What is Resistance Training?
What is Resistance Training? Resistance Training, also known as Weight Training or Strength Training involves weight bearing, physical exercise of a muscle or muscles, in order to improve strength, endurance and elicit muscle building. Resistance Training has a wealth of benefits, above and beyond its power to give you the body of your dreams. This article explains the benefits of resistance training and how you can use it to completely transform your body and health.
There is one very vital element to Resistance Training and the clue is in the title — ‘RESISTANCE’. It’s any type of exercise where resistance is either pulled or pushed — the resistance can come in several different forms.
Resistance Training Equipment
There are many different types of resistance training equipment out in the market today, the most optimal are:
Bodyweight ie Gravity (although, this only yields results for so long before you need to add additional weight in order to progressively overload)
You’ll find most of these at any good gym and it’s pretty cheap and easy to source a good range for use at home from somewhere like Amazon.
What does Resistance Training Do?
So, we said that resistance training “involves weight bearing, physical exercise of a muscle or muscles, in order to improve strength, endurance and elicit muscle building” but what actually happens in the body that creates this additional muscle?
Muscle growth is better known as Hypertrophy. This is the process that occurs while you are in your resistance training session — the weight-bearing exercise damages/injures the fibres of the muscle being trained and then post-workout your body repairs the damaged fibres by fusing them, which increases the size of that muscle. This might sound a little scary, to damage your muscles, but these are in fact microscopic, tiny tears which you may actually never feel, unless you have DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) — that muscle soreness you sometimes get after a good workout...usually after a heavy leg session!! We’ve all had those couple of days after a session where you can’t walk down the stairs, right? That is the result of those tiny tears which are step one of the muscle-building process.
In order to repair and fuse these tears and therefore grow your muscles, you should ensure you get sufficient rest and consume sufficient carbs, fats and especially, protein — aim for 1.4 - 2g per kilo of your body weight.
How many days a week should I workout to build muscle?
Whether you resistance train at home, or at the gym, the answer is the same...it really depends on several factors:
Your goals
Your lifestyle
Your level of experience or ‘training age’
As a general rule, you should aim to hit each muscle with 10-30 sets per week — this may sound like a big range, but your training age factors heavily and an individual who is new to resistance training should start at the lower end, whereas an advanced lifter could be close to the 30 mark. The amount of time you have per session then dictates the number of sets you can perform per session and therefore how many times you need to train per week to hit your rep target.
Keep in mind a randomised controlled trial by The University of Sydney who compared the efficacy of 10 sets per muscle group versus 5 sets per muscle group in a single session and found that 10 sets are no more effective than 5. In other words, doing twice the work in a session doesn’t necessarily translate to twice the gains. They suggest that 4-6 sets per muscle group per session is the optimal level. So, if your target is 15 sets for your quads per week, for example, you should ideally spread those sets over at least 3 sessions to optimise your training and not see diminishing returns by rep stuffing in a single session. Being smart in terms of Training Volume is crucial when it comes to a single session and an accumulated week.
For most of my clients, I recommend between 3-6 high frequency weight training sessions per week, this is, of course, dependent on the above factors and any other variables relative to them that would impact how often they can (or should) train. My Online Personal Training plans are bespoke, so 100% centred around and built for the individual needs of my clients — no one size fits all approach.
How Many Reps Should I do?
The amount of reps you should perform is dictated by your goal, which would ordinarily be strength, hypertrophy, endurance or combinations of these.
Strength: 1-6 reps
Hypertrophy: 6-15 reps
Endurance: 15-20 reps
How Much Weight Should I Lift?
Now you know your target rep range, implement these 4 very simple tips to get you lifting a goal and rep range appropriate weight:
The weight should be not so heavy that you can’t lift the weight to within a couple of reps of the full set you were intending to perform — so if your target is 10 reps and you start to struggle on rep 8, that should be appropriate
Not so light that you can easily get more reps than intended — if your target is 10 and you can easily smash out 12, it’s far too light
On the final set of each exercise, you should be leaving everything on the gym floor, there shouldn’t be any reps left in reserve
Once you can complete the full target set, up the weight, then build up again to your target range — you can curl 5kg for 8 reps and build this to 10 reps, once you’ve hit that 10 reps, pick up the next heaviest weight and start the process again
...this is Progressive Overload and this is what will elicit muscle building when teamed with a goal specific caloric intake and nutrition plan!
Benefits of Weight Training
Where to begin? There are so many benefits reaped from following a resistance training plan — here are the key things to look forward to:
Increased muscle mass and reduced risk of sarcopenia
All exercise can reduce the risk of Sarcopenia, the age-related reduction of muscle mass which can negatively impact mobility and risk of injury, however, resistance training has been found to be the most effective.
A randomised controlled trial of 57 adults aged 65–94 at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging found that performing resistance training three times per week increases an individual’s muscle strength over 12 weeks — so the damage can be reversed, but prevention is better than cure.
Bone Health
Resistance Training has been associated with improved bone health, The Scandanavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports conducted a study in 1998 whereby half the cohorts undertook a year of weight-bearing exercise and the other half did not. They found that after the training period there was a significant increase in Bone Mineral Density in the group that undertook weight-bearing exercise.
Reduced Body Fat
Resistance training has been shown to reduce body fat in countless studies. As well as burning calories during your weight training session, muscle needs fuel and that fuel is taken from the calories we consume, muscle, therefore, increases your basal metabolic rate (BMR) and our body then burns more calories per day — this can lead to fat loss
Decreased Blood Pressure
The British Journal of Sports Medicine performed a meta-analysis on the reduction of systolic blood pressure from resistance training. They asserted that resistance training may help reduce systolic blood pressure levels, stroke mortality and mortality from heart disease in people with diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.
Summary
What is resistance training? Resistance training is something you really need to start incorporating into your life. Not only will it give you an improved physique, from an aesthetic perspective, but it’ll give you a load of health benefits and if you are both looking and feeling better, this can only be a positive thing, right?
If you want help and support to guide you through a resistance training plan tailored to your needs, goals and lifestyle, with unrivalled support and research-driven methods, get in touch today!