Starting weightlifting?
I'm thinking about starting to lift weights, but I'm worried that I'm going to do something wrong and will injure myself. When I mentioned it to my primary care physician, he said that it's really important to do so only under the direction of someone who really knows what she/he is doing and that one needs to lift really light weights very, very ( Read more... )
Horizontal rows- lie on the floor under a table or desk that can support your weight. with your head peaking out from under the edge of the table grab the table top with your hands and pull your chest towards the table. Viola you have just performed a back exercise! This can also work with a broomstick laid across two chairs, etc.
Pull-ups - I have an iron gym, it is $30 and fits in a doorway that has molding around it. No screws required. Pull ups are great, if you can't perform a pull up or chin up you can do negatives, slowly lowering yourself down until you reach the floor. But, there are work arounds if you don't have the cash. You can do pull ups on a sturdy door in you home, just grab the top of the doorway and pull up. You can do them off beams hanging in the basement, off a pipe, off a tree-limb, etc. When I lived in a dorm I would throw my towel over the shower curtain bar (which was very sturdy as it was part of the shower stall apparatus) and grabbed onto the ends of the towel and did pull ups. That also works your forearms.
I hate the gym, and I hated when I used adjustable weights that it took forever to change the weight for each exercise. Not everyone has to hate the gym, I just could never get into it, although I wish I had liked it. It just freaks me out and I'd rather exercise than agonize over my gym-phobia. I really only do body-weight exercises now. They require usually just your body, or a pull up bar, and you can do them anywhere.
I have fallen off the wagon recently, but when i did work out regularly I mainly focused on my upper body.
I did differently styles of push ups, I did dips (i hung gymnastic rings from my iron gym in my doorway, dips on rings are killer! they can also be performed on the corner of a counter by placing your hands on either side of the V if you don't have rings, I'd also use the rings for horizontal rows), pull ups, and planks. If I had my druthers I would start doing box jumps and squats for my legs, but to be quite honest, I only work out to improve how my chest looks (it wasn't so great after surgery and it bothers me).
You won't look like a body builder from doing body weight exercises, but you can lose weight and build some muscle. Building muscle is a response to increasing resistance, and the main issue with BWE is that it is difficult to increase resistance in very small increments, and at a point you may have to start putting a weighted backpack on or something. But, that takes a while. I have a coworker who only does push ups and pull ups and his back and chest are huge. He had been doing pull ups, like 20 reps for 5 sets, all winter and he and a friend tried doing them with weight attached on a whim, and it turned out he could do 20 reps with 50 additional pounds on him, and he didn't use weights. Obviously not everyone will have results like that, but there is still a lot of room for improvement for most of us.
In my opinion, the most important thing isn't all the minutia of working out, its just doing it, eating right, and being consistent.
If you are looking for a lot of reading material regarding all this check out bwculture.net and join their forums, they are free and they have some good articles. And, no one promises you that you'll look like Arnold from BWE, people are very realistic about expectations.
Good luck!
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