Fitness information is everywhere nowadays, and not all of it is good. There are scare tactics on social media trying to persuade you that certain food groups should be on the ban list, and exercise and training plans promising the world in an attempt to make a quick buck.
As a fitness writer, I’ve been exercising for as long as I can remember, and I’ve been a regular in the gym since I was a teen. During that time, I made plenty of mistakes and learned from each one. Below, you can find the expert-approved pearls of wisdom I wish I had at my disposal when I first started strength training.
Fitness isn’t revolutionary
“In health and fitness, the things that we know work aren’t revolutionary,” trainer and Fat Loss Habits author Ben Carpenter tells me. This is one of my favourite quotes from any interview I’ve done.
While it won’t set the world alight, I’ve found the proven cocktail of good sleep, regular exercise, lifting weights and eating a nutrient-rich diet invariably delivers health benefits if done consistently.
However, the human brain loves a shortcut, so people are always on the lookout for a magic exercise or diet that will deliver untold progress at a rapid rate.
“People will often make something sound shinier than it is to sell you something,” says Carpenter. “If something really was revolutionary, like one specific diet, tip or exercise programme, you would be hearing about it from more than one person.”
Progressive overload
As a gangly teen taking their first tentative steps inside the gym, I did the same exact workout for months – a bit of time on the treadmill, a few biceps curls with 10kg dumbbells, several sets on the pec deck, some sit-ups and then out the door. And while I strongly recommend against this, I initially noticed some impressive changes.
“This is because any type of resistance training is a new stimulus to the body, and a previously unstimulated neuromuscular and musculoskeletal system will respond quite dramatically to lower total training volumes and less intense stimuli, compared to the more advanced lifter,” explains Amanda Capritto, a certified personal trainer and sports nutrition coach at Smarter Sweat.
In other words, because you’ve never lifted weights before, your body is taken by surprise and adapts quickly at first.
However, I soon saw my progress plateau, and no matter how often I went to the gym nothing seemed to change. So I turned to textbooks to find the solution, and discovered progressive overload; the theory that your training should change over time in line with your increasing strength and fitness levels. And the simplest way to do this in the gym is to increase the weight you’re lifting.
Rob Thurston, a professional bodybuilder and the trainer behind actor Stephen Graham’s impressive transformation for Disney+ drama A Thousand Blows, outlines what this might look like.
“If your training stimulus, rest, recovery and nutrition are all sufficient, your muscles will gradually become larger and stronger, allowing more reps to be performed with the same weight.
“You could start off aiming for three sets of six to 10 reps on an exercise. Once you can surpass the top end of the recommended rep range – eg perform 11 reps – with good form, you should increase the weight you’re lifting by about five per cent during your next workout.
“It is important to only make small incremental increases rather than large jumps, both to avoid injury and stay within the lower limit of the recommended rep range [simply: using this template, you shouldn’t lift a weight so heavy you can’t complete six reps with it].”
Intensity matters
As Red Bull athlete and Olympic silver medallist Kieran Reilly puts it: “If you do hard things, hard things become easier.”
The body adheres to the Said principle, which stands for “specific adaptations to imposed demand”. In layman’s terms: if you consistently ask your body to do something difficult, it will adapt so it can do it better, as long as you’re fuelling and recovering aptly.
If you’re resistance training at an intensity that tests your body, your muscles will become stronger, along with other tissues like bones, ligaments and tendons. Something that’s often overlooked is that you’ll also get better at lifting weights – it’s a skill, after all.
To reap these rewards, bodybuilder Thurston recommends working to “muscular failure”.
“A really good sign to look out for is, in the final few reps of the set, you will feel an involuntary slowing down of the concentric or lifting phase,” he explains. For example, if you were squatting, it would take you longer to stand up after a few reps because the muscles in your legs had accumulated fatigue.
“These are the final few tough reps you need to grind through in order to create enough mechanical tension within the muscle fibres – that’s the stimulus needed for muscle growth,” Thurston adds. “But without pushing through those hard reps, you don’t cause the required signal for your muscles to adapt and become bigger and stronger.”
Of course, you should also maintain good form throughout these tricky final reps. This, I’ve found, is where the magic lies.
Read more: These are the 13 best men’s gym trainers you can buy, according to our expert tester
Follow a plan and track your progress
Stepping into a gym can be intimidating at first. I found having a plan bypassed these jitters by giving me a clear idea of what I was going to do, and how I was going to do it. Happily, having a plan is also a far more effective approach if you want to see long-term results.
A progressive multi-week programme will provide direction in your training. Scheduling regular workouts holds you accountable, while also helping you keep tabs on your performance – the number of sets and reps you perform for each exercise, and the weight you lift. Through this, you can apply the progressive overload principle discussed above.
This isn’t to say you can’t go off-piste on occasion and try a random workout you bookmarked on Instagram. But some structure and tracking will help you see improved results in the long run – trust me, this is coming from someone who still has a pen and paper stashed in their gym bag.
Prioritise fun over optimal
There’s something of an obsession with “optimal” and “evidence-based” lifting online at the moment. This is all well and good – it makes sense that people would want maximum ROI from their time in the gym.
However, having enjoyment as the common denominator in your exercise plans is the best way to ensure you turn up for your next workout. If Hyrox gets your engine revving, have at it, if at-home HIIT classes give you the mood boost you’re after, crack on, and if old-school bodybuilding is your bag, that should form the cornerstone of your training.
The bottom line is that regular movement is very good for you, as is resistance training. If you can find a fun way to incorporate it into your life, stick with it.
Consistency is king
Of all the things I’ve done over the years to increase my health and fitness – and believe me, there have been many – the most impactful one is the fact that I just kept turning up.
“Being consistently good for 12 months will be a lot better for your health than being perfect for one month and then stopping because you can’t maintain that level of perfection,” Carpenter explains.
“If someone goes from zero to 100 straight away, which is what diets and exercise plans are often like, within four weeks they’ll often realise they can’t keep up with that pace and stop. Instead, try to prioritise consistency over perfection.
“Doing exercise is one of the lowest hanging fruits for improving your health, but most people are doing very little. So, rather than trying to go from zero to 100, I try to find ways to help people go from zero to 10, then 10 to 20. That’s often a gradual process.”
For most people, walking is the form of exercise with the lowest point of entry. Some movement is always better than none, so whatever workouts I do (or don’t do) in a day, I always like to squeeze a few steps in where possible.
Nail the fundamentals
A few years ago, I shortened my regular morning training sessions and gave myself an extra half an hour in bed. In the weeks that followed, my fitness and performance went through the roof.
Why? Because workouts are designed to provide the stimulus your body needs to trigger changes, but the actual adaptations happen while you’re recovering. I was also able to train far more effectively after a good night’s sleep.
Sleep is one of the fundamental pillars that supports a successful exercise routine, alongside diet, hydration and recovery. In my experience, it pays to fine-tune these before even considering pricey recovery tools or demanding workout plans.
“It’s like a pyramid,” says Jonathan Robinson, an applied sport scientist at the University of Bath. “The bottom of that pyramid is rest, recovery, sleep, hydration and nutrition – if all of those basics are right, you can then start to put everything else on top of it.
“Whereas if your nutrition isn’t great, you’re sleeping badly and you’re not recovering, then no matter how fancy your shoes are or what sports drink you have, [when it comes to performing] it’s not going to be hugely beneficial because you’re trying to build on shaky foundations.”
To improve your recovery, these five sleep tips from The Sleep Scientist founder Dr Sophie Bostock can help you boost the quality of your slumber. And if you’re looking for a few nutritional rules of thumb to follow, Carpenter has this to say:
“I like focussing on nutritious foods you can add in because they tend to have a habit of displacing other foods out of your diet. For example, there is research showing that if you tell children to eat more fruit, weirdly, they often lose a little bit of body weight.
“Appetite is finite, so if you tell people to eat more fruit, for example, they will often slightly reduce their calorie intake without even trying because it tends to displace other things out of their diet.
He defines “nutritious foods” as “foods that tend to be slightly less processed”.
“For example, fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, beans, lentils and whole grains, even if it’s things like rice and oats as opposed to doughnuts, pancakes and waffles – more processed versions of the equivalent grains,” Carpenter says.
“I also like the idea of focusing on more fruits and vegetables, and lean sources of protein, because that can be good for fat loss and supporting muscle tissue, specifically if people are resistance training.”
Read more: This is how much protein you need each day, according to a nutritionist
