Hiring a personal trainer at your local gym is an excellent way to get started if you've never weight trained before. However, not everybody can afford to hire a personal trainer. Fortunately, you can find many weight training tips online or in books and magazines on the subject.
One of the best weight training tips when you first start out is to set up a routine. For the first month or so, you may want to train your whole body during every workout with a few sets per muscle group. Make sure to train larger muscle groups like the legs, chest, and back first, and the smaller muscles such as the shoulders, biceps, triceps, and calves later. Don't waste your time with isolation exercises - just do the major compound ones like squats, bench presses, and deadlifts.
Another great weight training tip is to learn proper exercise form. If you start out by using poor lifting form, you'll develop bad habits that will be tough to break. You can't be impatient and try to lift too much weight too soon and be forced to cheat. Doing this will only lead to injury. If you do your weight training exercises the right way, you'll eventually get the muscle and strength you're looking for.
After you've learned proper lifting form on the major exercises and want to do more work for each muscle, you'll want to follow the weight training tip of splitting up your routine. Try a 3 way push-pull split routine. This routine looks like this:
Day 1 - chest, shoulders, and triceps
Day 2 - back and biceps
Day 3 - legs
When you follow a routine like this, a great weight training tip is to take a day off in between each workout. You can also do some abfominal training at each workout.
Avoiding overtraining is one of the best weight training tips. Your body needs a chance to recover from your workouts to build size and strength. If you do too much during each workout or train too often, your body won't have the chance to rebuild after the breakdown it gets from intense weight training. Try to get your weight training sessions done in about one hour and don't lift more than 4 days per week.
A weight training tip to avoid hitting a plateau in your size and strength gains is to make changes in your routine regularly. If you always do the same thing, you will hit a wall at some point. Switch up some of the exercises you do or change the amount of reps you do per set to keep your body guessing.
Another weight training tip is to train with a high intensity. Don't stop your working (non warm-up) sets short of failure. You may need a spotter on some exercises just in case. If you don't try to get another rep or lift a little bit more weight you're not going to build strength and size as quickly as you could.
If you follow these weight training tips and stick with a routine, you'll build the muscle mass and strength you want.