Weight Lifting for Walkers

By Sherri McMillan

As a walker, you take great care of yourself, and you understand the importance of complementing your walking program with some resistance training. Conditioning your muscles will not only tone and sculpt your body but also will also help minimize the risk for injuries, improve your posture, develop your bone density, and rev up your metabolism.

But here’s the confusing part — there are literally hundreds of different exercises you could perform to get the results you are looking for. So how do you know which exercises to choose? Here are a few guidelines to follow when designing your resistance-training program.

Follow a Well-balanced Program
Generally, you’ll want to perform a few compound leg exercises like squats, lunges, and step-ups and a few isolative exercises for the hamstrings, quads, and inner and outer thigh areas. You’ll want to perform three to five different exercises for the back like chin-ups, rows, latpulldowns, reverse flies and extensions, one to three exercises for the chest like presses or pushups, one to two exercises for the shoulders like overhead presses or lateral raises, a set of bicep curls and one to two exercises for the triceps like pressdowns, kickbacks, overhead extensions, or dips. Round off your program by including some exercises for the core, including crunches, but more importantly, include abdominal stabilization exercises like leg lifts, v-sits or planks. Remember that when you have a strong core, that strength radiates out to the rest of your body. Sets of 8-15 reps are perfect.

Start with Basic Exercises
It is necessary to progress from exercises that require the least amount of coordination and balance to exercises that maximally challenge these skills. This means that in the beginning, very basic exercises will do the trick. As you improve and master the technique of these exercises, then you should advance the program by incorporating more challenging exercises. So in the beginning, weight training machines work great.

You pretty much just have to adjust the machine, sit down, and then push or pull or press. Machines require very little coordination and balance, therefore allowing you the opportunity to focus on your technique, breathing, and slow speed for each repetition. But eventually you will want to incorporate tools that will help you advance your skills, avoid training plateaus, and ensure you continue experiencing great results. Hand weights, pulleys, stability balls, and medicine balls are fitness products that you will want to utilize as you advance. But remember — it is always important that you follow the appropriate gradual progression. You definitely do not want to attempt more challenging exercises without having first laid a good, solid foundation.

Know Your Body
What are your strengths, weaknesses, and imbalances? Before we design any program for a client, we perform a thorough fitness and postural assessment. Analyzing areas that are very weak and need to be strengthened, and areas that are really tight, overworked, and need to be stretched is critical to creating a program that is going to work for your body. For example, you may sit hunched at a desk and computer all day that is causing a forward, slouched posture. This would indicate that you would need to perform exercises and stretches that will pull your shoulder blades back and down, elongate through your spine, keep your head back in neutral position and your shoulders positioned in the correct anatomical alignment. We see a lot of people doing exercises in the weight room that are inappropriate for their body and are only compounding existing imbalances and deviations. Decide how you’re going to allocate your training time. For example, you may decide that you need to spend most of your time on your back, abdominals, and hamstrings in comparison to other body parts. You may decide to do four exercises for your back and only one exercise for your chest, or spend only 10 minutes on your legs but 30 minutes on your upper body and abs.

Change Your Program Regularly
The only perfect resistance program is one that changes. A program that we design today may be perfect today, but in about 4-8 weeks, it will no longer be perfect and you’ll need to mix it up. This is due to the Overload Principle; when you first begin exercising, the body is exposed to a stimulus that it’s not used to and it will be forced to respond in a positive fashion by getting stronger and fitter. But simultaneous with the physical adaptation is the physical plateau that many people experience. In order to experience ongoing results, the body must be stressed or stimulated to a greater degree than what it is used to — the body needs to be challenged in order to progress. So if you always do triceps kickbacks, this week try tricep pressdowns. This overload principle can be adhered to by changing your program in a variety of other ways too. You can change the resistance you lift, the exercises you perform, the order in which you perform the exercises, the number of sets or reps you lift, the amount of recovery time you take between exercises, or the number of days you work out each week.

Sherri McMillan, M.Sc., owner of Northwest Personal Training and Northwest Women’s Fitness Club, has been inspiring the world to adopt a fitness lifestyle for over 20 years and has received numerous industry awards including 2006 IDEA Fitness Director of the Year, 1998 IDEA Personal Trainer of the Year, 2005/2006 ACE Fitness Educator of the Year — Runner up. McMillan is a fitness trainer, fitness columnist for various magazines and newspapers, and the author of five books and manuals including Go For Fit — the Winning Way to Fat Loss, and Fit over Forty. For more information visit www.nwpersonaltraining.com.