Episode 33: How to Start Your Fitness Journey
Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast! I'm Jayd Harrison (@Jaydigains), a personal trainer and wellness coach. I created this podcast to share helpful tips to help you make gains in your fitness journey 💪
In this episode, I offer tips for beginners who are starting their fitness journey and for those looking to regain their former fitness levels.
The key to starting (or restarting) your fitness journey is to keep it simple—especially in the beginning. Start by increasing your daily activity, especially if you have a sedentary lifestyle. Set a daily movement goal, such as 10,000 daily steps or 150 weekly exercise minutes. It’s also important to focus on building core strength and stability with activities like Pilates, yoga, and balance training. Flexibility and mobility work are crucial for safe and effective workouts as you get stronger.
Links:
Sponsors/Affiliate Links:
Legion Athletics Supplements use code Jaydigains to get 20% off for new customers - Double loyalty points for returning customers
-
Jayd Harrison (00:09):
Let's talk about how to get started on your fitness journey. This is an episode that is specifically for people who are beginners to fitness or people who maybe used to be in shape. Maybe you were like a college athlete or maybe you did track in high school. One common thing that I find a lot of my clients say when they first start working with me is like I used to be in such good shape back in the day, back when I was in high school, back when I was in college, and it's just really, really hard for me to stay in shape. Now. It's hard for me to keep weight gain from happening, and it's hard for me to look strong and feel strong. And it is true when you get older, there's a lot of things working against you as an adult. You're generally less active than when you were younger.
(00:56)
Kids in high school, kids in college, they have much more active lifestyles usually than what most adults do, especially if you have an office job or if you work from home and a home office. So with that smaller amount of activity that you get, because you're usually busy and doing activities that need you to be seeded or sedentary, your body's just going to burn less energy. And it's super important to keep in mind that your body fat is just stored energy. That's your body's energy stored, your battery packs. And so when you're not burning a lot of energy, a lot of times energy that you take in through the food that you eat gets stored right? It gets stored in your belly, it gets stored in your extremities as well. So if you're thinking about getting started and you're just like, I don't know what to do to start this journey, these are my tips.(01:47)
This is the journey that I take my clients on when they come to work with me as a personal trainer or as their coach. The first thing that we want to do is recognize what your body is reading in terms of your overall energy use. If you are sedentary, meaning you spend most of your days sitting still or seated at your computer or whatever, and you spend most of your free time also seated or in front of your phone, then your body probably doesn't burn very much energy. So the first thing that you want to do as you're trying to build up your fitness and get back in shape is you want to get your body using more energy, which means that you're going to have to move more. And so this means that you want to prioritize building the habit of everyday movement. That's number one.(02:41)
So the first thing that I have my clients do when they first come to work with me is set a daily or a weekly movement goal. Now this is a goal that just prioritizes you getting up out of your chair and moving. There's a couple of different things that you can do here. One is you can set a daily steps if you like to walk, if you want to incentivize yourself to get up and go for walks or walk more park far away from your work and walk further or take the stairs more. These are all good ways to get more activity and to get steps in. And a good daily steps goal to set is I usually stay between 7,000 and 10,000 steps. 7,000 is a really good number to shoot for. It's pretty feasible. You have to make a little bit more effort to get to it.(03:27)
Now, for some people, 7,000 steps is really, really hard. If you wear a step tracker or a fitness device like an Apple Watch or a Fitbit or something, the first thing you want to do is figure out how many steps you're taking a day. What is your activity level right now? How many steps are you taking right now? And then you want to gradually increase that over time. So getting more active is going to do a couple of different things. One, it's going to get your muscles being used, right? You'll probably gain a little bit of strength from just getting up and getting moving when your muscles aren't used to getting much movement. This will also help you to burn more calories. Movement requires energy, so your body's going to burn energy to get you moving. And also if you're challenging your muscles, they're not used to moving, you may feel a little bit sore the first time you go for a walk or the first time that you push yourself to move more because your body is not used to that level of activity.(04:28)
So you'll probably also build some muscle which will also help you to burn more energy. And remember, your body fat is stored energy, so the more energy that we get your body moving, get your body using the better here. So setting a daily steps goal is one way to do that. Another way to do that is to set just kind of a general weekly movement goal of a certain number of minutes. So the American Heart Association recommends 150 minutes total of exercise time per week, and you can break that time up however you like. You can break it up in 10 minute intervals, go on several 10 minute walks a day or do some other activity. You don't necessarily have to walk anything that gets you up and moving in some way counts here. So that includes going for a walk, but it also includes things like going swimming or getting up and cleaning your house, tidying up your house where you're up and moving, anything that gets your heart rate going, gets your heart a little bit more elevated where you're breathing a little bit heavier, maybe you break a little bit of a sweat every minute doing that, whatever that activity is, that counts towards your weekly movement goal.(05:39)
So different ways that my clients like to use kind of check off their weekly activity is they go for bike rides. They sometimes will take dance classes like Zumba or an exercise class at their local gym. Usually exercise classes are pretty cardio focused, but anything that gets them up and moving counts here and they just try to get that 150 movement goal. Sometimes people need to break that up into like what does that mean on a daily basis? Well, you can get 150 minutes total by just doing five times a week for 30 minutes. So on five days a week you get up and you do some kind of movement for 30 minutes. That's a good place to start. And you don't have to do just 150 minutes total. You can do more, but that's like the minimum. So figure out something that you can do, whether it's getting your daily steps, goal setting that if that motivates you to get up and moving, then use that.(06:34)
Or if you want to try other things like other types of activities, then use the weekly number of minutes goal. And again, anything that gets you up in moving counts. I also have clients who garden, they garden or they do yard work or housework, some who play with their kids or take their dog out to play. So anything that gets you up and moving counts here. So you can use your imagination and you don't have to do the same thing all the time. You can try different activities just as long as by the end of the week you've done 150 minutes total of something that gets you up and moving. This alone will help you to improve your heart health, your cardiovascular health, and build a little bit of muscle because again, anything that's more than what you were doing before is going to move the needle.(07:26)
Now this is important because when you inevitably reached a point later on in your fitness journey when maybe you're more advanced and you're used to working out pretty intense intensely several days a week, there are going to be times where you're just not going to be able to get your workouts in. There are going to be times where you may not be able to show up. Maybe you get sick or maybe you're going through a bout of a mental health challenge or maybe someone in your family gets sick and you're not able to show up for your workouts and stick to your workout routine. You can always fall back on your daily or your weekly activity goal and maintain that as a bare minimum. You could always fall back on that. If you do, it's a lot easier to get back into your workout routine from a baseline level activity versus what happens to a lot of people where they just stop all activity altogether, they hit a bump in the road and they just stop all exercise and activity.(08:26)
If you try to maintain a base level of activity, whether that's his daily steps goal or the weekly minutes, you will have a much easier time getting back into your workout routine, and it will also help you to maintain a certain level of cardiovascular fitness and muscular strength to get back into your routine. So activity is number one, and a lot of times what I tell my clients when they have one of those weeks off and they feel really worried about losing all their gains, like, oh, I missed my workouts this week. The first thing I ask them is like, okay, well did you get any other kind of activity in? And a lot of times what they'll tell me is, well, yeah, I rode my bike and I went on a hike and I did yoga. And I'm like, well, then I'm happy. I'm happy as your trainer.(09:15)
I'm really happy with how that week went. It's okay. You didn't do the program, but you were taking care of your body. And that is the most important thing that I want you to keep in mind when it comes to starting your fitness journey. The number one goal that I teach, the philosophy behind my training and my philosophy of fitness is the goal here is that you're taking good care of yourself. We're learning how to take good care of our bodies, and sometimes that just means getting up and moving. Sometimes we can't push ourselves for whatever reason, but just getting up and getting moving is still taking care of yourself. And for me as a coach, when I hear my clients are still taking care of themselves, they're still getting active, they might not be doing the workouts that I prescribed, but they're still active, that is a win for me.(10:05)
And that's something that I celebrate for my clients and I try to get them to celebrate as well. It's like, maybe I didn't get my workouts in, but I stayed moving. You deserve a pat on your back if that's the kind of week that you've had. So I want to make sure I make that super clear. The baseline is activity. Activity comes first and you can always fall back on activity. Now let's talk about how to actually build a workout routine. You do not necessarily have to sign up for a gym membership if you want to start working out. In fact, there's a lot of things that you can do with no equipment at home to start laying the foundation for your fitness. The number one thing that you want to focus on when you are just starting to out is building up your core strength and stability.(10:47)
If you spend the majority of your days seated or sedentary, it's likely that your core strength, and by core I mean the muscles in your torso, so your abs, your obliques, your erector, spinney, all of those muscles that hold your posture upright, they're likely weak and you know that they're weak. If you look at your posture and your posture is like this and you have a really hard time holding yourself up straight. So that needs to be the primary focus of any workouts that you do when you're first starting your workout journey. So in my beginner level, level one programs that I create for my clients, we spend a lot of time doing exercises that force you to keep your torso muscles fired up and rigid. So this can be exercises like learning how to do Pilates imprinting, which I think is a really good skill to master.(11:41)
First Pilates imprinting is where you're laying face up on the mat and you're engaging your abs and your deep, your pelvic floor muscles and pushing your lower back against the mat down into the floor. It doesn't look like much, but it is a challenge, especially for people who aren't used to doing any exercise. And you want to learn how to hold that engagement while you do other exercises, and you can add on movement to this where you force yourself to keep that imprint while your legs are moving. So things like single leg drops with your knees bent, and then you can make it even more complicated by turning it into a dead bug by adding in arm movement. You can also do this type of exercise in a quaded position, like a tabletop position where you're just holding your body while you're trying to do some kind of a balance movement like sticking your leg back for a bird dog or something like that.(12:35)
Planks are a great way to challenge your core stability side, planks and variations of that. So a good beginning workout series for beginners will include a lot of those types of exercises that really focus on getting you engaged, getting your brain connected to your abs and your other core muscles, and teaching you how to hold your torso rigid. Because when you go to do other exercises that are a little bit more complicated, that squats, deadlifts, pushups, you need to be able to perform those exercises to do them safely. You need to be able to hold your core in nice and tense without any movement in your spine. So those kinds of exercises will help. So prioritize building core strength. And if that's all you do for your workouts, that's fine. You can do just like a daily little 10 or 15 minute mini workout where you just do a few exercises to strengthen your abs.(13:33)
That is a great way to start. And that's actually the focus of my ready set fit program. My ready, set fit program is a program of daily tiny little mini workouts that are like 10 to 15 minutes long. And their focus is a lot on building core strength because that's assuming you sit every day and you sit all day. That's that's probably the thing that you need to work on the most. And then you also want to start to work on balance. Balance training or stability training is very similar to core training where you practice standing and progressively more unstable positions. And this does the same thing for your legs, muscles as it does for your core muscles. Doing the stability work for your core. It helps connect your brain to your muscles so you start to learn what it feels like for those muscles to work.(14:23)
And it also is teaching you how to hold your body under tension in space, in alignment with good posture. So you can do stagger stance type exercises, single leg standing exercises, and then add more challenge by making your arms move in a certain way. Or you can step and then step into a single leg balance. So I have my beginning clients do a lot of those types of exercises as well. And really between core exercises and balance exercises, that's a really great way to start, and you could just practice that for a couple of weeks in the beginning of your fitness journey and make significant gains. And that's why I also like to recommend people if they're interested in starting a fitness journey. Doing yoga or Pilates is a great way to start because those styles of training are very heavily focused on building core strength and stability as well as flexibility, which is the other thing that you want to work on as a beginner.(15:25)
You want to learn what it feels like to stretch your muscles as well as work them. And a lot of people who spend the most of their day seated have poor flexibility. And when you have poor flexibility, it means that you're going to have a harder time moving through the exercises that are going to help you to build muscle like squats and dead lifts and stuff. Poor flexibility is going to impact your ability to do those and to do them safely. Tight muscles can pull at your joints and cause pain, like we talked about earlier today at the beginning of stream, having tight quadriceps is one of the main reasons why people experience knee pain when they're working out. And so I give a few tips for how to address that and to loosen up the quadriceps. So practicing flexibility, just stretching, static stretching, dynamic stretching, foam rolling are great ways to work on your mobility, and that should be your focus as a beginner.(16:22)
Build up your cardiovascular fitness by getting moving more, and then just start connecting your brain to your muscles with some stability work, some flexibility work, and some core stability work. And then you can build on from there. But that is what I would recommend that you focus on starting. And if you try these types of exercises, you'll probably notice that it's not hard in the sense of you feel like you're dying by the end of the workout, but it is challenging. This type of training is challenging, but it's challenging in a way that I find is very easy for beginners to do or anybody at any level. Stability work, balancing work and just stretching can still be quite challenging, especially if you're sedentary. So you still might break a sweat from this kind of exercise and burn more calories, but you have a very low risk of injury, which is something that a lot of beginners are really worried about when they start working out.(17:25)
It's like, I'm afraid that I'm going to hurt myself by doing it wrong. There's pretty low risk of injury with stabilization exercises, especially if you are following a program that starts very, very simple and then progresses very gradually. And for my clients, when I first start working with them, I keep everything super duper simple, and then we progress very gradually to more complicated stuff as they get stronger or as they need more challenge. So you want to keep it simple, simple, simple, simple. When you're getting started, build up your confidence, build up your strength, because remember when you haven't been moving much just a little bit, it's going to go a long way. I.
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
