In this episode, personal trainer Jayd Harrison shares step-by-step guidance for how to do an effective resistance training workout.

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Hi there. Welcome to the Jaydigains Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, a k a Jaydigains. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you some clips from my Twitch stream. I go live every week on Tuesdays and Fridays in the fitness and health category on Twitch. So if you'd like to join one of those, my Twitch channel is twitch.tv/jaydigains. Give me a follow to get notified anytime I go live. Now in today's discussion, I was following up an earlier discussion where I explained what resistance training is, and in this discussion we're going to go over how to actually do resistance training. Keep in mind that this episode has both a video component, which is available on my YouTube channel, as well as an audio component, which you can get anywhere you get your podcasts. There may be some points in this episode where I am doing something visually to demonstrate what I'm talking about.

So you can see that on the YouTube channel. Just go to the Jaydigains Coaching Corner podcast channel on YouTube. Make sure to follow me on my socials. I'm Jaydigains everywhere if you'd like to keep up with and connect with me. And of course, if you are looking for a one-on-one personal trainer or health coach, I am taking on new clients right now. So go to my website if you're interested in that. I also have some D I Y workout programs available through the Trainerize app, which you can find more information on at my website. So without further ado, let's get into the discussion.

So we covered what is resistance training and what makes a workout resistance training versus cardio, but now let's talk about how to actually incorporate it into your training and why we do resistance training. We do resistance training because it helps to keep our muscles strong, helps to keep our bones strong, and when you keep your bones and your muscles strong and healthy, it means that you're better equipped to go about your daily life and you can live more independently for longer. So if you're like, okay, now I understand why I should be doing resistance training, I understand what resistance training is, how do I actually incorporate it into my training, my exercise routine? If you are just starting off and you're brand new to resistance training, I would say start with just two or three days out of every week, do what we call total body training.

Total body training means that within your training session, you're doing exercises that target your legs, your arms, and your core, right? So you work the whole body, you're hitting each thing for one exercise. It's okay for you to train on days back to back. That's totally fine. You can train Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, doing total body, you may feel sore and have to reduce the intensity of your training if you're training back to back. If you're doing a total body on Monday, you may feel tired on Tuesday and Wednesday. You may not be able to push as much or use as much weight as you would if you got in a day or two of rest in between. So personally, when I'm programming for beginners, I usually like to leave a rest day or two in between each training session. So if I have them training twice or three times a week, I might do something like Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Monday, Wednesday, Saturday.

That way they have a rest day to recover between each training session. So that's how I typically recommend it. But I mean, it's not 100% necessary to have a rest day in between each training session, but you should at least have a rest day once a week, every seven days at the minimum, get a rest day every seven days. But you can exercise, you can work out every day. You're just not going to be able to work out really, really hard every day. The more frequently you train, the more you're going to have to moderate your intensity so that you have some days that are more intense, some days that are less intense, that way you're giving your body the time that it needs to recover. I do recommend that you get onto a consistent schedule for your resistance training. Instead of just saying, oh, I just need to lift two or three times a week, or I need to do calisthenics two or three times a week.

Actually take your calendar out and schedule your workouts to be on the same days at the same time every week. That is going to help you to be consistent because if you want results, whether you're working for fat loss or for muscle gains, you need to be consistent. And being on a schedule where you're doing the workout at the same time on the same days every week will help you to stay consistent, especially on those days when you don't feel like it. Having a consistent schedule and a routine will help you to overcome those feelings of, I just don't feel like it would be easier to show up for something if you're in the routine of showing up for it at that day, at that time. So put it on your calendar, schedule it on your calendar and treat it like a very important appointment that cannot be canceled or rescheduled.

Try as much as possible to not reschedule or to not cancel. Try as much as you can to avoid that if you absolutely can't avoid it, if you have to reschedule or you have to cancel, put it on the next day or as close to as soon as possible. Try not to skip more than one workout, right? Because that's how it becomes a habit. So put it in your calendar, try to keep it at the same day, same time every week. So now you've got your calendar down when you're going to do your resistance training, let's talk about how to actually do it. Remember that every time you show up for a workout, you need to have in mind what is the goal of that workout, right? Is the goal to get your heart rate up and burn lots of calories? You probably want to do a cardio workout.

Is your goal to build muscle? Okay, because you're going to have to train in a different way depending on what your goal is, right? For resistance training, the goal is to get your muscles to be stronger or to get them bigger, to improve some kind of aspect of your muscular fitness. We talked about last time the four main aspects of muscular fitness, which are hypertrophy like size, getting the muscles to be bigger. There's a strength, which is getting the muscles to be able to push or pull a big amount of weight or generate a big level of force, right? There's power, which is getting the muscles to generate a big amount of force with a consideration of speed. So we want to move a lot of weight and we want to move it fast. That's power and endurance. Are we trying to get the muscles to be able to contract for longer periods of time?

So whatever the goal is of your training is going to slightly change what you do for your resistance training workout. If you are a beginner to resistance training and a beginner to fitness, I highly suggest that you focus on hypertrophy and you train for hypertrophy. Hypertrophy is, like I said before, it's working out with the goal of getting the muscles to grow. Because if you're a beginner, there's a couple of things that you need to develop. You need to build muscle so that you can ask your muscles to perform skills. Basically. The other three aspects, strength, endurance, and power, they all kind of build on hypertrophy. Hypertrophy is where you build the machine, right? You build the muscle. And then the other three aspects, endurance, power and strength is how we program those machines to function. So you have to build the muscle first before you can program it to do some kind of a skill.

So focus on hypertrophy, focus on building muscle as a beginner, or if it's been a long time since you've been in training and you're coming back to training after a long period of time off from the gym, focus on building muscle for building muscle. You're also going to want to focus on technique, learning how to move again or learning how to move for the first time. Focus on mastering the technique of the major exercises like squats, bench press, pull downs, deadlift, learn how to move your body and be in control of your body. So the foundation of all resistance training styles is hypertrophy, hypertrophy and mobility. I say focus on learning how to move your muscles, connect your mind to your muscles, and try to grow muscle in the way that we train for hypertrophy. The way that we actually format the workout is going to be very similar to style all resistance training workouts.

Before you do a resistance training workout, it's always a good idea to do a warmup. And for the warmup, I suggest doing five to 10 minutes of some kind of cardiovascular exercise. For that, you can just walk on a treadmill or go for a walk outside, hop on a bike or some other cardio machine. You can also do some calisthenic cardio type exercises. Just don't make it too intense. You don't want to push your muscles too, too hard during your warmup, you want to save your energy for the challenge sequences where you're trying to build muscle. So something that's like gentle, that's going to get your blood flowing, get your heart rate slightly elevated, increase your core temperature. That's the goal of the warmup. So whether you're doing that on a cardio machine or you're doing calisthenics and a couple circuit of exercises, just keep it gentle.

Get your heart rate up, get a little bit warmer, get the blood flowing to the muscles. Okay, so that's the first part of the warmup and five to 10 minutes. And then I like to spend 10 minutes or more working on mobility and priming my muscles for the main challenge portion of the workout. So in your mobility exercises, you're going to focus on warming up your muscles to the specific movements that you're going to be challenging yourself with. So for example, if you're going to be doing a resistance training day where you're focusing on squats during your mobility training, you might do body weight squats and then different exercises to help you connect with the muscles that are involved in squats. So like monster walks to fire up your gluteus medias or some exercises to focus on bending and straightening out the knee, working on your ankle mobility.

Those are all great exercises to do during the priming sequence of your workout. There's certain exercises that I will do before any type of workout. So regardless of whether I'm going to be doing squats or bench or deadlift or just bodybuilding, I'm always going to start with some cat cows to warm up my core and to loosen up my back. All other exercises like the T-spine rotations, those are also really good, but there's tons of exercises that are specific to whatever the movement is that you're going to be doing. So the priming is a really important part that's part of the warmup. And the warmup can be like 20 minutes or so. I personally, like from my own workouts, I like to leave 15 to even 30 minutes to my total warmup, and that's everything, including the cardio sequence and the priming. So by the time I'm done with priming, I'm ready to start actually doing the challenge sequence.

Now, the challenge sequence for resistance training at the beginner level, or if you're working on hypertrophy even at a more intermediate and advanced level, your goal of your resistance training at that point is to build muscle. Okay, so how do we build muscle? How do we exercise in a way that builds muscle? First of all, you need to understand how your muscles work, learn your muscles and focus on learning your muscles and trying to practice naming them in every training session when you're using them. The main ones, your quadriceps, your hamstrings, your calves, your biceps, triceps, shoulders, deltoids traps, lats, abdominals. You need to know the muscles so that you can more effectively train them when you know what muscle group you're trying to target in a specific exercise that allows you to get more out of the exercise. When you are doing exercise and you know that you should be feeling it in your quads, you focus on your quads, and that will help you to do the exercise more effectively.

So that's first step for a lot of my clients is begin to learn your muscles. Really focus on getting down an understanding the technique of the exercise. So in my personal training programs for every exercise, there's a tutorial video that I want everybody to watch, especially the first time that you go to do an exercise. Watch the entire video, the entire video, even if it's eight minutes long, okay? It has the information in it that you need in order to perform the exercise correctly, safely, and understand why we're doing the exercise and what muscle groups it will target. It will teach you how to know whether you're doing the exercise correctly and where you should feel it. Okay? So watch the whole video before you try the exercise. So you watch the video to learn how to do the exercise, and then try the exercise with either no weight or very, very lightweight.

The first time that you go to do it, get a feel for the technique. Get a feel for how to actually do the exercise When you are doing the exercise, a couple of things I want you to keep in mind. The rate that you move is important. I want you to do each of your reps at a slow controlled pace, which means like two to three seconds on the extension, two to three seconds on the contraction. So if you're doing bicep curls, what we want to see is like two to three seconds up, two to three seconds down. And at this point, this will allow you to really focus on paying attention to the muscle that you're trying to train, that you're trying to fatigue. So go nice and slow. And then also when you are doing these exercises and you're just learning them, try to also focus on your breathing pattern.

A mistake that beginners commonly make is holding their breath for the entire set, and this is really not great for your body. So I do want you to continue to breathe, especially at the beginner level and especially when you're doing a hypertrophy training, even at intermediate and advanced level. The way that I like to encourage my clients to breathe the breathing pattern that I like is you take a, before you start the set, take a big breath and hold it in your belly. So you're trying to hold it in your belly. So instead of having your shoulders come up or your chest coming out, and exhale just a little bit in between each rep, and then inhale a little bit in between each rep. So you're taking shallow breaths in between each rep, so you take a big breath at the beginning.

So this allows you, when you breathe in this pattern, it allows you to practice what's called bracing. So in the beginning of the set, you're breathing into your belly and then you're creating pressure in your abdominal wall Here in your abdominal cavity, you want to have this nice and stiff and stable that's going to help keep you in alignment. It's going to help you to keep a healthy posture when you are breathing in between reps. You can avoid losing that pressure by just having a nice shallow breath instead of fully exhaling and fully inhaling. So it's just like a little tiny breath between each rep. Now we've covered, okay, how to do the exercises the first time, watch the video all the way through, and then practice with a lightweight so that you can get the hang of the movement. And then once you feel like, okay, I understand how to do the thing, then you can bring the weight up or the resistance level up, or you can try a more difficult variation of the exercise to actually push your muscles.

Say your program says do this for eight to 12 reps. That's a really good range to start with. As a beginner, you want to work between eight and 12 reps per set, and maybe you're working with a weight where your muscles fail before you get to eight reps. That is too much weight, and in that case, you need to reduce the weight, try it with a lighter weight in the next set. But maybe you are doing a weight that allows you to get to 20 reps before your muscles start to feel tired. And if you stop with two reps in the tank, you get to 20. That is not enough weight. So you need to do more weight, you need to use a different weight, use more weight in your next set. Okay? So that's how you can kind of figure out what weight you should be using is try to stay within that eight to 12 rep range.

Use something that will allow you to feel challenged within that range, but leave two or three reps in the tank, like stop your set when you feel like you could do two or three more reps. This is where your muscles are going to grow from in order to get your muscles to grow or to grow stronger or to get bigger, we need to push them past what they're used to. They need to be pushed past what they're used to. This is called the principle of progressive overload. So we need to push our muscles towards fatigue. If you're a beginner, you don't necessarily need to push all the way to muscle failure in order to stimulate muscle growth, or if you're really deconditioned and you haven't exercised or done resistance training in the past six months or so. But the more advanced you get as you get into the intermediate level and you continue to advance, the harder it's going to be to get your muscles to grow.

And at that point it becomes more and more necessary to train your muscles towards muscle failure. You have to put more load, more stimulus on the muscles, and that's where training to muscle failure can become very helpful, especially if you are doing shorter workouts. If you're short on time and you don't have two hours to be in the gym to just give yourself a bunch of different exercises for the same muscle group. Training to muscle failure is a great way to get the most bang for your buck. I more often will recommend training to muscle failure on isolation exercises that focus on just one muscle or one joint in action. It's a lot safer to train towards muscle failure on leg extensions in a leg extension machine than it is to train to failure with a couple hundred pounds on your back, right? So it depends on the exercise.

It also depends on how much time you have in the gym because you can get the stimulus that your muscles need as an intermediate or advanced person by just doing, you just have to do more of something. You could do more exercises, more sets, more reps, more weight, or increase the intensity so that you're training closer to muscle failure. So these are all different ways that you can tweak your exercise or tweak your workouts to overload the muscles in some way. It's like a soundboard and there's different dials that you can turn up to increase the load on your muscles so that they continue to grow. But that is a little bit more in the advanced and intermediate realm. And right now, today we're talking about getting started as a beginner and as a beginner, you do not necessarily need to train to muscle failure, and I don't actually recommend training to muscle failure in the first couple of weeks of your training as a beginner because it's not necessary for your muscle growth.

And the risk of injury is really high the closer you train towards muscle failure, and it's also going to make it really hard for you to recover from your workouts. So what I like to say is leave two reps or so in the tank. So do as many reps as you need to do within whatever the recommended number of reps is for your program. Do the set until you feel like you could do maybe two more reps before your muscles fail. And that's a general, a good sweet spot I think for people to end two or three reps leave two or three reps in reserve, and it's tricky to know what that is as a beginner, but just keep that as a philosophy. You'll get better at sensing how much you can push, the more that you practice and the more that you train. Okay, let's see.

So that's how you want to approach your sets as a beginner. The sets of every exercise train to the point where you could do maybe two more repetitions of the exercise, and then I want you to rest. Okay, take your rest periods. A lot of times people think that they need to just keep going from exercise to exercise or just take 10 seconds to rest before they start their next set. No, this is not a cardio workout. This is a resistance training workout. We want to give the muscles the stimulus that they need to grow, so taking our rest periods is going to allow your muscles to recharge. That way in your next set, you can push them with the right amount of weight, the right amount of tension that they need in order to grow. So take your rest periods. I think it's a really good idea also to take video of yourself, especially if you're working out by yourself.

I like for my clients to take video of themselves doing exercises, especially the first time that they do a new exercise, because then they can send it to me and I can review it and give them forum feedback and give them technique tips, right? It's a good idea to take video. That also gives you a sense of progress. As you get better at the exercises later on, you'll be able to compare your progress and how you did the exercise in the beginning, how you do it six months later. So usually for a beginner program, you got two or three sets per exercise generally, and you may have multiple exercises for the same muscle group, but focus on learning how to do the technique and try to connect with your muscles while you're doing the exercises and see if you can name them. Practice naming the muscles that you feel activating and point to them.

Put your finger on the muscle, like I feel this muscle activating to reflect between each of your sets. And that's how you're going to do every single set of every single exercise in your resistance training workout. And then at the end, you can just go home or you can take an opportunity to do a little bit more mobility training. A lot of people like to stretch, do flexibility training after they've done resistance training because their muscles are warm and it also just feels good. It feels good to stretch the muscles after you've worked them. So you could take five or 10 minutes to stretch, do some stretches, do some mobility work, and then you're done with your workout. Or you could just finish your workout when you finish the last set of your last exercise. That's also fine. Okay, so that's how you actually do a resistance training workout.

Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of the Coaching Corner podcast. I hope that you found it helpful and can use some of the tips that I gave in your own resistance training workouts. If you would like some more personalized guidance, I am taking on new clients right now. So go to my website if you are interested in working with me as your personal trainer or health coach. You can also follow one of my D I Y training programs delivered through the Trainerize app. Just go to my website and click on workout plans. And if you haven't already, make sure that you subscribe to this podcast wherever it is that you're watching. I'll see you guys in the next episode. Have a great rest of your day. Make sure that you drink your water, eat your veggies, and eat your protein, and I'll see you soon.