Weight Lifting Exercises

Weight Lifting Exercises - Tailored For Every Muscle

The human body has several muscles - large, medium and small - and each with their own role to play.

If you're in the mall, try to look at people closely. Some of them are obese, some borderline fat; still others are just the right weight and there are the few who are all skin and bones.

If you're an experienced fitness individual, you know who among these people have done weight lifting exercises for a consistent period of time: their postures are erect, they have a certain glow to the skin (because their hearts are robust and beating efficiently), and even with a large skeletal frame, look lean. "All muscle no fat", as the old saying goes.

There Are Weight Lifting Exercises for All the Muscle Groups

Individuals who work in the physical fitness industry, along with others from the fields of Kinesiology, Sports Medicine, Physiotherapy, and Physical Science have come up with an array of weight lifting exercises for all muscle groups.

Every year, new weight lifting machines appear in the market, and as manufacturers work with exercise experts, these machines become specialized in design, isolating one or two muscles to acquire specific results.

Take the legs, for instance: they have large muscles - the more popular ones being the quadriceps (front of the legs) and the hamstrings (back of the legs). There are weight lifting exercises for these two muscles, not just one or two, but several. And these exercises can be performed either with free weights or on machines.

Shoulders are another example. Muscles called "deltoids" are located just below the shoulders, on the upper arms. In the deltoid alone, there are weight lifting exercises to develop the front deltoid, the side deltoids, the trapezius and the rear delts.

Fitness authorities will encourage weight lifting exercises for each of the deltoid muscles in order to attain strong shoulders. People in the gym do many exercises for the front and side deltoids, and tend to neglect the rear.

Open a weight lifting exercise manual and you'll find numerous movements for several muscles that you didn't even know you had.

With the existence of free weights (i.e. dumb bells) and weight machines, your weight lifting exercises can benefit from variety, enabling you to work all your muscles with different exercises on a rotating basis.

Weight Lifting Exercises: Don't Play Muscle Favorites

As with any activity, people tend to adopt a routine and stay with it for a long time. There are two disadvantages to this:

One, doing the same weight lifting exercises every week can bring you to a plateau, which in gym lingo simply means that you've reached a point where there are no longer any signs of improvement or progress. You've arrived, and that's it.

Two, by doing the same weight lifting exercises repeatedly, you might be overworking those specific muscles to the exclusion of other muscles, thereby not getting a balanced workout.

The rear deltoid muscle for instance was mentioned above. Lee Hayward, a fitness trainer and certified strengthening and conditioning coach said that well developed rear deltoid muscles will you improve your strength when doing bench press exercises.

Weight lifting exercises for this muscle group will also give you a strong upper back.

Among the weight lifting exercises for rear deltoids, Hayward mentions a few such as the bent-over lateral raise, seated bent-over lateral raise, rubber band reverse fly's, and face pulls.

Each of these lifting exercises has variations as well.

Recovering from heart surgery? Try weight lifting for strength-building!

Your heart operation, your bypass, your angioplasty was successful; you're feeling great, and raring to re-embrace life.

Your doctor allows walking a few miles per week, and chances are, he/she will also allow weight lifting exercises, provided that you don't put unnecessary pressure on your tender muscles by working with heavy weights.

The American Heart Association recommends weight lifting exercises, because it builds and tones the muscles, increases the ability to burn body fat, and strengthens the bones. It reduces the heart rate and blood pressure responses to manual labor, thus decreasing the demands on the heart during regular daily activities.

Before you start your weight training exercises make sure to get an okay from your doctor.