Find the Perfect Strength Training Program for You in Just 60 Seconds

As you age, your muscles recover slower from exercise and your tendons and ligaments become stiffer, both of which can increase your risk of injury. To mitigate these issues, do no more than 6 days of intense exercise each week, don’t take your sets too close to muscular failure too often, and deload or take a week-long break from exercise every 6-to-8 weeks. Click here to learn more.

Your body’s “muscle building machinery” runs best when energy is abundant, so if you don’t eat enough calories every day, you’ll struggle to get bigger and stronger. Thus, if you want to build muscle effectively, you want to regularly feed your body slightly more energy than it burns (provide it with a “calorie surplus”).

That said, you don’t want to follow the traditional “bulking” advice of eating as much as possible, as most of these excess calories will be converted into body fat, not muscle. If you make this mistake, you’ll have to cut your bulks short to keep your body fat levels in a healthy range and then spend several months losing the excess fat that you gained. Instead, you want to maintain a small-to-moderate calorie surplus that allows for steady muscle gain along with a small amount of body fat that you can lose relatively fast when you start dieting again. If you want to learn exactly how many calories and grams of protein, carbs, and fat you should eat to maximize strength and muscle growth, take the Legion diet quiz now.

Although weightlifting is an essential part of improving your body composition (the percentage of your body weight that is fat versus muscle), your diet is equally important, especially when it comes to fat loss. Specifically, you must eat fewer calories than you expend over a period of time to cause meaningful weight loss—calories in versus calories out. You also need to consume enough protein to maintain or gain muscle, keep hunger at bay, and recover from your workouts. If you want to learn exactly how many calories and grams of protein, carbs, and fat you should eat to lose fat, build muscle, and get and stay healthy, take the Legion diet quiz now.

Since you’ve been following a proper strength training program for less than a year, you can also expect to build muscle and lose fat at the same time, what’s known as body recomposition. This will last for about 6-to-12 months, after which you’ll likely need to focus on either building muscle (while gaining a small amount of fat) or losing fat (while maintaining muscle). Click here to learn more.

While you don’t have to do cardio to lose fat, research shows that the best exercise routine for fat loss includes both cardio and strength training. Most forms of cardio burn more calories than weightlifting and are easier on your joints. Thus, once you’re already doing 3-to-5 strength training workouts per week, it’s best to burn additional calories by doing more cardio instead of weightlifting. A good rule of thumb is to do at least 1-to-3 hours of cardio per week to maximize fat loss without interfering with your weightlifting workouts. Click here to learn more.

If you’re new to weightlifting, you may find that a lack of joint mobility is making it difficult for you to do some of the exercises on this program with proper form. Common problems include tight ankles, which can make it hard to keep your chest from tipping forward when you squat; tight hamstrings, which can make it hard to keep a neutral spine when you deadlift; and inflexible shoulders, which can make just about everything more difficult, including bench and overhead pressing and squatting. If you find this to be the case, doing some mobility exercises may help loosen up your joints. Click here to learn more.

Research shows that if you want to gain muscle, strength, and endurance, minimize injury risk, lose fat, and maximize your overall health and longevity, doing a mix of weightlifting and cardio is optimal. Specifically, you’ll want to do weightlifting workouts and 1-to-3 hours of cardio per week (with more being better than less). Click here to learn more.

Since you said your most important fitness goal is to , you’ll likely make faster progress if you keep your total weekly cardio under 3 hours per week. While doing some cardio is a great way to boost fat loss, fitness, and health, most people find that it’s hard to progress in their strength training workouts if they’re doing more than this (most people find 1-to-3 hours is the sweet spot). Click here to learn more.

If you feel pain while weightlifting, the best remedy is usually rest—stop doing any exercises that irritate the joint that’s hurting until it’s tickety-boo, and then gradually begin training it again. That said, you can sometimes “train around” an injury by replacing the exercises that cause pain or discomfort with ones that don’t. You’ll need to experiment with different exercises to find what feels best for you, but here are some recommendations based on your answers:

Since you feel shoulder pain when weightlifting, consider replacing the barbell bench press, barbell overhead press, dumbbell overhead press, or dip with the reverse-grip bench press, dumbbell bench press, or close-grip bench press.

Since you feel knee pain when weightlifting, consider replacing the barbell back squat, leg press, or leg extension with the front squat, safety bar squat, Bulgarian split squat, or dumbbell lunge.

Since you feel lower-back pain when weightlifting, consider replacing the conventional deadlift or barbell back squat with the sumo deadlift, trap-bar deadlift, front squat, safety bar squat, or Bulgarian split squat.

Since you feel elbow pain when weightlifting, consider replacing the barbell bench press, close-grip bench press, or dip with the cable rope pushdown, cable rope overhead press, EZ-bar skullcrusher, or diamond push-up.

Since you feel hip pain when weightlifting, consider replacing the conventional deadlift, sumo deadlift, barbell back squat, or Bulgarian split squat with the leg press, hack squat or hack squat machine, belt squat, or dumbbell lunge.

While weightlifting offers many of the same health benefits as cardio, including improved heart health, insulin sensitivity, and more, cardio comes with some health benefits you can’t get from weightlifting. Specifically, cardio burns more calories per unit of time and is better at improving cardiovascular health and insulin sensitivity than weightlifting. You don’t have to do much to see the benefits, though: Just 1-to-3 hours of low-to-moderate intensity cardio of your choice is enough. Click here to learn more.