Most people who visit my site on a regular basis are fit men (though a decent portion are the ladies too) looking to take their training to the next level. For this reason, I usually cover more advanced stuff which is not always suitable for someone who just needs to know how to get started with training.
One of the most important decisions you can make for your training is to find what you enjoy doing.
A good place to start is bodyweight training, which is something most people would find more interesting and is easy to do in that it requires no equpiment. I never had much luck with body building, as I didn’t really enjoy it much and the results weren’t that great. On the other hand, once I started with bodyweight training the results followed fairly quickly, both in terms of strength and muscle mass, despite the fact I wasn’t trying to achieve the latter. Since the results were obvious and I had tons of fun with different bodyweight exercises, I just kept doing it.
You’ll find many articles which cover bodyweight here, but to really get you started you can check out my Ultimate Guide to BodyWeight Training series.
Even if you think you could never do Handstand Pushups or Pull-ups, believe me – YOU CAN. I’ve been there myself, in fact at one point I was so weak that I couldn’t even do a push-up. Nevertheless, you can always build up to any exercise you want and all these books start on a basic level, despite the fact that they cover a lot of advanced stuff. For instance, I show you how to work your way up to a pull-up through various easier exercises and that’s a great way for anyone to start training since it covers everything from basic to intermediate and advance exercises.
Just do a simple routine like the following which can be modified up or down to suit your level.
- Pushups
- Bodyweight Rows
- Squats
- Hanging Knee Raises
Start with where you’re at and build from there.
Now bodyweight training isn’t necessary. There are many options available so this is just one those that I would recommend to many beginners.