Weight lifting

Holly_Roman_Empire

krknobbe10 wrote: »

My main point of asking that question was to see if it was beneficial or not or if you would get better results. Just wanted to hear what most people do so they see results. I am trying new things to see better muscle tone. I like doing my full body three times a week. I am trying to gain muscle and lose fat. I am cutting on my cardio to help with the tone look. I have also heard to do low weights and high reps yet keep it challenging enough. Any opinions?

1) Seeing muscle tone = cutting fat while retaining as much of your muscle as possible.
2) You cannot gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. Those that can are either obese or beginning to workout when they were previously sedentary. You seem to be neither.
3) Low weights and high reps will do nothing to reach your goals other than improve your endurance.

My opinion is that you should really start a lifting program--one written by a professional, like stronglifts 5x5, Starting Strength, or NROL4W. I personally did Stronglifts 5x5 for a couple of months until switching to 5/3/1, which is an intermediate program. I got the best results following those and not deviating from the program.

auddii

hollydubs85 wrote: »

krknobbe10 wrote: »

My main point of asking that question was to see if it was beneficial or not or if you would get better results. Just wanted to hear what most people do so they see results. I am trying new things to see better muscle tone. I like doing my full body three times a week. I am trying to gain muscle and lose fat. I am cutting on my cardio to help with the tone look. I have also heard to do low weights and high reps yet keep it challenging enough. Any opinions?

1) Seeing muscle tone = cutting fat while retaining as much of your muscle as possible.
2) You cannot gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. Those that can are either obese or beginning to workout when they were previously sedentary. You seem to be neither.
3) Low weights and high reps will do nothing to reach your goals other than improve your endurance.

My opinion is that you should really start a lifting program--one written by a professional, like stronglifts 5x5, Starting Strength, or NROL4W. I personally did Stronglifts 5x5 for a couple of months until switching to 5/3/1, which is an intermediate program. I got the best results following those and not deviating from the program.

All of this.

jimmmer

natecooper75 wrote: »

I think the best solution to this is to start out on a a beginner program until you get back to the heavy weights you were doing before. Once you get to that point, you can make a determination on what is best for you based on the goals that you have. Don't be in such a hurry to get to the end of the course.

The reason for doing a beginner program is to build up base strength that is required to move on to the next phases of your lifting career. Since you have lifted heavy before, it shouldn't take you a long time to get back to where you were. Some people choose to go with a bodybuilding type plan, while others will choose to go into powerlifting, olympic lifting or maybe just another general purpose strength program like 5/3/1 or the Texas Method.

This is the perfect answer.

Along with the other answers that dropping fat/adding muscle is an exercise in dietary control you now have the tools necessary to go forward and achieve the results you want.

krknobbe10

Thank you all for your feedback. I am going to meet with my trainer for three weeks and see how it all goes. I am cutting back on my cardio and will be heavy lifting for three days a week for three weeks. After that, hopefully he will guide me in a good way to go. If not, I would even like to try a 4 day lifting program.

Lofteren

Full body training sessions are the way to go. This could be something as simple as bench/deadlift/barbell rows one day and overhead press/squat/pull ups on another day. It doesn't have to be complicated to be affective. Just work up to 3 heavy sets of 5-10 reps on each lift and try to gradually increase the weight.

Temple_Fit

It's really your preference as to how you want to lift. The only thing I'll add is that if you are trying to build muscle you will want to perform 3 to 6 sets, 6-12 reps 70-80% of your 1 rep max. As far as cardio, I personally would stay within your fat burning heart rate because you don't want to burn up your hard unearned muscle for the first month or so and tweak your diet.