Ok, so you have made the decision to better yourself and become the physical and mental embodiment of everything that is good in this world. Now what do you do?

I am going to give some very basic guidelines for what you should be looking to do in the gym. Programming is an art that needs to be specific to the individual’s goals, but I am going to give you some ideas that will work basically 99% of the time. If you are brand new and just getting started, they will work wonders.

For the most part when you are in the gym you want to focus on big movements, the ones that will give us the most “bang for our buck” so to say. Examples of these movements would be any form of squatting, pressing, or deadlifting.

I am not going to explicitly say you must back squat, bench/shoulder press, and deadlift because without a knowledgeable coach to teach you, you will more than likely just injure yourself. That being said, if you feel capable of teaching yourself, there are many resources available for the self teaching of the lifts. The book Starting Strength although a very dry read, offers an extremely detailed overview of how to perform the lifts and many things associated with training and would be a good place to start. Do yourself a favor and do not drink the milk as recommended in the book, just eat more protein.

Let’s say you don’t feel like reading a textbook on training though. Take whatever movements you know yourself to be proficient in, and try to get a squat, press, and pulling movement in each workout. This can be a front squat, dumbbell shoulder press, and barbell rows, or the traditional back squat, bench press, deadlift. I honestly don’t care what movements you choose if you are brand new to this whole thing particularly if you have no desire to do a lot of homework on the topic. Pick big movements, get a squat, press and pull every workout.

For gods sake warm up, this is a topic in and of itself, but I am a huge proponent of mobility work (a future article will be done on this). Google “Kelly Starrett” or “Mobility WOD” and use those to create a nice warm-up for yourself, all the while improving your mobility. When starting to do your lifts on a barbell or dumbbells, do a few warm up sets of the movement, for instance if you were looking to squat 225 for your 3×5, then you might warm-up with, 45# (the empty bar), 95#, 135#, 185# all for sets of five, maybe only 3 reps on the set of 185, you can also do more reps on the first set if you would like. Play this by ear and don’t be stupid.

In terms of sets and rep schemes three sets of five (3×5) is a generally good rep scheme for any movement you are looking to get stronger in and you should default to this if you aren’t sure how many sets and reps you should do. That being said, if you would like to include some hypertrophy focused exercises such as curls (all of the crossfitters just winced), three sets of ten can be used (3×10) to a better effect. Use the same weight for all 3×5 or 3×10 (also called sets across).

When determining how to add weight, you need to make consistent and small gains, and over the long term it all adds up. So if you are doing big barbell movements; five pounds a week or workout, depending on how difficult you found the previous training session (in terms of maintaining good mechanics), would be a good amount of weight to add.

Limit yourself to three to four training days maximum and two days as a minimum. Make sure to not do the same lifts day after day, perhaps instead of bench pressing every day, switch between bench pressing and shoulder pressing, the same goes for your squatting and pulling movements.

Along the path to physical enlightenment, you will eventually run into obstacles, namely injuries and plateaus. Injuries are such a large topic it will need to be saved for a future article. In terms of “plateaus” though. There is a very simple approach I would like you to use. If you find you cannot hit your required reps for the day, maybe only getting three or four reps on the last set. Take the current weight you are using and cut ten-percent off of it and start again. Do it only as you stall on a specific lift.

One last thing, with all of this strength training, we must make sure not to neglect our conditioning. Make sure to do some sort of metabolic conditioning work at least once a week, ideally two times a week. This can be as basic as going out to your local track and running 4-8 100-400m sprints. Avoid doing long slow distance forms of “cardio” and stick to high intensity, short (less than ten minutes), interval work. If you are looking to shed some extra poundage, doing a fasted walk for 30-45 minutes a few times a week in the morning will also help.

So there you have a basic approach if you are a total virgin to being in the gym. This is just the training portion; diet will be covered in a future post. This is not scripture and should not be taken as the “ideal”, it is just a good starting point. I encourage you to develop a passion for taking care of yourself, make it an obsession, and you will force yourself to learn the necessities of how to lift and how to treat your programming.

If you have any questions feel free to ask on twitter @thedanimal1991 or on the facebook page.