Advanced Lifting Techniques For Beginners

Are you a beginner lifting weights who often gets to hear things like ‘you are a beginner, you must stick to your repetitions’ or ‘be extra careful trying this as it is meant for advanced lifters only’ while training at the gym?

Well, while there might be some reality in what the advanced lifters around you are saying, but there is a problem with their friendly advice. Just because you are a beginner, you should not be restricting yourself to the terrible movement patterning or trying too hard to get your reps in motion. This kind of dysfunctional suggestions is often given by those advanced lifters who remain injured all the time or have focused too much on getting their reps right for many years. Nobody is saying that the caution is not required by the beginners while lifting, but to reach the advanced level, you do not have to wait for years. Here are some basic techniques of advanced lifting which anybody bodybuilder can try barring the level of their experience.

Technique 1: Paused Reps

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Any competitive powerlifter who is working hard to combat his weak points should make paused reps a staple in his workout regimen. Take your time to kill the momentum, find the lowest range of motion, exaggerate the contraction to build the strength at all levels. As a beginner, the force you will apply to balance the extra load you are carrying can help in controlling the reps. The pause that you will take while lifting will raise the safety levels by a notch, which will also make your lifting a true feat of absolute strength.
Though many exercises can benefit from the pauses, the squat variations, pullups, and pulldowns are the best ones for the beginners. You can also consider doing deadlifts for paused reps. Even though the deadlifts contain paused reps by default, you can make them more strengthening with every rep to improve on any of your weak points. Try to pause at a knee level or at mid-shin for a full second. Adding extra time during that moment of tension will only bolster the muscle growth and will build muscle memory to have good form for such positions.

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You will start discovering the difference soon enough. Make sure you are using pauses during your training and cutting out momentums, even though the amount of weight you might be lifting during the same number of reps might decrease. You can start by lifting the 80 percent of the conventional weights you are lifting for the same rep range but with pauses.

Technique 2: Forced Eccentrics Or Eccentric Reps

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Exaggeration of the eccentric component, which is also referred as the lowering phase provides lifters two-fold benefits. First of all, it exposes muscles to more time when under tension, which in turn ensures greater work and volume for each rep and set. Secondly, the eccentrics tap the strangles muscle fibers in your muscle group so that you work harder.
The strongest and the fastest muscle fibers in your body are responsible for giving the maximum strength and power output that your body can ever deliver. Lifting heavy-weights puts these fiber muscles into play so that they can be exploited further for the concentric phase of each lift. The concentric phase is the side of the reps that most bodybuilders focus upon. Thus they need high amount of power and strength
Once you can control the heavyweights on the descent, you will reap more strength and hypertrophy benefits than mindlessly doing the haphazard reps that may develop negativity. If you want to put things into action, then you can even completely avoid the concentric component and jump directly to the eccentric reps to build more pull-up strength.

Technique 3: Pre-Exhaust Methods

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Sometimes, the stronger muscles get activated unintentionally instead of the muscle groups that you are trying to work on. Thus, if you will do a targeted attack on your strong muscles beforehand, they will not block the growth of the muscles you are trying to access. This is called the pre-exhaust method, which allows you to approach the antagonist muscle group first. You can stretch your triceps before you start working on the biceps so that they will have limited activation.
Some of the best examples of the pre-exhaust method for beginner lifters can be: doing hamstring curls before the squats, bridges, kettlebell swings or hip thrusts so that they will not inhibit your ability to work on the glutes.

Final Take: Just Lift

If you want to create variety in your lifting schedule, then you can easily include any of these in your workout regimen. These techniques can help you prepare for the phases where your aim is to build up to heavy double or triple lifting. While there are many ways to change your lifting program and improvise on it whenever required, the bottom line remains that you must lift frequently and consistently to maintain the rhythm and strength of your body.
All the popular bodybuilders, strongman, Olympic lifters, powerlifters and other sportsperson have one thing in common, and that is they follow consistent and straightforward methods only. Their excellence is based on the methods they follow, and that also gives them a strong foundation of consistency and strength.

So, start right now and begin blazing your way forward towards fitness.