Gym newbie - quick question regarding workouts

[pollythecat]

I have joined a gym. Realistically I am not going to be able to go more than twice a week. Three times at most but it will likely just be twice. I have friends with loads of spare time who go multiple times a week and have set leg / arm / booty / core days. This isn’t going to work for me if I’m not going that often.

So I asked chatGPT to do me a beginners full body workout which I have done twice this week. Comprised of warm up on treadmill or bike, leg press, chest press, shoulder press, ab crunching machine and I also did some weights. Then finished with 5 minutes on the cross trainer. This felt achievable to me. But will it really do any good if it’s a full body thing just twice a week rather than focusing on specific areas?

I am trying to make healthy changes with the very limited time and resources that I have available to me so I feel like something is better than nothing. But also I want to feel like it’ll actually be benefitting me and isn’t totally pointless. Anyone in the know have any advice?

Pull exercises; bent over rows, either with a bar or dumbbells. Rowing from knee to belly button as you hinge at the hip.
face pulls on the cable machine using the rope attachment.
pull ups, using the assisted machines where you kneel on it.
cable rows where you sit on the bench and ‘row’ with the long bar.

Thanks that’s so helpful :-)

Lat pulldown is a good vertical pull, so works well with shoulder press which is a vertical push. Your chest press is a horizontal push (terminology is potentially confusing, weights are moving vertically but because it's at right angles it's horizontal) so you'd normally want to pair that with some sort of row, say a seated cable or machine row or a bent over row with dumbbells.

The fundamental movement patterns are squat, pull, push, hinge (e.g. deadlift) and carry (e.g. farmer's carry). It's good to make sure you have all of those included.

Time crunched, do compound exercises so big moves like squats, etc.

A good workout will have some elements of push, pull and rotate with some lower body stuff.

As other people say, don't overcomplicate things, doing something is better than nothing. If you have any risk of osteoporosis then there's some exercises that aren't the best. It's funny as I have adhd and ChatGPT told me to just do 15mins of something, anything because it gets adhd!