Starting strength training is easier than you think

Summer is here and everyone wants to get fit, play sport and take a look at their new year resolution which is untouched, lost and dusty. Unlike 2010, at this point everyone agrees that strength training is the elixir of life and longevity. If you don’t believe in longevity, strength training still improves your quality of life which you live every day. I want to write a series of blogs and this is the first one. In this I will cover purely practical, no-BS strength training starter pack for busy professionals and anybody starting out. Who am I? I play cricket and I lift for my sport. I along with my friends moderate a Tamil fitness group on Facebook which has about 22,000 followers.

• Structuring a weight program doesn’t have to be very complex. It is stupid to expect busy professionals with a lot going on in their life to hit the gym 5-6 times a week. As a beginner, the first place I would point them to is to look for existing cookie-cutter plans and blindly follow one for a while (ideally 12 weeks). Most cookie-cutter plans are written by professionals who think about programming workouts considering volume, recovery, time, etc. I don’t usually recommend programming your own workout on day 1 of your weight room journey. In an ideal case, the gym you train at should help you get started. But the majority of gyms in Tamil Nadu either expect you to avail their personal training package for specialized attention or they are super underqualified and would ask you to walk on a treadmill for weeks and suddenly drop you in the deep end of weight training, asking you to do crazy multiple-set pullups and pushups from day 1. They don’t understand that pullups and pushups are not the easiest warmup exercises to start with for absolute beginners, it takes some strength building and regular practice to start doing them. So a good resource to get started is muscleandstrength.com. Just look at their catalog of free workouts and pick whatever you feel easy to do. As a beginner, even if you sneeze you will put on some muscle. Look at the plan, watch how it needs to be performed on YouTube, ask the trainer or some random guy who looks qualified enough to check your form or teach you (I won’t go to the floor coaches because they would, majority of the time, demotivate/divert you to follow their plan or start selling you products if you are in a shitty gym). Take a chill pill. Gym is one of the safest sports because everything is in a controlled motion you understand where the load will be on your body, fixed movement patterns, etc. It is safe because you should be starting with the lowest possible weight until you learn the movement. Just like any other skill, lifting weights is also a skill. It takes its own time to master movements. But if you still feel everything is overwhelming and it would be better to build a simple plan for yourself, here are a few suggestions.

• If you don’t have any serious bodybuilding goals then 3 days a week is more than enough. If you have time you can surely add days but ideally I would highly recommend a beginner to stick to 3 days a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday is a good start. The moment you commit yourself to a 5-6 day gym-bro kind of split it gets difficult to be consistent. Strength training is all about being consistent. Most splits you see on YouTube are 5-6 days or a push-pull-legs split. They can train 6 days because it’s their job or they are deeply passionate, but we don’t have to start with 5-6 days. Your body will tell you when to add days. Listen to your body. I train thrice a week and I am doing okay. If you feel after months of training three days that workouts are longer and get really difficult to finish, then add a day. Not more than 4 days a week in the weight room. If you are still enthusiastic, play a sport or go on a walk on your rest day (active rest day).

• There are lots and lots and lots of movements to do. People keep inventing new variations every day. This is where major confusion starts. People keep chasing the optimal movement and completely forget the basics. Train hard, train consistently, keep getting better week on week. Usually what I suggest for my friends is to do 3 days of full body workout for the first 8-12 weeks. If you do 6-7 exercises covering the whole body, then in 3 days you would have learned 21 different exercises. Learning how to do a movement and exit safely is the first step. Once you master a movement, only then can you develop mind-muscle connection. You should learn different movements to identify which ones you like to do. Likeability is an important factor because strength training is not a sprin,you are going to do it forever. Likeability involves how you feel doing that workout, how easy it is to set up, whether your gym has the apparatus to perform them, etc. (for example I hate deadlifts because it is annoying to load and unload and my gym doesn’t have a dedicated deadlift platform).

• DO NOT GO MINDLESSLY TO THE GYM. You should have a plan. You should track every single thing you lift. I use an app called Hevy. My Hevy profile: https://hevy.com/user/the_void. As a beginner, the next time you do that workout you need to make sure that either your form is better than last week, or your tempo of executing a workout is better, or the number of reps you do is more than last week, or you are lifting slightly heavier than last week. This concept is called progressive overloading. Make small increments but there should be no place for bad form. Master the form and keep getting better. For example: I did lateral raises at 7.5 kg for 8 reps → try to hit 7.5 kg for 10 reps next week → then 12 reps → iron out form → slow the tempo → add an extra set (4 instead of 3) → move to 12.5 kg. This cycle keeps repeating.

• Workouts can be very minimal and simple. Include a lot of compound movements which can be a good foundation. Here is a very simple blueprint I follow so that you can build yours:

  Chest

• Pressing movement like bench press, incline dumbbell press and chest fly

  Back

• 1 horizontal rowing movement (T-bar row or seated row with wide grip) and 1 vertical pulling movement (pullups or lat pulldown)

  Legs

• Barbell squat, hamstring curl, calf raise

  Arms

• Tricep pushdown, tricep overhead extension, bicep curl (barbell or dumbbell)

Now you have a blueprint. you can add accessory work based on your weak points around these. 3-4 movements a day max is a very good start and it hardly takes about 40-45 min. If you just do this kind of minimal split you will still see crazy gains as a beginner if you are consistent and progressively overload.

• Most beginners worry about being judged in the gym. TBH nobody cares. In the last 5 years I never paid attention to anyone. So you don’t have to worry. If you are still shy, make a friend in the gym. It helps with consistency and makes the process enjoyable.
• Another common fear which I also had is body pain. We call it DOMS (delayed onset of muscle soreness). It’s very normal. This is where old-school uneducated trainers mess up. They ask newcomers to walk on a treadmill forever in the name of getting your body prepped instead of directly allowing you to start lifting. My advice is to start your progressive overloading with the easiest weight. For example, if you feel that you can bicep curl 10 kg each hand, start with 5 kg or 2.5 kg. Next week you can increase it to 5, then 7.5, then 10. So instead of lifting 10 kg on day 1 you would have primed your body for 4 weeks. It doesn’t matter if you can lift 10 kg on day 1 or in month 6 because strength training is something you will be doing forever. This will reduce your body pain considerably, but after a point you will start feeling good about this pain. For most folks this pain is their indication that their workout has been good. But remember that body pain doesn’t correlate to muscle growth or a good workout so some days if you don’t feel that pain it doesn’t mean you had a bad workout.
• Do not live inside the treadmill. I would take the extreme measure of not going near them at all. If you wanna do cardio, walk outside the gym. Walking is easier compared to lifting weights for someone who is lifting for the first time, so there is a high chance that you will start prioritizing walking more than lifting.
• If you are going to the gym for the first time or starting after a break, don’t think about your food. It gets really strenuous. One lifestyle fix at a time.
• Sorry for giving away random advice. I will write a series of blogs about how to choose your gym, simple and practical nutritional advice, working around injury (I had a chronic wrist injury due to cricket and now a toe injury), myth busting, workout splits if anyone is interested in these topics.