read

Strength Training 101: What Every Beginner Should Know

New to training? Welcome! Starting a new fitness regimen, regardless of what activity it is, is a great way to get active, get healthier, and feel better!

With a new routine there usually comes some questions - especially when it comes to the weight room. At Delta Kinesiology, we’re here to help you overcome all those hurdles and answer your questions so you can focus on your fitness goals. We hope you learn to enjoy training and learn new skills along your health and fitness journey.

What Is Strength Training?

Strength training is a form of exercise where your body works against resistance, whether that resistance be weights, bands, machines, grocery bags, or your own body weight and gravity.

What Are The Benefits?

The benefits to strength training are really endless, but here are just a few so you get a gist:

Stronger muscles, bones, and connective tissue
Increase in muscle mass
Decreased risk of injury and low back pain
Increased metabolism
Better sleep
Better mood
Increased insulin sensitivity
Prevents certain diseases and conditions

Again, this list goes on.

Ensuring you have a good base level of strength will help in an array of areas in your life. It ensures you’re able to handle everyday tasks like carrying groceries and going up the stairs more easily. It ensures you’re able to move with more confidence when put up to a challenge. It ensures your joints are stronger and your muscles are able to help and take the strain off of them. It can help manage any aches, pains, or conditions you currently have so your quality of life improves. Not to mention, being strong makes you feel strong too. It can do wonders for your mental health as well!

How Often Should I Strength Train?

If you’re just starting out with strength training, starting off with 2 or 3 workouts a week is a fantastic place to start. It’s going to be enough for your body to start adapting, and soon enough you should see yourself picking up some heavier dumbbells.

Aim to have at least a day in between workouts to rest. Recovery is where the magic happens! Giving yourself a rest day after a workout will help your body recover, build some more muscle, and will help you feel fresh for when the next workout comes around.

If you’re brand new to the gym entirely, give yourself some time to learn the exercises. Focus more on form rather than how much weight you can lift. Get used to the machines and start getting comfortable with pushing your body slightly out of its comfort zone!

What Should My Workout Look Like?

Start With A Dynamic Warm Up

A dynamic warm up is a great way to get everything feeling looser and ready for your actual work out. It should include some light movements, oftentimes some dynamic stretching and lighter sets of what you’re going to be doing, and you may also want to consider throwing in some breath work in there as well.

Breath work includes diaphragmatic breathing which can help with postural alignment, loosening up any tight areas in the torso, as well as creating a better connection to the core and pelvic floor.

You want to target muscles and perform movements that are similar to what you’re going to be doing during your workout. Doing these at lighter intensities will get your heart pumping and muscles loosened, allowing you to use a good range of motion and to lift some heavy weights.

Typically, your warm up should last around 5-10 minutes.

2. The Workout

Since you’re just starting out at the gym with 2 or 3 workouts a week, it’s best if you start off with full body workouts. It will allow you to work everything in your body, gets you quickly used to some common movements, and allows you to spread out some of the volume so your body is better able to recover.

You’re going to want to focus your workouts around the main compound lifts. Compound exercises are exercises that involve multiple muscle groups and move at multiple joints. They give you good bang for your buck as they use more muscles, use more energy overall, and are efficient. Not to mention, they’re usually motions you use in your everyday life, so you should see certain movements in your day to day feel a lot easier too!

Here are 4 main movements you should focus on:

Squat - Bending at both the hip and the knee
Hinge - Bending mainly at the hip
Push - Pushing something away from you either horizontally or vertically
Pull - Pulling something towards you either horizontally or vertically

You don’t have to do all 4 movements every workout either. You can split them up during the week. Pick one or two to really focus on each workout, and you’re best off to put those 2 exercises at the start of your workout when you’re still fresh.

Here are examples of the 4 main lifts:

Squat: Goblet squat, box squat, leg press, lunge
Hinge: Deadlift, Romanian deadlift, cable pull throughs
Push: Pushups, DB bench press, DB shoulder press, machine chest press
Pull: DB row, Cable row, lat pull down

After you’ve decided what your main lifts are going to be, then you can do some other, lighter exercises that may or may not fall into one of the 4 main movements described above. These exercises should work different muscles from the main lifts, and they should be a bit less intense but still require some effort!

There are many exercises that fall into each movement. Pick the ones you enjoy and that align best with what you want to work on.

3. Organising Your Workout

By organising your workout, we mean planning out the order. Many people just show up at the gym and do whatever exercise comes to mind, but it’s a good idea to already have a plan in place before you step foot in the gym.

A good way to organise your workout is to pair up exercises together, usually a lower body exercise followed by an upper body one. This will save you some time in the gym as well as keep you moving.

Often, this is written like this:

a), b); 2. a), b); ...

Usually I like to stick with 2 exercises back to back, but you can do 3 or even 4 in a row to make your workout more of a circuit. Doing 2 exercises, especially when one is a lower body exercise and the other upper body, allows you to rest while the other half is working. This lets you focus a bit more on strength and recovery. If you do more of a circuit style workout, you’ll get less rest and you’re more likely to work your cardio system and muscular endurance. Again, this all goes back to you and your goals and what you also enjoy doing.

4. Perform 2-3 Sets of Moderate To High Number Of Reps

A rep is a single repetition of an exercise, whereas sets are how many reps you do in one go.

If you’re brand new to the gym, it’s probably best to start off doing 2 sets of each exercise.

See how your body reacts to that amount of volume as there’s a good chance that 2 sets alone will cause a good amount of soreness. Don't worry, after a few workouts any soreness should become a lot less intense. Once that starts feeling manageable, try bumping up to doing 3 sets of each exercise and see how that feels.

Starting with a higher number of reps, say in the 10-15 range, is a great place to start as it gives you plenty of volume to get you practising the exercises and focusing on correct form.

5. Choose An Appropriate Weight

If you’re not confident with form, working solely with body weight in the beginning is a more than good option. Many people forget that body weight is weight!

Once you’re feeling ready to make an exercise more challenging, you want to pick a weight that’s going to be appropriate for the number of reps you’re planning on doing. It may be a bit of a guessing game to start as it’s all new, but you want to get to a point where the last few reps in a set are challenging, and you feel as though you only have 1-3 reps left in the tank. That’s going to be your weight.

6. Make Sure To Keep Challenging Yourself

In order to keep seeing progress, you need to keep challenging yourself. As you get stronger, the weights you’ve been using will feel easier, which means you have to change something up. There’s a few ways you can do this.

Use heavier weights: Remember, you want to use a weight that leaves with only 1-3 reps left in the tank. If you feel like you can do 5 or more, then it’s time to lift a little more.
Do more reps: This is another great option, especially if you don’t have access to a slightly heavier weight, or if you don’t feel comfortable jumping up in weight yet. Who says you always need to stick to that 10-12 rep range anyway? If you can get to 12 easily, let’s see you try to make it to 15, maybe even 16, and so on. Do a few more reps and see how many it takes to get you back to that 1-3 reps left in the tank range.
Increase the range of motion: Ideally you always want to do every rep in a full ROM (range of motion), but in reality, not every rep may look like that. If you can sink a little lower in a squat, get a bit lower in a pushup, or bring your arms a little lower during a bicep curl so your elbows are straighter, you’re going to challenge your body a little more.
Change up the tempo: Have you ever taken 3 seconds to sink down into a squat? How about 5s? 10s? You can probably already imagine the burn in your legs just from reading that. This is a great way to challenge yourself a little more and to really focus on the movement. Going slower, especially when your muscles are stretching (usually on the way down), will have you really feeling a burn. Another option is to add pauses. My favourite is to add a pause at the bottom of a motion, when you’re about to change direction. This will add a little more emphasis to that stretched position and really test your stability, mobility, and strength!
Choose a harder variation: For some exercises, you can opt in for a slightly harder variation of the exercise you’re already doing. A common way you can make most exercises harder is by using one leg or arm instead of both. Think of ways where you can use one limb at a time and/or introduce more instability. Here’s a great example: Squat to Box > Goblet Squat > Single Leg Squat

Another thing to keep in mind is that you want to repeat the same exercises for a period of time. You want to keep the same routine up for at least 4 weeks to really start seeing some progress. But after that, feel free to change it up a bit. Instead of a dumbbell row, try maybe a cable row for the next 4 weeks instead. It’s a great way to expose yourself to new equipment and form, while still being sort of familiar and giving you something new to try and do.

7. Use Whatever Equipment You Have Available

While having access to all the equipment Mr. Olympia uses is great, it’s not always necessary or appropriate especially if you’re a beginner. You can use whatever you have available to you, whether it’s dumbbells, bands, or even just body weight! As long as you’re consistently pushing yourself and challenging your body, you’re going to see progress.

8. Be Consistent

In order to see results, you just simply have to do the work. You want to aim to workout 2 or 3 times a week, specifically when it comes to strength training. You have to keep showing up, week after week, to see progress. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see progress right away! Keep at it and keep showing up. We guarantee, as long as you’re showing up and putting the work in, the results will come.

Do I Need To Do A Cool Down?

There’s a debate out there if you really need to do a cool down or not. It certainly doesn’t hurt, and sometimes can help you calm down after an intense session, so I personally like taking a few minutes to myself to relax a bit.

The cool down is a great time to get some stretching in. Since the warm up includes more dynamic stretching, this is the time to get some static stretching in, you know, the long holding kind.

I like to stretch out the muscles I worked during the workout and take my time sinking into the stretch, holding a position for at least 30s, sometimes even up to about 2 minutes.

So while it’s not absolutely necessary to stretch or cool down, it can be a good way to just relax a bit, especially after a tough session.

Don’t Know Where To Start? Check Us Out!

Our goal at Delta Kinesiology is to help women reach their health and fitness goals

regardless of age, ability, or experience level. We tailor each session using evidence-based principles and methods to help you reach your goals. Whether that be going about your day pain-free, building muscle, improving stamina, or feeling better about yourself, we are here to help.

Get in touch with us today to schedule a free consult by clicking the link below.

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