If you want to change your body and look great, one of the most important things you can do is to train with weights.
There are weight training programs for virtually all types of fitness goals including strength building, muscle building, fat loss, and body sculpting.
Strength and muscle building programs often require the use of progressively heavier weights.
Word here is "often" because there are systems such as isometrics that utilize lighter weights and still build strength and muscle.
The caveat is that these systems are more difficult to learn to use the right way and often require the supervision of an experienced trainer.
Body sculpting is similar to strength/muscle building except that you are now seeking to bring out the detail.
To bring out the detail, you first need to lay the foundation by first building up that muscle.
Body sculpting is also closely related to fat loss in that you need to lose fat in order to bring out muscle definition.
There is one denominator in all these; you have to build muscles, which is the basis and reason for incorporating a weights training program into your fitness goals.
Here are 5 keys to weight training success: Nutrition: We want to avoid the word "diet" which carries a self-starvation undertone.
In order to reach your weight training goal, you will need to eat right.
It is the food you eat that will fuel growth and give you energy for your workouts.
It is not necessary to count the nutrient content of everything you eat (who enjoys doing that anyway?).
Eating several (about six) small well-balanced meals spread out through your waking hours will do in most cases.
Proper form: Using the wrong form will not only frustrate your efforts, it will expose you to injury.
Learn proper lifting techniques.
Hire a personal trainer if your budget allows.
You don't have to keep the trainer for rest of your life; once you have learnt the basics you can go solo.
You could also learn from books and videos.
And keep learning, as you will never know everything.
Plus, things change - remember the days when sit-ups were the rage have now been replaced by crunches.
Consistency: You probably know the guy who comes to the gym for one week and then disappears for three weeks.
Or the guy who starts to workout when summer is around the corner.
Consistent efforts are what will lay down the foundation, brick by brick, of a well sculpted body.
Also, it is what builds muscle maturity and quality such that you will keep it longer if you ever stop weight training for any reason.
Intensity: In weight training, half-hearted efforts will bring about half-baked results.
Intensity is what stimulates growth and/or body sculpting.
This means doing every set to the point of failure, where you can do no more.
Sometimes you have to go beyond your point of failure to stimulate further growth or get over a plateau.
To do this you need to utilize techniques like forced reps, rest-pause, drop sets, and partial reps.
Beginners, stay away from such techniques for now.
Variety: Your body can adapt to certain routines and simply stop responding.
Also, your mind gets bored with the same routine which negatively affects focus and intensity.
You need to keep it interesting and to trick your body into changing by adding variety into your routine.
In fact, many professional bodybuilders never do the same workout twice.