For fat loss and building muscle, what is the best way to start out at a gym?

The 5 things you need to start doing today:

1. Eat what you want.

It’s not uncommon to see girls munching on salads, and not eating carbs because they demonize them. I mean, common sense is eating healthy, and you’ll look healthy. Right?

But, it’s more than that.

When you really start looking at nutrition with better understanding, you will be able to eat all the foods you really love without the guilt.

It comes down to knowing the nutritional value of food. That salad might provide you some vitamins, mineral, and fiber, but you need protein and fat too. You can eat chicken or steak, eggs and waffles, you name it, you can eat it, basically.

The ultimate hack to nutrition is being flexible with it. I would recommend you to log what you eat and learn about the nutritional value of food.

I use a free app called MyFitnessPal.

2. Heavy metal rocks.

When you’re eating enough to fuel your body, and you add weights to the equation, magic happens.

Not really magic, but you get the point.

Ideally, you would want to strength train 3 to 5 times a week. What I mean with strength train, is to actually pick very heavy stuff.

More specifically, I want you to squat, deadlift, bench press, and do overhead presses; at least once a week each.

Your week could look something like this:

Day 1 & 4: Squat + Deadlift + accessory work (like glute bridges, lunges, hip thrusts, etc.)

Day 2 & 5: Bench press + overhead press + accessory work (like side raises, cable work, push-ups, etc.)

Day 3 & 6: Rest

Day 7: HIIT.

Why those exercises?

They are known as compound exercises and those recruit the most muscle fibers in your body. You’ll force your body to push it harder and use more energy.

If you continuously get better at these exercises, you’ll see great results.

3. Do some cardio.

Don’t spend hours in the cardio area.

You don’t have to, unless you enjoy it.

Who does though?

In fact, too much cardio can be bad for fat loss.

If you really want to be time efficient, I recommend that you do high-intensity interval training (HIIT).

These should take you less than 15 minutes and if you really go hard, 8 minutes can be enough.

A really effective HIIT workout you can try is sprinting for 10 seconds, jogging for 30 seconds, sprinting for 10 seconds, jogging for 30, and so on. However, when I say sprinting, I mean running at your 100% of effort.

Try doing 10 rounds of this workout. Pick a day and do it once a week.

4. Ditch the scale.

For real.

A scale is a great tool, but it’s very misleading.

What I’d rather have you doing is taking “before and after’s,” and measurements of your body (legs, arms, waist).

The reason is that we tend to associate that number on the scale with fat when in reality it is a combination of several things.

If you’re on your period, you’ll be bloated and the number will be higher. 

Same if you ate a lot of carbs the day before, you’ll be holding in water. Or if you trained hard and your muscles are depleted, or even if you haven’t gone to the bathroom.

5. Follow through.

You can be the best most committed person from Monday to Friday afternoon, but you can offset an entire week of work if you don’t follow through the weekend.

I know this to be a real pain with many people. The weekend comes, and it’s packed with alcohol, late night munchies, and being lazy.

Look, this isn’t a crazy fitness magic tea or anything like that – good results yield from hard work. That’s it.

If you really want it, you have to work for it. Cliché, I know.

Don’t throw away all of your hard work on two days of partying and binge drinking. However, you can drink, party, and have a life, it all comes down to being flexible and maintaining a healthy balance.

A little party never killed anybody, but too many parties will definitely kill your efforts.

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Train hard, kick ass, eat well, be consistent, and have a plan.

Lucky for you, you can have access to an incredible blueprint that has helped many people achieve their physique goals.

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