6 Gym Principles for an Aesthetic Physique

Getting in shape is one of the most meaningful things you can do for yourself.

Not only will you distance yourself from the average, boosting your confidence and projecting an aura of self-assurance, but you’ll also regain control and power over your lifestyle. This will make you proud of yourself daily for doing what’s best for you.

In the long term, you’ll enjoy a greater lifespan, improved health span, disease prevention, and better mood and mental health. Basically, it benefits everything.

The process, however, can be overwhelming. With the sheer quantity of information out there, it’s hard to know what to apply and what to focus on when starting.

I remember when I started going to the gym back in 2019. Watching fitness content gave me anxiety because there was just too much quality information, and I couldn’t apply any of it since I didn’t know anything about this stuff.

This article is designed to be the opposite of that. I will give you the basic tools and fundamentals and explain why they’re important, so you don’t just follow blindly but rather understand the process.

Structure

When starting, the most important thing by far is to have a clear structure. You need to know why you’re doing it, what you’re supposed to be doing, and make sure that what you’re doing will actually lead you to your goal.

Everything becomes much easier when you have guidelines to help you navigate through the dark.

And a workout plan is only one component of your structure; there’s more to it.

Oh, what’s that? You don’t have a workout structure? You’re freestyling? You have the workout plan in your head? Okay, but not okay. Unless you want to switch your goal to being a skateboarder, I highly suggest a proper workout plan.

Now, in terms of logistics, here’s what you’re going to need in order to start building a remarkable physique:

1. A calendar

2. A workout plan

3. Self-discipline

First, get clear on when you’re going to exercise. Pick a frequency that’s realistic but effective. I suggest starting with at least three sessions per week.

The length doesn’t have to be long at first. An effective 30-minute workout is more than enough when you’re starting out. Book those slots in your calendar and, if possible, make it recurring.

Activate reminders so your brain has no option but to know that, for example, Thursday from noon to 1 PM is exercise time.

If you want to build your physique, exercising must become a priority, a non-negotiable.

You don’t "find the time" to exercise; you "make the time" to exercise. The semantics are very important.

Your body is the foundation of your health, and by not prioritizing it, you’re diminishing your health span. Procrastination and lack of motivation are not strong enough excuses.

Second, a workout plan. Unless you have an education in kinesiology or a personal trainer to start with, the workout plan won’t be perfectly adapted to your wants and needs, and that’s fine. That’s how it’s supposed to be at first.

Find a workout plan that seems reasonable. Most of the time, sticking to the plan is more important than the plan itself.

It’s your job to find what works for you and what doesn’t and to experiment with the exercises and variables over time. This means a lot of testing.

Even after years of experience in the gym, people are continuously testing different things. I’m still testing stuff too.

Don’t feel inadequate because you don’t know what to do; after a few weeks of practicing the exercises, your brain will have no choice but to become better at it. The good thing is that motor learning is fast.

The problem in crafting your own workout plan when you have no idea how a treadmill works is overwhelming. More than that, there is a lot of content out there and it’s easy to get lost in all of this (I’m speaking from experience).

There are a few fundamentals you should be aware of when starting. These haven’t changed over the years, and this is what you need to focus on.

1. When it comes to exercise selection, focus on learning the essentials known as compound exercises: squats, deadlifts, lunges, bench press, pull-ups, push-ups, horizontal row, among others.

2. Craft a basic workout plan. It doesn’t need to be technical; it just has to give you a direction. Focus on two compound exercises per session and make sure you’re targeting all muscle groups evenly. That means that, per week, you’re using different muscle groups and not always the same ones repeatedly. Don’t worry about sets, reps, rest, and tempo at first. The main goal when starting is to learn the technique.

The goal is to practice your form, and for that, you need to do it many times so that your brain essentially maps the motion using your motor neurons. Why would you have to do this complicated stuff?

Because if you want to get in shape, you need to understand the system as this is what will make the process sustainable. You need to try, fail, iterate.

There’s nothing inherently difficult or complex in shaping your physique and developing muscles. That being said, the reason most people never make it past the second week is that they lack self-discipline.

If you think motivation is what’s going to take you there, you’ll stop going to the gym quickly. If you want to build a fit and remarkable physique, from this point on, you’re not relying on motivation anymore; you’ll be using discipline.

Self-discipline is the ability to “manage a person's thoughts, emotions, or behavior in the face of temptation to achieve a specific goal.” You’ll want to stay home and watch Netflix instead of going to the gym on a rainy day, and that’s to be expected.

At first, there’s nothing compelling about going to the gym to induce stress on muscle tissue. And that is why knowing why you’re doing it will save you. Because it’ll allow you to use willpower to stand up, pack your bag and leave for the gym.

Self-discipline isn’t innate; you need to acquire it, just like you build muscle, through repetitions and diligence. The trap is to expect to feel motivated: Don’t. If you’re motivated, great, you’ll go to the gym. If you’re not, great, you’ll still go to the gym regardless.

Motivation is a bonus, not a necessity. If you do this, if you have a clear structure, you’ll drastically reduce the chances of quitting within the first months because you’re overwhelmed and stressed out.

Now again, bad days are to be expected and maybe you won’t stick to the plan, don’t dwell on it, every day’s a new opportunity for you to get better. The rule is that you can’t skip two days in a row or you’ll find yourself on a negative streak.

In the Gym

Let’s get technical about what you should be doing in the gym.

First of all, take the time to warm up. You really want to prepare your body for exercise. This will not only protect your joints and tendons but also make it easier for you to feel your muscles contracting.

And that’s a good thing because to build muscle, you need to apply stress to the muscles, forcing them to adapt to the resistance, which makes them grow. For that to happen, you need to contract them.

The way you engage your muscles during a particular exercise is crucial, as it will determine where the focus is. That’s why when you first start, your only goal in the gym should be to learn the technique and focus on ‘on command activation,’ or finding the right muscle.

Start by discovering and learning how to use your muscles and contract them on purpose to lift the weight during a particular exercise. There’s a prerequisite for that: you need to know which muscle groups are involved in the exercise you’re doing and where they’re located in the body.

This takes a little bit of knowledge, and you may have to look up where the hamstrings and, I don’t know, triceps are located.

This is empowering—this is you learning about your body and its structure. I strongly recommend learning basic anatomy if you’re serious about going to the gym.

This will help you build what’s called mind-muscle connection, a very powerful tool that will greatly help you build muscle. That’s the connection between your brain and your muscle system.

Establishing this relationship involves purposefully focusing on the contraction of a specific muscle group to activate it. Let’s say I’m doing push-ups. I don’t want to just push; I’m going to push while concentrating on my chest to provoke the strongest possible contraction.

This requires time and patience as it’s a neuronal wiring that needs to occur. This is why a frequency of three sessions per week is, to me, the minimum because frequency will help you build self-discipline as well as the mind-muscle connection.

Now you know when to go to the gym, what to do there, and what to focus on when exercising. What should you be aiming for every time you go?

You should focus on doing better each time. You want to apply the principle of progressive overload

A simple way to explain it is this: your body is highly adaptable but extremely lazy. It’ll do what’s necessary but the bare minimum.

By applying specific mechanical stress, you force adaptation as your muscles weren’t used to that much physical pressure. They have to adapt and they’ll (with proper rest and nutrition) grow bigger to be more ready for the next time.

Imagine a squat, if you’ve never done one before and you hop under the bar and do 3 sets of squats, your legs will be screaming to your brain that they need to get bigger to be more prepared next time.

That being said, if you always do the same thing every session, there’s no adaptation needed as your body has already adapted to that stimulation.

The goal is to always try to apply more pressure on your muscles, considering the fact that your technique is pristine. This is the key to progressing and defining your physique.

At first, focus on acquiring the technique but keep that principle of progressive overload as this is what’s going to direct your growth. You do that by changing the variables.

You can add more weight, but you can also increase the number of reps, sets, or range of motion. It doesn’t always have to be about the weight.

In fact, when starting, I highly suggest not focusing on frenetically increasing the weight. Increase the range of motion and the reps. Just need to remember this, learn the technique, then when acquired increase the “difficulty” of the exercise by adding more weight, sets, reps etc. on a regular basis.

Outside the Gym

What happens in the gym is as important as what happens outside of it, and that’s why so many people struggle to commit. Going to the gym is more than a sport; it’s a lifestyle. If you want to make real progress quickly, your nutrition and recovery are extremely important.

Your muscles don’t grow bigger during exercise; they do afterwards, mostly during sleep, if they have the proper resources to do so.

There are many important aspects of this subject, but we’ll stick to the basics.

First, your protein intake needs to support muscle repair. I won’t get into specific numbers here : Protein Intake Calculator. Think of protein as the building blocks your body uses to build muscle.

You need enough of it so that your body can recover and rebuild damaged muscle during exercise. It’s not only about the quantity but also the quality. Ensure you’re feeding your body good quality protein so it has no problem using the resources.

Secondly, you need enough overall energy to function and build more muscle. This implies consuming slightly more calories to ensure your body has enough energy for the whole process. Because as you start to exercise, you’ll obviously burn more calories than you used to if you weren’t exercising before.

And in order to put your body in an optimal situation for muscle growth and tissue repair, you want to give it enough resources to do so. Now this is considering that your BMI is normal and that you’re not overweight or obese.

Calorie Intake Calculator. For now, this is just an introduction to those concepts, there’s much more to say about it but I want to keep this simple.

This isn’t about gaining 5 pounds per week. It’s about making sure your body has everything it needs to recover from the mechanical demands of lifting weights.

Mindset

Lastly, your beliefs about yourself and what you’re capable of are crucial. Most of the time, going to the gym means battling against yourself to be better than you were the last time you came in.

Progressive overload applies to your mind too. You’ll quickly realize that your body is rarely the limiting factor; your mind often is. Building your physique is as much mental as it is physical, and your beliefs have a deep impact on your physical progress.

This can be negative and limit your potential, but it can also be positive, improving growth. Be aware of your thoughts about yourself, your fitness, and your exercise level.

You become what you think about repeatedly. If you think you’ll never be able to develop your physique, chances are you’ll make that your reality.

All of this is to say that you need to be careful about your thoughts, as they are powerful determinants of your success.

Now, this is what I’d tell you if I had an hour with you to get you on the right track. If you have any questions, use the comments.

I hope this helps, trust the process.