Never lifted anything in my life, joined a gym, and I have been on the treadmill for a fortnight because the free weight area at 6pm looks like a place where people know what they are doing. Three days a week is realistic, my goal is general strength and being able to carry things, not competing. Do I start on machines and move over later, or is that a detour that makes it harder to switch?
Pick the programme you will actually turn up for. Three compound lifts, add a little weight when you complete all your reps, write it down. Everything else is a detail you can fix in month four.
Started on machines for about three months and then moved to barbells, and here is the honest accounting of what transferred.
Transferred well: the habit of turning up, knowing my way around the gym at 6pm, and enough general strength that the empty bar was not a novelty.
Did not transfer: any of the balance, bracing or coordination. My first proper squat session with just the bar was humbling in a way the leg press had entirely failed to prepare me for.
Would I do it again? Yes, but I would spend six weeks on machines rather than three months, and I would do goblet squats and dumbbell rows during those six weeks so the patterns were not brand new later.
The bracing point is the key one. A machine holds your torso still for you, which is exactly the skill you are trying to build.
Six weeks with a couple of free weight movements mixed in sounds like the compromise I was looking for.
Disagreeing with machines first. The pattern is the skill, and you learn it by doing it under a load light enough to think about. An empty bar is 20 kg, or 15 for a women's bar, and most gyms have lighter technique bars too, so nobody is asking you to be strong on day one.
Machines for accessories, absolutely. But spend the first three months learning to squat, hinge, press and row with the bar and dumbbells, because you will be doing those movements for the next thirty years and the technique you build now is what you keep.
I do not really disagree with this. The only reason I recommend a short machine block is the confidence problem, which is the actual thing keeping the poster on the treadmill, not a technique question.
Twelve weeks of a simple linear programme, three days a week, from a genuinely untrained start. Sessions were about 50 minutes including warm up. Squat went from the empty bar to something I would not have believed in week one, deadlift moved fastest of everything, and the presses moved slowest and in the smallest increments, which is normal and not a sign anything is wrong. The single biggest predictor of progress was not the programme, it was that I did not miss sessions in weeks four to seven when it stopped being novel.
On the 6pm problem specifically, because it is a real constraint and not a confidence failing. Go at an off-peak hour for the first month if your schedule allows, even once a week, because an empty free weight area is a completely different room. Write your session on your phone before you leave the house so you never stand around deciding. And nobody is watching you. The people who look like they know what they are doing are entirely occupied with their own set and their own reflection.
@beatriz_moll · 3mo ago
I went straight to barbells with two paid sessions with a coach, which is the thing I would recommend over either option in this thread. Not a twelve week package, two sessions: one to learn squat, hinge and press, one three weeks later to fix what had drifted.
It cost less than two months of my membership and it removed the entire question of whether I was doing it wrong, which was the thing actually stopping me from going into that part of the gym.
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