Newbie question!

[zulu]

Hi, everybody!

I'm about a month in to my latest exercise program. I've been going to Spa Lady for about a month and doing cardio and weight lifting on alternate days, usually four times a week total. I've been increasing my weights whenever I felt able to do two sets of twelve reps easily. All this work has been on machines, not free weights.

Spa Lady also offers a class called "Iron Reps" which seems to involve free weights and an aerobics-type class structure. I was thinking I'd try it out, but I'm wondering:

a) will I be likely to injure myself from not having experience with free weights?
b) is this kind of class useful if my main goal is strength training?
c) if it's useful and not dangerous, how will I know what weight to start with when I first take the class?

Thanks for any advice!

Comments

Hi and welcome!

[rydra_wong]

My uninformed impression is that these classes tend to use pretty light weights and lots of reps so that people can keep going for an entire class. So it's not going to be dangerous if you haven't had any experience with free weights, and lots of people in the class will be in the same position. And it might be a good opportunity to get comfortable with free weights, if the class format appeals to you.

OTOH, "light weights, endless reps" is really not the most effective from a strength-building perspective, so you may find that after a while you fancy moving on and using free weights on your own so that you can increase the weight.

gubernatrix wrote a post about getting started that way:

http://gubernatrix.co.uk/2007/11/how-i-got-started-with-free-weights/

Re: Hi and welcome!

[zulu]

Thanks for the link! Yeah, mostly I've been doing high weights and low reps, so I'm glad to hear that's the right approach to increase strength. I might give the class a try to see if it works for me, but in general I prefer to work independently, and I might just stick to that.

Re: Hi and welcome!

[rydra_wong]

Gubernatrix and Stumptuous are both wonderful resources for getting started with free weights.

I wrote a couple of posts in the comm about how to feel more confident getting into the free weights room, which you might find of interest:

http://lifting-heavy-things.dreamwidth.org/15127.html
http://lifting-heavy-things.dreamwidth.org/16832.html

If you're interested in barbell lifts (which are AWESOME), then IMHO it's worth seeing if you can get an hour or two with a trainer or go to a workshop to make sure your form is correct; that way you'll get focused attention on the details of how not to injure yourself, in a way that you won't in a fast-moving class.