Workout Plan For Beginners

What kind of program you start with depends on your specific goals. This article will help you shed some light on myth that there is no perfect method in fitness. For example if you want to lose weight, running or cardio might not be the best thing. So let's start with understanding fitness in general.

Cardio for Weight loss?

If your goal is weight loss, then spending 1 hr on treadmill or running early in the morning(before breakfast) might give you OK results but it also has lot of drawbacks. In these kind of workouts you burn out your muscles as well as fat. In reality, fat is the last thing you'll burn in any workouts. You'll be burning glycogen stored in your body first and then muscles...

You see every pound of muscle you have will burn 50 calories a day. If you burn these muscles, your metabolism will slow down. You'll lose weight, no doubt about that but you'll also lose very important muscles.

Building body or strength?

If you check out with your local gym, there is very good chance that your coach or instructor in the gym will make you do High number of reps (around 15-20) every set. According to them this build body and strength and what not... Again this is ok but would you like to get access to better way of building strength & body?

Here's better way : If you use low reps with more sets (3 reps X 6 Sets) with heavy weights, not only you are making your muscles stronger but also you'll be shaping them.

A Beginners Workout plan

From my experience I had great results with strength training and working with cardio (High intensity training). Beginners on this workout gain strength in leaps and bounds and make great progress. If you check out most of the programs I have shared, you'll see I use many types of workouts which includes free weights, bodyweight calisthenics, odd objects like sandbag and other equipments like kettlebell. I always believe in "the chain is as stronger as its weakest link".

You workout every weakness of yours. You find out where your weakness likes and improve it. Not only gym rats who either work on their chest or biceps daily basis but forgets about the big gut hanging in front of them.

Heres another Workout plan for beginners which was featured on Men's Health magazine in January 2008.