Getting Back to the Gym?

Weightlifting After the Covid-19 Break. What do You Need To Think About? When going back to the fitness center or gym, your first inclination would be to bounce back to your old exercise routine. But fitness experts will tell you that this is a bad idea. On the bright side, you will quickly bring back any muscle and strength you might have lost during the break. On the flip-side, you will be exposed to muscle damage, and get more sore after the exercises. Although you’ve been training from home, you will still get more soreness and muscle damage because heavy barbell exercises come with a lot more pressure. Moreover, your style on the compound lifts ups such as bench press, deadlift, overhead press, and squats, will be rusty, limiting your capabilities to lift more, and leaving you at risk of injury. What’s more, if you jump back to the old training routine, you will likely not progress faster than easing back to weighty barbell exercises. Your muscle soreness from the first few exercises could be one primary reason for your slowed progress. The soreness delays your capability to add weights and boost your techniques. Also, it might make you skip several workouts because you’d not want to exercise with injuries. With these analyses, the disadvantages of diving back to the old weightlifting routine exceeds the benefits. What are you supposed to do instead? In the first few days in the gym, you should focus on training in a manner that improves your technique, and prepares you for heavy weightlifting. That is, you slowly reintroduce your body to strength training. Work on enhancing your bench press, military press form, squat, and deadlift. After several days of this exercise, you can transition back to the old routine with much ease. Here’s how to train in the first month of resuming to the gym: As you learned earlier, during the first days of doing strength training, you develop soreness after weightlifting, but the soreness stops with time. Thanks to the repeated bout effect phenomenon, muscles become resistant to damage caused by strength training. You may not know that going too hard on weights does not necessarily mean you’ll reap all the benefits that come with the repeated bout effect. But training with reasonably light weights protects you from damages brought by heavy weightlifting. How light or heavy should your weights be in the gym? Well, if you have a bit of weightlifting experience, and only took a break due to the current pandemic, you are less sensitive to muscle damage than someone who is completely untrained. It is especially true for you because you’ve been performing some home exercises during the lockdown. Here are the recommended weights in the first week after returning to the gym:  Use around 50 percent of your 1RM (One – rep max) on the compound workouts.  Use 5 RIR (Reps in Reserve) on the isolation workouts. The concept RIR represents the number of more reps you can do in a particular set if you had to. Like an experienced weightlifter, there is a way you talk when referring to your weightlifting sets; this is after doing a set of tight barbell curls, “Man! Wasn’t that a grinder? I had one more rep in the tank!” Here, you are referring to an RIR of 1. Therefore, an RIR of 5 indicates you could perform five more reps if you had to. After the first week in the gym, increase the compound workouts intensity to 60 percent of your 1RM. When it comes to your isolation workouts, bump-up the intensity level to 4 RIR. On the third week, employ 70 percent of 1RM for the compound workouts, and 3RIR for the isolation workouts. On the fourth week, apply 80 percent of the 1RM on your compound workouts, and 2RIR on the isolation workouts. Perform one to three sets in every compound workout and two to three sets in every isolation exercise As your body gets accustomed back to weightlifting, you’ll also want to slowly increase your exercise volume to have more challenging workouts. Here’s a plan to help you increase your volume gradually: o During the first week, do one set in every compound exercise, and do two sets in every isolation exercise. o On the second week, perform two sets in every compound exercise, and do three sets in every isolation exercise. o During the third and fourth weeks, perform three sets for both your compound and isolation workouts. Perform two to five reps on every set on the compound workouts Performing too many sets per workout can cause fatigue, excess muscle damage, and soreness. Doing a lot of reps per set can result in a similar effect; this is mainly true when it comes to compound exercises such as overhead press, bench press, squat, and deadlift. In these workouts, high-rep sets seem to be disproportionately fatiguing and damaging. Low-rep sets are perfect for boosting your technique because they lead you to many quality repetitions with less fatigue. Due to these facts, it’s recommendable to perform sets of two to five reps on the compound exercises in your first month to return to the gym. What about the isolation workouts? For your isolation workouts, you can apply low or high reps, but fitness experts’ advice on starting with higher reps, then progressing to lower reps. Here’s why:  Applying different rep ranges is more efficient for muscle growth.  A lot of isolation workouts such as lat pulldowns and dumbbell side raises are preferable for higher reps.  You’ll have a variety to enjoy during your training.  It exposes your body to many rep ranges, allowing you to be better prepared for any program you choose to follow in the future – after the first month in the gym. Precisely, during the first week, experts recommend 12 reps in every set for the isolation workouts, ten reps in every set on the second week, eight reps in every set on the third week, and six reps in every set on the fourth week. Wrapping up Follow these programs for only four weeks; then, you’ll have no problem transitioning back to the old workout routine. You never know. You could end up with a new, even more challenging routine! If you liked the post, contact StrategyFitness for more inspirations in your fitness journey. Stay safe; stay positive!