The Fitness and Strength Experiment: The Basic Resistance Training Program

Weight lifting is a process whereby you are deliberately creating a stress on your muscles in order to try and get the adaptive benefits of recovery from that stress. As such, you need to create the right kind of stressful stimulus and you need to ensure adequate time and create the right conditions for recovery. Our recommendations for resistance training are as follows:

1. Workout one time per week or two if you are working out with arms and upper body and then legs and lower body. The idea is to allow at least 5-7 days to recover.
   

2. Perform each repetition slowly, as long as 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down. The idea is to emphasize the muscles needed to stop the fall of the weight against gravity as much as you are emphasizing the lifting part.
   

3. Perform the set of exercises to full fatigue of the muscle. Usually 1 set only is what is needed.
   

4. Consider "Time Under Tension": for the muscle instead of just counting the repetitions. The muscle should get to full fatigue between 45 and 150 seconds. Typically this will mean about 7-10 repetitions, but the fatigue is what is important. Once you reach fatigue, hold the weight against tension for another 10 seconds. If it is taking longer than 150 seconds to reach fatigue then your weight is probably too low.
   

5. Workout arms, shoulders, trunk, legs with pushing, pulling, squatting and standing motions. The 5 exercises to consider the most are:

   1. Seated row

   2. Chest press

   3. Lat pull down

   4. Seated upright (military) press

   5. Leg press