New to Strength Training?

Here are some tips to get started by the professionals

Strength protects us as we age and creates resiliency to whatever life brings our way. Flexibility contributes to ease of movement and we (move) through our days.

When you’re starting out with strength training, perform new exercises with just your body weight first so you can learn proper form, said Elizabeth Davies, a strength coach in Kent, England, who works primarily with women who are relatively new to lifting.

Once you’re ready to add weight, start by picking up a weight that feels light to you. Focus on moving with good form rather than trying to do as many repetitions as possible.

You can use what’s known as the Reps in Reserve, or R.I.R., scale to find out how much weight you can handle for a full set. When you perform an exercise, estimate how many more times you could lift the weight — your “reps in reserve” — before feeling maxed out. You want to choose a weight where at the end of your set, you feel like you have a few repetitions left in the tank.

The R.I.R. method lets you adjust your workouts for how you feel — which can vary based on everything from sleep and diet to hormonal changes and stress — rather than sticking to a set amount of weight.

As a new lifter, your muscle tissue will generally adapt quickly to training, so you can stop when you feel like you have five or six repetitions in reserve and still see progress.

As you get stronger, research suggests that stopping two or three repetitions before failure can be ideal for maximizing muscle growth. Once you’re able to complete the same number of repetitions in a given set for two or three weeks in a row, add a bit more weight and see how that changes your sense of effort.

*if you ended up on this page by accident, then keep check back to the "classes" page of this website for upcoming announcement of a new course called Somatic Strength, which is basically strength training for yogis! 😁