When you start with fitness or bodybuilding, your body needs to adjust to regular training and the effect that weight training has on your muscles.
Your body goes into a kind of shock when exposed to new experiences, and it’s better to let it adapt to the new demands placed on it rather than bombarding it immediately with exercises, training methods, and weights.
Starting with a fitness schedule
To establish a good connection between your body and mind, the so-called ‘mind-muscle connection,’ it’s best to start with:
- just a few exercises
- not too much weight
- many repetitions
This way, your muscles and your brain learn to work together optimally, allowing you to get the most out of your training. However, make sure to consume enough protein for recovery, promoting muscle recovery with sufficient nutrients.
Over time, you’ll add more exercises to your workouts, spread the training of different muscle groups over several days, and think of ways to make the training more intense. Until then, you’ll do training sessions where you train your entire body at once.
Full-body schedule
This way of training is also a good method for ‘returners’ to get back into the training rhythm when you haven’t trained for a long time. This way, you gradually acclimate your body to the training pressure before fully engaging in training again. Coming back is actually easier than starting from scratch. You already know how to perform the exercises and how it should feel, which helps your body adapt faster. Additionally, you never fully regress because of the phenomenon of muscle memory.
Beginners are often prescribed a type of training known as circuit training. This involves being assigned a number of exercises, usually on machines, and performing those exercises consecutively, with each set a different exercise and repeated several times. Indeed, this is an effective way of training, but it’s almost impractical within most gyms and fitness centers because there are other people around who also want to use those machines, especially during peak times in the gym.
Since circuit training is so difficult to execute in the gym, and because you don’t have that training option at home when you train, I’ll provide you with a program that is feasible.
The following fitness schedule is designed so that all major muscle groups in your body are trained during each workout. Of course, you don’t do this every day, as your muscles won’t have the chance to rest and grow. No, you do this training a maximum of three times a week with at least one rest day between each training session.
To prevent boredom from doing the same exercises every time, or if someone else is using the last bench or the only leg press, I’ll provide you with an alternative exercise for each muscle group that you can switch each time. Just make sure not to always do the same exercise or to do the easier exercise instead of the harder one.
Don’t experiment too much in this phase; it’s better to ensure that you can perform an exercise perfectly rather than introducing a lot of variety into your training. That will come later!
Fitness Training Schedule: FullBody
| Muscle Group | Exercises | Sets x Repetitions |
| Quadriceps | Leg Press or Leg Extension | 3 x 20 |
| Hamstrings | Lying Leg Curl or Seated Leg Curl | 3 x 20 |
| Calves | Standing Calf Raises or Seated Calf Raises | 3 x 20 |
| Back | Front Lat Pulldown or Seated Cable Row | 3 x 15 |
| Chest | Bench Press or Incline Bench Press | 3 x 15 |
| Shoulders | Standing Military Press or Wide Grip Upright Row | 3 x 15 |
| Triceps | Close Grip Bench Press or Cable Pushdown | 3 x 15 |
| Biceps | Barbell Curl or Seated Dumbbell Curl | 3 x 15 |
| Forearms | Seated Wrist Curl or Standing Wrist Curl | 3 x 20 |
| Abdominals | Crunches or Leg Raises (to failure) | 3 x |
