If you’re here, chances are you just started your fitness journey to improving your body and performance. Congratulations!
Or maybe you were just asking yourself “how to start bodybuilding?”
In this post I will try to give you some important guidelines to follow when starting out, so let’s dive in right away!
What is bodybuilding?
First of all, let’s define what is bodybuilding by taking its definition on the Oxford English dictionary: “the activity of doing regular exercises in order to make your muscles bigger and stronger”. This concise definition highlights two fundamental details:
- Strength and size: Not only bodybuilding has a focus on hypertrophy (muscle growth), but also on strength, which is one of the main drivers of building muscles.
- Consistency: Most importantly I must highlight the word “regular exercises“. In fact only through consistent and regular training we will be able to get bigger and stronger, most likely following a well-structured training plan that helps us achieve our goal.
Set a goal!
When you are just starting you need to set a goal in order to keep your motivation high and to follow a precise direction.
Your goal will also shape your first training plans so you will need to choose whether you want to:
- Lose weight: if you primarily want to lose fat, you will most likely need to lower the intake of calories you get throughout your week, going into a calorie deficit which means eating less than your maintainance need. But anyway you will still respond quite well to muscle building stimuli.
- Build muscle: if your goal is directly to build muscle, you should push a bit on calories, if you start very lean you can raise your calories quite a lot in the first period without getting too fat, for example in a study by R. Rozenek in which they added almost 2000kcal of surplus the “Results indicate that high-calorie supplements are effective in increasing BM and FFM when combined with RT. However, once individual protein requirements are met, energy content of the diet has the largest effect on body composition.”
- Body recomposition (Both): if you keep a calorie intake which is approximately your maintainance need you will maingain (I will make a post about this in the future) which means that you will maintain your weight but add muscle mass while slowly reducing your body fat.
Main body parts and how to train them
Before diving into specific exercises let’s better understand what are the main muscle groups that you will be targeting during your journey and their main function:
- Chest (Pectorals): this is the main pushing musle group and it’s responsible for horizontal adduction which means bringing the arms closer to the center of your body and shoulders flexion which means raising your arms in front of your body.
- Back: this is the main pulling muscle group, it includes three main muscles:
- the lats (latissimus dorsi) responsible for shoulder extension, pulling the arms down and back,
- rhomboids and trapezius which assist in scapular retraction, pulling the shoulder blades together and shoulders elevation.
- Shoulders (Deltoids): their joint is the most flexible in our body, this permits the shoulder to perform
- abduction (raising arms to the side),
- flexion (raising arms in front of the body)
- extension (pulling the arms backward).
- Arms: there are three main components:
- forearms are responsible for wrist flexion and extension and is also fundamental for gripping.
- biceps perform elbow flexion which means bending the elbow.
- triceps antagonistic to biceps and they perform elbow extension which means making our arm straight.
- Legs: here we have four main muscles which are the biggest and strongest of our body:
- Glutes: responsible for hip extension (moving the thigh backward) in hinge movements.
- Hamstrings: they are fundamental in assisting hip extensions and knee flexion (bending the knees).
- Quadriceps: responsible for knee flexion.
- Calves: responsible for the plantar flexion of ankles, basically means pointing the toes downward.
- Core: it’s fundamental for our stability during lifting, twisting and bending, the main muscles are:
- Abs: responsible for spinal flexion, when we crunch for instance, bringing the chest towards the pelvis.
- Obliques: responsible for lateral flexion and the rotation of the torso.
- Lower back: fundamental muscle for our posture and to support spinal flexion.
Training split ideas
Now let’s talk about what could be an efficient training split for a beginner, there are different ways one could plan a training split, but I would recommend these three options for someone just starting out:
- Full body: with a split like this you should try to decide what are the 3/4 exercise you feel better for each muscular group and just make a rotation of those doing 1/2 exercises per each muscle group. This would be my recommendation for splits on 3 days.
- Upper – Lower: as per the full body, choose the exercises you feel better doing and stick to them as long as you are progressing. Try working out alternating antagonistic muscles, for instance do one exercise hitting the back and then one for the chest. Apply the same concept for biceps and triceps and quads and hamstrings. This is a comfortable option for beginners because it’s less confusing than a full body but my favourite recommendation is the next one.
- Push – Pull – Legs: (in whatever order you prefer): this is by far my favourite choice, it is also one of the most common splits for advanced athletes. I think it’s very simple to follow and progress with it, you just need to improve in weight and form on the exercises you are doing.
- Push: focus on chest, shoulder and triceps
- Pull: focus on back and biceps
- Legs: focus on the lower body
What I would focus on is improving on what are the main exercises that will shape your motor patterns such as bench press, rows, deadlifts and squats. Try to do a high volume (15-20 sets per training might be a good starting point) since at this point of your journey you will most likely not be able to train to failure and optimise your muscle growth this way. And keep in almost every exercise a range of repetitions from 6 (only after quite a bit of conditioning) to 15.
Also, if you want you can take a look at my personal split here (which I am following at the time writing this post) but it’s a bit overcomplicated for someone just starting out.
Track your progress!
Tracking your progress is fundamental for your growth in this journey, what you want to do is improving every single time you workout, either by adding reps or weight to the exercises you have done the last time you trained the same muscles. This is what beating the log means in bodybuilding, try to stick to this rule! My personal recommendation is to write on your phone notes the amount of sets, reps and weight you do for each exercise.
Fundamentals of nutrition
Nutrition is what will give you most results after a good training, I cannot give you a magic formula that will guarantee results for you, the only thing that you can try is eating as healthy as possible and getting enough of each macronutrient (read my introduction to macronutrients to better understand their function).
- Protein: a good rule of thumb is getting 1.4-2.2g/kg of bodyweight. Try to get these from different sources such as eggs, meat, fish, diary and also legumes.
- Fat: here depending on a lot of factors a good range can be from 0.5 up to 1.5 grams per kilogram of bodyweight in certain cases. I would say 1g/kg is the best simple option for every beginner. Try to get your fat intake from good sources such as olive oil, avocado, nuts and fatty fish.
- Carbohydrates: these will be the main energy intake to support your workouts so I would recommend to calculate your caloric intake using a TDEE calculator (I find this quite accurate) and remove from that the calories of fats and proteins and divide it by 4, that’s the number of carbohydrates you should eat, also as previously stated you can easily eat more without getting much fatter but improve much faster.
You can also decide to apply a carb cycling using this approach for better results when you will get more advanced.
Recovery and rest
Recovery is just as important as a good nutrition, in fact a body that does not recover will hardly build any muscle. To improve your recovery try to get enough sleep every day and most importantly, try to understand the signals your body is sending you, if you are too tired to hit a certain muscle group you can postpone that training to another day or train other muscles.
Also give importance to rest days, these will be crucial to avoid injuries or overtraining during your journey! You can also consider adding some active rest by doing stretching or low-stress on joints cardio such as an assault bike or walking.
Conclusions
Congratulations again on taking the first steps towards a long and satisfying journey in the world of bodybuilding, good luck with your trainings! Just to wrap up, keep in mid these few concepts:
- Try to always improve your technique to avoid injuries and ensure optimal muscle fibers engagement
- Follow your goals and actually do your best ton try reaching them
- Consistency is key on training, nutrition and recovery
- Listen to your body
- Always have fun