How To Pick The Correct Lifts

By Trevor Johnson


Ever taken a look round your gym to see what the people around you are doing?

Do you wonder if the workout they are doing will help you get to your own physical goals quicker?

Those are a number of questions to ponder as you continue reading this, but the fact is there is almost always a 'better ' lift to do than most of the lifts that you see folks performing at your gym.

For instance, today a couple in my private gymnasium took it on themselves to do a variety of exercises working their body from head to toe, or that is what they thought.

Their workout commenced with some dumbbell shoulder shrugs. That exercise targets the trapezius muscles that, if big enough, might make you appear as if you have no neck.

On the surface of things that would seem to be a good exercise to do, but if you dig slightly deeper you will find that exercise does little in the way of helping you burn even the most minute of calories.

Let us look at it mathematically. The amount of work done equals the force times the distance that you are moving that force and the quantity of times that you're moving that force. As an example, if one was to use 30-pound dumbbells you might move that weight a sum total of three inches maximum. The trapezius muscles are not that large so don't have the range that the bigger muscles do.

So that 30-pound weight moved 3 inches, 10 times, gives us a bunch of nine hundred. The unit of measure at about that point is irrelevant.

Now lets take a look at an alternative exercise, the military press. This exercise is done with an Olympic bar pressing it from about your jaw all the way above your head until your arms about absolutely extended.

For this exercise we only employed the weight of the bar which is 45-pounds. If you make the motion as if you were performing the exercise you may notice that the distance that bar is going to go is around twenty-four inches or more depending on your size, and that was done for a sum total of ten repetitions. So 45-pounds, times 24-inches, times 10 repetitions gives us a number of 10,800- again the unit of measure is unimportant. It only becomes applicable if we were to calculate that number into calories burned.

On the surface, doing the army press was twelve times better than doing a dumbbell shrug, and that was with only the 45-pound bar.

This is one example of one way to see if you are getting the most out of your workout session. Many of us are oblivious to some of the exercises that they choose to do and just do anything that comes to mind. You only have so much energy when you hit the gym floor, make it count and put it toward exercises which will give you the bang for you buck.




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