Starting a workout routine to achieve goals like slimming down and toning your body is the most common thing to do. As is the fear of transforming your body into an excessively muscular person, a big mistake we make... We have already talked about the benefits of strength training for womenand today we want to talk about how to get started in the gym.
If we take care of our diet, our training and our sleep, we will achieve wellness and an athletic body that will enhance our figure for the summer!
Tips to start training in the gym
1. Don't just do cardio
If you only do cardio, you will most likely lose weight, but if your goal is to tone while you lose weight, with only cardio, you will stay slim, without curves, without a defined body.
Cardio is always associated with running, but there are several modalities that may engage you a little more, so we propose a series of intervals of maximum intensity alternating with breaks. This type of cardio has advantages such as "needing less time to train", "more entertaining", "less muscle loss", "more motivating".
2. Learn the technique of the exercises well
Having clear the objective of the exercises to be performed correctly is very important, as well as the technique to avoid injuries.
You can prepare, together with a trainer, a plan or a training table with some guidelines, to slim and define your body. We propose a combination of basic strength exercises on machines to work all the muscles, along with cardio work for fat loss.
You can perform a routine 3 days a week, focusing on the parts of your body that you most want to work.
3. Flexibility training
Once you start an exercise routine in the gym, it is very important that we dedicate a part of the training to our flexibility.
Stretching is a natural movement that the body asks us, for example, as soon as we wake up in the morning, the first thing the body asks us is to stretch. If we want to focus more on the performance of our body, stretching is a good method to optimize our workouts.
4. Apply progressive overload
As we must imagine, we can not get to the gym the first day and lift 100kg, that is why, there is a process of adaptation of the muscle when lifting weight. In progressive overload, over time, you increase the weight of an exercise by performing the same repetitions.
5. Use free weights and dumbbells
Free weights are all kinds of tools such as dumbbells, medicine balls, kettlebells ... are all the elements that give us freedom of movement in the exercises, ie, are not the gym machines in which the movements are guided.
Thanks to this freedom of movement, we can focus on the work of specific muscles, in addition to being more natural movements or similar to those that the muscle performs in their daily lives!
6. Increase protein in your diet
To define and gain muscle tone, we must add to our diet the necessary protein in our diet and that your intake is higher than that of carbohydrates.
In a diet designed for the gym, we must take into account: "do not skip meals", "do not want immediate results", "measure controlled amounts of food", "learn to interpret the labels of the products, they are not healthy just because they are light".
7. Full body routine
For a beginner level, you can create a three-week full body routine, in which the exercises are 15 repetitions. You can focus on these muscles:
-Quads and glutes: with incline press.
-Biceps: with femoral lying on machine.
-Back: with rowing.
-Chest: chest with barbell.
-Shoulder: shoulder press with dumbbells.
Triceps: pull-ups with barbell.
-Abds.
To learn more about this routine in detail, you can take a look at our women's fullbody routine.
Summer is almost here, and although the ideal would be to follow a workout routine all year round, we encourage you to put more emphasis now that the good weather is approaching to feel good about yourself.