08 Feb
Posted by admin as Fitness Training Room
If you lift weights, you do a certain number of reps of each exercise. Most of the time, you do between 8-16 reps, depending on your goals but, if you’re new to strength training, you may have no idea how many reps you should be doing. I had a client ask me about this the other day, wondering why I always had her doing 12 reps. Obviously, it amuses me to force other people to lift weights repeatedly but, beyond that there is a good reason for that.
8-16 reps isn’t just an arbitrary number. That rep range is based on percentages of , which is the amount of weight you could lift just one time for any given exercise. People much smarter than I have figured out that when we lift weights at above 85% of our one rep maximum, which comes out to about 6 reps per set, the risk of injury increases dramatically.
To ensure success and results with any strength training or conditioning program, it must be designed through the following principles in mind. Effective training programs will incorporate periodization, specificity, and overload, while avoiding overtraining.The following paragraphs will briefly describe what each of these terms mean.
PeriodizationPeriodization is a name used to describe the breakdown of a training program into periods, or phases. The idea behind periodization is to constantly present a new training stimulus to the body to force it to repeatedly adapt to this new stimulus.
If a new training stimulus is not presented, the body will adjust to the training and performance will not continue to improve and will eventually decline.