Dr. Vonda Wright

But if you're stepping away from the couch for the first time, you need to work through lifting light first, learning how your body works, learning the proper lifting technique before you attempt these.

And then this is a great time to hire a trainer to show you because technique is critically important when you lift heavy.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of ways.

And so I base my lifting and the lifting that I prescribe for people on powerlifting.

The upper body push-pull, so some kind of bench, some kind of weighted pull.

lower body push ball, which means squats and deadlifts.

I prefer myself and for people to do them with bars and iron.

You can do them with free weights.

So those are the four core lifts that we do the heaviest, four reps, four sets.

because they're compound.

They take multiple joints, multiple body balance.

They take multiple muscle groups.

To support that, the way we prescribe is the supplemental lifts, and I'll describe that.

You can do eight or 10 of those.

not to failure.

So for the bench press, for instance, if I'm going to do, if it's bench press day, and I'm going to start with that as my heavy sets, to round out the day in upper body, I might do three or four sets of eight to 10 biceps, triceps, lats, delt, rows, right?

To augment this, to support the heavy lift I do.

For women, forever it was all about aesthetics.

I'm healthy, I'm thin.

Because they are under the assumption through sociocultural ideas that a woman is coming to the gym to lose weight, not to get strong, not to gain muscle.