Weight Training Tips: How to ... Video Transcript

Webcast Transcript

DAVID FOLK THOMAS: What about, you also hear about squeezing it out? Do want to tense your arms if it's a biceps curl? Do you want to really focus on that, or do you just want to lift it as normal?

JONATHAN GLASHOW, MD: I think the body has a very good memory, and if you train the muscle to work over it's complete arc of motion, when you go to use that muscle in some other event that you've trained for, whether it be hockey or baseball or football, it will remember being stressed under all those conditions. If you strengthen the muscle in a very limited range, it will be very good in that limited range, but you take it out of that range and it won't function as well. So in order to gain as much as possible you'd want to train that muscle through the entire range. Jim's tempo, up slow or up medium pace, hold, and control and slow down, I think is excellent.

DAVID FOLK THOMAS: OK, and I think we have the clip you just alluded to a moment ago. What's this guy doing wrong?

JIM RAMSAY: Basically, this guy has too much weight on the bar. This would be you, Dave. What he's trying to do here is, he's trying to lift and create, again, his beach body, where he's going to have the big biceps and the big chest. He's giving up form to lift a heavier weight, which he's not benefiting from this at all. He's shrugging his shoulders up, he's arcing his back, he's lifting his chest to try to get the weight up. His biceps aren't doing half the work that they should be doing. When he dropped the weight down and did some concentration curls in a lighter weight he could focus and maintain that workload throughout the range of motion. Whereas there, he's creating a scenario for injury.

DAVID FOLK THOMAS: The last thing -- we're almost out of time -- that I wanted to ask about. You always hear the higher the weight, building strength. The more reps, building size. Is that accurate or inaccurate?

JONATHAN GLASHOW, MD: I don't think it's quite that simple. The way the muscle builds is by breaking down muscle fibers and allowing the body to regrow those in a stronger way by giving them proper nutrition and rest time. So whether you do it with very high repetitions over many sets or you do it with a very heavy weight for a short amount of reps is a debate. I think it's probably best to do both and vary things.

DAVID FOLK THOMAS: All right. Well, that's going to wrap this webcast up. So I want to thank my guests, Jim Ramsay and Dr. Jonathan Glashow. Remember, when you're going out to the gym -- and I think they were being a little too hard on me -- remember, basically focus on doing it slowly, properly, not that many reps, about 10-15 reps, about three sets of each exercise, and you'll get out of there, maximizing your time and looking a lot better at the beach. Thank you for joining us on this webcast. I'm David Folk Thomas. We'll see you next time.

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