4 Lessons I Wish I Knew as an anxious 19-Year-Old Gym Beginner

Honestly, I had no idea it would change my whole life.

Five years ago, I started working out like everyone else—hoping to look better in summer Instagram photos and, you know … impress the guys, and attract the girl.

Back then, I felt skinny, underpowered, and socially anxious.

And I knew nothing about macronutrients, exercise science, or even what real quality sleep was.

Yet, five years later, not only has it completely transformed how I look, but it has profoundly changed my lifestyle and mindset for the better.

So today, I want to share with you the four most valuable lessons and insights I’ve learned since I started lifting at 19,

so you can get ahead and follow through on your own transformation.

Get Your Sleep Right if You Want Abs

This first piece of advice might sound generic, but trust me, it’s still incredibly underrated.

Like most 20-year-olds, I started working out just for the lifting part. In my mind, all that mattered was going to the gym, lifting a bunch, and then the hard work was done

I could move on with life and not worry about it anymore…

My sleep was chaotic. I wasn’t consistent. I was scrolling until 2 a.m. or going out just to escape the boredom.

I had no idea how much poor sleep quality was holding back my progress. In fact, I didn’t progress much during my first year of training because of it.

My chaotic sleep took everything from me. The worst part is that It wasn’t just about the gym—I also had constant brain fog, headaches, and a sluggish feeling every morning.

It wasn’t until recently, about two years ago, that I started following a strict sleep schedule. And it changed everything.

I’m convinced that you haven’t fully experienced life until you’ve had eight solid, uninterrupted hours of sleep. Everything feels easier, and life becomes magical.

Now, everyone knows they should be sleeping 7-9 hours and avoiding screens 1-2 hours before bed. In fact, you probably know you should be doing that too.

So why are people still not prioritizing their sleep, even though they know it’s key?

Honestly, I think it’s because they feel like their day is empty when they go to bed. They feel their needs and expectations are unmet, and their daytime wasn’t fulfilling enough.

In the chaos of modern life, they don’t get enough personal time. So they try to reclaim it by cutting into their sleep…

At least, that’s what I was doing. - and this has a name It’s called revenge bedtime procrastination :

you procrastinate going to sleep because your daytime life isn’t fulfilling enough. You extend the only time you feel you have control over, your nighttime.

But this is costing you everything—your gains, energy, mood, productivity…

And I fixed that with the simplest protocol, I set an alarm for the same time every day and placed my phone 10 feet away from my bed.

The logic is simple: if you have to physically get up to turn off the alarm, you’ll wake up. you have to force your future morning self to stand up and get moving.

Because once I’m up, then It’s just about making a conscious decision and either going back to bed and breaking the streak or just stay up and start my day.

No matter the day, how late I got home the night before, or how bad my night was, I knew there was no way around waking up at 5:30 a.m, phone on the desk.

Make waking up a non-negotiable, and your brain will follow.

Say No if You Want to Get Fit

Now, the usual question that follows is…

“But if I wake up at 5:30 a.m. every day, does that mean I have to go to bed at 9 or 10 p.m.?

How am I supposed to have a social life doing that?” That’s exactly what I used to ask myself.

I was scared that if I cut down on the only time I had control over, I’d have no life left.

But let’s come back to your goals.

What is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish? And here, I’m specifically talking to my 19-year-old self. What is it that you’re trying to do ?

Do you want to get disciplined, get in shape, and build your business and be proud ?

Or do you want to be known as the party guy who doesn’t need sleep after a night out and shows up to class just to sleep with his head on the table?

What matters most? Because I can’t see any positive reason to ruin your sleep, your health, and your gains—

except for the feeling of being socially accepted*,* which, in the end, doesn’t even matter.

Because deep down, you know it just doesn’t feel right. You’re going out to escape the loneliness, not because you’re truly enjoying it—

you’re just trying to convince yourself that you are and it doesn’t even work.

Now, don’t get me wrong, having a tribe is a primary need, and humans have thrived because of that.

But we often forget that if you don’t choose your tribe, you will be assigned one.

And if you’re in a situation like I was, most people around you aren’t the type of people you aspire to become.

They don’t engage in actions you find meaningful, and they’re not the ears you’d whisper your secrets to.

If this is the case, if you know you aren’t surrounded by the right tribe, then I need to tell you:

• You do not have to force yourself to go out

• You do not have to put on a fake social mask.

• You do not have to do what they do just to feel accepted.

Because the truth is that these people are most likely not going to be the long-lasting friendships you wish they were, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean they’re bad people; it just means you belong somewhere else.

Don’t spend your 20s living a fake life just for social validation, it’s simply not worth it.

Again, if your goal is to get in shape, lead a healthy lifestyle, and be productive, you will have to say no most of the time to the distractions that drive you off track.

So, narrow down, focus, learn how to

• say no

• stay home

• open a book

• disconnect, stop answering messages for a few hours

• fall asleep at 10PM because you’re exhausted from your workout

• just because you’re alone doesn’t mean that you’re missing out on anything important

This will be meaningful to you, even if it looks boring to the outside world. Because by doing that, you’re actively working on yourself and moving towards your goals.

At the end of the day, self-priority is what’s going to lead you toward your goals. And once you realize that, you’ll start prioritizing your sleep, your nutrition, and your training over an unfulfilling social life.

Don’t Try to Reinvent the Wheel

When I started lifting and didn’t know much about exercise science, like many, I underestimated the complexity of going to the gym.

In retrospect, this is something I notice in the gym every day, especially among my beginner clients—they mistake accessibility for simplicity.

Just because the gym is a very accessible place, and you can start training at 16 for $20 a month, doesn’t mean it’s easy to do well.

Like any other sport, you’ll need hours and hours of practicing the same motions to get better at it.

The problem is, people think that since the gym is easy to access, it can’t be that hard to master.

So they set unrealistically high expectations for themselves and just end up feeling inadequate and unconfident when they actually start lifting

Remember, people do PhDs in exercise science for a reason.

The reality is, when you’re starting out, you don’t know half of what you need to know—and that’s okay. It just means you have to stick to the fundamentals.

Here are the most important things you need to know about training:

• The quality of your technique is the most important variable in your training, and you can always improve it.

• You need to build the mind-muscle connection to feel and contract the correct muscles when training.

• You must strive to do better each session, whether that means perfecting your form, slowing the tempo, adding reps, or increasing weight. You have to apply more tension to your muscles than last time for them to grow (progressive overload).

• Stick to basic exercises and organize your training with a workout plan that you follow in order to monitor your progress effectively.

That’s it, for your first year in the gym, I would just hold on to these 4 concepts.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel, just follow what has been working for decades.

As David Goggins would say, “there is no hack.” The only hack is to keep repeating the same proven principles over and over again while tracking your progress.

You will encounter obstacles, and your duty is to find solutions that allow you to stay on track.

The transformation you’re seeking will be found in basic tasks that you must do again and again.

Incredible results are often the result of incredible consistency, not incredible complexity.

I found immense comfort in knowing that if I just was to just hold on to a handful of simple concepts and follow them daily I would see the results I was looking for, it countered the beginner’s overwhelm.

This applies not just to the gym, but to almost any endeavour—whether you want to become good at exercising, writing, surfing, math, or astrology.

You have to stick to the fundamentals long enough to understand the domain in its entirety. Only then will you be able to reinvent the wheel and innovate—if you still wish to do so.

And if you want to learn all the fundamentals of working out and everything that will help you transform your body autonomously, consider joining Fitness Autonomy - link here.

Always Choose Quality Over Quantity

Humans are not optimized for qualitative quantity—machines are.

When I started seeing some results from my workouts, I thought:

“If I’m getting these results by exercising four times a week, what if I exercise every day? Seven days a week, no rest. And what if I stack three boxing sessions on top of that?

That should get me better results than training only four days a week.

After all, I don’t need rest—people on the internet said that overtraining doesn’t exist and that it’s just an excuse for people who don’t want to put in the work.”

This thinking was profoundly flawed, and it cost me months of progress, two tennis elbows, and waking up every day for months feeling like my body was giving up on me, without understanding why.

Don’t get it wrong—a minimum quantity is required. This doesn’t mean you can engage sporadically. The number one rule that makes transformation possible is still consistency.

That being said, there is more growth, enjoyment, and progress in the quest for quality than in the quest for quantity.

The goal, at the end of the day, is to engage in activities that are meaningful to you—the ones that bring you closer to your goals and aspirations.

More than that, the problem is that too much of something doesn’t equal better. In fact, I’d argue that 99% of the time, too much is detrimental.

Biological systems—and if you want to extrapolate, life in general—are governed by the rule of homeostasis. This is the biological tendency of systems to maintain equilibrium as much as possible.

This means that the brain and body don’t want to stay in the extreme. it will always try to balance itself out.

If you push yourself to the extreme, you can’t stay in that state for long, or else you’ll break the equilibrium and expose yourself to detrimental consequences.

I found this to be true for everything, which is why you should always aspire for quality in the moment and for quantity over time.

Motivation works just like that, as an autonomic balance - and if you want to learn how to control it, here you’ll find the way to do it.

Don’t rush the quantity, or you’ll find yourself too deep in the extreme, and it will cost you a lot more than if you had just focused on quality and allowed quantity to build gradually.

As always I hope this helps, trust the process.