Introduction to fitness training methods for beginners

The core method for newbies to get started with fitness is not to just copy Internet celebrities’ differentiated training and pile on training weights. Instead, it takes 1-2 months to establish the lowest frequency of exercise habits, master basic movement patterns, and find a training form that you are willing to stick to. If you do these three things, it will be 100 times more effective than training hard in the first two weeks and then lying down for three months.

I met a young man at the gym last week who had just finished the college entrance examination. He saved two months of pocket money to apply for a season membership. On the first day, he followed the video to learn deadlifts and did 20 sets of 15kg bar pulls. The next day, he couldn't straighten his waist and was helped to the hospital by his mother. Even the scheduled graduation trip was ruined. In fact, this is not an isolated case. 80% of novices give up on fitness because the threshold they set for themselves is too high at the beginning: they either feel that they must practice to exhaustion to be effective, or they feel that if they don’t lift the iron, it is not serious fitness. They are put off by muscle soreness and fear of difficulty after just three days of exercise, and the fitness card is finally reduced to a bath card.

When it comes to the choice of training format, there are actually two different views in the circle. There is no right or wrong, it all depends on your own situation. One group believes that novices must start with strength training and seize the novice welfare period to quickly gain muscle and improve basal metabolism. The other group believes that it is safer for novices to start with aerobics to establish habits. If your base weight is more than 30 kilograms higher than the standard value, and you have no exercise habits at all, there is really no need to hit the iron hard. The pressure on your knees and lumbar spine is too much. Start by walking briskly around the community for 20 minutes after get off work every day, or go swimming twice on weekends. If you can persist for two weeks, you can talk about adding strength training. If you are active and often play ball and climb mountains, it is no problem to start directly with strength training.

Don’t believe the nonsense that “novices will gain muscle quickly by stacking heavy weights during the welfare period”. If you don’t do the movements correctly and all the weight is placed on the joints, the welfare period will directly turn into a recovery period. An office worker sister I took care of before started squatting with a 20kg barbell according to the plan on the Internet. After squatting for a week, her knees hurt and she had to struggle to go up and down stairs. She went to the hospital to check for meniscus wear and rested for two months before she dared to move again. In fact, it is really not that difficult for a novice to learn movements. Basic movements such as squats and deadlifts can be practiced with bare hands for three days in front of the mirror. When squatting, don’t buckle your knees inward and don’t collapse your waist. Just squat until your thighs are parallel to the ground. There is no need to pursue any "standard" for squatting to the end. Every time you practice, take a short 10-second video, compare and adjust it with the teaching video, and you can basically find the right feeling of exertion after practicing five or six times.

The issue of whether to hire a personal trainer is quite controversial. Some people say that personal training is just cutting leeks, while others say that novices must hire a personal trainer to avoid pitfalls. On the contrary, I think it depends on your budget and learning ability: if you have enough budget, find a coach who has four major certifications, has a decent body shape, and will not urge you to buy 30 classes right away, and take 10 classes to learn the basic movements of the chest, shoulders, back and legs, the price/performance ratio is really high; if the budget is limited, now site B There are a lot of free novice action tutorials on Xiaohongshu. Jeff's novice series and the fitness guidance videos produced by the State Sports General Administration are all reliable. You can learn clearly if you make more adjustments to the exercises. You don't have to save money to pay for personal training, and don't think that you can learn worse than others by watching videos.

There is no need to limit the training frequency. Don’t just set a KPI for yourself and say you must practice 5 times a week for 1 hour each time. Office workers work overtime on weekdays and it’s already 9 o’clock when they get home. Where do they have the energy to go to the gym? When I first started practicing, I went twice a week. Each time I practiced three movements: squats, chest presses, and rowing. I took a 40-minute shower and left. I gradually got used to it and increased it to three times a week. Now I have been practicing for almost three years. My body shape has changed much better than those who fished for three days and sunbathing on the net for two days. Even if you don’t want to go to the gym, you can dance with Pamela at home, do aerobics with Liu Genghong, or even play badminton two days a week, as long as you can move regularly, you are already in the game. There is really no need to be bound by the rule that “you must go to the gym to lift iron”.

In fact, there are really not so many high-level thresholds for fitness. I have seen too many people collect dozens of training plans, buy yoga mats with three layers of dust when they come home, and go to open a fitness card once. On the contrary, it is the aunt downstairs who walks around the neighborhood for 40 minutes after dinner every day. After half a year, her blood fat has dropped and her sleep has improved. To put it bluntly, the core of getting started is never how professional you are in practice, but if you start taking action first and persist, you will already beat 90% of people who just talk without practicing.