A phrase I cannot stand is, “It’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey”. Really? Without a destination, there is no journey, so it must have some importance.

That said, when it comes to strength training, I must admit, the journey does matter more, because the destination keeps changing. It’s difficult to focus on more than one area at a time, and there will be times when you want to emphasize conditioning, or mobility, losing fat, or building muscle.

Since I’m beating down hackneyed cliches… a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. It’s a good idea to start out on the right foot. I can’t believe I just wrote that.

Here are ten tips for beginners.

1. Get your mind right. Fitness is more about “want to”  than anything else. Whatever your fitness goals, whatever your motivation, you must have the right mindset. Viewing training as something you have to do, instead of something you want to do, gives it too much gravity. Training, even really hard training, shouldn’t be seen as a chore. It should be simply another choice you make in a balanced lifestyle.

2. Get strong. Everything else becomes easer when you become stronger. Even if your goal is to lose weight, you’ll do it faster and easier by getting strong. Strength is often defined as work capacity. The most effective weight loss programs require a pretty high work capacity, because they tax the body severely with little rest. A good strength program will build muscular endurance first, and give your muscles, including the heart and lungs, a solid foundation. Should you decide to become a bodybuilder, being strong will make it easier to shape your muscles any way you wish.

3. Build muscle. Even if weight loss is your goal and primary motivator, you’re best off building muscle first. Muscle is more efficient than fat, burning calories longer after exercise and processing food better than fat. Remember, you can only tone muscle.

4. Dial in your nutrition (This leads to another tired cliche, “You can’t out train a bad diet”, but I won’t go there). It’s impossible to overstate the importance of good nutrition. Not only is a good nutrition plan vital to strength goals, it’s necessary to help recover from training. Lifting weights, even just your bodyweight, stresses the entire body, including the central nervous system. Recovery is part of the training process, and nutrition is a major factor in recovery. Eating a healthy diet full of proteins and healthy fats and carbohydrates allows you to train hard, build muscles, get strong, get lean, and get ready to do it again.

5. Recover. While it may seem a bit pedantic to mention recovery again so quickly after tip number five, there is so much more to recovery than just good nutrition. Fitness is measured by how quickly one recovers from exertion, and if nutrition is recovery tool number one, then sleep is one A. Myriads of studies show the efficacy of a good nights sleep, usually defined as seven or eight hours, on human performance, from the playing field to the office. While sleep is paramount, there are other, more active ways to recover from strength training. Experienced lifters will use active forms of recovery to recharge their bodies. Many powerlifters will follow a heavy squatting day with a two mile walk the next day. Trainees with more modest goals can use something like gardening as an active recovery tool. You make so many of the same movements; squatting, lunging, pushing, pulling, etc. without loads, allowing your body to easily put into practice all the training you’ve been doing with weights. With joints and muscles stress free, your body understands why you’ve been asking it to work so hard.

6. Embrace the eighty/twenty rule. Way back in 1906, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto discovered that eighty percent of the peas in his garden were produced by twenty percent of the pods he’d cultivated. He looked around, and saw that eighty percent of the land was owned by twenty percent of the population, and in business, he noticed that eighty percent of a given company’s revenue came from twenty percent of it’s customers. Also called the law of the vital few, it’s the same in strength training. A casual perusal of any mainstream fitness magazine will show you a bazillion exercises, usually to build arms, flatten stomachs, and lift butts (In Two Weeks!). Serious trainees rely on the standards, just like Tony Bennett. Squats and deadlifts, pushes and pulls, are the most used tools in their kits. The reason is because they produce the best and most consistent results. Remember, elite performers, whatever their arena, aren’t elite because they do the great things great; they’re elite because they’re great at the basics.

7. Focus on losing fat, not just weight. Truly, losing weight is simple (not to be confused with easy): Take in fewer calories than you expend. That’s not really healthy, nor does it produce the desired body composition most people seek. Even if you think you need to lose fifty pounds, you’re better off focusing your efforts on burning fat and building muscle. As I said way back in tip one, muscle is more efficient than fat. It burns more calories post exercise than fat, and it looks better, too. Because muscle is denser than fat, you could lose no weight, and still look marvelous. There is nothing unhealthy about muscle, and nothing healthy about fat. Fat is the weight we want to lose.

8. Train the whole body. Do you want a flatter stomach? Train the whole body. Is a higher, tighter tush your goal? Train the whole body. Do you have a desire to flash some serious “guns”? Train the whole body. All of the compound lifts, the push-up, bench press, pull-up, deadlift, and the squat, involve the whole body. Indeed, they require the whole body to participate. Try pushing against the wall with both hands. Feel your abdominals tighten? Squat into a chair, hold for a second, then rise. Feel your abs tighten again? Now, once again, do those same two exercises, and notice what happens in your butt, your legs, and your back. Your entire body wants to participate, and you’re better off allowing it to do so.

9. Embrace being a beginner. You will make your biggest gains in the first year of training. You’ll add more weight to the bar, do more sets and repetitions as a beginner than you will after you become an intermediate or advanced trainee, so embrace it heart and soul. After a couple of years, adding twenty pounds to your deadlift will be harder than it was in year one, but by then you’ll have the patience and fortitude that comes with experience.

10. Have fun. I like training. I like lifting heavy objects, I like hoisting myself on a bar, I like running, jumping, and playing. If training is a chore, like cleaning the toilet, it becomes just as unpleasant a task. Cleaning the toilet is necessary, and, for optimal health, so is physical training, but if training isn’t fun, or at least not “unfun”, you won’t train. However, if you set some goals, like a repetition maximum of ten pull-ups, build and execute a plan, carry it out, and then test yourself, you make training more attractive than it would be if you did because you felt like you had to in order to get in shape, whatever that means. Trust me, the stronger you get, the better you’ll feel, and the better you feel, the better you’ll do.

These tips guide my training, as well as the programs I write for my clients. Indeed, they are the guiding principles of all serious trainees. I offer them here, in a spirit of community, as a way of making the journey more important than the destination, and the first step in elevating the banal to the sublime.

Bon voyage.