Helpful Fitness Terms

Before you start to exercise or hire a personal trainer, make sure you read the general guidelines of training and exercises, and become as knowledgeable as possible.

There’s nothing wrong with hiring a personal trainer to get help and the motivation to improve your health.

Additionally, gaining basic information about exercises and how to train, as well as knowing some basic terms of muscles and their actions can greatly increase your understanding making you a better evaluator of a good or “not so good” personal trainer that you are investing in.

Besides, it’s always an advantage to have some basic know-how and resourceful knowledge in any area of interest you’re pursuing.

Here are some good reasons to have a personal trainer

- You need a well rounded introduction to different exercises for different body parts and to learn how to perform these exercises correctly

- You need the motivation and the extra push to perform your workout the best possible way

- Your personal trainer can give you the knowledge of how to choose effective exercises and teach you to design different workouts that will make you self-reliant when it comes to training in the near future.

Now that we’ve identified good reasons in favor of hiring a personal trainer, let’s mention some basic but important exercising guidelines:

Exercising right requires simple steps to follow, for example:

1- Drink enough water during your workout exercise to keep your body hydrated.

2- Exercise every muscle in your body and not only some, this way you maintain a symmetrical and functional body also not to mention getting stronger.

3- Follow a correct form during a particular exercise-let me give you an example of push-up exercise. During the push-up exercise:

-keep your midsection in line with your body and NOT swayed.

-Also keep your knees locked out and not bent.

- Your breathing shouldn’t be shallow so you can inhale efficient oxygen.

- Workout exercise: is a collection of exercises performed in a set of time. Example, you can have a workout exercise for the next 30 minutes, training your upper, lower, or the whole body.

What is a Repetition: repetition is a completed range of movement of an exercise. For example, one complete repetition of squat exercise starts from standing to squatting down and then standing up again, that’s equal to 1 repetition.

- What is a Set: a set is the total number of repetitions performed continuously in exercise before taking a rest. Squatting 10 repetitions continuously - one after another is a total of 1 set.

Rest intervals: the time you stop after performing a set so you can recover before you perform the next set.

Breathing while exercising: the recommended rule for beginner trainees, is breathe during the eccentric movement and inhale during the concentric movement.

For example, if you’re performing the push-up exercise, you breathe while you are bringing your body down and exhale while you push yourself up.

Holding your breath momentarily 1-3 seconds is something that happens naturally to humans when they are lifting fairly heavy objects.

The same thing occurs if someone is throwing a ball at you or a sack of potatoes, and the understood reason for that is because of intra-abdominal pressure that stabilizes your body.

Exercise Warm-up: to make a very long story short - it is good to warm up before you start your workout.

Some of the benefits of warming up is to:

- increase the body temperature,

- increase blood flow to muscles and heart,

- increase the range of motion(ROM)of the joints,

- enhances the coordination and reaction speed through improving the central nervous system,

and all that can ultimately prevent injuries.

High intensity interval training (HIIT): this type of workout is great to burn body fat and build muscle mass. It’s also very demanding on the body, thus introduce yourself to it gradually. So, what is HIIT?

It’s alternating between high intensity and low intensity exercises

Example:

Exercising at very fast pace (ex., sprinting or jumping rope) for about 15-30 seconds, then resting (walking or performing abs exercise) for 90-120 seconds. Then immediately you repeat the same cycle for another 10 to 15 times, total of about 30-minute session.

Muscle gain workout: it’s a workout intended to perform exercises mainly for muscle gain. Like performing higher repetitions(~7-15 reps) and/or sets and focusing on certain muscles.

Weight loss workout: it’s a workout intended to perform exercises mainly for losing body fat. Like performing exercises that require a variety of movements for longer periods of time, or at a faster pace during the sets.

Strength training: the general rule regarding strength training is the manipulation of the number of repetitions, which is between 3 to 6 repetitions per set. Many Olympic weight lifters and other sport athletes follow the principle of low repetitions as the main routine of their training.

Hypertrophy training: most bodybuilders -professionals or not- their main objective is to increase muscle size more than for example, power or speed skills.

So, they follow a training routine that is specific to that objective. As a general rule, following 7-15 repetitions can induce muscle size growth.

Aerobic training: aerobic means in the presence of oxygen, so aerobic training is the capability to obtain oxygen, transport and utilize it. Running, rowing, and cycling are good examples of aerobic training.

Anaerobic training: the word anaerobic means without oxygen present, which leads us to define this type of training as a brief time of certain activity like sprinting, and the muscles derive their energy from adenosine triphosphate (ATP), creatine phosphate (CP), and Glycogen compounds.

Endurance training: the ability to exercise over a certain time period to build stamina for short or long distances and time. Running 5k or 10k, triathlon, and mountain biking are some examples of enduarce aerobic training.

Sprinting, weight lifting, and plyometric movements are examples of endurance anaerobic training.

Explosive training: it’s also called plyometric and it’s a type of exercise that requires you to move as fast as you can. Examples, jumping up on a bench, or performing hand clap push-ups where you need to push yourself up as fast and powerful as you can.

Power training: it is a combination of strength and speed, to produce a powerful force and it usually requires a low number of repetitions.

Concentric (flexion movement):when you bring your forearm to your upper arm you’re flexing your biceps. At the same time you can flex your triceps (the back muscles of your arms) when performing triceps cable pull down.

Eccentric (extension movement): the muscle is stretching (lengthening) during this movement. Back to the chin-up example, eccentric movement occurs when you bring the body all the way down (like hanging down position) or in the push-up exercise, eccentric movement occurs when you lower your body back to the starting position.

Isometric tension: Contracting your muscles during the exercise with no movement of your joints and muscles (while maintaining tension? Instead of but there is tension.) Example, wall pushing is an isometric exercise where you are not moving the wall but your muscles are contracting very hard.

Exercise program: is a collection of ‘workout exercise sessions’ throughout the next several days, weeks, or months.

Core exercise: focusing on exercising your core muscles. The core muscles are considered:

1. Abdominis rectus

2. External & internal obliques

3. Multifidus (muscles that run along the spine)

4. Hip flexor muscles

5. Transverse abdominus

Primary muscles: if you are performing the bicep curls exercise, your bicep muscles would be the primary (major) muscle that is mostly (involved) doing the work.

Secondary muscles: same as the above example except that your forearm muscles would be considered the secondary muscles.

Stabilizer muscles: muscles that stabilize or fixate the body part/joint to enable the other body part to do its task like moving and exerting force.

An example of stabilizer muscles are the rotator cuffs and their most important task is to keep the humeral head in its proper position.

Agonist: the term indicates a muscle in contraction, a condition while the opposing muscle or antagonist is in relaxed state.

Antagonist: these muscles are usually positioned on the opposite side of the joint and they relax while the agonist muscle is working.

Example, performing bicep curls exercise is working the biceps (agonist) while your triceps the antagonist muscle is relaxing.

Muscle soreness: the muscle experiences inflammation where repair and recovering are taking place after a workout session.

The muscle soreness sometimes will be felt after a half day or longer (referred to as delayed onset muscle soreness- DOMS).

Supersets: alternating between one exercise and the next until you are done with the prearranged number of exercises without rest.

For example, performing bench press and then rowing back exercise or performing bicep barbell curls and then immediately switching to tricep press down before you rest and recover.

Return from Fitness Terms to How To Exercise home page