How to reach your fitness/weightlifting goals in 2024

Are you new to the gym? Have you not even started your fitness journey yet? Do you not know where to start? If so, this is the perfect article for you.

We will go over:

- Training

- Diet

- Sleep

These are the 3 most important things when it comes to building muscle, losing fat or even both. 

Training

For Building Muscle

Now don't get me wrong here. If you train for building muscle you will get stronger, and vice versa. However, if you choose to optimize one, over the other, for example building muscle over strength, you will likely build muscle faster than if you trained for strength. For the primary goal of building muscle, focus on a moderate rep range (around 10-15 reps) on MOST of your lifts. Train close to failure on most sets, but for some sets every once in a while, train to failure so you know how it feels like and can properly gauge how far away you are from failure when you train close to it. There is no big enough difference in stimulating hypertrophy when you compare using machines vs free weights, so you can do both or do more of either, that is completely up to you.

Here are some good exercises you can use to target certain muscles:

Chest

- Push-ups 

- Barbell Bench Press (flat or incline)

- Chest Press

- Pec Flies

Back

- Pull-ups

- Lat pull-downs

- Barbell row

- Cable row

Triceps

- Cable Tricep Push-downs

- Skull-crushers

- Overhead extensions (cable or dumbbells but I prefer cable)

Biceps

- Dumbbell Bicep Curls (seated or standing)

- Standing barbell curls

- Preacher Curls

Shoulders

- Overhead press (Barbell or dumbbells but I prefer seated)

- Lateral Raises

Forearms

I think all of the forearm exercises are awkward and don't really strengthen your grip as optimally as Dyna Grip, a hand gripper that can count your reps and measure your grip strength as well as tell you how strong you are relative to people your similar age and gender. Have bigger or smaller than average hand size? No problem. The Dyna grip can easily be adjusted to fit any hand size with a simple know. It's also on sale for 50% off currently, but I don't know how much longer I can keep the discount on for. So click here to learn more. 

Quads

- Squats

- Leg press

- Leg extensions

 Hamstrings

- Romanian deadlifts

- Leg curls

 

Training for building strength

Training to get stronger is very similar to training to build muscle, and if you get really strong on the three main lifts: Bench press, Squats and Deadlifts, you could become a powerlifter. The main difference between training for strength, or training like a powerlifter is that they often train with much lower rep ranges (around 3-5 reps) for compound exercises. This is much more optimal for getting stronger. 

Training to lose fat

If your main goal is to lose fat, then your diet will be much more important than the training part. When training, try to focus more on cardio, but when you do train you can train for building strength or getting stronger. 

If you don't have access to a gym, and don't have your own equipment at home and buying dumbbells, then check out our store. We have a variety of accessories you can use to meet your fitness goals, from hand grippers, to resistance bands and much more. Some people emailed me saying the products were too expensive, so I put half of them on sale. 

Diet

Creating a diet is simple, but actually following it is a different story. If you want to lose weight, eat less than your calorie maintenance. After you finish reading, you can search up "Calorie maintenance calculator" and it will give you a rough estimate of your calorie maintenance. If you want to lose weight eat less calories than your maintenance. If you want to gain weight, eat more calories than your maintenance. It's that simple. Of course, if you want to lose weight, don't starve yourself. There are plenty of low calorie foods you can munch on all day without going over your maintenance (maybe not all day but you get the point) Make sure to prioritize your protein intake because protein will help recover your muscle from gym sessions. Goodbye.