Quick Tips for People Getting Started

Apparenlty some of you have started lifting

I’ve been reacently informed that some people read this substack. I’ve also been informed that it’s inspired at least one or two of those people to get more serious about their resistance training. Personally I thought I was just sending things out into the void, but I guess this works too. Anyway, if you’re starting to get more serious about your lifting here are some quick things I want to mention:

Volume

I’m going to need a whole post about this, but the short version is with a few exceptions more is better. Working out twice a week gets you more gains than once a week, three times a week is better still, four will get you more jacked, and people go all the way up to 6 days a week with two of those days being double workouts. But here are the exceptions:

1. You need to be consistant. Getting to the gym 3x per week for a year will out perform going 6x per week for a month and then quitting.

2. You need to avoid overtraining. Over training is when you train more than your body is able to recover. It basically doesn’t happen to people just starting out.

3. Increased volume has deminishing returns. The exact curve is different from person to person, but each marginal workout has much less impact than the previous workout. If you assume something like a 50% decrease in effectiveness you wouldn’t be crazy.

   That means your second workout would only have half the effectiveness of your first, the third is a quarter as effective, etc. So the 5th workout is only 6.25% as effective as the first one. No need to kill yourself at the gym looking for results.

Form

Focus on good form. Watch videos, have a more exerienced friend or coach watch you and give feedback, film yourself and watch later. Doing a movement with bad form will do much less to stimulate the muscle than doing the same movement with less weight and good form. And make sure to control the eccentric¹ don’t just drop your weights.

Rep Ranges

Stick to the 5-10 rep range for the first few weeks of a new movement. It’s easier to learn good form and stick to it in this rep range. And if your new to lifting all together it’s easier to tell when you’re close to failure, as opposed to just tired, in lower rep ranges.

Intensity

You need to push yourself on your lifts. You don’t need to go all the way to failure, but you do need to push youself close to it. That looks like the consentric² gets slower, you start grunting, you make an ugly face, or something like that. This is where “no pain, no gain” comes from.

Exercise Selection

If you’re new to lifting, try and stick to compound movements. A compound movement is something that involves moving two joints, usually either the shoulder and elbow or the knee and hip. Exercises like that hit mutiple muscles at once and let you get more done in less time³, they’re literally like doing 2-4 isolation exercises at the same time. Examples of compond lifts:

Pushing

1. Bench Press

2. Pushups

These hit the chest, front part of the shoulders, and the triceps.

Pulling

1. Rows

2. Pullups

These hit the biceps, forearms, back part of the shoulders, and various muscles in the back.

Legs

1. Deadlifts

2. Squats

3. Lunges

Deadlifts hit your entire posterior chain⁴. Squats and lunges hit your quads and glutes.

Hip Hinges

1. Good Mornings

2. Stiff Legged Deadlifts/Romanian Deadlifts

3. Anything where you bend over with your knees straight.

These aren’t technically compounds, but they hit your hamstrings and usually your glutes.

Progessive Overload

Do a bit more each time you do a movement. A little more weight or an extra rep on every set. Ideally your last workout made you a tiny bit stronger, so you need to increase the difficulty to keep the same growth stimulus. Also, being able to do a little more each time is one of the few good ways to tell if you’re adding muscle on a timescale as short as a week.

That’s it

Have fun, and rerack your weights.

1. Lowering phase of the lift

2. Weight go up portion of the lift

3. And with less effort.

4. Every muscle in the back half of your body.