REPO Man wrote:Got my dumbbells on Friday. I don't have a workout plan nailed down yet. I'll have to clear out some room in my place for a lot of the exercises I've seen. For now, I'm mostly doing supinated bicep curls (as seen here) whenever I'm anxious and bored. Mostly I've done about 10-20 reps a day on average but today I tried to see how many I could do while listening to Crazy Lixx's cover of "Sword and Stone", but I stopped when the song got to the 3:50 mark. I realize that may have been a serious mistake.
What size dumbells do you have? Or are they adjustable? You'd be able to do full body if you have 3 to 4 different weight sizes
They go up to 15lbs each, but I honestly haven't adjusted them any lower. I figure that I'll probably move up to heavier ones once I get used to lifting weights. Of course I need a real workout plan other than bicep curls to burn off nervous energy.
The tricky part is that my place is packed tight until I can ditch my sofa and replace my bed with a futon.
Yeah, that's why you don't do that. With weights, as a beginner, you want to do only a few sets with breaks between to rest your muscles. And you also want to vary your exercises so one muscle isn't doing all the work.
For you, bicep curls, two sets, 10 reps. Then hammer curls, two sets, 10 reps. Then shoulder rotations, two sets, 10 reps forward and then two sets, 10 reps backwards. Give it a couple of days to see how you feel, and then do it again.
On your off day, do a different exercise. Squats and calf raises, Russian twists, leg lifts, etc. work multiple muscle groups across the body.
Nah. Being sore a day or two after a workout is normal, and a good thing. It means that you stressed your body and it is adapting. The term for this is "Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness," or DOMS.
When you are completely detrained, it's really easy to push yourself to the point of being very, very sore for the next couple of days. As you train more, it becomes more and more difficult to stimulate your body to adapt further. Soreness will decrease significantly.
That said, what you don't want to do is injure yourself. As a beginner trying to do as many curls as you could for four solid minutes probably meant that your form was probably absolute garbage. Your torso was probably swaying, you might have been jerking up with your shoulders to try to get your elbow under the weight and get a more favorable angle. You were almost certainly not controlling your eccentrics.
You can put a lot of bad stress on your shoulders and elbows if you aren't careful. I would highly recommend studying form and going very slow on all of your repetitions, particularly in the eccentric phase, for at least a couple of months. It will go a long way in helping you avoid injury.
I'm not sure if my torso was swaying or if I was jerking my shoulder up, though I will concede that some of the reps were off from their intentions. I mean I wasn't doing the very exact same movement each time.
Uh...yeah, your form was probably bad then. Which doesn't mean you can't work on it; even bodybuilders will slip up at times. But doing reps for such a sustained amount of time and then doing them improperly can do some serious damage.
Give yourself a few days to let your muscles heal after that, and in the meantime go back to some basics for warming up. For example, did you do any sort of stretching before you just jumped in, or did you go in cold? Having a good stretching routine will help, and it should help ease the stiffness and soreness you're gonna feel over the next few days.
No stretching. Hopefully I'm slightly better by tomorrow afternoon since I have a shift at my afternoon job. If not, at least it's pretty slow right now.
