How do I begin working out at a gym?

I suppose you are completely new to the gym. I will try to make my answer as useful to you as possible.

First of all, if you can get a coach then it will help you a lot towards your goals. I strayed around the gym for a couple of years without a proper trainer and hardly made progress. I still don't have a regular trainer. A lot of my knowledge comes from reading and experimenting. Trust me, that is not the proper way to go.

If you can't get a trainer, try to have a friend who has some good knowledge (not bro-science in the gym). If nothing works, try to make friends in the gym. If you can make it to the gym regularly, eventually you would be able to make a few friends and some of them could be relatively knowledgeable lifters. Take advice from them. Until then, I will try to help you and cover the basics and the bare essentials for you so that you would be able to do something regularly at the gym.

Always get a good warm-up session when you get to the gym. Restrict your warm-up movements to something dynamic; jumping jacks for example. Don't do any kind of static stretching before your workout. Save those for the end of your session.

Now when it comes to working out, if you intend on doing any kind of weight training right away, then focus your attention on big compounded movements like squats, deadlifts, and bench press. 

The key thing is to master the right form for doing these exercises. A wrong form can cause many problems. Recently, I've been preaching this a lot in my answers - Form over Load!

Your lifting form is more important than how much you can lift or how many reps you can do. If you are not lifting with the right form, you are not only just inviting injury, but also hampering progress and possibly gains as well.

That's basically what happens in someone does not exercise with proper form. You can:

• get injured.
• not make the right progress.
• not make the gains you are supposed to.
• not be able to lift to your actual strength.

The most common injury you can sustain is to your back.

Getting out of position during lifting can put a great deal of stress on the lower back muscles, and when the demand is too high on a muscle it can be injured. Too much stress can form tiny tears in a muscle, known as a muscle strain, which is a very common form of back injury.

This type of back injury can be quite painful, making it difficult to move the affected and surrounding area. When a back muscle is strained, it can even be painful to breathe normally. A back strain will typically heal, although it often takes a long time (a few weeks or months).

Exercising with a proper form means to generally:

• Exercise Through a Full Range of Motion - Make sure to work through the full natural range of motion of your targeted muscles.
• Maintain Constant Tension - Avoid locking out the joint as a means to rest and thereby decrease intensity.
• Focus on the Negative (Eccentric Contraction) - Concentrate on the negative portion of the lift by trying to lower the weight at the same pace, if not slower, than you lifted it.
• Slow Down Rep Speed - Do things slowly. This will help you to maintain proper form as well as to maintain tension in your muscles for longer durations.
• Achieve Peak Contraction - Squeeze hard at the completion of a rep. You will feel an additional burn this way. Especially noted while doing curls.

A few additional tips I would like to share with the reader would be to:

• Never skip your warm-up.
• Never rush through your workouts.
• Unless you are fully convinced, don't work through the pain. It is not satisfactory at all. I have done it. I hated it later.

Master the right form for those big compounded movements. Deadlifts are the best exercise you can include in your routine. They are a really good compounded movement that works a lot of muscles in your body very efficiently when done with proper form.

The list of muscle groups stimulated and affected here are huge:

The grip strength (finger flexors) and the lower back (erector spinae) work isometrically to keep the bar held in the hands and to keep the spine from rounding.

The gluteus maximus and hamstrings work to extend the hip joint.

The quadriceps work to extend the knee joint.

The adductor magnus works to stabilize the legs.

The deadlift activates a large number of individual muscles:

Torso

Front

Abdomen

Rectus abdominis (under aponeurosis)

Abdominal external oblique muscle

Abdominal internal oblique muscle

Back

Iliocostalis

Int

ertransversarii laterales lumborum

Latissimus dorsi

Levator scapulae

Longissimus

Quadra

tus lumborum

Rhomboideus major

Serratus posterior superior

Serratus posterior inferior

Splenius cervicis

Teres Major

Trapezius muscle

Legs

Quadriceps

Rectu

s femoris

Vastus lateralis

Vastus intermedius

Vastus medialis

Hamstrings

Biceps femoris muscle

long head

short head

Semitendinosus

Semimem

branosus

Hips

Gluteal muscles

Gluteus maximus

Gluteus minimus

Piriformis

Superior gemellus

Forearms

Flexor digitorum profundus

Some noteworthy benefits of deadlifts are:

1. Increased Fat Burning
2. Better Posture
3. Increased Real Life Lift, unlike in the case of a bench press
4. Improved Grip Strength
5. Increases Hormones (Testosterone and similar growth hormones)
6. Increased Cardio (as opposed to the general notion)

These are only a few of the benefits of this really wonderous compounded movement that everyone who is involved in weight training, whether lifting for fitness, fat loss, aesthetics, or strength training should include in their routine.

If you, however:

• struggle to do weight training at first
• struggle with learning proper form
• are not able to get a good training partner or a mentor or coach

then you might have to resort to cardio. It might also be a good idea generally. Although we all always recommend weight training to people who are looking to lose fat, in your case if you have severe obesity or severely lack the strength and stamina for weight training, then cardio is your best friend. I was never a fan of cardio. I loved to lift weights. But then I came across HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training). This was the ideal solution for people like me. This technique reduced the duration of cardio sessions to 20-30 minutes. We burned more calories than what we would have burned with traditional cardio. So what is HIIT?

HIIT, or high-intensity interval training, is a training technique in which you give all-out, one hundred percent effort through quick, intense bursts of exercise, followed by short, sometimes active, recovery periods. This type of training gets and keeps your heart rate up and burns more fat in less time.

Guess that is pretty self-explanatory. A sample routine I follow for example is of 20-minute duration with a 5-minute warm-up and a 5 minute cool down and hence is 30 minutes long overall. I usually do this on the treadmill. During the 5 minutes warm-up I go from walking at a speed level of 4 to jogging at 7. After 5 minutes, you increase the speed to 9 so you are comfortably running. You do this for a minute or two (this is more of a personal preference within HIIT. You can try for 2 min-1 min sessions or 1 min-1 min sessions or any such break down as you like). Once you complete this run for 1 minute (in this case) I increase the speed to 12 and am running faster now. I maintain this for another 1 minute and then bring the speed back to 9. The cycle goes on for the entire 20 minutes and then the cool down process starts. You can vary the speed according to your level of fitness at present. Varying the intensity in this way has many advantages.

HIIT has shown to:

• Increase your metabolism
• Burn more calories
• Cause more fat loss than muscle loss as opposed to traditional steady-state low-intensity cardio

You can apply the principle of HIIT to any form of cardio like running, cycling, elliptical, aerobics and even to weight training (well it's a bit different in that case. But since we are strictly talking about cardio here, am not gonna go to the details of that.).

There is no single cardio workout that can be termed as the best. You can't stick to the same routine forever. A technique like HIIT makes cardio less boring and more efficient. Give it a shot!!!

If you have a problem with HIIT then stick to normal cardio. Start by walking. Then move on to walking with an incline. Then move on to jogging. Once you are comfortable with jogging then try to run. Once you can run fast and long then try to sprint. The whole point is to keep yourself moving. Try to increase the duration too as you progress along.

Guess that's all the basic aspects of starting with workouts. If you have further doubts, please do let me know.