Ask Lemmy

Right on! Best of luck to you

Again no pressure or expectations or anything, just throwing some stuff out there for whoever may be curious - The basic thing with exercise selection is you want to make sure “the big six” are represented somewhere in your routine each week. These are movement patterns, and not specific exercises with specific implements (you could use bodyweight, or dumbbells, or barbells, or a machine, or rig up one of your resistance bands, or a bucket of water, or a big rock, etc.)

The big six are namely:

Horizontal push (like a bench press, or a chest fly, or pushups)

Horizontal pull (like a seated row)

Vertical push (like an overhead press)

Vertical pull (like pull-ups, or lat pulldowns)

Squat (like goblet squats, or lunges)

Hinge (like deadlifts, RDLs, back extensions, or hip thrusts)

There’s really about a thousand ways to set up for each of these! You’ll notice that any “proven” program you find online will have something from each category. You probably also want to add some core (crunches, leg lifts) and some cardio like the other user suggested. Stuff like bicep curls, leg extensions, and other single joint isolation movements are great if you want to focus a particular area. Not a huge priority though if you’re tight on time

The main thing is, whatever the specific exercises you end up going with - you want these movements to be performed safely, but at the same time still be quite challenging, so make sure to carefully check a technique video if you have any doubts. You also want a way to “scale” the movement over time as you get stronger

Rule of thumb is you want to aim for a resistance you can perform at least ten repetitions with, and when you get strong enough to where you can do like 17 or 18 reps then increase the resistance a little bit and start the process over. Most people will notice this process starts to slow down a lot after a year or two - there’s really no pressure to keep chasing higher numbers after this point unless you just really love pushing yourself!

Oh, and you also probably want to perform 2 or 3 sets of each exercise before moving on to the next.

There’s tons of valid ways to progress but this one is pretty foolproof. After a few months, if you’re very confident with a movement pattern you can start using heavier rep ranges like 8-12 or 6-10. Or you can go lighter if it’s more convenient for your setup. Pretty much any rep range works between 5 and 30

And yeah for food basically just get your veggies, reasonable amount of carbs and fats, and shoot for a decent protein goal, usually like 70-100g per day is plenty, it’s okay to go higher though if that feels better. Eat a little more or a little less food overall if you want your weight to go up or down. Be really really really careful with any nutritional suggestions that are more complicated than that. There’s an unlimited amount of scammers out there, unfortunately, who will try to sell you on various schemes