How to Set Reasonable Strength Training Goals

Although the usual time to start thinking about strength training is before summer or around New Years, starting a new workout routine can be accomplished at any point during the year. In fact, the cool Fall months are a great time to get started, since the weather is nice enough for outdoor activity and you'll feel great going into the holidays, whatever your holiday of choice might be.

The inclination for most people starting a strength training routine is to start out hard and intend to get harder. People want to see quick results and are quickly frustrated when that doesn't happen. Although true for all exercise routines, for strength training it is important not to fall into this trap. Jumping into many exercise routines too quickly and putting too much into it too soon can cause burnout, but in strength training, it can cause actual injury.

Therefore, it is important to set reasonable goals. By doing so, you can avoid burnout and injury while at the same time assuring steady growth. However, in this era of the fad diet and with images of stars minutes post-baby with beautiful bodies, it is hard to know what reasonable goals might be.

First and foremost, humans don't like to disappoint others. Therefore, telling someone that you're starting an exercise routine can be greatly helpful in starting a strength training routine. Your first goal could be to mention to someone that you're starting one. Better yet, see if you can find an exercise buddy. Strength training can be arduous and exhausting. If you can share that with someone, you'll have a better chance of success in your strength training goals.

Secondly, before starting a strength training routine, remember that you have to start by improving your behavior before you can hope to see any improvement to your muscles. Thoreau's big beef in Walden was that it is inordinately difficult for any animal, including the human animal, to reject old patterns and habits. Therefore, the first goal must be to vow to change your behavior. Shake things up. The only time in the day you have to exercise is first thing in the morning, but you can't seem to get out of bed? Go ahead and start by getting up 10 minutes earlier each day for a week. This gradually changes how your body thinks of sleep and starts to develop a pattern that gives you a bit more time in the morning. I always feel better at work if I can get up early enough to get something accomplished beforehand, and exercise is a natural endorphin with longer lasting results than, say, chocolate.

Now you're getting up a bit earlier and someone knows that you're going to start strength training. If you're extra lucky, you have someone to exercise with you. But you're not totally ready to really jump into a serious strength training routine yet, although you can certainly start exercising at any point in here. Strength training can sap you physically if you're not careful. Therefore, making sure to eat right and get enough sleep is extra important, particularly at the beginning of a strength training routine or during later surges. We subscribe to a free website called Sparkpeople.com that really helps on all of the above points, but particularly this one. Even if a website wouldn't be useful, make sure to assess how much you're eating. Start by trying a couple of healthy meals in a week if you're used to grab-and-go snacks instead of proper meals. Drop a dessert of pie in favor of sorbet or even fruit. You'll want extra protein and iron for strength training to help build muscles, but do not fall into the trap of going overboard on this. Eating nothing but red meat may have been what was touted 30 years ago as the best way to build muscles, but no more. A balanced diet will make you feel more energetic and ready to go.

Your next goal is to determine what your goals are in strength training. Some people want to build huge muscles. Others just want a bit more tone. If you want huge muscles, you'll need to lift more weight for fewer repetitions. If you want tone, you do more reps with less weight, simply speaking.

After you've determined which sort of training you want to do, you'll also want to determine which muscles are most important to work. You can't just choose one set and stick to that, because the human body does not work that way. Expect that even if your goal is to work on your calf muscles, you'll still want to spend some time working your biceps, if only to give your calves a break. But knowing your hot spots will allow you to jump right into the next goal.

At this point, you're eating right and sleeping right. You know what your plans are for strength training. You're ready to go. Some people find great use in going to a gym with all the proper equipment. Others like to purchase the equipment themselves. Still others like to start strength training with only the most basic equipment (a can of vegetables can double as light weights at the beginning of a routine). Assess what you think will work best for you, then do it. Personally, I hate gyms, so we have strength-training equipment in our garage. It's nothing heavy duty, because my assessment was that I wouldn't need gigantic weights and massive machinery. You can purchase some basic leg lift or bench press machines (or even some that do both) at used stores or on sale for very little. Gyms have a bigger variety of equipment and can afford to purchase fancier machinery, plus you'll be among people, if you like that sort of thing. They also often offer, either with cost of membership or for an additional fee, trainers.

With machine in hand and accessible, it's time to ascertain where you are. Even if you've never done any strength training before, you obviously have some strength, or you wouldn't be able to get around. Different people have different levels. If you're in construction or are a physical therapist, you might be exposed to more muscle workouts than a desk worker in a typical day, so your level of strength may be better. A trainer once told me that what you should do is find the absolute limit of what you can do on a given machine, then drop 30 - 50% off of that to set a workout amount. This is a process. Different machines work different muscles, even if they don't seem like they would, so being able to lift 40 pounds on one machine doesn't mean that you should lift 40 pounds on every machine. You should be able to be comfortable for one round of repetitions, though a bit strained. If you finish your repetitions and are exhausted, you're lifting too much and should scale back. If you finish your reps and feel ready to do 100 more, you're lifting too little.

Now you're finally lifting some weights. If you're like most people, you can do this for about a week before you decide that you are not seeing enough in the way of results or that you prefer sleeping in to exercising in the morning. A birthday may come up and blow your carefully prepared diet, leaving you lethargic and unwilling to exercise. Therefore, your next goal is to set some viable short-term goals. In the beginning, we're not even talking muscle mass or scale based goals. I'm talking about goals along the lines of "every other day next week, I will exercise, even if I don't feel like it" or "I'm going to drink only water this week." Accomplishing these goals will allow you to focus on things that you can manage and see progress, even while your muscles yelp with this new stress because of your strength training routine.

As time progresses, your goals move on to seeing improvements in how much weight you can lift. I like to keep a journal of my strength training numbers, denoting how much weight I lifted on a given day so that, two months later, I can look back and marvel at how little I lifted then versus now. Since much of strength training is nearly subjective and certainly gradual, keeping a journal will allow you to see the improvement that may be hard for you to notice in your body.

Finally, you'll start to see improvement to your body. At this point, your goals can become body related. You can switch which clothing you wear, or see more definition in your arm muscles. You likely will gain weight in the beginning, since muscles weigh more than fat, but measuring yourself in inches rather than pounds may help you to see the improvements you're making with your strength training routine.

Above all else, the biggest goal in any strength training routine is to stick with it. Even if you start to get frustrated, or can come up with a million excuses, sticking with it can be a goal just by itself.