How to Start Bodybuilding: A Beginner's Guide
By CoachAk · · 7 min read
If you are wondering how to start bodybuilding, the good news is that the basics are simple: lift weights two or three times a week on a program that slowly gets harder, eat enough protein and enough food overall, and sleep well. You do not need to compete, take supplements or train for two hours a day. You need a sensible plan, done consistently, for months.
The short answer
- Train 2 or 3 days a week, working every major muscle group, with full-body sessions to start.
- Pick a handful of basic exercises and learn to do them well, mostly in the range of about 8 to 12 reps.
- Push your sets hard, but not to the point of losing form, and add reps or weight over time.
- Eat about 1.6 to 2.2 g of protein per kg of body weight a day, with calories at or a little above maintenance.
- Sleep at least 7 hours a night, and take rest days.
- Expect strength to rise quickly and visible muscle to come more slowly. Judge progress over months, not weeks.
If you have a health condition, an injury, or have not been active for a long time, speak to your GP before you start.
How to start bodybuilding: the training basics
Bodybuilding simply means training to build muscle and change how your body looks. For a beginner, that comes down to a few rules.
Train often enough. The NHS advises all adults to do muscle-strengthening activities that work all the major muscle groups on at least 2 days a week. For building muscle, the American College of Sports Medicine's 2009 position stand on resistance training suggests that beginners train 2 to 3 days a week, using multiple sets with loads they can lift about 8 to 12 times.
Use full-body sessions. Training every major muscle in each session means each one is worked two or three times a week, and a missed session does not leave a muscle untrained.
Learn a few key movements. You do not need dozens of exercises. Cover these patterns and you have trained your whole body:
| Movement | Examples |
|---|---|
| Squat | Goblet squat, leg press, back squat |
| Hinge | Romanian deadlift, hip thrust |
| Horizontal push | Machine chest press, dumbbell bench press, press-up |
| Horizontal pull | Seated cable row, chest-supported row |
| Vertical pull | Lat pull-down, assisted pull-up |
| Vertical push | Dumbbell shoulder press |
Machines and dumbbells are great places to start: they are easier to learn, and you can add barbell lifts once you are confident.
Work hard enough. A set only builds muscle if it is challenging. Aim to finish most sets with about 2 or 3 good reps left in the tank. If you could have done ten more, the weight is too light. If your form falls apart, it is too heavy.
Get a little better each time. This is progressive overload, the most important idea in building muscle. Add a rep, or a little weight, whenever you can. The ACSM suggests increasing the load by about 2 to 10% once you can do one or two reps more than your target on two sessions in a row. Progressive overload explained shows a simple way to do it.
Write it all down. Record the exercise, weight, sets and reps every session. Without a log, most people lift the same weights for months without noticing.
A simple first week
Here is a three-day full-body week. Do 2 or 3 working sets of each exercise (the ACSM recommends multiple sets for building muscle), after a couple of lighter warm-up sets on the first exercise. Rest a day between sessions.
| Day | Session |
|---|---|
| Monday | Goblet squat or leg press, machine chest press, seated cable row, Romanian deadlift, dumbbell shoulder press |
| Wednesday | Leg press, lat pull-down, dumbbell bench press, hip thrust, dumbbell curl |
| Friday | Goblet squat or leg press, chest-supported row, machine chest press, leg curl, triceps pushdown |
For each exercise:
- Pick a rep range, such as 8 to 12.
- Choose a weight you can lift for 8 good reps with 2 or 3 left in the tank.
- Each session, try to add a rep.
- When you reach 12 reps on every set, add a little weight and start again from 8.
Start lighter than you think. The first two or three weeks are for learning the movements and finding your starting weights, not for proving anything.
Eating to build muscle
Training gives your body a reason to grow. Food gives it what it needs to do so.
Protein. A 2018 meta-analysis by Morton and colleagues in the British Journal of Sports Medicine pooled 49 studies and found that gains in lean mass levelled off at about 1.6 g of protein per kg of body weight a day; the authors suggested up to 2.2 g/kg to cover nearly everyone. For a 70 kg (154 lb) beginner, that is roughly 110 to 155 g a day, spread across your meals. The free protein calculator works out your number, and how much protein to build muscle covers good food sources.
Calories. Muscle is hard to build in a big calorie deficit. A 2022 meta-analysis by Murphy and Koehler found that a deficit of about 500 calories a day was enough to stop lean mass gains on average, even though strength still went up. So, as a beginner:
- If you are lean or slim, eat a little above your maintenance calories and let your weight rise slowly.
- If you are carrying a fair amount of fat, eat around maintenance. Beginners can often lose some fat and build muscle at the same time.
The free calorie and macro calculator gives you a starting point. Weigh yourself regularly, look at the weekly average, and adjust from there.
The rest of your diet. Plenty of fruit, vegetables, whole grains and water make it easier to recover, feel well and keep going. You do not need special foods or supplements to start.
Recovery: sleep and rest days
Muscle grows between sessions, not during them.
- Sleep. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society recommend that adults sleep 7 or more hours a night. A short night now and then will not ruin anything, but regularly short sleep makes training feel harder and recovery slower.
- Rest days. Training the same muscles hard every day leaves no time to recover. With full-body sessions, leave a day between them.
- Soreness. Expect some muscle soreness in the first few weeks, especially after new exercises. It usually fades as your body gets used to training. Soreness is not a measure of a good workout.
What to expect in your first months
Strength comes first. In a small 2007 study in the Journal of Applied Physiology, Seynnes and colleagues had seven young adults train their thighs on a leg-extension machine three times a week. Strength rose by about 39% in five weeks, far more than muscle size, which is why early strength gains are usually put down mostly to the nervous system learning to use the muscle better. Muscle size changes were detectable after about three weeks and had reached around 7% by five weeks, on a scanner rather than in the mirror.
Visible change takes longer. Expect it to take a few months of consistent training before you or anyone else clearly notices a difference. Progress photos taken in the same light every few weeks help you see what the mirror misses.
Everyone responds differently. In a 2005 study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, Hubal and colleagues gave 585 men and women the same 12-week arm-training program. Changes in muscle size ranged from a 2% loss to a 59% gain. Compare yourself with your own starting point, not with anyone else.
The first year is the fastest. Beginners build muscle faster than at any later stage, then progress slows each year. How much muscle can you build naturally? gives realistic numbers.
Common beginner mistakes
- Program hopping. Changing your routine every couple of weeks makes progress impossible to track. Give a program at least a few months.
- Copying advanced lifters. Long, complicated programs built for people with years of training are not what beginners need.
- Going too heavy too soon. Lifting more than you can control raises your risk of injury and stalls your progress.
- Not tracking anything. No log, no idea whether you are progressing.
- Under-eating protein. A common nutrition mistake, and an easy one to fix.
- Expecting a transformation in a month. Building muscle is slow. Consistency over a year beats intensity for three weeks.
Where coaching helps
Starting is when the right habits are easiest to build, and when wrong ones are easiest to pick up.
With one-to-one coaching from CoachAk, you begin with a welcome questionnaire, then get a training program written for your schedule, experience, equipment and injury history, with sets, reps, effort targets, rest times and coaching cues for every exercise. Your daily calorie, macro and step targets are in the app, and you log your workouts and daily weight, which is shown as a smoothed trend. You can send form-check videos for your coach to reply to while you learn the lifts. Each week, a short check-in covers your training, nutrition, sleep, energy and any questions, and your coach replies in writing with what went well, what changes next week and why.
If you want to start properly from day one, apply for coaching, or read more about muscle gain coaching.
Free newsletter
New articles, straight to your inbox
Get new CoachAk articles by email: training, nutrition, contest prep and health, explained plainly.
Free. Unsubscribe any time. Your email address is used only for this newsletter, is never sold, and is not shared with anyone else unless the law requires it. Privacy policy