What actually matters when you start lifting

My oldest has started training.

I’m not going to turn him into content, so that’s most of what I’ll say about it. He’s a real kid with a real life and he didn’t sign up to be in a blog post. But he’s started, he’s into it, and I’ve been walking around quietly proud of him for a while now. It’s a strange feeling. He’s curious about a room I’ve been walking into since long before he was born, and he asks me about it from roughly three feet off the ground.

I’ve been lifting for about twenty years. That’s long enough to have been confidently wrong about almost everything at least once, in public, usually at volume.

The thing I keep having to stop myself doing is handing him all of it at once. Every cue, every rule of thumb, every opinion I’ve collected. Twenty years of information delivered in one go by a man who’s very pleased with himself. lol. Nobody in history has been helped by that.

So I’ve been trying to work out what I’d keep if I only got to say a few things. Not to him specifically. To anyone standing in a gym in their first week, holding a phone with somebody’s program on it, wondering what they’re supposed to be doing with their hands between sets.

This is what I landed on. It’s shorter than I expected and there’s nothing clever in it.

1. Go on the same days every week

I can’t prove this and I’m only going on twenty years of watching, but the difference doesn’t seem to be the program. The ones I’ve seen get somewhere went on Monday, Wednesday and Friday for two years. The ones who didn’t went extremely hard for three weeks in January and then stopped.

Pick your days now, before you’re motivated, and pick fewer than you think. Three is plenty. Three that you’ll still be doing at Christmas beats six that fall apart by February. As far as I can tell the whole thing runs on attendance and almost nothing else, which is annoying, because attendance is the least interesting thing anyone can tell you.

I’d rather someone trained badly for ten years than perfectly for ten weeks.

2. Learn about five movements, properly

Squat, hinge, push, pull, carry. That’s the whole map. Everything else is a variation on one of those, and you can spend a very long time getting good at those five before you need anything else.

Learn them from someone who knows, or film yourself from the side and be honest about what you see. Your first month isn’t the time to be creative. It’s the time to be boring and repetitive and slightly bored, and that’s fine. Boring is the fee you pay early so you can enjoy it later.

If your gym has a coach who’ll watch you for twenty minutes, that twenty minutes is worth more than anything you’ll read this year, including this.

3. Make the weight go up slowly, and write it down

Not every session. Not heroically. Just generally upward over a long stretch of time, and written down somewhere so you know whether it’s true.

I used the notes app on my phone for years and it worked fine. The point isn’t the system, it’s that memory lies. You’ll swear you’ve been progressing and then look at four months of the same number and understand why nothing’s changed.

Writing it down also stops you redlining every session, which is the other beginner trap. You don’t need to leave a puddle on the floor to have done something useful.

4. Eat enough

This was me for years, and I’ve watched a fair few other people do the same thing. You start training, you carry on eating exactly what you were eating before, and it doesn’t come close to matching what you’ve suddenly started asking of yourself. You feel terrible, and you decide what you need is a fancier program.

Eat proper meals. Get protein in most of them. Don’t build an entire philosophy around it in month one, because the philosophy is usually a way of avoiding the boring part, which is buying food and cooking it.

5. Sleep

I don’t have anything smart to say here. Everything is harder on no sleep. Training’s harder, eating properly is harder, wanting to go at all is harder. If you’ve got little tornadoes at home like I do, you already know the difference between the week you slept and the week you didn’t.

Sort the sleep out before you sort out anything in a tub. It’s free and nobody sells it, which is probably why it gets talked about least.

6. Be boring for longer than feels reasonable

This is the one my younger self would’ve scrolled past. Nothing worth having in a gym arrives on the schedule you’d like it to. You keep showing up, the numbers creep, and the day you notice you’re stronger turns up a long way after the day you started getting stronger.

What I spent my twenties buying instead

Now the rueful bit. I bought a lot of tubs in my twenties and I bought most of them for the wrong reasons. Lightning bolts on the front. A name in a font that looked like it was shouting at me. A page in a magazine with a list of ingredients I couldn’t pronounce and a blend I wasn’t told the amounts of.

I wasn’t buying a product. I was buying the feeling of having done something about it, on a Tuesday, without going to the gym. That’s the mistake, not the money. The money was a few hundred bucks over a few years and I’d survive it. The mistake was that every one of those purchases was standing in for the six boring things above.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that the order matters. Show up, learn the movements, add weight, eat, sleep, and keep doing all of it for a lot longer than feels reasonable. Then, once all that’s handled and running on its own, have a look at what else is available to you.

Go do this with mine, if you’re an adult and the rest is handled

Two things, and I want to be very clear about who they’re for.

They’re for you. Grown adults, 18 and over. None of this is for my kid and none of it for yours. What a young kid who’s just started training needs is dinner, a full night’s sleep and someone patient to show them what to do, and any parent reading this already knows that better than I could tell them. I’m not putting anything in a tub anywhere near this part of the conversation.

For the adults: CREATINE MONO is the least glamorous thing we make, and that’s exactly why I’d point a new lifter at it once the basics have gone boring and automatic. ESSENTIAL AF is the daily one. Neither is exciting and neither is trying to be.

If your attendance is patchy and your sleep is a mess, buy neither of them yet. Go and fix that first. It’ll do more for you than I can, and I say that as a man who’d quite like to sell you something.

That’s what I’d tell him if he asked, and roughly what I’ll say when he does, spread over about ten years so it doesn’t all land at once.

Stay Swole,
Justin 💪

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.