Moving on

Full potential. You won’t reach it without totalbody exercises.

Should I train movements instead of muscles?

Put it this way: focus on one area and you do so at the expense of overall co-ordination.

THE E XPERT

NAME: VERN GAMBETTA SPECIALITY: STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING

■When you irst go to the gym, it’s tempting to just focus on your chest and arms. It’s what most of your fellow gym-goers will probably be doing — and everyone wants to look good in a T-shirt. But in reality, whether you want to build a stronger body, get better at sports or just prepare yourself for day-to-day life, it pays to base your sessions on how your body works as a whole rather than targeting speciic parts.

Weightlifting involves training your body to be better co-ordinated when dealing with added resistance and teaching your muscles to link up and work through diferent movement patterns more powerfully and eiciently. If you focus on and isolate speciic muscles, you reduce the amount of full-body co-ordination required, and with it the relevance to real-life situations.

Compare training your legs using machine leg extensions and barbell squats. The squat requires your hip, knee and ankle to work together, while the leg extension isolates the quad and trains it out of context. Guess which is more useful when you’re climbing a step?

Instead of splitting your workouts into body parts, I suggest making them all full-body sessions, and ensuring that each contains exercises that work through the ive main movement patterns: pushing, pulling, squatting, bracing and rotating (see right). You don’t need to train each pattern exhaustively, either. I recommend a maximum of two exercises per movement in each workout, performed back to back as a superset (any more increases the risk of injury, which is another reason to avoid spending a whole workout targeting only one area).

MOVE TO IMPROVE An example would be to twin dumbbell high pulls with kettlebell swings for your pulling exercises, barbell squats and dumbbell lunges for your squatting exercises or alternating dumbbell bench presses and pushups for your pushing exercises. To further rei ne your workout, do any total-body exercises — for example, deadlifts for pulling or push press for pushing — at the start of the workout, and save exercises that are specii c to the upper or lower body for the end. ■

MAKE YOUR MOVES Gambetta’s picks for targetting the main movement patterns.

1 P U S H

PUSHUP Keep your core and glutes tensed to ensure you’re working your whole body.

2 P U L L

DUMBBELL HIGH PULL (left) Think about spreading your elbows wide apart and pulling the dumbbells back rather than high up.

5 R O TAT I O N

RUSSIAN TWIST (right) Tense your core to stop your feet or the kettlebell touching the ground as you twist from side to side.

3 S Q U AT

ALTERNATING DUMBBELL LUNGE (above) Keep your chest up throughout, and push off your front leg to return to the start position.

4 B R A C E

PLANK Keep your body tense and straight, and avoid the temptation to let your hips sag.