Gym Lessons

- safety -

Read and watch instructional videos online prior to testing any exercise in the gym. Use only light weights and high reps for the first month with a new exercise. Focus on getting form 110% correct, before thinking about adding weight. Pay attention to body signals, making sure the exercise doesnt give you ANY pains except muscle soreness. Never train a sore muscle directly. Never train with joint/skeletal pain. Never train with fatigue or headache.

General fatigue and persistent pains/aches means your body cant fully recover from your workouts. You MUST take a break from training when this occurs. When you start training again, you must increase the NUTRITION TO EXERCISE RATIO, and pay extra attention that you avoid those symptoms.

Train your back more than anything else. Modern lifestyle creates an imbalance where legs and front side become strong compared to back. This means that from the start, you are probably strong enough OVERALL, to move a weight that is DANGEROUSLY heavy for your back to carry.

- growth -

Most people seem to underestimate the sheer force/tension it takes to make muscle fibers grow larger. The dilemma when starting out is that you are generally not strong enough to lift the type of weights required to generate this type of force on your muscle fibers. (Lots of people have reported that it took many years before they started growing, but when it finally started, they grew quite fast.) After gaining some strength, you probably still lack the strength to lift those weights SAFELY, and your muscles have sort of reached their strength potential for their CURRENT size. This is a PLATEAU where many people stay a LONG time. It can lead to frustration and desire to try UNSAFE tactics and like lifting too heavy or too high volume, while ignoring the important safety principals above. From my experience, there are only two things that really improves this situation.

The first is food. Scientific tests has shown that weight gain from over eating is minimum 30% muscle mass. This % goes up with weight training. However, if the the weight gain is rapid, a significant portion will always be fat. So, you can decide how much hurry you are in getting away from the size/strength plateau I mentioned above. If you are willing to put on some body fat (AND increase your cardiovascular disease risk factors) you can quite quickly escape this plateau by eating a lot of EASILY DIGESTIBLE high calorie foods. I did this myself, and I was a huge fan of it at the time. My weight increased 15% in 6 months and I got a LOT stronger, but the doctor started complaining about my blood pressure, and girls started to seem less interested in me. And while losing half the gained weight was super easy over a 3 month period, the rest was really hard work that took me nearly a year. In retrospect, I should probably have tested my 'dieting skills' FIRST, and then done a slower more controlled weight gain.

The second is 'safe cheating'. By this, I mean finding RELATIVELY SAFE ways of putting your muscles under the tension of weights you cant lift in 'regular fashion'. The two main ways of doing this are STATIC HOLDS and NEGATIVES. An example of a negative, is starting with reverse grip HANG CLEAN, and then slowly lowering the bar for a negative bicep curl. There is also the LESS SAFE method of 'bouncing', where you use the 'elastic band energy' stored in the tendons on the way down, to get the weight out of the bottom position. Mark Rippetoe advocates using this whenever squatting, and also for barbell bicep curls (starting at the top).

- be skeptical -

The overall quality of advice has improved since everyones mother started reading on the internet. Even so, bad/dangerous advice is still out there, in the gyms, in the magazines, in forums and in online articles. Especially regarding the consumables that people earn money on (whey, supplements, steroids).. so be aware. Dont trust anything until you find multiple trustworthy references.