7 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Lifting

all right what is going on everyone so in this video I want to share with you guys the top 7 things that I wish I knew when I started lifting because if someone had just told me these things I would have either gotten results a lot faster or would have saved a lot of time or wasted energy now for the record I started lifting when I was 15 years old I'm 28 now so that's 13 years in the gym so I'm gonna overlay some clips from my latest upper-body workout as I go through the tips

here and before we get started I do want to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this video and I'll have a little bit more about that at the end ok so the first thing I wish someone had told me early on is that I shouldn't let others influence my own training so easily I see this manifest in a few ways in new lifters and I'd say it's most common in young lifters probably the most dangerous form of this is lifting to impress your friends or other people in the gym usually this results in loading on more weight

than you can handle with good form and so you end up doing things like not squatting to full depth not touching the bar to your chest on the bench press or having your spotter curl the weight up for you and trust me as an experienced lifter I can say that no one really cares how much weight you can move if it's not done with good form and personally when I see a new lifter in the gym I'm the way way more impressed if they have a really nice technique than if they're just throwing a bunch

of weight around so even though it can be very frustrating to see people getting stronger than you faster than you I think it's important to keep in mind that ideally this is going to be a lifelong journey for you and the downside of encoding bad lifting habits early on that then need to be unprogrammed down the road is far worse than just having your buddies getting slightly ahead of you in the beginning now I also see this take form is basically just copying exactly what it is your favorite bodybuilder or influencer is doing I actually

fell for this one pretty hard early on in my career whoever was the biggest and strongest guy at my gym I just take everything he said and run with it and if I wasn't so easily influenced by others I might have been able to find out what works better for me through a combination of self experimentation and healthy skepticism number two is that building muscle and losing fat is actually pretty simple I think a lot of youtubers and influencers sometimes it make the process sound much more complicated than it actually is and because you have

so many different influencers doing so many and things it can be difficult to figure out what it is that actually matters you've got all this stuff at the very tip of the iceberg being thrown at you all the time so it's hard to decipher what it is that's actually driving progress so I had someone tweet me saying that if you can't explain it in a single tweet so on two hundred and eighty characters then you probably don't understand it so here's what I said in response you want to lift weights with good form mostly in

the six to 12 rep range that doesn't mean only in the 6 to 12 rep range mostly with compound movements be consistent train hard have fun eat enough protein be in a caloric surplus to gain size faster in anak lauric deficit to lose fat now I would probably add progressive overload to that which is kind of captured in the be consistent and train hard part but it is important that you're not only consistently showing up to the gym but also consistently progressing with what you're doing I cover this in detail in my fundamental series which

I'll put a link to down below but the bottom line is that while it can be fun to try out different workouts and use fancy training techniques and in my opinion there's nothing wrong with doing that that's important to keep in mind that these main things that are driving the majority of your progress forward especially as a beginner the third thing I wish I realized is just how much genetics matter when I say this a lot of people get discouraged because they assume maybe they don't have the best genetics for building muscle and so there's

no real point in even trying but that isn't the case it simply means that like almost anything we're not all starting on an even playing field which means you should only compare your current physique to your starting place and not anyone elses current physique so you can use other people as motivation but it's important to recognize that even if you copy exactly what your favorite bodybuilder or influencer does it's still possible that you'll never attain their level of physique development because of differences in genetics and also the fact that these social media platforms tend to

select for the genetically elite anyway setting an unrealistic standard for most people so I want to look at this study from who ball and colleagues which had subjects train their biceps and triceps for 12 weeks you can see here from the graph that despite everyone being on the exact same training program there was a huge range of muscle growth that the subjects saw the best responder gained 59 percent and a few people actually lost muscle maybe that was due to overtraining or poor nutrition another point is that all these subjects ran the exact same program

so maybe that implies that maybe a subject toward the bottom end just didn't respond well to that style of training not that they were a non responder to any style of training so this is why it's important to self experiment and try different training styles to figure out what best fits your needs however this doesn't also mean that you should always be hopping around from program to program you need to give it time to see if it actually works and in a blog post on genetics Gregg knuckles argued you need to train consistently for at

least four months or you can have a reasonable idea of how well you respond to a particular training program if you don't put in at least a year of consistent challenging training with a good attitude you probably aren't justified and confidently claiming that you have bad genetics for lifting also quickly on the topic of genetics while you can make a muscle bigger or smaller and that can kind of change how your body shape looks you can't really change the shape of a muscle itself much so things like AB symmetry and bicep insertion distance from the

elbow can't be modified with training so don't be fooled by people who claim to have some special trick for this ok the fourth thing I wish I knew when I started is that your physique is gonna look very different based on lighting your level of pump the time of the day etc I remember when I first started lifting I'd look at my physique in my bathroom and then I go and look at my physique in my bedroom notice that they looked very different in the bathroom I'd look much more muscular in my bedroom I'd look

much less muscular now from my perspective today it's obvious that it was just a difference in lighting but I think the lesson here is that you shouldn't judge your progress on an hour-to-hour basis or even a day-to-day basis because you may actually find that discouraging or destabilizing I think the key is to gauge your progress over a longer time scale and use more objective means to track your progress so you can take progress once or twice a month use average body weight trends and most importantly make sure you're getting progressively stronger in the gym and

these things are going to be a much better indicator of whether or not you're making progress than just constantly checking yourself in a mirror so kind of piggybacking off the last one I think being very analytical about your training and nutrition as a Jenner is a very good thing for driving progress so you should have some kind of workout logbook or app where you track your weights and reps from week to week and I also think that tracking macros or at least tracking your food intake is the best way to know exactly what you're putting

in your body and how you can regulate that to best suit your goals and following a meal plan also can work fine as long as the macros are well suited to your needs but I prefer to set up a more flexible approach for beginners so you don't become a slave to that particular meal plan and you'll be able to be more flexible with your approach over time as your goals and needs change and eventually you'll be able to understand your body and its nutritional needs so that you don't really need to track or follow a

set and trishul plan at all anymore now of course this doesn't imply that you need to track every single set that you ever do or every single bite that you ever eat but having a log of what you're doing for future reference and to see if you're making progress is extremely valuable even if there is some ballpark estimation to the specific numbers okay so number six is that you don't need steroids to build an impressive physique a lot of early lifters get so convinced that in order to build any muscle or have a lean physique

at all then you need to use steroids and this simply isn't true I'm not going to go into any length or detail here I would I think steroid use especially when you're still new to the gym can set up a slippery slope for serious mental and physical health issues down the road especially when you cycle off and lose most of the size you had put on which can then perpetuate the problem over time I'm so anyway I talked about those issues in detail in a steroid science explained video which I'll have linked down below and

also I think there is something to be said for more or less maxing out your natural genetic potential first before even thinking about turning to steroids because this way you're going to be forced to learn how your body really works and how it responds to different training styles without having the magic of steroids in your corner from the outset and the final thing I wish I'd been told when I started lifting is that when you're new to training you are by far the most primed for growth so during this time you really want to take

advantage by getting serious about your training it's common for me to see guys only hit chest and arms for their first year of training and then end up with an unbalanced disproportionate physique that might then take another a couple years of really hard leg and back training to balance back out so while you're still in the newbie stage you want to be intelligent and thoughtful about how you're training because this is the time that you're probably gonna make the best gains of your life and unfortunately there isn't ever gonna be a time that you can

get that newbie period back unless you completely D train again that isn't to say there's any real urgency to the journey here if you don't get everything perfect during your newbie phase that's fine I don't think anyone ever actually does and as long as you're consistent and balanced with your training over the coming years things will eventually balance out as you near your natural genetic limitation anyway um so all other information I want to direct you guys over to my fundamentals video series here on this channel covers all the basics you need to know as

a new lifter and then my technique Tuesday series covers all the basic exercises you might want to include in a training program and if you're looking to make all this stuff more actionable in the gym and recommend checking out my fundamentals hypertrophy program which was designed for people in their first couple years of training and before we go I want to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this video Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform that I used to run Jeff Nippert comp and actually just finished redesigning our website layout over there so I built in a new

video loop that plays on the homepage and revamped all my program pages so Squarespace has really aesthetic designer custom templates in 24 hour customer support they'll use anytime that I run into any issues and they make the entire process of running your own website really simple so if you're looking to get started with building your own website or your own online store and go to Squarespace comm for a free trial and then when you're ready to launch go to Squarespace com /in deburred and that's gonna save you 10% off your purchase of a website or

a domain so thanks again guys so much for watching don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you guys all here in the next one [Music]