I remember when I first started training seriously. I ate to build muscle, and I trained hard in the gym. Over the course of three months, I added 70lb to my bench press, 80lb onto my squat, 100lb onto my deadlift, and I gained 27lb of muscle. I went from skinny-fat to jacked in a matter of 90 days. It was insane. Today I’m going to share with you exactly what you need to do if you’re new to training and want to build muscle, and it only involves four things.

A Simple Full Body Workout

If you’re a newbie, you don’t need to be following Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 6-Day Split routine. Instead, you need to train 3 times per week, using a full-body workout consisting of compound movements. Each major compound movement needs to be present in the workout. I recommend choosing one exercise from each movement category:

Horizontal Press

• Push-Up
• Dumbbell Bench Press
• Barbell Bench Press

Horizontal Pull

• Seated Row
• Single-Arm Dumbbell Row
• Chest-supported row

Knee-Dominant

• Lunge
• Front squat
• Back Squat
• Bulgarian Split Squat
• Zercher Squat

Hip-Dominant

• Deadlift
• Romanian Deadlift
• Single-Leg Deadlift
• Hip Thrust

Vertical Push

• Dumbbell Overhead Press
• Military Overhead Press

Vertical Pull

• Pull-Up
• Lat Pulldown

Choose one exercise from each category, and you’ve built a full body workout. As for sets and reps, use the following for every exercise:

• Day 1: 3 sets of 12 reps
• Day 2: 3 sets of 10 reps
• Day 3: 4 sets of 8 reps

For example, your workout for day one could look like so:

• 1A: 3×12 dumbbell bench press, rest 2min between
• 1B: 3×12 seated cable row, rest 2min between
• 2: 3×12 front squat, rest 3 min between
• 3A: 3×12 lat pulldown, rest 2min between
• 3B: 3×12 dumbbell military press, rest 2min between
• 4: 3×12 hip thrust, rest 3min between

End Your Workouts With Isolation Work

I used to be totally against isolation work for beginners, but then it hit me: if your goal is to build muscle, then you need to know how to feel a muscle working, and learn how to contract that muscle as hard as you can. How do you teach this? Isolation work.

Do 2 sets of 8-12 reps on each exercise. The goal is to contract the working muscle as hard as possible.

Day 1

• Dumbbell lateral raises
• Biceps curls
• Triceps pressdowns

Day 2

• Chest-supported reverse flyes
• Dumbbell chest flyes
• Plank (2 x 60sec)

Day 3

• Calf raises
• Hamstring curls
• Side plank (3 x 30sec holds each side)

Aim For Overload

Every workout, your goal is to get stronger. This is how you progress. Exercises should never feel easy. If it feels easy, you’re not gaining. Each workout, you should aim to do one of the following on every exercise:

• Add weight
• Add reps
• Match your weight and reps from last time

Your goal each and every workout is to beat or tie last workout’s results. So if last time, you bench pressed 100lb for 3 sets of 10 reps (30 total reps), then this time, you should do one of the following:

• 105lb for 3 sets of 10 reps
• 100lb for 3 sets of 11 reps
• 100lb for 3 sets of 10 reps

Eat Enough Calories and Protein

When you’re a newbie, it seems like everything you eat goes towards building muscle. It’s amazing. This means you can get away with eating copious amounts of food, and you’ll build muscle fast. I recommend eating bodyweight x 18 in calories, so if you’re 150lb, you’ll need to eat 2700 calories per day in order to build muscle.

For protein, you want to get a minimum of 1g/lb, so if you’re 150lb, you need at least 150g of protein per day. There is no negotiation here. At first, it’ll seem like a lot. Get over it and just eat it.

With the advice above, you can harness your newbie gains and build an incredible body. All you have to do is use a full-body workout three times per week, end your workouts with isolation work to enhance the mind-muscle connection, always try to add more weight or more reps in order to progress, and eat enough calories and protein to sustain muscle growth. Dedicate yourself to this plan for the next three months, and I guarantee you’ll make some incredible newbie gains.

The post The Newbie Guide to Building Muscle appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Any good gym will have a friendly staff to guide you through your beginner phase. [Photo credit: Thomas Showers]

Weight rooms can be wonderful social environments to relieve stress. Many of my good friends are people I met from the gym. Most of them are just trying to enjoy their workout and improve themselves. Our like-mindedness made for a quick connection! On the flip side, you don’t have to do much speaking to people if you don’t want to. I’ve been through many training sessions where I go about my business and only communicate with others for questions like, “Are you using this rack?” or, “How many sets do you have left?” Headphones are great tool if this is your objective; just make sure you are aware of your surroundings.

What’s in a Warm Up?

Okay, so now you’re in the weight room. What should you try first? Find an open area and do a quick 5-minute warm-up. The point of the warm-up is to literally warm the tissues in your body. A warm up can be as simple as doing 25 jumping jacks, lightly rowing for a few minutes, or even performing your first exercise with very little weight. The primary objectives of warming up are:

• Improve tissue pliability, nerve signal transmission, and muscle coordination via movement rehearsal
• Excite the endocrine (hormone) system
• Increase cardiac output
• Increase synovial fluid viscosity in the joints

Okay, so what do those mean? Improving tissue pliability makes the musculotendinous unit (your muscle and the connective tissue that attaches it to your bones) more compliant and less stiff, reducing your risk for injury. Faster nerve signal transmission will decrease reaction time and may allow you to stay on balance more effectively. Rehearsing a movement at a low intensity for practice will improve your coordination for the higher intensities. Exciting the endocrine system will set the metabolic processes in motion that are necessary for you to exercise at your full capacity. Increasing cardiac output means that your blood is being circulated faster. Increasing synovial fluid viscosity in the joints allows the tissue surfaces in the joints to glide with less friction.

Some people like to get fancy with their warm up by “activating” certain muscle groups that they deem to be important for their performance in the upcoming session. Activation exercises usually address synergistic muscles, or muscles that assist in a movement but are not prime movers. These are located around the hips or shoulders, and are addressed by performing an isolation exercise for the desired muscle. Doing so makes it more readily recruited, or used, during the primary exercises that follow.

For example, you notice your knees are caving excessively inward toward your midline during a squat. This may indicate that your internal rotator muscles are dominating over your external rotator muscles in the hips. Someone who likes activation exercises might use something like a banded clamshell. One set of 10-20 reps per side should be enough. You use that exercise before you squat for the next five sessions, and your knee-caving problem gradually dissolves from session to session. You should now stop using the activation exercise, and continue with the same technique in your squats. If the problem arises again, use the clamshells again or try another exercise.

Overall, a warm up can be simple or complicated. Put something together that works for you, and make sure you’ve broken a little sweat by the end.

Cardio or Lifting? Depends on Your Goals

You’ve just finished your warm up. What’s next? A common question is, “Should I do cardio or lift weights first?” The answer comes back to your fitness goals. If your primary objective is to set personal record times on the rower, running, cycling, etc. do that first. If getting stronger, building muscle, and burning fat are your goals, lift the weights first. If you’re indifferent or don’t have any of these goals, lift first.

Why should you lift before you do cardio? Cardio, if done right, should make you tired. Feeling tired prior to lifting heavy weights is a bad idea because your technique, focus, and strength will likely suffer; dampening the magnitude of stimulus you can provide to your body. Remember: the greater the stimulus, the greater the adaptation. Lifting weights at the appropriate volume and intensity will strengthen and build lean tissue in your body.

Lifting heavy weights after cardio won’t allow you to get the best training stimulus. [Photo credit: J Perez Imagery]

More often than not, the cardiovascular training people perform at the gym is called low-intensity, steady state (LISS). LISS is categorized by the intensity and duration you perform it. Walking, jogging, using the elliptical (perhaps the most ineffective piece of exercise equipment you’ll find), biking, or rowing at an easy to moderate pace is LISS. The stimulus you get from LISS sessions is usually not enough to send your body into this anabolic (building) state, and generally makes you feel tired for a short period of time after the session. This tired feeling won’t last like an intense session will. Basically, if you can hold your pace (or intensity) for longer than one minute, without getting heavily fatigued, then it’s too easy.

When it comes to cardio, intense, short bouts of sprinting, rowing, biking, etc. can provide a large enough stimulus to create significant adaptation. Each bout should last one minute or less and be alternated with a rest period. An example would be to row as hard as you can for one minute, rest for two minutes, and repeat for 15 total minutes. This style of training is commonly known as high intensity interval training (HIIT). HIIT should be performed as a separate session from resistance training because both should be intense, and your body can only handle so much intensity at one time before it’s too much. HIIT is hard, but that’s the whole point! You’ve got to send a message to the body that it needs to adapt to the demands of this training, and the only messages that get through are the strongly worded ones.

Lifting Lingo

Lifting weights is similar to HIIT in that the lifter usually performs an exercise at a moderate-to-high intensity for a short period of time. This concept is called time under tension. The amount of time under tension for a training session is called volume. If you spend time in a weight room, most people don’t directly measure their volume in seconds or minutes; they measure in repetitions. A standard repetition for a resistance training exercise lasts three seconds; two seconds on the way down and one second on the way up with no wasted time in between. Small groups of repetitions are called sets. Sets are followed by a period of rest to prepare for the next set.

To draw a parallel to the rowing example, a lifter could theoretically perform a similar exercise for five sets of twenty standard repetitions with two minutes of rest between sets. This equates to the same volume as the rowing example. Exercising at moderate-to-high intensities followed by adequate rest periods stimulates adaptations in your body. Lifting weights and HIIT do that job well.

Don’t Over-Think the Cool Down

The end of your exercise session is a good time for stretching or self-massage techniques like foam rolling. This period of training should be used for 5-10 minutes of light movement, stretching large muscle groups, and massaging problem areas. A lot of people cool down by walking to the locker room, changing clothes, and walking to their car. There’s nothing wrong with cooling down this way; in fact, that’s usually what I do. Your body temperature is still decreasing at the same rate as if you performed a cool down routine.

The cool down can be separated from the session completely, if that’s what you prefer. Now, it’s not so much a cool down as it is an excuse to move around and do a quick “system check”. The system check can include a handful of callisthenic movements, foam rolling the entire body, and stretching the entire body. Throughout the system check I pay attention to areas that feel tight, painful, or somehow “out of whack,” and try to relieve them. Sometimes, I’ll do a system check in the morning, before I lift, and before I go to bed. That may seem excessive, but the more it’s done, the easier it is to stay on top of imbalances. Here’s the takeaway for cool downs: You’re going to cool down no matter what. It’s just a convenient place to fit in stretching, massaging, and lightly moving around, which everyone should be doing.

Time to Get Started

I hope this article has answered some general questions you may have had about working out in a gym. In future articles, I’ll be diving into the specifics of the methods I’ve outlined, and show you how to design your own training program. For now, explore the gym and all it can offer.

Don’t let age be a barrier:

Starting Weightlifting Over 40

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First and most importantly, just because you’re in love with your new thing doesn’t mean everyone else feels the same way. And even though you know that the rest of the office would benefit from being more active, it doesn’t mean they want to hear about your new “Fran” time, the new pair of bike shoes you bought, or hear you explain for the tenth time today why going paleo would solve all their problems. Just chill bro’. When the horses are ready they’ll find the watering hole on their own. If they’re not ready yet, they’re not ready and all you’re doing with your preaching is pissing them off and turning them away from exercise of any kind.

One of the things I admire most about CrossFit is how passionate people are about it and the strength of the community. But as a newbie who is trying to fit in, it doesn’t mean you need to go out and buy one of every t-shirt Rogue or Reebok has so you can fit in. The same goes for shoes. Just buy one pair that you can wear for just about anything. If I had to pick a single pair of shoes it’d be my beloved Saucony Kinvaras. They’re reasonably flat so I can lift in them, and I know I can run an entire Ironman marathon in them without getting even a single blister. That’s value for money right there.

And this is a big lesson for those entering a sport like triathlon, too. It can be incredibly daunting when you turn up to your first race and see bikes in the transition area that are more expensive than your car. You don’t need one of those for your first race, though. In fact, you may not ever need one. I have a friend who is a serious triathlete. She travels all over the place to attend races and trains every day, yet she doesn’t own a time trial bike because she recognizes that it won’t make her any faster and she’s more comfortable riding a road bike. And when it comes to distance, comfort is king, because even the smallest thing can be massive after five hours. Likewise you don’t need a disc wheel or an aero helmet either.

Sticking with triathlon for a moment, you also don’t need the most expensive wetsuit you can find if it’s your first race. Many places rent them out so first-timers can get a feel for what fits and what it’s like to swim in a wetsuit. The only thing you actually need to be careful about is that it fits securely around the neck – otherwise it’ll fill up with water when you swim and act like a parachute. Like with whatever bike you end up with, the most important thing is fit. Even small things will become incredibly uncomfortable after they rub you for a few hours.

One of the biggest issues you may face, particularly if you have experience in other athletic areas and are just starting a new sport, is that you may be just strong enough to really hurt yourself. Olympic lifting is a prime example of this. If you have some experience lifting weights, it’s quite likely you can get some decent weight overhead. But do you have the mobility to do it correctly and is your technique sound enough to allow you to do it safely? There’s a reason you can find clips on YouTube of eight year olds in China working technique – because it takes a lifetime to master. Patience is a virtue when it comes to learning new skills, and just because you have skill in another physical area doesn’t mean you’ll have skill in a completely new one.

This applies to running more than any other discipline I can think of. You can be a monster on a rowing machine, be able to smash the pedals on a bike, and squat the house down, but if you haven’t been running you’re going to need to be patient. Even top aerobic athletes like Lance Armstrong had to be patient in building up running muscles. The best piece of advice I ever received was to imagine how far you’d be able to run barefoot on your first day of running before your feet would hurt and then run that far. If you want to train longer then you’ll be reduced to walking for the remainder of that session. Gradually build up the time you spend running, adding no more than ten percent to your total time each week. (And yes, I’m aware that this will take a long time, but it’s better than tearing your calves multiple times or suffering Achilles issues.)

I’ve seen this same problem in martial arts, despite all the warnings to people to leave their ego at the door. It’s common to have a new, relatively fit person start a martial art and wonder why he or she is so damn sore after the first few sessions. It’s going to take the body a long time to get used to the impact, the speed of movement in fighting arts, and the non-stop movement. In the book The Path to the Black Belt the Gracies advise not training more than twice a week for the first two years of BJJ. That sounds a lot like the running advice – do a little and stop before it starts to hurt. Very gradually add time spent doing the activity and then increase the number of sessions to prevent the body breaking down.

And that’s good advice for the first time CrossFitter, kettlebeller, triathlete, or runner too. It’s great you’re in love with this new thing, but take it easy because you’ve got the entire rest of your life to enjoy it. You’ve also got the entire rest of your life to build up your wardrobe of sport-specific t-shirts and other clothes to let everyone know just how into it you are. You don’t need to try to train for the CrossFit Games team on your first week in the box, nor do you need to worry about what it will take to qualify for Kona in your first triathlon. Relax and enjoy the ride, my friend.

Photo 1 courtesy of CrossFit Impulse.

Photo 2 courtesy of CrossFit LA.

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