How To Prepare For Your First Time In The Gym Part 2. The Workout

Part 1 of our article went over the first few things you’ll do upon entering the gym for your first workout in a while (or ever). We also showed a very basic warm up section that pretty much anyone can try before beginning a resistance training workout.

Here in Part 2, we’re going to give you a few ideas and sample workouts that we recommend for your first time back into the gym.

Before we show you the follow along workouts, we want to explain why they’re good for beginners or intermediate gym goers who haven’t been in the gym for a long time (anything longer than a month).

These workouts are full body workouts. These are generally preferred in this case because:

• It only takes roughly 2 weeks after your last workout for your body to begin deconditioning your muscles and losing some strength/muscle. Obviously the longer, the more muscle and strength are lost.

• Full body workouts offer the most bang for your buck as they work pretty much every muscle in your body. It also allows you to push more weight than split routine workouts or isolation exercises which increases the total workout of your workouts without over-doing a single muscle group.

• Not over-working a single muscle group is key for your first time back to the gym. If you did a split routine for example you’d be so sore in a specific muscle group that you won’t want to work them out for up to a week!

• Last but not least, smart full body workouts promote balanced strength and muscle all around. This means you won’t develop any discrepancies or muscular imbalances, it may even fix them if you have any.

Here is a video that goes over most of the following article:

Full Body Workouts For Beginners

This is real simple, we want to pick 5-6 exercises. Each exercise will target a main muscles group in the body. This way every muscle gets worked during at least one exercise.

Exercises can be categorized by their respective movement patterns.

There is some debate as to how many categories of movement patterns apply to the human body but we are going to use the simplest method.

• Squat (Knee Dominant Lower Body)

• Deadlift (Hip Dominant Lower Body)

• Push (Upper Body)

• Pull (Upper Body)

• Core (can be broken down into “rotation” and “anti-rotation” exercises)

This means that for every workout we are going to select 1 exercise from each category.

Here are some examples from each movement pattern. The links bring you to a bigger playlist of exercises for each movement pattern on our YouTube page:

Goblet Squat, Frog Squat, Front Squat, Back Squat, Split Squats, Lunges

Deadlift, RDL, Single Leg Offset RDL, Dumbbell RDL, Kettlebell RDL

Push Ups, Bench Press, Overhead Press (seated or standing)

Pull Ups, Bent Over Rows, Inverted Rows, Single Arm Rows

Planks, Side Planks, Deadbugs, ASLR

Performing 1 exercise from each category will ensure you’ve worked all the main muscles groups evenly throughout the body and will help you build a base of strength and muscle - two things you need whether your goal is to build muscle or lose fat. These Full Body Workouts are compound exercises that work multiple muscles at once. This means it’ll burn more energy vs isolation exercises or machines so it’s generally better for fat loss. It also means you’re getting more load on your body so your strength improvements will be better than isolation. This is important for beginners no matter what your goal is.

Additional Exercises

Earlier in the post I mentioned 5-6 exercises. We offer the 6th exercise as an “optional exercise” if you want to target a specific muscle group. Let’s say you’ve noticed that your push ups are very weak compared to other parts of your body. In this case it’s fine to add a second exercise from the pushing category to add volume to that muscle group to help address the weakness.

For example, your first exercise may be a bench press and at the end of the workout, once all other exercises are completed, you add in 1-3 sets of push ups.

Another example would be for aesthetic purposes. Let’s say you really want bigger arms, you can add some direct isolation arm exercises at the end. Maybe biceps curls or triceps extensions. You DO work your biceps with rowing and pulling exercises. You also work your triceps a lot during ANY pressing movement, but they are not the primary muscle used in the movement so it’s ok to add direct work at the end if you feel like you want more.

Follow Along Workouts

If all of that is still a little confusing for you, we have some video workouts that you can follow along with.

Beginner Dumbbell Workout - Day 1

Beginner Dumbbell Workout - Day 2

Beginner Dumbbell Workout - Day 3

Remember, if you feel pain or discomfort doing these exercises you should skip the exercise. You may need to see a physiotherapist for help or it may be an issue with form that a personal trainer can easily help you fix.

If you’re interested in personal training, shoot us an email info@clearcut-fitness.com or you can apply to be a client with us by clicking this link and scrolling to the bottom of the page!