Can I Start Weight Lifting if I've Basically Never Exercised?

ou are a very impressive person, which has motivated me to, you know, actually do stuff, and try to improve...as a human being, which involves exercise, theoretically! But here's the thing: I have not exercised a single day in my life. I don't run, I don't know how to use the machines at the gym I went to once for 10 minutes before fleeing in terror, I don't stretch, I'm barely even willing to bike up a hill. I know you were a runner before you started lifting, so you were at least adjacent to being in good shape, but I am not. Can I just roll up to the gym and start lifting heavy things? Will I break something? Will I die? Should I do cardio first because my heart is probably slowly atrophying? Also the answer to this is probably "get a personal trainer to show you how to do things, idiot," but I don't really have that kind of budget.

—Katie

It is in my nature to be combative, so let’s just try this out and see how it grabs you. The fleeing in terror? That was exercise!! If you’ve ever walked anywhere, that is exercise; if you’ve ever picked up, I don’t know, a bag of groceries, that is also sort of exercise. You are, firstly, better at this than you might think.

Some training programs are ridiculously convoluted, and many people think lifting weights is about attacking individual muscles one at a time—curls for biceps, ab crunch machine for abs, calf raises for calves—until the point of exhaustion. But you can also combine moves and get a lot done with less effort. In other words, you can make working out endlessly complex or actually pretty accessible and simple.

There are a lot of kinds of exercise that are just doing stuff your body is naturally good at. For instance, heavy lifting, including squatting, benching, and deadlifting are not random movements pulled out of the ether; they are movements that maximally use as many muscles as possible, together, to move as much weight as you possibly can while mimicking the movements you’re making in your everyday life. Picking up a heavy object? That’s a deadlift. Getting your luggage into the overhead bin? Pressing. Lifting movements come from how bodies move naturally and most efficiently. Of course, different body proportions have slightly different advantages in different lifts, but my point is: Lifters, coaches, and fitness pros didn’t choose core weightlifting movements randomly. They continue to choose them because we can be at our absolute strongest by training these compound movements.

So, that said: I did do a lot of running training before I started lifting, which prepared me for strength training very poorly. A balanced training program can include lifting, but I was terrified that if I touched a weight I’d suddenly look like peak Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I just skipped it. I also played sports in high school, but that, too, involved no lifting whatsoever. I’m not naturally muscular at all, and it’s hard for me to build muscle (as it is for the vast majority of women). So, I didn’t start from precisely zero, but I was closer to it than you might think. Even now, four years later, I don’t think I’ve gained more than ten pounds of muscle overall.

Walking into a lifting-focused gym was also intimidating, and mine just happened to be the dirtiest, most poorly-lit box filled with men who had huge, rippling arms and teeny little legs. There was equipment, plates, and dumbbells scattered all over the floor. I wore several layers of clothing and headphones and mostly pretended not to hear anyone who spoke to me; I went in with a plan, having practiced my lifts. The first time was extremely uncomfortable, not least because you have to figure out where even things are; the second time less so, the third time even less, and so on. By the second month, I barely thought anything about what people would think of me and how to accomplish what I wanted to do.

I approached learning lifting by learning the movements from books (Starting Strength and New Rules of Lifting for Women were two of them) and videos online (Layne Norton and Girls Gone Strong are good resources), and using, I kid you not, a Swiffer as a “barbell,” just practicing alone in my house. Even then, I wasn’t doing the movements perfectly, but it gave me a chance to see what moving the various parts of my body in the right order felt like, and to concentrate on using my muscles together and where I should be feeling everything. Between gym sessions, I’d practice some more, a few minutes each day.

At first I couldn’t lift the barbell for any of the movements. I started with dumbbells until I got strong enough to handle the barbell setup for the major movements (squat, bench, deadlift, row, overhead press). That happens much faster than you may think; most popular beginner heavy lifting programs (like StrongLifts or the GZCLP program) instruct you to add weight (usually five pounds, but you should customize it to your needs) every session each time you lift in the beginning, so even starting from nothing you might be able to go from a bodyweight squat to a squatting the barbell, which is 45 pounds, in about three weeks).

In contrast to me and my spindly experience, there are many women out there who have done little to no exercise before, yet they can walk up to a barbell and, say, squat close to their own bodyweight, or bench more than they ever thought they could. You might surprise yourself! But either way, absolutely everyone starts somewhere.

By the way, a just-in-case detail: You shouldn’t actually roll up and start lifting the heaviest weight you can budge. As I’ve mentioned before, form matters, and warming up matters, too, so please take care of both of those things.

And if you have any health concerns or are worried about your mobility, old injuries, aches and pains, or whether your level of fitness right now can support a new workout routine, check in with your doctor, who can help you figure it all out.

So, what I’m saying is, no, you don’t have to already be preternaturally strong or fit to start lifting. Learn from trusted sources, start slow, master the movements before throwing on weight, and see where it takes you.

Yes, You Have To Learn To Use Your Muscles

Dear Swole Woman,

I recently bought a beautiful sofa on Craigslist, and thought the thought that I always think when I move furniture, which is: “Wow, I bet this would be easier if I were stronger! Gee, if only there were a way for a human to make herself stronger!” So I started Mark Lauren’s You Are Your Own Gym beginner program, which he says “anyone healthy enough for rigorous exercise should be able to do.” I walk a mile and a half every day, and run five miles when I feel like it, so I figured this included me. But then I strained all the tendons in my arms and shoulders, resulting in days of pain. Adding insult to literal injury, my actual muscles felt entirely unworked. This also happened to me when I tried working out in college (on the terrible machines in the student gym). I just hit the tendon-death point before the good-muscle-soreness point, and then I can’t exercise, carry books, or lift coffee to my mouth for a week. What gives, Swole Woman? Is it normal to have such pathetic tendons? Is there a way around this?

Please help me. 🙁

Signed, Pathetic Tendons

A number of you have written to me lately about your tendons. Who is telling you all that your tendons are problematic and that you have to resign yourself to a box labeled Bad Tendons? Is it Gwyneth? I will fight her.

Without getting terribly medical, and barring a medical issue I’m not qualified to evaluate anyway, here is the thing: learning to use your muscles takes work, especially if you have not used them in a while, and even more especially if you’ve never used them much before, ever. You have to learn to find them and feel them in your body and activate them when you need them to work for you. It’s a very cool feeling — you cannot flex your traps or pecs on your enemies without knowing how to find those muscles in your brain and make them pop. This is the mechanism by which Beyonce can flex her individual butt cheeks in the 7/11 video, for the record.

But for many people who haven’t engaged physically very much with the world, doing things with your body may not be as intuitive as you might assume, given that you’ve lived in your body all your life. We all bend down to pick things up from the waist like arthritic zombies without using our hips or knees and throw our backs out doing it, or carry bags with the weight on our internally rotated shoulders (deep internet cut incoming). We all have bad physical habits that come out when our muscles fall into disuse, so we have to re-learn where they are and what they do. This is entirely normal.

A thing I’ve read often is that what separates elite lifters from less-trained people is they have insanely high levels of muscle activation — years of training has allowed them to learn to turn on and work their muscles all in concert, to the muscles’ capacity. Per Greg Nuckols, “Strength is part neural, and part muscular.” A less-trained lifter can use some of their muscles and get them to fire at roughly the right time, but often not to their capacity, and not as well as an elite, because they have less practice and training doing it. Their muscle utilization might be more like 50%, with muscles coming and going more as they please and less at the lifter’s mental command, where an elite lifter may be upwards of 90%, purely out of habit, and maybe even without consciously focusing quite so hard. This has basically nothing to do with how absolutely strong either of their muscle groups are; it’s entirely the act of turning them on and making them work together. If you’ve ever heard of the “mind-muscle connection,” that is basically what this is.

A big part of using the right muscles is using correct form for whatever you’re doing. To use your legs, you first have to get in the right position (bar over midfoot, shoulder blades over bar, shins touching bar, back straight) and FEEL the tension in your hamstrings and butt. Those muscles should be screaming to launch your body into the air, at that point. If you don’t do any of these things and just do what all the spindly-legged men in my gym do, where you just sort of walk over to a barbell, flop down at the waist, grab it, and then drag it up through the air by heaving your spine with all your might, all you’re doing is giving yourself back problems.

To know what good form is for any given exercise, you may either have to engage a trainer or do a little research, but even a 30-second bodybuilding.com video will tell you what exercises you should feel where.

Beyond knowing what muscles you are supposed to use, you then have to invest the time in using them correctly. You can flop through any exercise as fast as possible and feel real macho about the number of reps you completed, only to end up with tender knees and elbows and shoulders by having put the effort where it doesn’t belong. If your muscles aren’t coming through on the lifts you are doing, you have to focus on what is called “rep quality” — good form performed in a slow, controlled motion where you really focus on squeezing the muscles you should be using. It’s not even necessarily going to happen the second you do it; it may take a few tries, or several, or many. This is practice, and practice involves some failure. Expect it.

This can be hard when you’re impatient to get a workout over and done with, impatient to get stronger, impatient to grow, impatient to shrink, whatever your goal is. But good exercise that works demands your focus. Picture yourself curling a 10-pound dumbbell in a slow, controlled movement, where your entire brain is one with your bicep through the full range of motion, for 10 reps. Now picture yourself with a 20-pound dumbbell, doing a curl where you have to heave your wrist, elbow, and shoulder and torso to get the weight up, for 15 reps. With each rep, your entire body gets more exhausted and the range you move gets shorter and shorter.

In which scenario do you think you actually developed stronger and more shapely guns? Which one will you hurt more in a bad way tomorrow? Which one will hurt in a good way? Perhaps you don’t know, so I will tell you: it’s not the way where you used more weight and more reps. The first way is the better way. It is absolutely true that you can get better muscle development, better exercise, and more overall fitness from relatively less weight and relatively fewer reps, IF you do them with intention, good form, good control, and a lot of focus on the muscles you should be using in the movement. (Please note I’m saying *relatively*. Weights that are as heavy as you can tolerate for a given exercise and number of reps are crucial to cultivating strength and swoleness and even a tiny, modest amount of “toned” muscle. This does not happen with 2-pound dumbbells for 100 teeny pulses; sorry.)

It’s also possible you’re trying to do too much too quickly, so start with less weight than you think you can possibly do, just for now. It’s better to do a relatively lighter weight with great form and add weight next session than to lift with your ego, hurt yourself, and ingrain a bunch of bad habits like lifting with your joints and tendons and thrusting your spine through the air like a dancing snake rather than just using the muscles you want to be using.

This is not a problem with your tendons. Be gentle with your poor tendons. Protect the tendons at all costs by learning to work your muscles instead, with weights those muscles can manage. This takes practice and is, again, something that all people who lift weights are continuously working on and trying to get better at. You cannot get the muscular rewards of lifting without giving yourself the time and space, mentally and physically, to let your body learn the right way of doing things.

How to Learn to Lift (and Which Shoes to Wear)

I read your annotation of the BuzzFeed piece where a guy claimed to gain 20 pounds of muscle in 3 months, and I didn’t even know that you’re not supposed to squat in running shoes! I’m worried I’m doing everything wrong now. What is the right way to lift weights? How do I learn? — M.

There are a lot of little things like that, and they are tough to learn without some dedicated effort and time (by the way: squat in flat, stable shoes, like Chuck Taylors)*. Women actually have a bit of advantage here because they are generally coming to lifting fresh, and don’t have to unlearn bad habits from information passed around between friends and bros in a gym. But I can’t teach you everything here, there are many books about this stuff and The Hairpin is only paying me so much money.

There are a few different ways to learn the correct way to lift. This isn’t the same as doing everything perfectly, or never, ever getting injured. But lifting weights is a technical thing, like all sports, and just because a resource makes it look easy doesn’t mean that’s all there is to it. The average workout article in a women’s magazine isn’t going to tell you, for instance, all the nuances of correct dip form, or that doing dips with a chair or bench is kind of bad for your shoulders. And yet, I defy you to find a magazine workout that doesn’t tell you to do chair dips. They all do. Magazines love chair dips.

Once you get past the beginning levels, there are right and wrong ways of doing things, and investing the time in learning the right way to them from the start will pay off many times over. The time I’ve spent learning to lift weights correctly pales in comparison to the time I’ve spent studying workouts in the backs of magazines, and I know which one I regret.

There are 3 basic ways to learn to lift correctly:

  1. Get a personal trainer. Trainers can be a little bit of a mixed bag and not all of them specialize in heavy lifting or will teach you to do it correctly (see: the trainer in the aforementioned BuzzFeed piece who instructed the writer to eat a psychotic 440 grams of protein per day). But there are many great trainers, and some people work best with someone motivating them. Unless you have some sort of medical condition or injury, don’t listen to any trainer who tells you you’re not “ready” to learn how to lift heavy weights; don’t stand for anyone who pushes you through several rounds of football shuffles and burpees instead of just learning to do a squat. Try going to a gym equipped for heavy lifting (with barbells, plates, and racks) and ask the front desk if they have a list of personal trainers, either on staff or not, who could help you learn “to lift heavy weights” or “powerlifting (squat, bench, deadlift) or “weightlifting” (snatch, clean and jerk). Focus on finding someone who is willing to teach you the skill of lifting weights, the idea being that eventually they can set you free to work out on your own, if you’d prefer, with maybe occasional check-ins. If you aren’t sure the personal trainer you’ve engaged knows what they’re talking about, here is a test I completely made up and would be very interested to know if it works: ask the trainer to warm up to a “work weight” of a squat. If they do not break parallel when they squat, or squat in squishy running shoes, or pad the bar with a foam roll, run away.

  2. Go to a seminar/take a class. These are little bit harder to find, but many gyms hold seminars (either for individuals or groups) to teach people to do the core lifts. Again, this is a good one to ask your local gym about. For instance, the South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club offers a four-week, eight-session class on powerlifting (they also used to offer individual sessions but I can’t find what happened to those).

  3. Read, take video, make friends. Perhaps you are like, Swole Woman, those first two options sound great but they are mad expensive! True, but one, they are an investment not just in your health but in your knowledge. You are learning to do a thing that eventually, you will mostly be able to do by yourself for free! (Or for the cost of a gym membership). But if you can’t swing that, there are a lot of cheap or free resources for learning about lifting. Stronglifts is a popular website/app/resource where you read about doing the core lifts correctly. The bible of starting strength training is, erm, Starting Strength, which has all the tips on things like not lifting in running shoes and much more. There are videos from the author of that book, Mark Rippetoe, and from people like Alan Thrall and Omar Isuf, and Johnny Candito. Once you start lifting yourself, you can record yourself with your phone (prop it up against other gym equipment) and post the video to forums like bodybuilding.com or the r/Fitness and r/xxfitness subreddits for other people to critique you and help you with problems. Nothing will be as good as a skilled and knowledgeable person form-checking you in reality, but many people subsist this way.

However you get started, it’s worth knowing that, like running or yoga or anything else, you can jump in with relatively little knowledge, but you almost certainly can’t do it in a vacuum in isolation forever (if you do actually want to get stronger, and building muscles does require progressing your weights). Your form will drift as you add more weight, and you may learn bad habits without even realizing. Just like you may have to learn to correct your stride once you start running longer distances, or spend extra time maintaining hip flexibility to get your pigeon pose, lifting is a fight toward good form as much as it is toward strength. Getting started in a way that gives you an infrastructure for maintaining good habits, and therefore your health, is the safest and best way to approach.

*you can also squat/deadlift barefoot or in socks, but some gyms won’t let you for safety reasons. Dropping weights on your shod feet hurts, but it hurts even more barefoot.

Hi — I’m Lindsey, co-host of beloved podcast Who? Weekly, where we have accidentally(?) started a meme(?) where we get our listeners to say (and comment) “Good Form, Bella Thorne” on the Instagram of a Disney ‘Who’ who constantly posts Instagrams of herself working out. It’s fun to say, honestly. Try it! But what I’m writing to ask you, Dear Swole Woman, is if this Disney Who actually HAS good form? I would hate to think that we’re not only spreading false information that this woman has “good form,” but also that we are encouraging her via Instagram comments, to keep up this Actually Bad form.

Hi friend of the column Lindsey Weber of Who Weekly! What a fantastic and enlightening podcast you have that everyone should listen to. I hope Bella Thorne is not taking fitness advice from Instagram comments; indeed no one should.

Bella Thorne represents a thing I love, which is the cult of personality as it relates to fitness. What is the magic of celebrities that you just look at their Instagram and before you know it, you’re wearing several waist trainers on top of each other and drinking Fit Tea? Mysteries for another column.

I personally did not find that Bella Thorne constantly talks about working out; her photos are 99 percent selfies. However, I looked through and found some posts about working out, and I’m sorry to say Bella Thorne’s form is Actually Pretty Bad.

Here is Bella Thorne using a Smith machine to do squats, which is bad because it often encourages bad form and prevents you from developing stabilizing muscles (which includes your core; odd for someone who talks about her core so much). She also has the bar padded with a towel, which is usually bad because it destabilizes the weight on your shoulders. It’s like a running shoe, but for your traps, i.e., bad.




Here is Bella Thorne doing incline pushdowns, pausing to look at the camera. Always keep your neck neutral when possible, Bella Thorne, or you risk injury.



Here Bella Thorne says she is doing something called a “viper wood chop,” which either is not a thing or is something her trainer made up. The only Google results for “viper wood chop” are her video.


Lastly, here she is in the cable cross doing…definitely not what she should be doing. Even her followers are not fooled and many of the comments express confusion and concern.


If you are looking for a celebrity with good form, I recommend Daisy Ridley. Here she is deadlifting 176 pounds with pretty great form, though she too is wearing the wrong shoes (seriously, everyone, get Chucks or do it barefoot):

She does other good stuff too.