“What should I do for a workout?”
After all, many people are interested in getting started with strength training and want to know what workout routine to follow.
Considering that a program should be developed around a person’s biology, age, goals, diet, free time, etc, there’s a lot of factors I can’t get in through email that would allow me to tailor a program specific to that person.
I can certainly offer up suggestions, but there’s one person that knows what’s best for you: YOU. And the best workout program is the one that you ACTUALLY follow!
Determine Your Situation
For starters, how much time can you devote to exercise?
If you can do an hour a day, that’s awesome. If you have a wife or husband, three kids, a dog, two jobs, and no robot butler, then maybe you only have thirty minutes every other day. That’s fine too.
Whatever your time commitment is, developing the most efficient workout is crucial. Why spend two hours in a gym when you can get just as much accomplished in 30 minutes? Right?
After all, we know that weight training is the fat-burning prize fight victor, and efficiency rules all.
Next, you’ll want to determine WHERE you’ll work out: At a gym? Here’s how to behave in a commercial gym At home? Have you tried our beginner bodyweight workout?
Once you determine where you want to train, you can start to determine how much time you have to train, how to build your routine and more.
What Exercises Should I Do?
I like to follow the motto of “Keep it simple, stupid.”
(Note: I am not calling you stupid. You’re reading Nerd Fitness, which means you’re intelligent, good looking, really funny, but most of all, modest.)
The best workout is the one that you do, and people make things FAR too complicated and try to target a bazillion different individual muscles with six types of exercises for each body part and it’s exhausting, unnecessary, inefficient, and intimidating.
Keep it simple! We’re going to pick 5 exercises, and get really strong with those movements.
Unless you’ve been strength training for years and know what you’re doing, we recommend that you pick a full body routine that you can do two or three times a week.
You want a routine that has at least one exercise for your quads(front of your legs), butt and hamstrings(back of your legs), one exercise for your “push” muscles, one exercise for your “pull” muscles, and one exercise for your core.
Yes, this means you can develop a full body routine that uses only four or five exercises.
Hows THAT for efficiency!
Here is a quick breakdown on those movements: Quads – squats, lunges, one legged squats, box jumps. Butt and Hamstrings – hip raises, deadlifts, straight leg deadlifts, good mornings, step ups. Push(chest, shoulders, and triceps) – overhead press, bench press, incline dumbbell press, push ups, dips. Pull(back, biceps, and forearms) – chin ups, pull ups, bodyweight rows, dumbbell rows. Core(abs and lower back) – planks, side planks, exercise ball crunches, mountain climbers, jumping knee tucks, hanging leg raises.
Pick one exercise from each category above for a workout, and you’ll work almost every single muscle in your body. These are just a few examples for what you can do, but you really don’t need to make things more complicated than this.
We do have high-definition multi-camera demonstrations of each exercise above(over 100 HD videos) in our flagship course, The Nerd Fitness Academy. Here’s an example from the NF Academy, with Team NF’s Jim and Staci demonstrating a proper bodyweight push-up:
