newbie to gym work

eoin2nc

Hi, i decided to invest in gym membership to lose a bit of weight and build muscle. Its just Ive been hearing about workouts and stuff, but i dont fully understand the terms and what they mean eg,deadlift, bb curl, lat raise ect.
Thanks for the help

Colm_OReilly

Eoin,

There's hundreds of exercises, and even exercises with hundreds of names

As with anything else, there's good and bad. To put it simply, good exercises use multiple muscle groups and joints, and replicated real lift movements or train the muscles used in everyday/sport situations.

The movements with weights you want to learn are the squat, deadlift, shoulder press, bench press - progressing to learning the olympic lifts and there variations. You'd also want to spend time doing gymnastic/bodyweight exercises - sit ups, push ups, pull up/chin up, dips, etc.

If you go to http://www.crossfit.com/cf-info/excercise.html you'll find videos of these exercises and how to perform them correctly.

For the more "cardio" aspects of training, row, run, bicycle, swim short and intense sessions. You do not need to spend hours upon hours on the cardio machines.

Where were you thinking of joining? If you post your location and suggest some gyms the other people on this board will be able to tell you a bit about them.

If you've any questions I'd be glad to help,
Colm

NoQuarter

eoin when you join the gym one of the staff will usually put you on a program and bring you around showing you the exercises to do also, its not until your in the gym that youll start understandin most of the stuff and then start adapting your program to suit yourself!