Weight Training Tips and Articles

Lower Back Workouts

  Any serious weight trainer needs to perform lower back workouts regularly to avoid injuries and lift more on weight training exercises for other muscles. A weak lower back will negatively affect you on many major exercises, deadlifts and squats in particular. If you don’t have a strong lower back you will also be way more likely to hurt yourself lifting, even if you aren’t using much weight.

  The best weight training exercise to strengthen the lower back muscles is the deadlift. You should always start a lower back workout with them. Good mornings are a rarely used exercise for the lower back but is a good one to do after deadlifting. Hyperextensions should be done for high reps with no or little weight and are a great finisher to a lower back workout.

  Try a workout like this to build muscle and strength in your lower back:

Deadlifts (1 or 2 sets of 12-15 reps on light day, 2 or 3 sets of 8-12 reps on medium day, 3 or 4 sets of 3-8 reps on heavy day)

Good mornings (1 or 2 sets of 15-20 reps on light day, 2 sets of 10-15 reps on medium day, 2 or 3 sets of 5-10 reps on heavy day)

Hyperextensions (1 or 2 sets of 20-30 reps during each lower back workout to finish off with).

  This workout should allow you to strengthen your lower back without overtraining as long as you get enough rest between workouts. You may want to try your deadlift one rep max every now and then on your heavy day to test your strength.

Building Upper Back Width

  If you’re trying to build a muscular physique through weight training it’s very important to create a wider appearance in your upper body. Doing this will give you a classic Herculean look and create an illusion of a smaller waist even if you haven’t actually decreased the size of it.

  One way to increase your upper body width is to build the latissmus dorsi muscles of the upper back. The lats are the large wing-shaped muscles of the upper back and building them will help make you look wider.

  The best exercises for building wider lats are pull-ups and cable pulldowns. Pull-ups are a superior exercise to cable pulldowns because you’re moving your body through space when you do them, but many weight trainers may not be able to do enough pull-ups for an effective set if they weigh too much or haven’t built up enough strength so the pulldowns are a great alternative to building a wider upper back. If you want to do pull-ups but can’t do too many reps, there are alot of gyms that have assisted pull-up machines that will allow you to get enough reps to build the lats.

  Whether you do pull-ups or cable pulldowns you should vary your grip to get the most muscle growth possible. Close grip pull-ups and pulldowns with an underhand grip will give you a nice contraction when the bar is at your chest, while wide grip pull-ups and pulldowns with an overhand grip will give your lats a nice stretch to start off a rep. To get the best overall upper back development you should include both close grip and wide grip pull-up and cable pulldowns. You can also experiment with other grip ranges if you’d like.

  When you do pull-up and pulldowns exercises you should always do them to your chest or neck. Pull-ups and pulldowns to behind the neck put your shoulders in a precarious position which may cause an injury.

Do Abdominal Exercises On A Core Ball

  Abdominal workouts are great for strengthening your core and giving you washboard abs if you don’t have a layer of body fat covering them up. Chunches are an especially great exercise for building the abs. However, many weight trainers and workout enthusiests do their crunches on flat benches or machines with a flat back support that don’t allow you to stetch the abdominals at the beginning of a rep.

  To build muscle for any part of the body it’s very important to do full reps during your weight training exercises. Part of a full rep is getting a nice stretch at the beginning of a repitition and a good muscle contraction at the end of it. While you can get the hard contraction you need at the end of a crunch rep on a flat bench, you won’t be getting much of a stretch because the bench won’t allow you to go any further back at the beginning of a crunch rep.

  To get that stretch to start a crunch rep you should do them on a core ball. When you do abdominal exercises on a core ball you’ll be able to stretch your midsection to start the rep which should result in an even better contraction at the end of it. Training your abs on a core ball will also allow you a lot of variety. You can add a twist to your core ball crunches to help buiild and strengthen the ab - oblique area on each side of your midsection. You can also start a set of an ab exercise on a core ball with your lower back on the ball to get a better stretch and make the reps harder. Then, as you get closer to failure you can move your body forward so the ball is higher up under your back so you can crank out a few more reps. A weighted medicine can also be used at the beginning of a set of crunches on a core ball and dropped as you get to failure so you get some more reps with just your body weight.

  Beyond the fact that you’ll get a better stretch in the abs when you train on a core ball is that you’ll also be strengthening many small stabilizing muscles and improving your balance. Try doing your abdominal training on a core ball get the most out of your workouts.