When you are beginning strength training you should be very careful as to not put pressure on your body with excess weight. Take a trainers advice to understand just what the right weight is for you to begin with. After the first week of strength training, you must begin to start lifting weight a minimum of ten times. If you face moderate amounts of difficulty while lifting such weight, you have actually passed to the second stage. But, if you think that you are lifting the said weights with great difficulty, you should realise that the weights are heavy for you, so you should decrease the heaviness of the weights.

The next stage of progression includes the reassessment of the difficulty faced while performing each exercise. If you feel that you aren’t facing a great deal of difficulty with your current weights, you can get started on the next stage. This stage, typically includes, performance of overhead press using dumbbells weighing around one pound. The progression doesn’t end here, but continues throughout the duration of your strength training regimen.

Progression is important if you want to experience the complete range of benefits of strength training. Strength training is all about challenging your body every step of the way with heavier weights. This helps in the gradual development of muscles, and these muscles are challenged when you lift heavier weights. This process helps improve the strength of these muscles. It’s all a part of helping you achieve strong muscles that you can be proud of.

Where athletes might go wrong

Athletes might go wrong in the selection of the strength training program. A budding athlete, who knows that strength training, is good for him/her might just choose to go the route of weightlifting programs rather than finding just what is suited for his/her needs and requirements. It’s been noticed that quite a number of athletes choose bodybuilding and Olympic weight lifting programs. Such programs form an important part of the training regime of the athlete. But, such a selection, at times is flawed.

The first thing that comes to anybody’s mind while thinking of strength training is lifting weights. But, the truth is lifting weights is just one of the components of strength training and there are many more facets to it. If you are training for a particular sport, then a more refined approach towards strength training might work more than just an arbitrary selection of a method.

It’s about choosing the right strength training plan

Strength training for an athlete will only work for him/her if it mirrors the demands of the particular sport. So, a bodybuilder might want to develop a specific group of muscles, hence will isolate it and work only this group day in and day out. But an athlete who wants to compete in a track and field event wants to improve his movements rather than muscles. In such cases, going through a strength training routine that includes leg extension, toe raise etc might be better than lifting weights.

Weight training

The purpose of weight training is to provide resistance at the beginning of the movement. The focus of attention is the initiating joint angle. This is the place where the muscle must lose all the inertia that is result of the mass of weight. You might want to perform the repetition fast or go about it slowly. But you must understand that if the repetitions are slow, you might never overcome the inertia. In such cases, thee resistance will always be constant.

Resistance training

As the name suggests, in this form of strength training, there is an opposing force that tries to make your effort difficult. In point of fact, this force is generated by resistance. So, your muscles are moving against the force. The purpose of resistance training is to building the size and strength of the skeletal muscles of your body. If you perform resistance training in the correct manner and that too regularly, you will notice a significant improvement in the general functioning of the body. It offers your body a tremendous amount of functional benefits.

Isometric training

The concept behind isometric training is to make sure that there is no chance in the length of the muscle and the joint angle of the person during the process of contraction. In isometric training the opposing force is equal to the force that is an output of the muscles. This means that the net movement is zero. The focus of attention of this type of strength training is a particular joint angle and the improvement of the strength of that particular joint angle.