How long have you been working out at a gym for? Have you ever been to a gym? Regardless of your answer, at some point in your fitness journey you’re going to find yourself feeling a little lost. That’s the purpose of this! This is going to be a beginner to intermediate guide on all the do’s and don’ts when starting out in the gym and some secret pointers that you might not know about if you’ve already been going for a while. By the end of this you’ll be ready to start making your Mr. or Mrs. Olympia dreams come to life!

Rack your damn weights, then follow these 12 rules of gym ettiquette: https://t.co/gTYiRmqaKw pic.twitter.com/STk9sH1Zzl

— T NATION (@T_Nation) May 10, 2015

Let’s get some of the no brainers out of the way first. Make sure you’re wearing gym clothing. Have you ever been to the gym and seen someone wearing steel toe boots? What about a big winter jacket? Let’s not even get started on that one person who thought jeans would be a good idea. It’s suboptimal and quite frankly can be down right dangerous. You don’t want to wear any sort of clothes that are going to restrict your range of motion or worse, your blood flow. Second, it’s just going to look silly and give off an unserious impression. Remember those kids that never brought adequate gym attire in high school? Exactly. Lastly, it’s just not drippy, we’ll get to that later though, the point is: wear proper gym attire! 

Another seemingly no brainer is to make sure to bring a water bottle. I know what you’re thinking: “it’s the gym obviously I’m going to bring a water bottle” wrong. As obvious as it seems, next time you’re at the gym take a look around at how many people have water bottles, it’s probably less than you’d expect. The water fountain is NOT sufficient. If you were consuming a sufficient amount of water during your workout using  only the water fountain, you’d be there for six hours. That or you’re the guy who backs the water fountain up to ten people. Solution? Just put the bottle in the bag bro.

Finishing off the obvious ones with probably the most important thing to ever know when going to the gym. For the love of whatever is sacred to you, please wear deodorant. It is appalling the amount of people that don’t wear deodorant to the gym. There should never be any excuse to not wear deodorant when going to workout in a public gym. Keep it in your bag if you have problems remembering or are someone that needs to reapply throughout the day. Whatever you have to do to make sure it’s on, do it. It will not go unappreciated by the people around you at the gym. Nobody wants to smell you during their workout. 

Now that we got the barebones out of the way let’s get into the workout itself. There are so many different types of workouts you can do and an endless amount of ways to do them. We’re just going to look at some of the most popular types of workouts and some effective ways to get the best results to have you achieving your goals in no time. For this we’ll be focusing on bodybuilding training as it can apply and easily be transitioned to other types of training like powerlifting. 

Starting with bodybuilding, let’s talk about the different splits. There’s the classic push, pull legs, or the Arnold (Schwarzenegger) split. You could also do a more unconventional split like; chest and biceps, back and triceps, shoulders, and legs. Are you a psychopath or maybe just have a sporadic schedule? You could just go in and do whatever you feel like on the day. No matter what split you choose, you’re going to be hitting the same group of muscles so let’s look at some of the must knows. For hitting chest it’s best to hit an incline exercise, a flat plane exercise, and a fly motion. The big three for building the Terminator chest would be; cable flys, incline machine press, and a flat dumbbell bench press. These three exercises will hit all parts of the chest while giving you a good stretch from the extended range of motion. Working the back is just as simple with its own big three; lat pulldown, cable rows, and you could do face pulls or a T-bar row for the last exercise to make sure you’re not neglecting that upper back. Arms are even more simple, it’s important to remember repetition matters more than weight. Biceps you just need a couple sets of simple dumbbell curls and go until failure. Working triceps, you could do a cable pushdown or a dumbbell overhead press. They’re practically the same workout just pushing in different directions, and once again you’ll want to push through till failure to really get that mountain peak on your arms. Legs get a little more tricky. Because of how big the leg muscles are it’s best to always start with a compound lift. What’s a compound lift? A compound exercise is one that hits all parts of the leg in a singular exercise. Some examples are; leg press, hack squat, or bar squat. If you’re a beginner I’d recommend going with the leg press as it is the easiest to control and get the hang of. For legs because of the muscle size it’ll be necessary to do more warmup sets to get the blood flowing and reduce the risk of injury. It’s recommended to do more working sets as well (again) because of the sheer muscle size. It gets easier from here, after the compound you only really need to do one more exercise for each part of the leg. The most effective ones will usually be; calf raises, hamstring curls, and leg extension. Finally it’s time to learn how to get those boulder shoulders of your dreams. The shoulders are interesting because they’re largely what give your size impression. Think of the shoulder split into four different parts; front, lateral, back, and your traps (neck/upper back). Each of these usually just need one exercise each or you could elect to go with a compound lift like a shoulder press to hit all aspects of the shoulder at the same time. It’s a lot of information, and that’s barely scratching the surface of the workout world. 

Now you’ve got some of the gym etiquette basics and some core workouts to get yourself started, but there is one important thing that still needs to be touched. Remember the whole gym attire thing? Not only for the reasons stated previously is it important to wear the right clothes to the gym, but for the mentality. Ever heard the term look good, feel good? Dress to impress? Dress for the job? It all falls under the same umbrella idea. If you’re going to the gym there’s probably a reason, and it’s probably along the lines of wanting to feel good. Showing up to the gym dressed in your favorite workout clothes is a feeling like no other. The confidence or for lack of a better term the aura radiating off of you when you show up to the gym stylish is unmatched. People will be turning their heads looking at you and not just for your muscles. This will help improve your confidence and the gym experience for you as a whole. It’s largely unsaid but this might be the best tip you could get when starting your gym journey. Now that you have all the core concepts for getting started, what are you waiting for? Go get those gains!