There are many different training routines you can adopt but no matter which one you decide upon, the weight you will be lifting varies little between them. As described in part 2, the body grows its muscles to compensate for the stress of lifting weights. This doesn't happen as soon as you begin to lift but is triggered after you stress the muscles hard enough. All the exercise needs to do is to make sure you stress the intended muscle out hard enough to pass this trigger point and so stimulating growth. This is the basis of all the exercises and so the weight you need to use remains the same for nearly all the different training routines (unless otherwise stated).
The weight you will lift for each exercise can be worked out in an number of ways. One is to deduce the weight needed from your body type (see Know Your Body ). Once you know exactly what type of body you have, simply load up your intended apparatus (e.g. a dumbbell) with a large amount of weight. Then try to lift this weight using a dumbbell curl. Continue to add more weight to the bar until you can only just manage to lift it once. This is one rep maximum and means you can lift this weight only once before you reach failure. Then remove a percent of this total weight to comply with your type of body:
MEN Ectomorph - use 70% of your total 1RM weight
Mesomorph - use 65% of your total 1RM weight
Endomorph - use 60% of your total 1RM weight
The lighter muscled you are, the heavier the weightage you will need to lift to keep up with more muscular types. This is why the percent is much higher for Ectomorphs as they need extra stimulation. Men can generally lift heavier weights than women due to their biology but that is not to say a woman cannot lift just as much as a man. If you find your weight too easy to complete your repetitions or too hard (below 3 reps), then you may need to alter your weight accordingly. Remember that you must aim to complete around half of your maximum repetition per exercise to maintain a growing routine (see below).
Another way to determine your optimum weight is achieved by a little trial and error. If your exercise requires you to perform 10-12 reps then you must aim to lift at least 6 or 7 with your weight before you hit failure. This is fine for most training types such as HIT as you can aim to better your reps by 1 every time you exercise until you can reach 12 easily. Then add more load to your apparatus until you can only do 6 or 7 reps again. In this way you can guess your optimal weight and progress at the same time.
