resistance training

In their quest to build muscle fast and just hit the weights, most body builders over look one of the most important aspects of building muscle. Warming up.

Warming up makes your workouts more effective thereby maximizing muscle growth. Chief among the benefits of warming up are:

a) You will be able to lift much more weight. If you recall from an earlier post, the key to building muscle is progressively lifting more weights so this is pretty important.

b) It significantly reduces your chances of getting injured when you lift the heavier weights.

I recommend structuring your warm up into three mini-parts. Trust me, it is a lot less work than it sounds. First you should do a light cardio exercise on either the treadmill or any of the other cardio machines. Stairmaster and cycle machines are fine too. The cardio should be light so that you do not burn energy that is best used for making your workout as intense as possible. 5 minutes at 3.5 miles/hr works great.

Doing light cardio exercise causes synovial to be secreted. Synovial is a fluid which lubricates the joints and reduces friction whenever there is movement. A good amount of this makes your workout ‘frictionless’ if I may use that term!

After you complete cardio, next you will want to stretch thoroughly. Don’t simply go through the motions and breeze through this. Make sure you feel a little tension in the muscle but no pressure on the joints. There are wrong and right ways to stretch and the proper form is illustrated in the link below. Stretching is often overlooked by most body builders but can make a significant difference in how great your workout will be.

The last part of the warm up phase is light exercise on the muscles that you will be working out that day. If it is a leg day, for example, do squats and dead lifts with a really light weight. Once this is done, the heavy lifting can commence.

Again, do a whole body stretch but warm up sets for just the muscle groups that you are targeting on that day. Ideally your work out should last no more than 15 minutes. Always try to maintain laser focus on what you have planned so that you minimize the time spent in the gym, spending no more than 75 — 90 minutes total for each training session. One way of enhancing this focus is to visualize powerfully during the cardio part of the workout.

Cardio is relatively less mind intensive than any of the other things you will ever do in the gym so use this time to do ‘theater of the mind’ exercises and imagine yourself already in possession of the body you want. This isn’t mumbo jumbo voodoo science by the way. Visualization is a proven powerful technique for attaining success of any kind.

In summary, resist the temptation to rush into the gym and just hit the weights. A proper warm up will pay immense dividends for you in both the short and long term.

Don is a fitness enthusiast and writer. Get the Real Results Men’s Workout Also Learn how to get Men’s Workout Abs