Weightlifting Exercises for Body Building

When you do body building, you start with a routine composed of weightlifting exercises designed to specifically target particular muscle groups.

What many people don’t realize is that these weightlifting exercises are also designed to target different overall goals, based on whether you are seeking to build a healthy body, an athlete’s body, an Olympic body, or a model’s body. So you need to know specifically what type of body building goals you have before picking out weightlifting exercises.

When choosing between each of the exercises, you may find that you have a choice between using machines or free weights to do the exercises. If you just want a healthy body or a model’s body, machines are probably the easiest and safest way to go. If you are looking for a professional performance body or to enter body building competitions, you will need to go with free weights in most cases. But, there are some exercises you may need to do that only exist in one of the two forms.

The advantages of free weights used in weightlifting exercises, such as barbells and dumbbells, are that they provide more natural and complete workouts of the muscles as they work in concert to both lift and maintain control of the weight. Of course, the fact that you have to control free weights is also part of the increased injury risk that may not be necessary to take if you have more modest body building goals.

With a well-designed exercise machine, you are more inclined to use proper form and work out a specific muscle well without causing damage. It takes a lot of discipline and concentration not to get into “cheating” patterns with free weights. But, if you do maintain your form, you will reap better benefits. Having the supporting muscles develop evenly with the target muscles is quite necessary when you are a performing athlete or on display for your muscular development.

Beyond those decisions about weightlifting exercises, you will also need to supplement your body building efforts with a healthy lifestyle. If you aren’t eating right, your results just won’t be very good. You need to make sure you are eating foods that contain all of the energy and nutrients you need to both perform your exercises and build muscle. Likewise, if you aren’t getting plenty of rest, all of those weightlifting exercises won’t do you much good. Over-training is one of the biggest mistakes new bodybuilders make.

 

One Response to “Weightlifting Exercises for Body Building”

1. Kourtney says:

   November 30, 2011 at 6:50 pm

   That’s really shrewd! Good to see the logic set out so well.