I do something I enjoy 4 days a week, Brazilian Jiujitsu. I augment it with something I don’t - strength training once a week for half an hour. One warm up set of 12 reps and one working set of 5-8 reps to complete failure. I use machines to avoid injury from failure. 5 exercises- leg press, chest press, row, lat pulldown and overhead press. It’s a pretty intense workout. My goal is to keep the muscle I have and prevent injury in jiujitsu. I feel like I get like 40% of the weight training benefit for like 20% of the work that I’ve put in before with barbell training (strong lifts, 5/3/1, madcow, etc).

I’m a woman who just wanted to be strong and I found that hiring a personal trainer was best for me. Not only do they tell you what to do but they walk you through the exercises. Having good form is really important.

What’s your goal? Weight loss? Build muscle? Have more stamina?

For weight loss, I would start with diet. I lost 60 pounds in four and a half months just calorie counting with no exercise - but it’s really hard to out-exercise a bad diet. Losing that weight made it easier for me to start exercising. I do a combination of hiking and running to try to keep things interesting. A “couch to 5k” type program is working well for me.

I used to be a gym rat and have won a few bench press contests in my day. The trick is to make it an enjoyable routine. You don’t have to kill yourself, but you do need to push yourself a bit. Do a few body parts a day and maybe two exercises per part. I did chest and shoulders one day, back and triceps the next, then legs and biceps. Lift slow and use weights you can control. No jerking or bouncing. If you hate doing something, don’t do it. Find something else that works.

Walk very far distances. Before cars, a lot of people walked between towns. It was completely normal and safe if you know what you’re doing. I have friends who sometimes walk up to twenty miles to the neighboring towns because they swore off vehicles, and they show up and people are flabbergasted like they’re thinking “holy crap it’s a miracle you must be gods” as if the friends didn’t just have to use two feet for two hours to get there. But that’s what a human is supposed to do, biologically that is. And you don’t even have to run, in fact it’s better for your body and mind to walk than run.

Also, sleep well and stay hydrated. Sleep controls metabolism. Metabolism controls fitness. Bad sleep equals bad metabolism. Same goes for hydration. Drink a pint of water every time you piss. That’s probably why there are drinking fountains next to bathrooms. All this advice has worked for me too.

• Skip rope. Grows stamina, heart and other muscle strength, breathing strength, probably balance as well
• Commute/move around by walking/bicycling. Chain with the public transport if possible and if the distance is otherwise too big (I have cycled tens of thousands of kilometers just to get to school/work/leisure time places)
• Check out the multi-stage fitness test! Here’s one video you can try out!
• Try out dancing! If it’s fast enough, it can be one of the most effective fitness activities there is! Trains your body, trains your brain (familiarize and learn movement patterns and pace them with them music) and trains your social skills (if you do dances that require partner(s))

Some tricks:

• Gamification. Habitica as an example. Take/infuse your favorite game mechanics to your exercises! Come up with a nice reward system!
• Follow progress. Write down the reps, time periods done and other information to see that you have actually developed! You can play with making charts to visualize this even further!
• Distract yourself while at it. Watch a movie, listen at music/podcast
• Build some kind of a exercise plan. At the gym as an example. What you do, how often, how long breaks and how often, what muscles it affects. Alone or by the help of someone else
• Don’t do it alone! Exercising with friends can be at least double the fun!
• Challenges! “I will do x amount of x, before x o’clock, x times in a day, x days in a week!” You can also challenge friends to do the same stuff and even come up with a chart or start using an app that follows everyone’s exercise for some competing!
• Start with a too easy plan that you do less often. Rise up the reps and the cooldown in between with the slightest (It’s not exercise but I started being less at the computer by 1min in day 1, 2min in day 2, 3min in day 3 etc. Now I’m at 166min/day)! This helps building a new habit. And don’t be afraid if you fail to do stuff a couple of times - try again or lower the requirements. A little is always better than none at all!
• Find cheap equipment at recycling centers! I like tennis and found a racket or two in 20€ in an excellent shape (they can cost hundreds as new)!

Some gamification ideas:

• Collect resources through reps. You can build stuff with them - buildings and villages, machines, whatever!
• Collect followers through reps. Come up with a cause that can make it fun!
• Collect strength, wisdom, power through reps. Beat up more and more difficult opponents and reach godhood (or something else)!
• Advance in evolution with reps. Start as the smallest speckle of life, eat, grow, mutate and become the most epic creature there is!
• Advance a quest line or something else with reps. Become a squire and then a knight and later a king or save up the world little by little or whatever!
• Collect particles with reps. Build protons, neutrons, electrons with them and further build every atom there is in the existence!
• Build up a factory or something. Reps can be money.
• Draw a Tetris box on the paper. Come up with activities/reps and determine a shape for each. Then fill your Tetris box with those shapes by doing the required things! You can make different box sizes, shapes and build even level categories that include many different levels (like, Easy category which has smaller boxes, mediocre that has bigger ones etc)

Remember: Make it as fun as you can, and you’ll create a habit more easily!

The first question you should ask yourself is what you want to achieve, beyond just saying “to be fit”, and be honest with yourself. Do you want to be stronger, bigger, more flexible, better endurance, etc…?

If your main goal is to just stay overall fit and flexible as you age, yoga is a great inexpensive option that you can do at home without fear of other people judging you (if you got social anxiety). Get a yoga mat and try out a yoga session, you might get pleasantly surprised. Down Dog is a great app that generates sessions for you based on your time, experience level, etc…

By the sound of it though, you are currently looking at training in a gym doing weightlifting, since you’re mentioning stance and bracing. In that case the best advice would be to stay the hell away from fitness influencers while you’re getting accustomed to the gym.

The industry is rife with grifters that are making a living criticising all sort of things and telling you to DO THIS THING IF YOU FEEL THIS TOTALLY NORMAL THING DURING YOUR SET (looking at you Squat University) because they know many people who go to the gym are insecure since it’s a completely new environment and prefer to be told what to do.

Simple fact is that there is no one size fits all. People are built different which means your friend with a short torso and and long legs will need a different stance than your friend a long torso and short legs, etc… Unless you got a competent PT to help you, you’ll need to find out yourself what works for you.

Find a beginner program that fits your goals and schedule and stick to it, and don’t worry too much about doing the movement perfect. It’s takes time for your nervous system to get used to a new movement. Don’t expect your deadlifts and squats to move perfectly, it takes time and repetition. Experiment with stance width, grip width, etc… to find out what works best for your body.

And remember that your body is more resilient than you might believe. Don’t worry too much about your aches and pain, being sore is normal and not harmful, often your brain will play tricks with you and makes it worse the more you worry. Barbel medicine (which is run by actual medical doctors) is a good source if you got fitness influencer induced exercise anxiety.

Good luck on your journey and remember, the most difficult mile is the one from your house to the gym :)

Edit: some links to help with the technique/bracing confusion you got.

A level headed video talking about lifting technique.

How to brace, explained by the current world’s strongest man (bad/clickbaity title unfortunately)

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My general advice though - start small, and build up what works for you. Move your body, drink water, try to establish healthy eating habits with all the colors (greens, vegetables, whole grains, etc).

Whatever you do won’t be wrong. It’s always a good thing to do a good thing for your body, whether its big or small or a regime or a once-in-a-while thing.

I saw a funny meme of someone in a train taking a picture of 3 old bald guy with a white beard and a fat belly that looks the same. I was thinking that if i grow old and dont take care of my body i will look like them. And i dont want that. So im doing sports now. I just wrote “workout no equipment” on youtube and did that for the last 40 days for now. It works. I was not fat but slightly chubby. Im still thick but i see my muscle well now

A portion of your regime, must absolutely focus on diet.

If you have a gym membership, do stronglifts 5x5 to start. It’s a scheduled workout plan with basic compound exercises, meaning, they don’t focus a single muscle, but a movement instead. Ease into it, all of them need a degree of technique so you don’t injure yourself in the process. 3 days a week to start is good, don’t push yourself this early on. Your body needs to be made aware that working out is something that will happen constantly, and that takes time. It will suck at first, everything will hurt, even muscles you didn’t even know were there. You will also be more hungry. Eventually, DOMS (muscle pain after working out) will become tamer, only then should you think about increasing your workout sessions.

If health is your primary motivating factor, be mindful of what you eat and how much you sleep. We need every kind of nutrient, but if at the end of the day you have a calorie excess, and you’re not working out like a madman, you will gain weight. Mind you, most of the calories we burn aren’t burnt on a treadmill, we just burn calories by being alive. So, better to have a healthy diet with some cheat days, than stress about what to eat and what not to eat.

It’s important to note that fitness is not really a project with a beginning and an end - it’s a journey that you will be on for as long as you live, basically. As such, you ideally want to find things that:

• Can sustainably fit into your life
• You truly find joy in doing

For example, I used to think that the only viable form of cardio was running, and that I needed to be running for the sake of my health. The problem is that I fucking hate running, I consider it to be boring as shit. Hence it was always an uphill battle to run for me.

In its place, I’ve found cycling to be an endless source of fun - I don’t really have to try hard to go cycling, because I yearn to do it as much as I can reasonably fit in.

So I recommend that you try different things until you find something that you really enjoy.

Other than cycling, I really like strength exercise. I used to have easy access to a gym earlier in my life, which is unfortunately not true where I live today, so to get strength work done, I do a routine of body weight exercises. This is by no means the perfect way to become stronger, but you really shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good. The best fitness activities are the ones that you can consistently do indefinitely.

Finally, two things that caused problems for me at the start of my fitness journey:

Having neglected strength work for all my life gave me some muscle imbalances that didn’t correct themselves by just doing regular workouts, I had to consult with a physical therapist to learn how to counteract these years of inactivity. The same may or may not be true for you.

Being overweight posed a big challenge at the start of my fitness journey - higher-intensity exercises can really hurt when your organs are a bit cramped by fat. After a huge struggle with dropping my weight, I noticed that a lot of exercises that previously hurt a lot no longer do. This may or may not be applicable for you either.

Diet is really important. Eat light breakfast such as museli, oats etc, lean meat, egg for lunch and dinner. And A little exercise is all you need.

If you have a Switch and a TV, I’d recommend trying out Ring Fit!

That game has been my primary fitness source since 2020. It makes the exercises very approachable, and also engaging. You really don’t need any prior exercise experience to hop in and play it, and it’ll help ensure you get a well rounded workout in.

Definitely start light. And don’t rush to increase your reps or time or anything like that. Even just 5 pushups a day. Get in the habit and make it a part of your routine, like brushing teeth. Then after it’s something you don’t forget to do, just increase it a little every few weeks or months. Even just 10 minutes is good, but if you can eventually get up to an hour, that would be better. Warm up for more rigorous exercise, do some walking or some pushups. Hell, even just having a daily walk is a great way to exercise especially if you have some good sights nearby.