We’re almost into another January…a time where we all make that confident public promise – THIS is the year we’re going to finally get into shape.

The statistics unfortunately show that fervour has all but disappeared, even as early as February…in fact some gyms count on that.

This article will attempt to help you from becoming one of those statistics. The real key to changing your body composition is consistency and that means making it well past February, and these are our 3 things that we think de-rail that and what to do instead.

So we’ve talked about technique, now it’s time to see what exercises to apply that to. This is going to be a difficult section to write for as there are an almost endless amount of movements to choose from. Physical education stretches back a long time and really the fundamentals haven’t changed that much over time, like with nutrition though fads have come and gone with the advent of marketing.

There’s only a select few people who actually enjoy spending time in gyms, so we’re going to concentrate on the minimum effective dose here, in that what is the maximum benefit in the shortest amount of time or the biggest bang for your buck!

Enter compound movements, and to explain that term it means movements that move more than one joint. As an example think of a squat movement vs a leg extension. The primary joints moving in the squat are your ankle, knee and hip, this consequently means there are also more muscles acting upon those joints to produce that movement.

Though this series is entitled ‘basics’ and aimed primarily at those who’d like to start weight training, each of these are also applicable to the average trainee too, even those who might consider themselves intermediate or advanced.

If the foundations aren’t right, then there’s little point in building on top of that and we believe that proper technique should be your base for a few solid reasons. The main objectives being…
To limit your risk of injury
To build efficiency into your lifts
To ensure you use a full range of motion
To help maintain constant tension
To ensure the correct joints and muscles are bearing the load

This originally started as a single blog post but as with anything we do, in order to make it as understandable as possible we thought it better to break it down into a few manageable posts. It also means you can go off and work on these individually and by the end of the series you’ll have pretty much everything you need to get you results.
Though we’ve done similar posts before, we’re going to delve a little deeper into each subject in this mini-series.

Firstly, there’s been a wave of change over the last few years towards weight training for fat loss, and away from endless plugging away on treadmills and cross trainers, and for good reason. People are realising that there’s a difference between fat loss and weight loss, and strength training plays an important role in that. This is not to discredit cardio work at all, that’s still an important element of health, but from a fat loss perspective and time:reward ratios there’s a more efficient way of changing your body shape.

If your goal is fat loss then your primary objective ought to be reducing your bodyfat % while maintaining your current level of muscle, or in some beginner cases even increasing it.