Training at Hygieia – What to Expect When You First Start Training

This article was first published on 1/4/2021. Since then, we’ve learnt more about the concerns and questions that new lifters have when they first start training and decided to give this article an update.

Welcome to Hygieia Strength and Conditioning! We are a gym that specialises in getting older adults through strength training using barbells. If you are considering starting your training with us and looking for more information to be sure if this is really for you, we hope this article gives you an overall view of how training with us will be like.

As mentioned above, we focus specifically on strength training using barbells. We believe that strength training should be your primary focus because an increase in your ability to produce force (strength) will also positively impact other fitness attributes altogether (for example, speed, power, balance, stamina, and, to a certain degree, your flexibility and cardiorespiratory endurance—the list goes on).

In practice, your daily activities will become easier when you get stronger, and you can do it without overly worrying about getting injured. It also allows you to explore more demanding physical endeavours with better performance. Being physically strong benefits your quality of life when you are young but exponentially more as you get older.

People use many different modalities to train for strength. However, we believe that barbell training is superior to others. Here are why:

Firstly, barbells’ ergonomic nature allows you to load them while performing movements that closely resemble your basic daily movement patterns, such as sitting down and standing up, bending and picking an object off the floor, pushing, pulling, and throwing—all can be done using barbells.

Secondly, the resistance can be precisely adjusted to your strength level and your progression rate. Our lightest barbell starts at 5 kg, and we can increase the load by as little as 0.5 kg. As you get stronger, you can load the barbell to hundreds of kilograms and perform the same exercises without any change in the movement pattern. This is something that most dumbbells, machines, kettlebells, or resistance bands can’t offer.

The First Session: Learning the Movements with Us

During our first training session*, you’ll be introduced to the exercises: Squat, Press, Deadlift, and Bench Press.

*Depending on the lifter’s learning pace, teaching these four movements might take two sessions.

During the teaching process, you will perform each exercise in sets of five reps. Your coach will gradually increase the load on each set till you get to a weight that’s slightly challenging while still performing the lift with good form.

We teach you by giving you short instructions to follow. Most instructions are verbal, and sometimes, we reinforce them with visual or tactile feedback.

As you perform the lifts, your coach will continue to observe your movement and give reminders (cues) to adjust the movement when necessary.

Some of our existing clients have commented that we do not explain many of the “whys” during this first session. While understanding what you are doing is important, many things are happening during your first hour of barbell training. We want you to be able to replicate the movements consistently without overwhelming you with additional information. However, don’t worry; keep asking us questions as you go along. We’ll be happy to answer every single “why”.

The Logic Behind the Four Exercises

As mentioned earlier, you’ll learn the four basic barbell lifts in your first session: Squat, Press, Deadlift, and Bench Press.

We select these four exercises based on three criteria:

To use as much muscle mass as possible
To use as much weight as possible
To move in the longest effective range of motion

To fulfil this, we utilize compound movements. Compound movements cross multiple joints of our body, thus using more muscle groups of different functions to work together to perform that movement. As we utilize more muscle mass during these compound movements, we can usually load it with higher resistance than single-joint exercises. Compare a Squat to a Biceps Curl.

We will teach you to perform these four exercises safely and efficiently through the longest effective range of motion to achieve a specific adaptation: strength.

If gaining strength is your main goal for fitness, great! That’s a perfect match! However, most people don’t think of strength as their main goal for fitness. Regardless, your increase in strength can positively impact your bone density, muscle mass, body fat, as well as the other fitness attributes we mentioned earlier.

These Four Exercises Are Enough for Now

When you first start learning to play the guitar, you’ll find out that you can play many songs simply with just C, D, and G majors so it makes sense to focus on these first. We don’t need to know all the chords at the start, just like we don’t need 15 different exercises and 20 other variations to get stronger. Doing so will be counterproductive.

Most of our lifters have never touched a barbell before training with us. To a true beginner, learning and practising good form are essential parts of the process. Thus, learning and mastering these four exercises will give you better outcomes than “focusing” on twenty.

The benefit of starting with just these four exercises remains true even if you are “familiar” with strength training. You can get more consistent improvement in strength by doing these four basic exercises consistently rather than doing them every few weeks by rotating them (or, even worse, randomising them) with 20 other exercises.

As we go along, if you are a suitable candidate, you will learn the Power Clean or Power Snatch. We might also add assistance exercises, such as chin-ups or dips. More on this later!

You Will Start with a Simple, Basic, and Generic Program

Workout A

Squat: 5 reps x 3 sets
Press: 5 reps x 3 sets
Deadlift: 5 reps x 1 set

Workout B

Squat: 5 reps x 3 sets
Bench Press: 5 reps x 3 sets
Deadlift: 5 reps x 1 set

Above is the template for your first program, the Novice Linear Program (NLP). Everyone will do the same program with different weights, depending on their strength level, and gradually increase the weight a little bit at a time.

Our goal in this first stage is very general—to get you stronger every single time you come to the gym. Gaining strength is going to be useful no matter what other goals you have in mind (sports performance, weight loss/gain, bone density, etc.). Once the NLP is exhausted, your program will evolve to one that is more specific to you.

The beauty of the NLP is that it’s very basic, meaning everyone will do the same thing, yet it works for everyone at the beginning. As we begin our coach/lifter relationship, we are unfamiliar with you as a person and an athlete. We do not pretend to be able to write a highly individualised training program for you based on our initial consultation, nor do you need it anyway. However, after running the NLP for a few weeks, your coach will start to get to know you better and will be able to make decisions on your training

Lastly, the program is simple. Not many variables are involved in NLP; thus, if something stops working, adjusting those specific variables is not hard. A linear algebra problem with two variables is more straightforward than one with 4. Again, we want something practical—if something simple works, why make it complicated? In the future, as your training level becomes more advanced, your program will be more complex anyway. Let’s save the headache for next time!

Scheduling Your Training

The Starting Strength Model we follow works best with a training frequency of three times per week. This is because, with the stress we receive during the workout, our body is able to recover and adapt to a higher performance level within 48-72 hours.

We recommend leaving a 1-2 day gap between workouts. For example, you can schedule Monday-Wednesday-Friday or Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday.

“What if my schedule doesn’t allow me to do it three times per week?”

We found that in the earlier stage of training, most lifters can still make consistent progress with a frequency of two times per week.

If you are doing that, you can space 2 to 3 days in between training. For example, Monday-Thursday or Wednesday-Sunday.

“How about once a week?”

We understand that sometimes that’s the maximum amount of time you can carve out of your busy schedule. If you train consistently once per week for one whole year, you are still training 52 more times than if you didn’t train.

The downside of training at this frequency is that the rate of progress is very slow, and sometimes people get stuck very early on.

There are two reasons why it happens:

Your performance level will dip back to baseline if you are not training with enough frequency and consistency. More on that here.
As you get stronger, the required amount of stress also increases. At one point, it’s impossible to accumulate enough stress from one workout. Think of it this way: You can combine your meals in one day into one sitting. However, eating one week’s worth of food in one sitting will be impossible.

With that, my two suggestions are to manage the expectation of progress and to try to find a way to train on the second day of the week. Discuss with your coach if you are thinking of doing so independently.

Common Concerns After the First Session

We understand that there can be different points of view about our approach to training. However, the main complaints usually come from a few angles: too monotonous, it doesn’t feel like you’ve been working out, and too much downtime.

Our highly structured training is often seen as too rigid and boring. This is understandable, especially since most people do more than four types of exercise and program them in different sequences, reps, and sets. We feel that this is a worthy sacrifice for quantifiable progress—which is the weight on the bar. Moreover, the program will evolve as you progress, and I’m sure your coach will consider more of what you like as you finish your NLP.

Another comment we often hear is that the first few training sessions do not feel like a workout. Many people attribute a good workout to being out of breath and feeling sore afterwards, which you might not get especially if you have been generally active.

For that, you can dive deeper into what we categorize as “exercising” versus what is “training” here. However, to keep it short and sweet, we want to agree that the most important point of training is improved performance. More specifically, for our purpose, is measured by the weight on the bar.

We can achieve this without making you feel destroyed after every workout.

The first training session will not be too tiring, and you may only feel some slight soreness around the shoulders or thighs for the next 2 days. The training will feel easy the first few weeks before starting to feel harder. After the third session, people usually do not feel any soreness after the workout anymore. This sensation of “soreness” or being “overworked” will only come back occasionally when the training stress peaks, your training program changes or resuming training after taking a break.

The last concern that people point out is that our training could be faster-paced: “We rest more than we work out.”

Your coach usually insists you rest for a few minutes, although you feel you can do it again immediately. While at the beginning, 1-2 minutes of rest should be sufficient, you will soon realize that short rest at heavier weights will compromise your performance for the following set.

Most lifters will often start negotiating for longer rest when the weight on the bar starts to feel heavy for them. Then, 4-6 minutes of rest is appropriate, depending on the difficulty level.