rydra_wong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rydra_wong) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
lifting_heavy_things2010-10-08 10:34 pm
rydra_wong) wrote in lifting_heavy_things2010-10-08 10:34 pm
How To Invade The Free Weights Room, Part II
Part I
Barbells! (Not the body-piercing kind.)
First a disclaimer: personally, I wasn't comfortable trying barbell lifts until I had a chance to learn them in person (I had the great good fortune to go to a women's weightlifting workshop). There are lots of things I'm happy to teach myself from books and the internet, but this wasn't one of them.
The key issues here:
1) Barbell lifts give you the potential to move much, much heavier pieces of iron than almost anything else. For building pure strength, they're unequalled. However:
2) In many cases, your knees and your back are going to be involved in said moving, and you need to make sure they are involved in good, strengthening ways, rather than oh-shit-that's-not-good-ow-ow-ow-motherfucker ways.
So having someone else who can check your form and make sure you're lifting correctly when you start is invaluable.
A workshop is ideal. Some gyms -- particular those leaning towards Crossfit or related forms of "physical subculture" -- offer workshops in skills like barbell lifts. But obviously, whether anything like that is available depends on your location.
Assuming it's not, if you get a free session with a trainer with your gym membership, consider using it to get them to teach you the basics of barbell lifts.
If you're teaching yourself -- and people can and do manage this, I'm just timid -- then study form liek whoa, start any new exercise using only the bar, and watch your back and knees like a hawk for the slightest twinginess or feelings of strain.
And get a copy of Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training. Okay, get a copy of that anyway.
First off, anatomy of a barbell.
You have the bar itself. If it's an "Olympic barbell", it'll weight 20 kg; many gyms will also have lighter ones, usually 15 or 10kg. For many exercises this is a substantial weight in itself, even for people who are relatively strong.
It is perfectly fine and acceptable and common to do an exercise using just the bar -- either because that's enough weight already, as a warm-up, or because you want to concentrate on mastering correct form before you start adding more weight.
(For many exercises -- overhead squats or good mornings, for example -- it's a good idea to start with a broomstick before you even try the bar.)
When you want to add more weight, you add on weight plates, which slide onto each end of the barbell.
They're held in place with "collars", which either have to be screwed into place, or are wire and have a squeeze-mechanism to release them. The collars stop the plates from moving around or sliding off and crashing to the floor if the bar tilts.
N.B. The weights on each end of the barbell need to be matching. Lopsided weight is nobody's friend.
In order to help you line yourself up so you're in the middle of the bar, and get your grip spaced the way you want it, there will be "grip marks" on the metal -- alternating smooth and "knurled" sections (with a cross-hatch pattern on the metal).
The total weight you are lifting is the weight of the bar itself plus the weight plates.
Also N.B.: Sometimes it can be difficult and unwieldy getting heavy plates onto a bar (especially if the bar's on the floor because you want to do deadlifts). This feels incredibly embarrassing. As far as I know, there isn't a graceful way of doing it; you just have to live with it.
Things to do with a barbell: squats and deadlifts.
Okay, okay, there are lots of other things you can do -- notably bench presses, overhead presses, and of course all the Olympic lifts -- but squats and deadlifts are pretty close to being the core, and doing them with a barbell is a very different experience from doing them with dumbells.
I'm not going to try to explain basic form here, because of being profoundly unqualified to do so (I rec Rippetoe and Stumptuous). Instead, I'm just going to describe some key bits of equipment you'll see in the free weights room and what they're for.
For squats, you have the squat rack:
If someone is doing bicep curls while standing in the squat rack, you are officially allowed to hate them.
(There are even t-shirts.)
Okay. As you can see, the squat rack has protruding peg-thingies (note my mastery of the technical terminology) at different heights.
These let you set up the bar at a height that's good for you and load it up with plates; you can use much more weight this way than you could if you had to lift the fully-loaded bar up to shoulder height.
The bar should be racked a little below shoulder height; you're going to dip below the bar, get it settled on your shoulders, then stand up, lifting it off the rack and taking the weight fully.
Then you take a step or two back until you're standing over the safety bars, the low horizontal bars that extend around thigh height.
If you go down to the bottom of a squat and realize you don't have the oomph to get up out of it, you can safely ditch the barbell onto the safety bars and duck out from underneath it.
In a deadlift, you lift the bar from off the ground. As a result, there's no need for safety bars; if you drop the barbell, it falls to the floor without hitting any bits of you on the way.
Where equipment does get involved: if you're only using the bar or relatively small weight plates, the bar is going to be significantly closer to the ground than if you're using plates of 45lb and up (the point where they hit a standard diameter). In other words, unless you start out your warm-up set by lifting 135lb/60kg, the bar is going to be lower to the ground than "normal". That gives you an added disadvantage, as the bar has to travel further, and also places extra stress on your lower back.
Some gyms have "bumper plates" which are the same diameter regardless of weight, but many don't.
So until you get to the big weight plates, you may want to rest the bar on some plastic blocks or phone books to get it up to regular height; Rippetoe gives standard height as about 8 1/2 inches or 21.5cm between the bottom of the bar and the floor.
Like the squat rack, the bench press ... er ... bench (seriously, is there a name for it? or do you just say "the bench press bench"?) has pegs at different heights so you can set the bar at a height above the bench that works for you:
However, it has no safety bars, so you need to make sure you don't go to failure unless you have a spotter. Always make sure you have at least enough strength to get the bar racked again, so you don't get stuck with it on your chest.
This is usually not as life-threatening as it sounds -- if you're tired, the bar can easily be too heavy to get all the way up again without being remotely heavy enough to crush your chest -- but it is very embarassing. Best avoided.
If your gym is large and extensively kitted-out, you will see various other bits of equipment around. Some are fairly obvious (e.g. bars for dips and pull-ups); some are completely baffling.
But the truth is you don't need to know what every bit of equipment is in order to use the free weights room.
If and when you decide you want to learn how to use a particular bit of kit, it'll still be there.
In the meantime: squats and deadlifts.
Barbells! (Not the body-piercing kind.)
First a disclaimer: personally, I wasn't comfortable trying barbell lifts until I had a chance to learn them in person (I had the great good fortune to go to a women's weightlifting workshop). There are lots of things I'm happy to teach myself from books and the internet, but this wasn't one of them.
The key issues here:
1) Barbell lifts give you the potential to move much, much heavier pieces of iron than almost anything else. For building pure strength, they're unequalled. However:
2) In many cases, your knees and your back are going to be involved in said moving, and you need to make sure they are involved in good, strengthening ways, rather than oh-shit-that's-not-good-ow-ow-ow-motherfucker ways.
So having someone else who can check your form and make sure you're lifting correctly when you start is invaluable.
A workshop is ideal. Some gyms -- particular those leaning towards Crossfit or related forms of "physical subculture" -- offer workshops in skills like barbell lifts. But obviously, whether anything like that is available depends on your location.
Assuming it's not, if you get a free session with a trainer with your gym membership, consider using it to get them to teach you the basics of barbell lifts.
If you're teaching yourself -- and people can and do manage this, I'm just timid -- then study form liek whoa, start any new exercise using only the bar, and watch your back and knees like a hawk for the slightest twinginess or feelings of strain.
And get a copy of Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training. Okay, get a copy of that anyway.
First off, anatomy of a barbell.
You have the bar itself. If it's an "Olympic barbell", it'll weight 20 kg; many gyms will also have lighter ones, usually 15 or 10kg. For many exercises this is a substantial weight in itself, even for people who are relatively strong.
It is perfectly fine and acceptable and common to do an exercise using just the bar -- either because that's enough weight already, as a warm-up, or because you want to concentrate on mastering correct form before you start adding more weight.
(For many exercises -- overhead squats or good mornings, for example -- it's a good idea to start with a broomstick before you even try the bar.)
When you want to add more weight, you add on weight plates, which slide onto each end of the barbell.
They're held in place with "collars", which either have to be screwed into place, or are wire and have a squeeze-mechanism to release them. The collars stop the plates from moving around or sliding off and crashing to the floor if the bar tilts.
N.B. The weights on each end of the barbell need to be matching. Lopsided weight is nobody's friend.
In order to help you line yourself up so you're in the middle of the bar, and get your grip spaced the way you want it, there will be "grip marks" on the metal -- alternating smooth and "knurled" sections (with a cross-hatch pattern on the metal).
The total weight you are lifting is the weight of the bar itself plus the weight plates.
Also N.B.: Sometimes it can be difficult and unwieldy getting heavy plates onto a bar (especially if the bar's on the floor because you want to do deadlifts). This feels incredibly embarrassing. As far as I know, there isn't a graceful way of doing it; you just have to live with it.
Things to do with a barbell: squats and deadlifts.
Okay, okay, there are lots of other things you can do -- notably bench presses, overhead presses, and of course all the Olympic lifts -- but squats and deadlifts are pretty close to being the core, and doing them with a barbell is a very different experience from doing them with dumbells.
I'm not going to try to explain basic form here, because of being profoundly unqualified to do so (I rec Rippetoe and Stumptuous). Instead, I'm just going to describe some key bits of equipment you'll see in the free weights room and what they're for.
For squats, you have the squat rack:
If someone is doing bicep curls while standing in the squat rack, you are officially allowed to hate them.
(There are even t-shirts.)
Okay. As you can see, the squat rack has protruding peg-thingies (note my mastery of the technical terminology) at different heights.
These let you set up the bar at a height that's good for you and load it up with plates; you can use much more weight this way than you could if you had to lift the fully-loaded bar up to shoulder height.
The bar should be racked a little below shoulder height; you're going to dip below the bar, get it settled on your shoulders, then stand up, lifting it off the rack and taking the weight fully.
Then you take a step or two back until you're standing over the safety bars, the low horizontal bars that extend around thigh height.
If you go down to the bottom of a squat and realize you don't have the oomph to get up out of it, you can safely ditch the barbell onto the safety bars and duck out from underneath it.
In a deadlift, you lift the bar from off the ground. As a result, there's no need for safety bars; if you drop the barbell, it falls to the floor without hitting any bits of you on the way.
Where equipment does get involved: if you're only using the bar or relatively small weight plates, the bar is going to be significantly closer to the ground than if you're using plates of 45lb and up (the point where they hit a standard diameter). In other words, unless you start out your warm-up set by lifting 135lb/60kg, the bar is going to be lower to the ground than "normal". That gives you an added disadvantage, as the bar has to travel further, and also places extra stress on your lower back.
Some gyms have "bumper plates" which are the same diameter regardless of weight, but many don't.
So until you get to the big weight plates, you may want to rest the bar on some plastic blocks or phone books to get it up to regular height; Rippetoe gives standard height as about 8 1/2 inches or 21.5cm between the bottom of the bar and the floor.
Like the squat rack, the bench press ... er ... bench (seriously, is there a name for it? or do you just say "the bench press bench"?) has pegs at different heights so you can set the bar at a height above the bench that works for you:
However, it has no safety bars, so you need to make sure you don't go to failure unless you have a spotter. Always make sure you have at least enough strength to get the bar racked again, so you don't get stuck with it on your chest.
This is usually not as life-threatening as it sounds -- if you're tired, the bar can easily be too heavy to get all the way up again without being remotely heavy enough to crush your chest -- but it is very embarassing. Best avoided.
If your gym is large and extensively kitted-out, you will see various other bits of equipment around. Some are fairly obvious (e.g. bars for dips and pull-ups); some are completely baffling.
But the truth is you don't need to know what every bit of equipment is in order to use the free weights room.
If and when you decide you want to learn how to use a particular bit of kit, it'll still be there.
In the meantime: squats and deadlifts.
no subject
no subject
Nooooo, just using the bar can be exactly the right thing to do until you've got your form down and are ready to add some more weight. I have a decent deadlift now, but I use just the bar for good mornings, and I'm still at the broomstick stage for overhead squats!
So, not a loser at all. Very sensible.
no subject
I am also totally not qualified to talk about form, but the one thing I've had drilled into my head by three different people (all of whom have stood by me poking me with a stick while lifting, saying 'you're doing this wrong') is keep your back arched, chest up and stick your butt out, especially on squats and deadlifts.
awwww this series is so awesome, if I had read this at a younger age I would've so totally invaded the free weights room back then
no subject
Yep. That, and don't let your knees bow in during squats.
no subject
Also, you look really cool. I haven't tried the Olympic lifts yet, but this is a fact I have observed. The throw-the-bar-down-step-back "Yeah, I'm done here" attitude is inherently impressive.
no subject
I've also found that if you ask other people who look like they know what they're doing at the gym to show you stuff, they'll be more than happy to. You do run the risk of being shown wrong though. I'd double check with youtube afterwards.