So, you want to pack on some serious mass and carve out those abs? Here’s a step-by-step introduction to the iron game that will get you started on the right foot.

Don’t expect overnight miracles—building a body takes time, focus and consistency. The good news is that the first 6-12 months is the time when you will probably make the most dramatic gains.

However, it is important to learn proper form and basic safety rules now to make sure you don’t injure yourself down the road when you’re pushing heavier weights around.

Training

As a beginner, you can train more frequently than intermediates and advanced trainers. The reason is simple: as you get more experienced, you learn to push your muscles harder and inflict more damage that takes longer to recover from. Beginners, on the other hand, get sore but bounce back quicker since the muscular damage isn’t as severe.

If the word “damage” makes you flinch, don’t worry. It’s a good thing for a bodybuilder to incur limited muscle damage, because it nudges the body to recover and overcompensate (grow) slightly to prepare for future workouts. This is what bodybuilding is all about—a continuous cycle of one-step-back, two-steps-forward, repeated over and over on a weekly basis.

With this in mind it is also easy to see why rest and sleep is extremely important, since this is the time when the body does the two-steps-forward phase.

So, instead of training each muscle group once a week, you can start with a twice a week-schedule and play it by ear from there. Furthermore, we’re going to split the body into two separate days: Upper body except abs on day 1, lower body plus abs on day 2. Since we’re aiming to train each muscle twice a week, this means we can do day 1 and 2 on Monday and Tuesday, for example.

Then we do day 1 and 2 again on Thursday and Friday, leaving Wednesday and the weekend open for rest and relaxation. The following week you start over on the Monday-version of day 1 and so on.

We want to learn the basics, so I’ll focus primarily on classic exercises. Once we’ve mastered these simpler exercises we’ll move up to Intermediate territory with a new focus on more complex compound exercises. At this point, it is more important to learn the form and get the right “feel” for each exercise rather than lifting as heavy as possible.

Some exercises, like lat pulls and most shoulder raises, are particularly hard to target the right muscle do the work if you use too much weight. Start easy; pick a weight you can do 10-12 strict reps with and work your way up when you’ve got the technique down pat. Keep track of your workouts—jot down your poundage and number of reps in a notepad or designated training log for future reference.

Supplements

Sport supplements can be a great aid in your efforts. Not only can smart use of supplements ensure you get enough of all nutrients you need to function well, you can even give yourself an extra edge in terms of strenght, recovery speed and injury prevention.

However, navigating the seemingly endless list of supplements with the most fantastic claims can be challenging for experienced bodybuilders and daunting to beginners.

What works? What is just hot air and marketing baloney? And once you have figured out which products actually work, what brand do you pick? Do you go for the bargain from the company you’ve never heard of and risk getting disappointed, or do you go for the big name brand and get fleeced?

These are all valid questions and will be dealt with in due time, but let’s start simple. As a beginner, you only have two real must-haves in terms of supplements. In a perfect world you don’t even need that much, but in reality it is very hard to get what you need from regular food alone.

I am talking about the two fundamental bodybuilding supplements: Multivitamin/mineral tablets and some type of supplemental protein.

The Mental Game

Work, family commitments and plain ol’ laziness are parts of life that will tug you away from your scheduled gym session. Don’t get me wrong, your kids’ school play is important, but there’s a big difference between making a rare exception and routinely letting your workouts slip down the priority list.

As stated many times before, focus and persistency are crucial to bodybuilding success, so here are a few tips on how to get your mindset right.

Your first step is to define a long-term goal in as specific terms as possible. “Getting in shape” is not good enough. What exactly are you looking for? Gain weight in the form of quality muscle? Lose fat? How many pounds up or down are we talking about, specifically? Increase your strenght? In that case, by how much?

The goal is to establish exactly where you want to go and how you will measure your success. Make a realistic assessment of how long this should take and write down to the target date. Being a beginner this may be hard to estimate, but make your best guess and allow for some wiggle-room if your guess was off target.

Once you have your goal and your timeline defined, establish a number of milestones, say a month apart, that you can use as checkpoints to make sure you’re on track. This helps make the end goal less daunting, since adding 10 lbs to your bench press by next month is within your reach while adding 80 lbs by April can feel far-fetched and discouraging. As an extra incentive, you can give yourself a little reward when you hit your target.
The more detail you can get in there, the better. Repeat whenever you are faced with temptation, delays or anything else that could make you deviate from your plan. You will find that the more you run through the ideal day in your mind, the more like it your day-to-day life will become.