Thinking about some resistance training?

Michael Schramm writes at college.usatoday.com with some advice about weightlifting exercises.

Here are 7 tips that will set you on the path for success.
1. Understand how weightlifting works scientifically.
Your muscles actually grow by being torn down. When performing resistance training, your muscles will create small tears from being pushed to the limit. Once this happens, your body repairs these micro tears, adding more tissue than before to account for the increased damage in your body.

2. Be realistic about your goals.

3. Know the basics of how to train.
You’ll want to understand how lifting regimens work before choosing one that’s most effective for you. When weightlifting, you perform exercises that engage specific muscles. Beginners frequently perform a few exercises on each muscle 2-3 times a week and work up to splitting their workout days by body part. Tricep and chest day, bicep and back, and leg and shoulder day are a few examples of how to split up a 3-day-week exercise regimen.

4. Heavily research a workout plan before you start.
Instead of making your own routine, it’s often easier and more effective to start with a routine that a professional has created. Websites like bodybuilding.com contain a variety of exercise regimens — with an entire section dedicated to beginners.

5. Doing an exercise correctly is more important than using more weight to do it incorrectly.

6. Push yourself.
You should always use correct form, but you should also be pushing yourself to perform an exercise with either more repetitions or a higher weight than you’ve done before. No exercise you do should be easy because then you’re not maximizing the tears and gains that you could make. If it’s easy, then you should be trying to either do more repetitions or increase the amount of weight.

7. Switch up your routine.
These changes can include the amount of sets and reps done, variations in the exercises you do for each muscle and incorporations of other weightlifting techniques (drop sets, super sets and negatives, for example).

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