5 Things Beginners Should Know Before Joining Gym

If you’re just starting to go to the gym and beginning your fitness journey you might be unsure of what you should really do.

It is crucial for you, as a beginner, to get the right advice and training early on as this will set you on the right path and help you achieve your goals.

Welcome to Norbert’s Fitness Studio and in this post, we’ll cover 5 things every beginner should know before joining the gym.

 

1. Set Realistic Fitness Goals

 

Let’s face it, you won’t see visible abs, bulging biceps, and get a chest like Arnold in your first month or even a year.

It’s important to have a broad overall goal such as “lose 10kg”, “become as strong as possible” as this will be your long-term motivation but you’ll need short, actionable goals that you can achieve on a week-to-week basis.

Eg. of Actionable Fitness goals are:

• Going 3-4 days a week to the gym
• Set 30-45 mins for the main workout
• Sticking to a nutrition plan

These goals will keep you in check and will eventually see you achieve your goals. This is popularly known as the compounding effect and is applicable to various aspects of life including fitness.

Track your progress

Getting into the habit of tracking your lifts, body weight, calories and workouts is a great way to obtain optimal results.

You’ll have a much clear idea of whether you are in line with your goals and where improvements have to be made.

You can keep a Journal, an Excel Sheet, or use mobile apps like HealthifyMe to track your workouts and calories and FitNotes to track the weight you’re lifting every day.

 

2. Get Proper Nutrition & Sleep

 

It is important to understand and get the basics of healthy eating down as this will help you avoid these “diet fads” that promise you quick results or sell you weight loss pills or sketchy supplements.

Choose Nutrient-dense foods

• More than calories, nutrient-dense food is more important for healthy eating
• A general rule, eat foods that are high in nutrients like protein, fibre, healthy fats, vitamins, and minerals.
• These foods include veggies, fruits, nuts, seeds, beans, fatty fish, chicken, and eggs.

Cut back on highly processed foods

Avoid carbonated drinks, mass-produced baked goods, candy, sugary cereals, and certain boxed snack foods that contain little if any whole food ingredients.

Sleep

If you plan on doing intense workouts for building strength you’ll need sufficient sleep of at least 7-9 hours for muscle recovery and growth.

Having a poor sleep schedule can have the opposite effect on your body even if you work out. This can raise cortisol (stress) levels and lead to muscle loss and fat gain.

Your sleeping schedule will obviously depend on your lifestyle and profession but it is important to get those 7-9 hours of sleep.

Cut down excessive screen (phone) time before sleeping and avoid spicy and acidic foods and caffeine as these can disrupt your sleep.

 

3. Do Compound Exercises (Bodyweight and Free Weight Exercises)

 

For a new gym-goer, compound movements are essential to building muscles as they allow you to attack multiple major muscle groups with one movement; ultimately saving a lot of time.

Focus on compounds movements such as:

• Pull-ups
• Overhead press
• Deadlifts
• Squats

Even if you are unable to do these movements with weights, it’s important to learn the correct technique of doing these exercises early on as it will benefit you later.

Because you’re working multiple body parts at once, you will develop coordination and control that other machine-based and isolation exercises simply don’t provide.

Only increase weights on exercises if you can perform them with the correct technique and form.

Don’t rely too much on Machine Exercises

It’s easy for beginners to spend more time on machine-based exercises since they are simple exercises and are easy to use.

But this won’t be beneficial for you in the long run if your goals are to build strength, gain muscle, and fat loss.

The drawbacks of machine-based exercises are:

• Suitable mostly for average-sized people – If you’re tall, short, overweight, you might face problems
• Unnatural movement paths (eg. Smith Machines)
• Don’t strengthen stabilizer muscles (you’re in a fixed position)

To give credit where it’s due, there are some machines, such as the Cable machines, which can be hugely beneficial for beginners to perform exercises like the Latpulldown that trains most of the muscles required to do pull-ups.

For best results, it is recommended to keep Free weight, compound exercises at the start of your workout and do machine exercises for later.

Don’t Focus only on Isolation Exercises

Even though isolation exercises can be good for specific muscle targeting and managing volume, Doing mostly isolation exercises for a major chunk of your workout is not beneficial.

Cons:

• Less number of muscles targeted (Less work, more time)
• Don’t allow lifting heavier weights

Only using Light Weights

Relying only on light weights for a long time won’t get you results. To build more muscle, you’ll need to apply Progressive overload (increase demand put on muscles by increasing weights, repetitions, intensity).

This could be done by adding more weights incrementally (say a 1.5kg increase) to a barbell exercise, or by increasing the difficulty of a bodyweight movement, eg. switching from a normal pushup to a decline pushup.

Going Too Hard, Too Early

In the early stages, it’s important to pace yourself and do only those exercises that your body is capable and comfortable doing.

It is important to learn the correct technique of doing exercises, especially on lifts such as Deadlifts, Squats, Benchpress as these are compound movements.

Only increase weights on exercises if you can perform them with the correct technique and form.

Simply adding more weight to exercises that you can’t perform properly can lead to injuries such as muscle strain, joint pain.

Establishing a strong mind-muscle connection, i.e. conscious, deliberate, and emphasized muscle contraction, is also more important than aimlessly swinging weights.

Some helpful tips to achieve mind-muscle connection:

Check Your Ego At The Door

Forget about how much weight you’re pushing, concentrate instead on the quality of each repetition.

Perform The Exercise Very Slowly

• Use a lighter weight than normal for this.
• Take 4 or 5 seconds for each of the concentric and eccentric parts of the repetition.
• Pause for a moment at the point of max contraction.

Flex Your Target Muscles In Between Sets

• This forces additional blood into your muscles
• More aware of your muscles when they’re fully pumped, which makes it easier to mentally isolate them.

 

4. Warmup before your main workout

 

Even if you’re short on time don’t exclude warmups as this could lead to injury or unnecessary strain on your muscles.

Important to warm up before doing any of your main exercises, whether it’s cardio, strength training.

Benefits of warmups include:

• Increased Flexibility
• Lower risk of injury
• Increased blood flow and oxygen
• Better range of motion
• Less muscle tension and pain

Types of Warmups:

Dynamic warmups before your main workout to prime your body.

Focus on movements similar to your workout, for instance, movement-based stretching like lunges or squats, jumping exercises.

Static stretching is effective at the end of a workout.

They help lengthen and loosen your muscles and connective tissue. Eg. tricep stretches, hamstring stretches.

 

5. Be aware of Newbie Gains

 

One thing that beginners need to be aware of is “Newbie Gains”. When you go from an untrained phase to regular training, you can quickly see results by following mostly any program.

This is an important phase where you can make a lot of progress, especially if you follow the right workout routine. Most beginners should focus on Full-body workouts instead of bodybuilding routines like “Bro Splits”.

Full-body workouts should include compound exercises that maximize the use of and target most muscle groups. This will make your workouts optimal for overall strength development.

Once the body adapts to regular training (typically after 2-6 months, but varies from person to person), future “gains” take a lot more work and time.

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