The perfect gym workout for beginners!
Now I have your attention, to many people when starting the gym try to go at it alone or try follow what some social media influencer has told them to do as it works for them. Anyway I am here to spit some truths and give you a standard workout I would suggest for a beginner stepping foot in a gym, and no it isn’t going to be a ‘bro split’ of chest and biceps or back and triceps. It is a full body workout, if you are not familiar with these then you need to.
The reason we are going to do a full body workout is simple, you are a beginner and your muscles are not going to be used to being placed under the stress that a chest session would place on the chest. This can lead to:
Poor form,
Lack of muscle engagement,
Increase risk of injury,
Increase muscle soreness over the next few days preventing you from training again frequently.
Whereas if we were to hit a full body workout we can target more bigger muscle groups and really push the full body rather than exhausting one body part. By doing this we can ensure the bigger muscles are growing which will over time lead do increased muscle mass and decreased body fat, if paired with the suitable healthy diet (calorie deficit or surplus depending on goal).
Doing full body workouts 3 times per week would benefit a beginner so much more than using your 3 workouts to spend an hour working on just your chest, your back, your arms or legs. Providing you are giving 24-48 hours between sessions to allow the muscles worked to recover adequately then we are all good. If you are wanting to train more than 3 times per week which as a beginner I would advise against this is where the different training splits would come into it, however this doesn’t stop you incorporating cardio such as walking/running/cycling etc on top of the 3 sessions per week.
This workout is designed with an absolute beginner in mind who has not stepped foot in a gym either ever before or for years prior.
Each exercise will be completed for 3 sets of 10-12 reps with a 60 seconds rest after each set. The reps are what dictate the weights used, so you want to be ‘struggling’ by the end of the 12 reps on the 3rd set of each exercise.
Exercise 1 - Seated Chest press machine
Exercise 2 - Leg Press
Exercise 3 - Seated Row machine
Exercise 4 - Seated shoulder press machine
Exercise 5 - Lat Pulldown machine
Exercise 6 - Leg extension machine
Exercise 7 - Bicep Curl using dumbbells
Exercise 8 - Seated Triceps pushdown machine
Exercise 9 - Seated/Lying Hamstring curl machine
Once you have completed all 9 exercises for 3 sets that is a total of 27 sets with a minimum of 270 reps with not much rest. You will have worked nearly all the big muscles in the body and worked in every dimension to (vertically, horizontally etc) which is good for overall body health too.
You can repeat this workout using ‘progressive overload’ which we will cover another time, but basically when you get comfortable with the workout you need to change some things up to provide the body with a new stimulus to keep growing. This can be done by increasing the weights uses, reducing the rest time, increasing the rep range or adding an exercise in as a superset (that is for another blog).
If you try this and it works for you then great, if you feel like you have outgrown this and unsure where to go from here and require some guidance why not drop me a message and get yourself some online coaching where I will set your workouts for you each week along with nutritional goals to help you reach your desired goals.