Ryan Butler explains how to pick the right weight by checking three things: proper form, controlled tempo, and hitting your target reps. If any of these breaks down, the weight is too heavy. He demonstrates with rear-deltoid flies, showing how form collapses with 10-lb dumbbells but improves with a slower tempo.
What's going on everybody? Ryan Butler here with Reset U Fitness, here to help you out when you get back into the gym, either as a beginner or after this quarantine is all complete. Uh, one thing that I get asked a lot is what weight should I start with, right? Maybe you're a beginner entering in the gym and you have no idea which weights to grab. Well, I usually like to recommend just starting somewhat light, but there's a few things that you want to focus on once you pick that weight initially, right? First one is your form. That is the biggest thing you need to make sure that you have, right? If you have good form when you do this lift, the weight's probably good. Second is your tempo. All right, now you're like, what the heck is tempo? Tempo is how fast and slow you do the exercise. Maybe you're doing a curl and you want to go nice and controlled, right? That's your tempo. You're not doing this super fast. Okay. You want to have a good controlled tempo. The third thing you want to look for is how many reps you can do. Say your goal is to do 8 reps. All right. And you're doing all 8 reps and it felt either really, really heavy after like 6, 7, 8, and then your form kind of diminishes. It goes away. That's a good indication right there that the weight is a little too heavy, especially for the goal rep range that you were going for. Now if you feel like, okay, I could probably done 10 more or 5 more even, that's how you know the weight may be a little bit too light. All right, now if you check mark all those things, right, you got good form, you have really good control with a good tempo, and you hit all your reps that you want and it feels good, that's when you can increase your weight. Now people may think that it's an easy thing to do just to keep bumping up weight, but let me show you with a rear delt fly, actually how difficult it is to up your weight. So for instance, I'm going to start with a rear delt fly. I'm going to do a 1-3-3 tempo for 5 reps. All right. And I have 5-pound dumbbells. Okay. So first I'm going to start and go up 1 second, hold it for 3, 2, 1, and then 3, 2, 1, back down. Again, 3, 1, 2, 3. All right, notice how form is good, my tempo is nice and controlled the whole time. I'm not losing any form, I'm not flying those weights around, everything is exactly where I want it to be. Here we go, 5 reps. That was easy. All right, so that's how I know right now 5-pound dumbbells may be a little bit too light. So I'll go back and try the 10-pound dumbbells. Little warning though, if you get to the 10-pound dumbbells, for instance, and your first couple reps look something like this, right? That's probably a good indication right there. Put those 10s back down, go back to the 5-pound weights and mess with your tempo a little bit. You can go with a 1-5-5 tempo. You're holding the weights up here for 5 seconds, control it back down for 5 seconds. Right? There's ways to control all these different variables to make sure that you have the right weight. Another way is maybe up the reps, right? All these different ways will help you determine which rep or which weight you need to grab when you come back into the gym, or if you're a beginner, which weights to even start with. Now, if this video has brought you value, go ahead, share this video with a friend. Tell someone new that you know that's starting their fitness journey to watch this video. To make sure that they stay out of pain and they don't injure themselves right away. Until next time, guys.
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