If you're new to exercise, you'll want to make sure your efforts pay off and that you don't spend hours working out at cross purposes to your goals. For example, certain types of exercises promote strength, while others promote stamina and speed—doing exercises that promote one type of fitness can interfere with the other. Plan your workouts to maximize success.
Match Exercises to Goals
If you are looking to build muscle, you'll want to create limit strength or bodybuilding workouts that have you using the maximum weight you can lift or close to it. If you want to improve your sports performance, you'll want to improve your muscular endurance, or ability to use your muscles during a match or game. Do this by using lighter weights and performing more repetitions. Aerobic exercise is effective for building cardiovascular stamina, but uses slower muscle fibers than you use in many sports, according to "Addvantage" magazine. To train your cardio system for peak performance during the season, you'll want to use sprint training exercises.
Plan Your Season
All of the exercise types mentioned can contribute to better health, general fitness and sports performance. The key so that they help you reach your goals is to perform them at the right time. Do limit strength and aerobic exercise a month or more before your competitive season. Do sprint and muscular endurance training in the weeks leading up to your season and throughout it.
Recover
Lifting weights doesn't build muscle, it damages it. The benefit from working with weights is the recovery, repair and regeneration process your muscles go through after a workout, according to BodyBuilding.com. To maximize the effectiveness of your resistance training, take a day off between workouts. If you'd like to work out every day, work on your upper body one day and your lower body the next, alternating core workouts every other day.
Warm Up, Cool Down and Stretch
You will get more benefit from exercise if you take several minutes to warm up, coordinating your blood circulation, heart rate and muscle flexibility, according to fitness expert Brian Mac, a UK Athletics performance coach. Taking several minutes to slow down your heart rate after exercising and stretching will help prevent later muscle stiffness and soreness, says Mac.
Fight Gravity
When you lift weights, it's normal to let the weights fall back down, rather than lowering them slowly with your muscles. For example, if you lift weights up during a biceps curl, or pull yourself up with a pull-up, fatigue may tempt you to let the dumbbell pull itself down, or your body drop from the bar. Use your arms muscles to lower the weight or your body to create more muscle resistance and exercise benefit, recommends fitness author Dr. Gabe Mirkin. Many fitness experts recommend crunches instead of sit-ups because they avoid a gravity drop. When doing crunches, you keep your shoulders off the ground as you lower yourself after the upward crunch—this makes you keep using your abdominal muscles on the way down, keeping constant tension in them since you can't rest on the floor.
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