The concept of putting together a plan aimed at your goals can be daunting.

“Should I run? Should I jump on the elliptical? Or are group fitness classes the best option?”

“When I lift weights, should I lift heavy? I’ve heard low weight, high reps is best for losing weight… Is that true? What exercises should I do?”

The list of questions goes on and on, and there’s so much information out there nowadays that you’re likely to find a number of different answers for each and every one of those questions.

It doesn’t have to be daunting, though.

Let’s start with the basics, and for the purposes of this article let’s focus on maintaining or manipulating your weight (since getting to a healthy weight and maintaining a healthy weight is the primary concern for most people in our society).

The Basics

For starters, ANYTHING is better than nothing. This goes for exercise selection and amount of actual exercise.

So if you’re doing nothing, start by doing something. Get up and go for a walk. Try out a few machines at the gym this week.

Just get going.

We overthink our fitness (and nutrition) all the time. We can simplify it to energy in vs. energy out, and make quite a bit of progress on that concept alone.

Energy in is the food you eat. Energy out is the work you put into exercising.

We’re talking exercise in this article, so energy out is the focus. Just increase it.

Guidelines for Exercise

So we’ve established more exercise is better than none. I’m gonna guess that’s not groundbreaking news for you.

What are the actual guidelines for how much we should exercise each day, or each week?

The global recommendations on physical activity are as follows… Healthy individuals between the ages of 18-64 should aim for at least:

• 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity (or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity).
• Muscle strengthening (weight lifting) activities on at least two days each week.

We can make it even simpler.

Try and exercise for 20-25 minutes each day.

Evidence of the Benefits

A recent study gives us some insight into how much simply meeting these guidelines can improve your weight and overall health. A total of 1.7 million Americans were surveyed and asked to self-report their physical activity levels.

Those who met at least one of the guidelines (either aerobic or weight lifting) were 30 percent less likely to have obesity.

People who met both criteria were 50 percent less likely to have obesity.

Now, there can certainly be some flaws when you’re asking people to self-report data about themselves, but when it’s a sample size this large (1.7 million people), I think we take some of this data seriously.

The best way to lose weight, or maintain a healthy weight, is to do both aerobic and weight training.

Coaching Cues

We’ve already gone over quite a bit about what to do with your fitness, but let’s outline it as clearly as possible.

If you’re not exercising, start doing so. Aerobic physical activity can create drastic and immediate improvements in your health. I wouldn’t recommend going from doing nothing to trying to run a 5K, though. Let’s take it slow and build over time.

Start walking, and start small. Walking is the single most impactful and beneficial exercise anyone can participate in. It’s low impact, so you won’t feel overly sore or fatigued from doing it. But it WILL start to improve your health after the first bout.

Walking is a total-body exercise, so you’re getting incredible bang for your buck (or in this case, incredible results for your time). You can do one 20-minute walk, two 10-minute walks, four 5-minute walks… Whatever is most feasible.

If you’re already walking, up the ante a little bit. Try going for a jog outside, hop on the treadmill and push the pace up, grab an elliptical, or take a ride on your bike or the spin bike in the gym. You can even start counting your steps with the goal of slowly increasing them over time.

There’s nothing magical here. It’s all about progressively increasing your workload over time.

And if you’re not lifting weights, let’s start. There are some very easy ways to get started if you’re unfamiliar with lifting, and it starts with machines.

Virtually every gym has machines you can use. All you have to do is select a weight and get working. The machines are great for beginners, because they put you in a safe, fixed range of motion. Machines can teach you proper form, which will allow you to graduate to doing dumbbell or barbell work later, if you want.

Start by doing three sets for each muscle group. Work at getting really good at each movement. Once you feel you’ve mastered the movement, increase it to four sets. Later, increase it to five.

And so on, and so forth.

The physical activity guidelines say to do at least two days of weight training, so you can start by breaking things down into an upper body day, and a lower body day. Later, if you want to add in more work and continue to progress, you can break the movements down into lower body, pushing, and pulling. Or break things out by muscle groups (shoulders, arms, chest, back, core, legs, etc.).

You don’t need to be an expert to get good at this stuff. Quite frankly, everyone sucks at exercising when they start.

It’s all about committing to these guidelines and slowly progressing over time. If you want to lose weight, or maintain a healthy weight, just pick whatever interests you the most — aerobic exercise or weight training — and start there.

Get moving, and get yourself headed in the right direction. It’s that simple.

Good luck!

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Thanks for reading! I hope you found this article helpful. If you have any questions about this topic, please feel free to contact me. I’d be happy to help! And if you’re interested in coaching to reach your goals, or take your fitness and nutrition to the next level, check out my coaching page and let’s talk about what plan is best for you!

CGF