My Beginner Lifting Journey

My Personal Fitness Background

I grew up swimming and playing other team sports, but I never had to do any kind of individual training outside of practice. As a result, when I stopped swimming and started college, I didn’t really have any good personal fitness habits or knowledge.

When I was in high school, a friend of mine was into lifting because of what he did for football. He had a bench in his basement which we would let us use and I would go workout with him from time to time. It was pretty simple and fun with slight focus on form but mostly just as a way to hang out and talk to each other because I didn’t really have any particular strength or aesthetic goals.

Starting Lifting (Again)

It wasn’t until April 2023 when I really started to want to lift weights and I bought NordicTrack iSelect Dumbbells. Although I now had the necessary equipment, I wasn’t exactly sure on how to use it. I found a beginner workout routine Push-Pull-Legs split online on Reddit and followed it pretty faithfully only because I had no idea what I was doing. The post spoke with enough clarity and confidence that I just blindly accepted the point of view. I would probably recommend this approach to other beginners because at first, consistency is everything and you shouldn’t really worry about optimality. There is so much conflicting information out there on exercise science that can easily be confusing without the proper context of your personal goals as well as the background knowledge to be able to separate pseudoscience from actual science.

I wasn’t very consistent and didn’t know exactly how hard to be working which was a bit of a self-reinforcing loop because the lack of consistency called lack of results which made me be less consistent. It wasn’t until July of 2024 where I started to take it more seriously. I started again with the routine that I found on Reddit, but also talked to my brother who knew more about lifting than me. I also found science-based lifting creators in August 2024 which exposed me to a lot more concepts and terminology which help give me the tools to think critically about my own workout program.

I think the most important part of my lifting journey was becoming consistent. At this point, it’s a part of my daily routine. I wouldn’t really consider it a hobby, it’s just something that I do to be healthy. I do enjoy it for what it is, but I’m not sure if I inherently love moving around heavy weights.

Now and Beyond

I want to get stronger/bigger and have been starting to notice some gains in muscle mass, but more than that I have just felt that I’ve had a more energy and far better mental health. There are some tweaks that I will need to make to my workout program to fit my needs more, but otherwise I am going to try to settle into something that I can do for the long haul. I am not trying to make quick gains, I want it to be sustainable over the long-term.

As you can probably see through my my workout data, it took me a very long time to start doing Legs. I didn’t do the Legs portion of the split because in my old apartment, I used to have a Schwinn Upright Exercise Bike that I was using for cardio and I didn’t want my legs to be sore after a workout to prevent me from biking. While I don’t bike as much anymore, partially because that bike stopped working, I still don’t work legs because I prefer to walk/run on the treadmill now.

However, I think that I want to start doing a proper Push-Pull-Legs split: RPPLPPL with Sunday being my rest day. I want to workout before work early in the morning so that I don’t have to think about when I need to workout during the day. Since I didn’t really have a set time where I would workout every day, I think it took away some of my focus from other things when I would have to decide when to workout.