How to Lift Weights - Simple and Straightforward
How to Lift weights: Learning the muscle groups
Your chest, arms, legs, shoulders, and back are all comprised of muscle groups which you will be training. I'll break each down simply:
Chest: The chest contains the pectoral muscles. These muscles are trained most commonly by the bench press. There are various machines that can also be used to train the "pecs".
Arms: Your arms have the bicep muscles (the front) and the tricep muscles (the back). You will want to find an exercise for each of these as you cannot effectively train both with just one exercise. An example would be bicep dumbbell curls for the bi's, and then tricep pushdowns for the tri's.
Back: Your back is comprised of the "lats", which is the most commonly trained area of the back, and provides for width. More advanced lifters will train also for back thickness working the middle portion of the back. For the lats, one can choose an exercise such as lat pulldowns on a cable machine to give added width and "V taper" to the back.
Shoulders: The Deltoids is the muscle group commonly trained for the shoulders. Lifts like frontal dumbbell raises or dumbbell shoulder presses can effectively nail the "delts".
Legs: Learning how to lift weights isn't just figuring out how to train your chest and arms, but rather consideration should also be taken in regards to your legs. The front portion are your quadriceps, and the back portion are the hamstrings. An exercise like the leg press will work the "quads", while lying leg curls will work your "hammies". The calf muscles can also be trained by a toe raise machine.
As long you keep things basic and simple you can easily learn how to lift weights quickly and effectively. Start out by choosing at least one exercise for each muscle group. Perform this exercise for 2-3 sets of around 8-10 repetitions. Once you get more familiar with how to lift weights with each exercise, you can increase the amount of weight and lower the repetitions to a 6-8 range.
