Warmup sets are an important part of your training routine. Properly executed, warmup sets effectively prepare you to perform your heavy work sets to the best of your ability.
For new lifters in particular, how to approach one’s warmup sets — how many of them to perform, and at what weight — can be a subject of conclusion. This guide will give you some guiding principles and a couple specific methods to approach your warmup sets.
If you want to get stronger, you have to lift heavy weights. You also have to eat and rest!
Bay Strength lifters are invited to get together for a Recovery Picnic / potluck BBQ in Tilden Park. We’ll cook some good food and have a good time together.
Deadlifting is one of the best things you can do for your back. Subjecting your back to a controlled stress that forces it to adapt and become stronger is good for your longevity and overall quality of life. I am frequently amazed by how quickly routine back pain improves in clients after just a few weeks of barbell training – and deadlifting is central to this improvement.
One common mistake made by novice lifters, even some who are generally attentive to detail, is to combine steps 2 and 3. Instead of bending over at the hips and grabbing the bar (step 2), and then as a separate step bending their knees to establish the correct shin angle (step 3), lifters may both bend over and bend their knees simultaneously.
Almost always, this will result in an incorrect start position, with hips too low, the bar forward of the mid-foot, and the scapulae behind the bar rather than directly over it.
Recovery is a critical aspect of strength training. If you don’t recover from your training, you don’t adapt, and you don’t get stronger.
And at the heart of recovery is nutrition. You need to eat enough calories, and you need to eat the right things.
If you are serious about your training, it is probably a good idea for you to track and measure what you eat.
But tracking and measuring is not useful if you don’t know what your goals are.
To that end, we’ve put together a macro calculator for you.
One aspect of the press that many lifters can stand to easily improve is the position of their elbows at the bottom (or rack) position of the press. It is incredibly common to see lifters, especially those who have not yet received proper coaching, perform an entire set without correctly setting their elbows once.
This article will briefly review where your elbows must be set at the bottom of the press, why this position tends to deteriorate throughout a set, and what you can do to fix it. Having a consistent rack position in the press is one key to effectively training the movement and making steady progress with it.