Bodybuilding newbie - advice for a beginner?

[TankEsbie]

Hi ya'll! After reading tons of articles on the site, I decided I should just join the community and talk to the people, haha. My name's Emma, I'm 25 and around 150 pounds.

My exercise/diet history has been all over the place. I've been working out since my teen years, with varying spurts of lifting and trying to get fit and crash dieting to lose weight -- really sporadic and unhealthy with no real information on health or fitness to back up what I was doing. I struggled with an eating disorder around the end of high school and spent most of college recovering from that and learning more about nutrition. I started lifting after college with my friend, and fell in love with it. We were definitely still beginners, but I stuck with it for about a year and I felt the happiest and healthiest I ever have. I moved back to the city after that for a new job, and my fitness goals sort of fell by the wayside.

Anyway, I'm trying to get back in a good fitness routine, and especially learn more about diet to go along with it. I've had a really unhealthy relationship with food for most of my life, and although I'm much much better now, I think I still have ways to go to throw out all the "fad" diet information in my brain and replace it with a more healthy, informed outlook!

Right now I work out about 4-5 times a week. I usually do about 30 minutes of cardio, and about 20-30 minutes of weights/resistance training. When I lift, I usually do 3 different exercises for the muscle groups I'm working. (So like, if I'm doing bis/back, I'll do 3 bi exercises and 3 back). Is this a good place to start?

WHEW that was a lot of explanation. Anyway, I'd love to meet some of you guys and learn from your experiences! If you have any resources/tips/advice/stories to share, I'd love to hear them and get to know you all.

[LunaLifts]

No, that's not a good place to start. Newbies are always recommended to start with an established routine, and for good reason. It's a lot more than picking exercises for muscle groups, there's push/pull ratio, preventing imbalances, sticking to the exercises that will do the most for you, frequency, progression, etc.

A good beginner routine will be 3x a week full body focused on compounds (movements that hit multiple muscle groups), this let's you hit everything often, because your recovery is good. You don't need accessories yet, or ab work, those get worked in all the bigger lifts.

Strong Curves is a great workout for lower body focus if it's a goal for you, there's also a bunch more recommendations (and generally great info) in this thread: https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showt...hp?t=168176343


Diet is simple. Enough calories for your goal, enough protein and fat. You don't need to restrict things, cut food groups, etc. As long as you get enough of your macros, some nutrient dense foods (fruits/veg), and overall calories, you can be flexible with it.

[okayest]

You might want to see an eating disorder specialist or at least a registered dietitian associated with one to help you with your food issues. Telling someone with an unhealthy relationship with food and a past eating disorder that diet is simple doesn't acknowledge that you very likely have strong emotions and beliefs tied to foods and eating. Getting to the source of your issues is how you're going to finally get rid of them.

[AddingPins]

One of the best books that helped me dig through all of the nonsense information on the internet surrounding diet was Girth Control by Alan Aragon. His approach to nutrition is very objective and you're not going to be hit with nonsense and over complicated procotols around eating (meal timing, macro timing etc)

Well done on getting yourself to a better place with your ED by the way. I've been in your shoes and I know how easy it is for the bad information on the internet to take your good intentions (wanting to eat better and be healthier) and spin you right back down the path of ED tendencies and orthorexia. So, be very careful who you go to for guidance. As was mentioned above, a registered dietician would be a very safe bet and it would be even better if the person specializes in EDs. The book I mentioned was very helpful to me and Alan Aragon's approach to writing is in no way triggering, in my experience. If I recall correctly the book also teaches you to calculate sane estimates for your goals.

Your goals are what may be of concern though and you will need to be very honest with yourself. What are your current body stats and what are you current goals with your training?