Introduction
If you are a beginner and you are now starting to work out this The Benefits From Starting To Work Out As A Beginner may be helpful for you.
I’m going to tell you about my experience working out when I started.
Did you know that a fundamental aspect of succeeding later in the Gym is how you begin?
To help you navigate this I have split this document in the following parts:
- A little bit about myself and where I stand now so you have perspective.
- The things I’ve experienced when I started working out.
- What to expect and be aware of the progress.
My Background
I come from a background that was very athletic. I’ve been doing sports all my life ranging from football, basketball, karate, swimming, tennis and the latest addition is exercising in the gym.
I have been going to the gym for well over 18 years now consistently with a few breaks in between. I usually take 1-2 months at the most off every year to let my body recover and recuperate as I think this is fundamental to keep going.
I love the gym so much that I feel in love with it and never left it for many of the good things it gives me besides health which I will talk about later in this article.
During covid like everyone else the gyms got affected massively and they started closing down. They went through the phase of 1-2 years where you had to schedule appointments to get in, sometimes being completely closed to the public and some outright went out of business.
This was a major hit for me as I love the gym so I decided to take out some of my savings and invest a good $2000 to build my own home gym at home since I love it so much. This will give you some perspective that I’m pretty serious about it and I am not here to sell you anything other than help you learn from things I’ve learned the hard way.
Over the years I had 4 trainers of different levels and backgrounds. Most where in Miami from a prestigious gym in Brickell called equinox. Each of them gave me a little piece to carry forward and keep with me and over the years I basically built up to learning and making a system that’s adaptable to me.
Having said that I am not a health or fitness coach and I don’t do this professionally. I’m just a software developer that has passion for the gym. If you really seeing for that more professional advice you should seek out to the right people and use my article just as awareness advice.
Why I work Out
Before I tell you what to do when you start working out I feel it’s important to tell you the things I’ve noticed when I first started working out and why I keep doing it up to date. Obviously those change a lot over the course of years as you become more and more skilled at it.
In this section I’m only going to focus on why I worked out when I first started and what kept me going to this date.
Hormonal Balance
If you suffer from any hormonal disbalance I can assure you the gym will help you with it. I did not necessarily suffer from anything in particular but there were times where my testosterone was a bit below the average.
Having said that this may seem as a minor negligible thing but in the long run it isn’t. Testosterone has a lot of good things associated with it and being slightly elevated helps.
Once I started working out 6 months in I went and did a testosterone test just to see where I’m at and repeated it again 1 year into the process. I noticed that not only did I go over the average I had a good 15% and then 20% increase subsequently completely natural.
I did not take any supplements at the time so keep that in mind if you try to challenge it.
And by supplements I mean natural ones that are available over the shelf like Zinc, Magnesium etc. that are known to help a bit with testosterone levels. I’m a completely natural athlete and never take any steroids in my life.
Mood Elevation
I think this is by far my favorite thing when working out. I find it balances my mood and helps me cope with day to day stress. I immediately started noticing change in my life and how I was dealing with stressful situations.
I dare to say that even from day 6 the changes where obvious. I took a long break when I started for some personal reasons (2 months in my journey) and during that time I realized that my stress levels and anxiety went back up at work and started affecting me. As soon as I returned back to my routine (2 weeks after the break) things started to immediately improve right after.
Having said that this was a repeated and occurring pattern in the last 18 years of my journey with the gym, so I know the results are there.
Since I’m not a medical advisor I won’t go into why or how this happens, I’m sure it has to do something with hormones and neurotransmitters but I’ll let you draw conclusions.
All I care about is the result and that’s a big positive.
Physical Change
While this is more on the superficial side of things the physical appearance change cannot be completely ignored. When working out you will see changes especially if you are serious and consistent about it. At the beginning the changes are going to be so drastic that you may not believe in your eyes.
A lot of people refer to this kind of thing as newbie gains which is a common term tossed around the gym society and culture. So if you hear that from someone take it as a compliment and be sure it’s a reality as it happened for me.
More specifically 2 months into my journey I started noticing a lot of parts of my body becoming thinner and more muscular. The parts I had the most changes on were the legs and my back.
What changes you see may vary from person to person and how you workout your muscles. Also your pre-genetic disposition and body build may come into play and this may be different for you.
Regardless to say this is a massive thing for me as it acts as a catalyst to keep going on.
Improved Health
Finally one of the most important aspects was that I started noticing my health improving. More particularly since I incorporated some cardiovascular exercise (more on that later) in my work outs I noticed that my day to day tasks were happening effortlessly.
I like to go on walks on my lunch breaks and sometimes during summer I would gas out and start to sweat pretty hard. While this may seem dumb when I started doing more intense cardiovascular exercise bundled along with resistance training in the gym all that was much easier.
My sweating reduced, my endurance went up and I was able to catch up with my really fit at the time friends that would run marathons for fun.
Besides that intrinsically I felt better overall and I’m sure my blood work would have checked out lower cholesterol, blood sugar etc. Sadly I never got to do blood work in the beginning of my journey other than testing my hormones so I can’t tell you for sure that this was the case.
If you would like to read more about how the immune system works there’s a good article here.
Better Diet
The last and for me one of the most important aspects that blends well with improved health and feeling good mood is incorporating a better diet.
But you would ask me isn’t a better diet something separate from starting to work out?
The answer to this is actually quite complicated but I can tell you for sure that it’s not completely separate.
Exercising has a lot to do with how you end up eating.
More specifically with me when I started my journey I noticed that junk food and things that I would always binge eat started feeling foreign to my body. I could feel my body asking for good nutrition and proper food made up from whole grain sources.
What I ate and how I ate slowly started changing to the better and over time when I would work out and stay in routine my diet would be pretty much spot on.
I didn’t even have a feeling to do cheat days anymore and this has nothing to do with cravings because those kind of vanished. I just ate well (good amount of calories) of nutrient dense foods. Since this is a completely different topic I’m going to discuss it in another article which you can find below.
The Gym foundation has a great article talking about the connection between exercising and your diet which you can find here.
What Results To Expect
Since most people in the western cultures want to have a take away I couldn’t leave a sample timeline summary of how things would span out of you and what you should be expecting in the first year of starting to exercise.
Again this may be different for you based how serious and consistent you stay but if you do average like I did you should be seeing more over those results to some extent.
- First 1-2 Weeks: Lots of soreness and body aches, recovery is slow. At this time you’d feel the need to sleep and eat more.
- Weeks 2-4: Similar to the first couple of weeks but the recovery is better.
- 1-3 Months: At this phase things will start to drastically change for you. You should noticed improved mood, more calm personality and physical changes in the way your body looks (not much yet though).
- 4-7 Months: During this time you should start seeing big differences in your physique if you have stayed consistent. Also your endurance and recovery should be through the moon and doing great.
- 8-12 Months: Continue to see big changes on your physical appearance and how you feel. At this stage you should also start making progress on your resistance training in terms of weights and slowly familiarizing yourself with more isolated and advanced exercises.
- 12-18 Months: This is the feel at home stage where everything is coming in naturally for you. You are always feeling great, your mood is balanced but also something new may come up here which is cravings. Don’t worry give in and have whatever you want every now and then just don’t over do it. You have made a lot of progress and should be proud of yourself and results. Also your appearance should speak for itself at this stage and motivate you to take the step further. Finally your newbie gains will slowly start diminishing here and your progress will continue but not at the same rate as when you started.
Conclusion
If you found my The Benefits From Starting To Work Out As A Beginner useful and you think it may have helped you please drop me a cheer below I would appreciate it.
If you have any questions, comments please post them below I check periodically and try to answer them in the priority they come in. Also if you have any corrections please do let me know and I’ll update the article with new updates or mistakes I did.
How does working out has helped you?
I expressed in great detail above all the great things that working out has helped me with but the one that’s sticking out the most for me is that it helps me cope with stress it’s a form of therapy at a biological level to me.
Here’s some other articles which you may find useful regarding your health: