Eight Principles To Build Muscle And Strength When You’re New To The Gym
Here are eight principles that I wish someone had explained to me (and I had been smart enough to listen to) when I first started training.
If I had I would have progressed faster, had fewer injuries and enjoyed the whole process a lot more.
Making a start with weight training can be daunting and overwhelming.
I remember walking into the gym for the first time and being baffled as to what to do.
My mate and I found a chest machine and competed to see who could lift the most weight.
We were clueless.
This was in the dark ages before the internet.
The problem now is more likely to be having too much information thanks to social media.
What I want to do here is give you some guiding principles to help you get the most out of your fitness journey.
As someone much smarter than me once said.
“Methods are many. Principles are few. Methods always change. Principles never do.”
Methods are the details such as your choice of exercise or which reps you use…and there is a lot of individualisation with them.
There is no one method, like an exercise version of the Ring of Power, that rules over the others.
But there are principles which will guide you on which methods to use and bring you great results if you keep them in mind.
We’ll start with possibly the most important yet often the hardest one.
Leave Your Ego At The Door
We are all competitive idiots at heart (the turnout for the parent’s race at my daughter’s sports day was the final proof I needed of this).
We just want to be better than the next guy, after all winning feels good.
The thing is, you have to earn your wins.
When you first start with weight training, it’s not often pointed out that you’re now learning a new skill.
Some bright young thing shows you how to set up an exercise machine and away you go.
Lifting is not just the application of brute force but muscles learning to coordinate with each other to provide force efficiently.
When you start using the dumbbells, yours may look a lot smaller than the ones you see other people using.
You may get out of breath more easily than you expect.
If you’ve been physically fit in the past you probably have a memory of how you felt at your peak…
…and part of you still thinks that’s where you should be.
I’ve been in this position myself several times.
t’s easy to get angry or frustrated with yourself.
How did you let things slip? Why did you let them slip?
This way of thinking often leads to problems.
You either go too hard too soon, trying to be that person you remember being and end up either injured or burned out.
Or you put your head in the sand and just avoid hurting your ego by not exercising.
Where you are right now is simply the line in the sand.
The point at which you are going to build upwards from.
If you do the right things, in the right way you will progress and you will move towards your goals.
But not accepting where you currently usually leads to ego lifting.
This is when technique goes out of the window and your focus is only on moving a weight from point a to point b.
As Yoda almost said, anger leads to ego lifting, ego lifting leads to injury and injury leads to no gains.
The truth is…no one is going to be impressed by this.
Besides the point of training isn’t really about impressing anyone else.
(Except maybe yourself and the person you spend naked time with).
No one cares how much you lift.
If you really want to impress someone, do that with your journey.
By starting with the right weight and gradually build your strength.
All of this can be summed up as “fuck whatever anyone thinks of you”.
Building strength and fitness is about learning new skills.
Being open to learning more about yourself and how your body functions.
As soon as you think you know it all you’re screwed.
I’ve been coaching since 2001, every day I study to improve as a coach and an athlete and I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.
2. Mind Muscle Connection
What do you feel working when you lift a weight?
Is there just a general feeling of fatigue, do you feel a specific area burning…or nothing at all?
The role of a weight is to provide a stimulus to the muscle.
Your body is always trying to find the most cost-efficient way to perform any movement.
Which is the exact opposite of what we want.
We’re aiming to get our muscles to work and drive fatigue into them…not find a cheeky cheat to move more weight for less effort.
Let’s take a biceps curl.
You can do this now without any weight in your hands.
Hang your arm by your side, then bend your elbow to lift your hand up towards your forearm.
That’s no big deal is it? You can do that all day long.
Now do the same thing but tense your bicep as you lift your hand. Like you're trying to show off how big your guns are.
Do you feel a bit more tension in the muscle now?
Now imagine doing that same movement with a weight in your hand.
The muscle would start to burn and tire and probably with less weight than you’d normally use.
But the stimulus to the muscle would be greatly increased.
You could probably lift more weight another way.
If you could swing your arm a little or lean back through your torso.
Look around your local gym and you’ll no doubt see people doing this.
The stress to the muscle is reduced.
The signal to become stronger, grow and adapt is reduced.
This applies to any exercise.
You don’t need to swallow an anatomy book.
But knowing which area an exercise is targeting and focusing on building fatigue in that area as you lift you will deliver greater results.
This may take more thinking about at first than seems normal.
You’ll possibly have to reduce the weight that you’re using (remember to check that ego).
As the body learns the new pattern of movement and you increase the weights, you’ll find your body changing in a way that makes it all worthwhile.
3. Big Exercises Come First
Whatever exercises you choose for your training plan there is one key principle.
The most complicated and challenging exercises come first.
For example, the Deadlift is going to use all the big muscles in your legs, your abs, your back and your forearms/grip.
With progress you’ll be able to lift a relatively heavy weight with this exercise.
If you’ve started your workout with biceps curls then your arms will be too fatigued to allow the exercise to be adequately trained.
If you’ve been for a big run or you’re coming to the exercise already fatigued then your technique will be compromised which could lead to an injury.
The bigger the exercise, the more muscles it uses, the more energy and coordination is required.
This also means you get a greater systemic adaptation.
If you want to lose weight then a biceps curl will do little as it’s a relatively small muscle, that doesn’t require much energy and does not affect the rest of the body.
To help you figure out which exercise to put first we have some basic classifications.
Compound Exercises vs Isolation Exercises.
Compound exercises use multiple joints and multiple muscles at once.
An isolation exercise focuses just on one muscle (group) and covers just one joint.
A leg press is a compound exercise as the knees and hips move (multi-joint) and the quads, hamstrings and glutes are trained (multiple muscle groups).
A leg extension is an isolation. It trains only the quads (one muscle group) and only one joint moves (the knee).
Open Chain vs Closed Chain
In open chain exercises the area lifting the weight (arms or legs) can move and are not fixed to one point.
Closed chain the arms or legs are fixed.
In a squat or deadlift your feet are fixed to the floor. You put force into the floor but the floor doesn’t move.
In a leg press you push the weight away from you. The chain is open.
With a lat pulldown, you pull the bar towards you, your hands move meaning it’s an open chain exercise.
A chin-up may look similar to a lat pulldown, but your hands are fixed to the bar and you move your body towards them.
This is closed chain.
Generally, closed chain exercises are more demanding on your body than open chain.
They are also useful athletically as this is generally how we interact with our environment.
Running or walking is a driving force into a non-moving floor.
As a rule of thumb, you’ll place your closed-chain, compound exercises first in your workout.
They take the most skill and control.
They usually have the most “bang for your buck” (they cause the greatest amount of improvement and adaptations).
Your open chain, isolation exercises will come last, such as focused arm work.
These are the icing on the cake.
They take a smaller amount of effort, have the smallest effect on your system and take the least amount of skill with the lowest chance of causing an injury.
4. Feel A Stretch – Quality Movement
Aka don’t be a Billy half repper.
Thinking back to when I started lifting with mates makes me half cringe and half laugh.
We were full of ego.
The result was we’d often perform sets (especially on bench press), where we wouldn’t lower the weight enough.
All we cared about was moving more weight than each other.
An exercise is always most challenging when a muscle is in its most lengthened position.
Such as when the weight is lowered on a bench press or when the arm is fully extended on a bicep curl.
The result is people avoid these positions.
Again, watch most people doing arm curls and they’ll avoid letting their arm lengthen.
More and more research shows that the greatest stimulus for growth and development occurs when the muscle is lengthened.
Avoiding these positions because they suck and you need to use a lighter weight is just cheating yourself of results.
Too much ego will hold you back.
5. Tempo – Control the Eccentric
Eccentric is the fancy term for the lowering part of any lift.
What you might think of as the easy bit.
This tends to be rushed by new lifters as all the focus is on lifting the weight (the concentric phase).
The lowering phase is another super important stimulus for muscle and strength development.
DO NOT RUSH THIS.
For most exercises think of taking three seconds to lower the weight and one second to lift it.
The magic doesn’t just come from how many reps you do, but how you do those reps.
Occasionally the eccentric phase is skipped altogether.
This is to protect the lifter from too much fatigue or injury.
An example is the deadlift when the lifter will drop the weight after each rep.
They’re (usually) not doing this to piss you off with the noise but because they’re lifting a lot of weight and don’t want to cause their back an issue when lowering.
(Note: deadlifts, Olympic lifts and if you’re struggling on a squat are the only times it’s ok to drop the weights…after a set of arm curls is not acceptable…unless you’re in your own gym, respect the kit).
6. You Are More Than Just Chest and Biceps
Again, this is more geared towards guys.
(Women tend to have less ego in the gym but need to be encouraged to lift heavier).
Guys hyper focus on their chest and biceps, which leads to an imbalanced program.
Which leads to an imbalanced body and injuries.
You may think legs can be avoided as we spend most of our lives in long trousers.
But switch your thinking.
Legs exercises are challenging because there are so many large muscles in the legs.
The more muscles trained and the larger the muscle the greater the energy requirement.
This means if one of your goals is to trim some extra pounds of your waist, training your legs is invaluable.
The biggest reason most people suffer with back and knee pain are glute muscles that have become too weak/dysfunctional.
Training your legs will help prevent you feeling like your 80 years old in the morning when you’re not yet even 50.
If you want a strong bench press, then the shoulders need a strong base to work from, which means a strong back and legs.
If you want that fancy ‘V’ tapered shape with your shirt off, then you need to train your back.
Your triceps are a larger muscle group than your biceps, so if you’d like tight sleeves on your t-shirt train your triceps.
Your body isn’t a bunch of separate muscles.
Each part of you relies on the other parts to function well.
This includes your mind and thought patterns.
If all you do is train your chest and arms, then you are holding yourself back.
7. Find A Way to Enjoy The Process
There will be many times when you will not want to train.
This isn’t laziness, it’s normal.
As we’ve already noted your body is an efficiency machine.
If you’ve burned more energy that week than it’s used to then some dashboard lights will come on.
Your body will try and prevent you from moving too much.
“Let’s sit on the couch/in the coffee shop and do naff all”.
You may have an urge to eat high calorie foods (biscuits, cakes) as it tries to calibrate the amount of stored energy.
Because you don’t feel like doing something is not an excuse to not do it.
You can feel resistance to doing something and do it anyway.
Try and find little tricks to help yourself keep going.
I think of training as adult playtime (that sounds ruder than I meant).
If I’m training then I’m not on a work call, figuring out what to cook for the family dinner, being dad or any of the other grown-up roles that consume us.
It’s just me in the moment.
If I’m running, I’m thinking about my breathing and how my feet are landing on each stride.
In the gym, it’s just focusing on the next set.
It can help to store up a favourite podcast for when you’re training.
Or dig into your favourite tunes.
For me, it’s my time and when I’m done…even if I’v only had time for a quick 20 minute lift…I know I’ll perform all the other roles in my life in a better way.
8. Take Your Rest…But Not Too Much
It pays to take enough rest between sets.
With enough rest, you’ll be able to maintain the level of intensity in each set.
A tendency with beginners is to rush into their next set and as there is too much fatigue, they won’t be able to maintain the same level of intensity.
On the flip side do not become the person who sits staring at their phone for ages between sets.
Ideally, only have your phone for music or recording your workout.
There is no need to scroll social media.
You lose focus and waste your time.
I have never seen someone get a great workout whilst dicking around on Instagram.
This leads to the question of how much rest.
There is no exact answer.
As a rule of thumb, the lower the reps you use the longer your rest period.
This is why you’ll see powerlifters perform 1-3 hard reps then rest for 5 minutes plus.
These ranges are taxing on the nervous system and require a longer recovery period.
The more experience you get with lifting the better you’ll become at managing your rest and choosing the right weight.
As a beginner, usually take at least 60 seconds maybe increasing that towards 90-120 secs depending on how demanding the last set was.
Overall training and exercise should be an enjoyable experience.
There will be times when you doubt that.
There will be days when it feels hard, the weights are heavy or you feel gassed.
There will be days when you feel like a superstar and you’re amazed at you’re now able to do.
The key is to be consistent.
Don’t judge yourself.
Don’t define yourself by one workout.
Don’t worry about what anyone else in the gym is doing.
Focus on building your own skills and good things will happen.