The most difficult aspect of physical fitness for those who are not currently in shape is the giant morass of anxieties, mental health issues, fears, excuses, and rationalizations that stop one from starting. This article is for the individual who has a lot of fear and anxiety about moving forward, and perhaps may find themselves overwhelmed or at the mercy of all the noise online about what is the best way to get fit, the benefits of doing so, how to exercise, etc. This is for the ones who want to be in shape, but who may be fighting against a whole range of things that could be hurting their progress.
So let’s start with two simple things: Exercise regimen, and type of exercise.
DISCLAIMER: While I personally take care to provide information that is helpful, correct, and useful, I do so with absolutely no warranty. I am not a licensed medical professional, and nothing I write should be taken as medical advice. You are solely responsible for the actions you take/perform in all things regarding all things. I accept zero legal liability for any decisions you make as a result of reading anything I write. Think before you act. Your decisions are your own.
Exercise Frequency
One common misconception about strength training exercises is that a person has to exercise every day, and that the individual has to be sore every day. This is wrong. Regardless of whether you are training for muscle growth or just to increase practical strength, all the gains you will make after exercise will only occur after exercise. In other words, during the rest period of your training.
Despite this, I actually do not recommend a proper work-rest-retrain cycle if you are just starting out with fitness, or if you have been out of shape for a long time. If you are just starting out on your fitness journey, then I recommend you do a full 1-month challenge where you exercise every single day for 30 days.
At this stage, momentum is far more important than proper technique. Unless you are already highly disciplined, it’s going to be very difficult for you to stick to an exercise schedule long term unless you’ve built your exercise into a habit. In order to do this, you want to reach a point where your body notices not when you exercise, but instead your body notices when you haven’t exercised for the day.
You want to reach a point where your body notices when you haven’t exercised for the day.
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If you don’t do this when you first start out, your body will notice when a day is an exercise day, and you will have to exert energy to overcome that resistance. But if every day is an exercise day, then so long as you don’t stop for the duration of the challenge, your body doesn’t have to notice. If you don’t stop, then there’s no chance you want start-up again. At least for the first 30 days.
Furthermore, you absolutely should not train your muscles till failure at this stage. Proper gains require muscles to be worked till fatigue and failure to see results. But at this point, that is not what you should be trying to do. You’re trying to form a habit, so you need to eliminate resistance as much as you can.
To this end, there are two rules of thumb you can use when starting out:
- Stop 5-10 minutes after you break a sweat. If you don’t break a sweat, do more repetitions or decrease the time you wait between sets. If you can’t complete a set of a certain number of repetitions, then do more sets of less repetitions.
- If you are sore the day after you exercise, then do half as many total repetitions as you did the last the day. If you are note sore the day after you exercise, then do at least as many repetitions as you did the day before.
Again, when first starting out, your goal should be to stick with the regimen through till the end. No one achieves massive gains in strength or appearance over the span of a single month. This is especially true for those who are out of shape or who are just starting out. So put your thoughts of gains or your physical fitness goals out of your head for now. You have one objective, and one objective only: Reach the finish line.
Only after you’ve successfully exercised every day for 30 days should you start thinking about lowering your frequency of training. But before then, you shouldn’t even be considering it. To that end, I won’t be discussing a more appropriate long-term strength training regimen in this article. We’ll get to the more advanced stuff later. I promise.
The Big 3 Types of Exercise
I am referring, of course, to:
- Strength Training – Exercises consisting of sets of repetitions of specific duration per repetition, using weights or just body weight.
- Aerobic Training – Exercises that require you to work your lungs and your heart. Running, rope skipping, dancing, etc.
- Flexibility Training – Stretching. Not as a warm-up, but as an exercise in itself. Treating stretches as exercises in and of themselves involves a commitment to gradually increase your maximum flexible range of motion for each stretch. It implies over time being able to stretch farther and farther for each specific exercise done, and not simply stretching as a warm-up before resistance or cardio training.
When doing your first 30-day startup challenge, I recommend not trying to do all 3 types of exercise. Do not mix-and-match different types of exercises on different days, either. Rather, do 1 type of training, and only perform that type of training for the duration of the challenge. For the purposes of these challenges, you can and should consider each type of training as a completely separate activity that requires a completely separate habit to be formed.
Hence, only after you have done a separate 30-day challenge for each type of training should you then switch over to a more appropriate training regimen for each type.
Now then, operating under the assumption that strength training will be the first type of exercise that you will be performing, here are some basic fundamental tips regarding that type of exercise. Tips on cardio and/or flexibility training will come in future articles.
Strength Training
Breathe During Exercise
One of the basic principles of any sort of resistance exercise is breath. When you do launch into any sort of exercise, be it a push-up, a sit-up, a pull-up, or something else, you must remember to breathe. If you hold your breath when you start the exercise, your muscles will be starved of oxygen before they even get a chance to do any work.
The boundaries of your breath should be aligned with the boundaries of your repetitions. To give an example, let’s say that you start a push up as you exhale from your last breath. You may do as many push-ups as you wish while you are exhaling. When you begin to inhale, however, you should be either at the top of your next rep, or at the bottom of your current rep. Thus, when you start to go down on your next push-up, you are doing so as you are starting to inhale. Or, as you start to go up after your last push up, you are also starting to inhale.
Your breath should be aligned with the starts and stops of each repetition. This is a good habit to practice when you are exercising.
In Summary
If you’re just starting out or have been out of shape for a while, then momentum is your greatest friend. Being able to build up that momentum is the best way to keep going long term, and going long term is going to get you results that last you the rest of your life.
There are many, many other things that you can/could consider when starting out your fitness regimen. However, if you stress out about optimizing or maximizing results this early in the game, then you’ve already lost.
You are just starting out. There is absolutely no combination of factors or regimen that will make any significant difference from any other. When you are an elite athlete, then small changes make big differences. But you have a long way to go before you reach that bridge. So don’t worry about crossing it just yet.