Pain is Gain

Pain is Gain

            Lifting hardcore feels amazing.  Soreness and pain are the aiming points for gains, letting you know that you’ve worked hard.  Your biceps feel like they are stretching your skin to the point of tearing.  Your chest feels like you are going to rip your shirt.  And your legs make you feel like running three miles in a minute.  These are all the effects of a long hard workout but it usually results to soreness and pain in the morning. 

            This is normal and is a result of your muscles breaking down their fibers and releasing amino acids.  This can become one of the best things that can happen to you in weightlifting because as your muscles break down and are soon replenished with proteins, sugars, and rest, they grow to become bigger and stronger. And who doesn’t want that.  This is a huge part of why getting food, mostly proteins, is extremely significant in order to get gains.

            Now, pain really is gain, but if you continue to weightlift even after you feel the amazing feel-good pain, it’s a horrible idea to work it again the next day or even the rest of the week.  The only exception to this is if you lightly work the area for just a few minutes.  Let’s say that you decide to work biceps for your workout that day and that night and the next morning you feel soreness and tenseness.  The last thing you want to do is to re-work your biceps the next day.  The reason for this is because it could, instead of breaking fibers to regrow muscles and get stronger, it will instead break them down farther to the point of actually overworking them and losing mass.  And no one wants that.

            So the next time your old grandpa that used to lift tells you that you really haven’t done anything to your muscles if they don’t feel like they’re going to fall off, he’s not crazy.  Remember, we’re all in this together, keep your stick on the ice.   

Maintaining Muscle Mass

Maintaining Muscle Mass

            One of the hardest things in lifting is always confused to be getting gains and getting stronger and getting that dream body, which does take hard work and sacrifice, but the true hardest thing is to maintain all that glorious muscle.  Lots of people mistake that once they work hard to get their dream body that they only have to work out a few days a month and that they’ll be fine.  This is a big reason why many people go from fab to flab.  This is a post to give you advice to keep your amazing body for as long as you want.

            OK so it’s obviously a bad idea to slowdown your weightlifting after you reach the desired muscle tone you worked for.  That’s like training really hard to win the golden gloves in boxing and once you finally win them you decide you don’t need to train anymore.  HORRIBLE IDEA!  Once you get your dream body you do get some leeway in your working out.  Mostly your can maybe workout for only three to four days a week instead of five to six, and you get the pleasure of easing your workout plan by a bit, you still workout as hard as you did but like if you usually do a bench press of so much weight for eight reps, just do the same weight but with five or six reps. 

            This is only something you want to do if you are one hundred percent sure that you don’t want to get even an ounce stronger or more defined, because what this is really doing is bringing repetition to your muscles causing you to plateau, which I have talked about in a previous post, basically maintaining everything about your current muscle tone.

            If you for some reason decide that you want to maintain your gains and stay the same but later in life you decide to get back at it and get even stronger and more toned all you have to do is increase your reps, exercises, and weight to confuse your muscles from its average repetition and into getting stronger again (easier said than done). 

            If you decide to stay where you’re at and not get more toned follow this post and remember to comment.  Remember, we’re all in this together, keep your stick on the ice.   

Dealing with Weightlifting Injuries

Dealing with Weightlifting Injuries

            I thought this would be a great thing to make a post on because I have recently broken the bottom tip of my shoulder blade off, or as I like to call it my shoulder nugget, and I currently am in way too much pain to lift or do sports.  There are tons of things that can go wrong in weightlifting but very rarely will such an incident occur if you are following the correct technique and using the right amount of weight for your lift.  Many different injuries can happen but I am going to talk about some of the most common injuries that happen with weightlifters, how they most likely happened, and how to prevent them from happening in the future.

            Probably the number one injury to happen with weightlifters is a back injury.  Mainly the lower back is the area that has the biggest risk of injury but upper back injuries are also possible but unlikely.  So many lifts rely on a strong lower back or are either dependent on keeping a straight lower back to prevent injury.  Exercises like dead lift, RDL, bent over rows, and standing push press, put tremendous stress on the lower back area and require lots of attention to make sure it is constantly in the right position.  For these lifts the last thing you would ever want to do is not pay attention and arch your back even slightly while doing the lift.  This is exactly what happened to me when I first started weightlifting and was trying to show off by dead lifting more weight than I’ve ever done, in front of a crowd of experienced lifters.  For your information I was able to do the lift and impressed a few people but when I finished and put the weight on the ground I had to try very hard to hide the excruciating pain I was feeling in my back.  I lifted the weight but my form sucked.  This little error pulled my muscle and put me out of the weight room for a good three to four weeks.

            Another common injury I see in the gym is a shoulder injury like I am experiencing now.  Although the reason my shoulder is broken now is not because of lifting but because of a faulty takedown during wrestling practice and I got slammed on my shoulder blade (not fun at all).  But most weightlifters hurt their shoulder muscle, not their shoulder blade or their rotator cuff.  This usually happens when people decide to put too much weight on while doing a push press, or while overstretching their shoulders while doing an inclined bench press or dumbbell press. 

            The last of the common injuries I will talk about is the hamstring which runs along the back of your thigh.  This is a muscle that usually is hurt by over extending it while doing lifts.  This can happen if you are doing something like lunges and you stretch out too far and planting your foot a long distance ahead of you.  This is great if you are stretch but if doing this while lifting can pull the muscle too far and damage it.

            So just be smart and learn proper technique while lifting and listen to trainers or experienced lifters to avoid injuries.  These are some of the most common injuries but certain circumstances can cause many other injuries so be careful.  Remember, we’re all in this together, keep your stick on the ice.