The first step should be a physical checkup; consult your doctor before you begin any kind of strength training routine. After that, the following steps will help you get started.
The Beginner’s Strength Training Routine
If you don’t know the fundamentals of strength training already, then start with weight training. It’s a good place to learn the rules and guidelines.
Warm up before your workout with some light cardio exercises.
Your initial exercise routine should work all the muscle groups. Select a group of exercises that fulfill this requirement, and perform a few sets of 8 to 10 reps of each exercise. Feel free to change it up as necessary: more reps with lighter weights, for instance, or fewer reps with heavier weights.
Start with machines for practice. This will give you more stability in your movements.
Don’t exercise on consecutive days. It’s not laziness: it’s giving your exercise time to do some good. Exercise is how you build muscle, but the actual building can only happen while you’re resting.
Gradually step up your exercises. Every week, you should add a few pounds to the weight, or an extra rep. Once you hit 16 reps, increase the weight and go back down to 10 reps.
Do not overexercise. The important part of getting started is not hitting the ground running, but learning how to walk: in your first weeks, you need to learn how to exercise properly, not how to bench press an elephant.
After six weeks of your routine, you can start adding more advanced exercises.
High-intensity training is a proven training system that works! I use it my self as a personal trainer, and I applied these methods with all my clients whether they want to lose weight, build muscle or simply use it for their own health & fitness.
I’ve followed these scientific methods of high-intensity training for sometime now, which are based upon the research of Arthur Jones and Mike Mentzer. When applied properly this method of short 40-45min intense training sessions can deliver fantastic results.
Ok, lets take a look at intensity to help you understand the concept. Most people just go through the motions with training or do too much seeing little or no results at all. Remember that high-intensity muscular contraction is the most important step for the stimulation of increasing muscular size and strength in return helping you burn body fat along the way. The duration of the exercises are not important – high-intensity muscular contraction in terms of practical application to bodybuilding means that the harder you train the less time you will be able to spend in high-intensity training. So when you look at it you can either can train hard or train long but you can’t do both.
Strength training is beneficial for everybody! It doesn’t matter whether you want to be a competitive athlete, be healthy enough to play with your grandchildren, or just lose weight.
That’s right…I said lose weight! Many people who want to lose weight are afraid of building muscle. They think that strength training will make them look big and bulky. This couldn’t be further from the truth! By strength training you build muscle, which increases your metabolism. That means that your body will be burning more calories even when you’re resting. By strength training you are actually transforming your body into a lean, mean, fat-burning machine!
So if you really want to “lose weight” don’t focus on losing weight, focus on losing body fat and building muscle. Muscle is active; it never stops burning calories for you! Fat, on the other hand, is inactive. It just sits on your body and does nothing for you, so get rid of it. And the best way to get rid of that fat is to surround it with fat-burning, metabolism-boosting muscle!
I’m going to cross the line to argue one of the most debated topics in the history of resistance training; the full body routine vs. the split. Now let’s first decide what a “full body” and “split” routine is. A “split” generally means you’re splitting your workouts up by muscles, movements, or body parts; for instance, push/pull/legs is a split of movement, upper/lower is a split of body part, and conventional bodybuilding splits that target specific muscles one at a time or even two at a time are considered split of muscle groups. All of these have their place and have their pros and cons but I do have a favorite and I’ll get to that later in the article.
Let’s start with the “full body routine”, a routine that goes by exercises and nothing else. Basically, instead of hitting the muscle with loads of volume in one day you would hit it multiple times over the week increasing the frequency and sometimes decreasing the movement variation. Full body routines can typically be better for beginners since it puts focus on the movements that need focus and less focus on the movements that are not needed. The beginning exercises that are needed for balance and strength for muscles are horizontal pushes and pulls, vertical pushes and pulls, squats, deadlifts, and hamstring work. Full body routines often put emphasis on these while some splits (although not all) put emphasis on other muscle movements.
The first step should be a physical checkup; consult your doctor before you begin any kind of strength training routine. After that, the following steps will help you get started.
High-intensity training is a proven training system that works! I use it my self as a personal trainer, and I applied these methods with all my clients whether they want to lose weight, build muscle or simply use it for their own health & fitness.
