Many people new to exercise often go into the pursuit with guns blazing. One of the primary reasons many fall off the exercise wagon is that they go too hard and fast.

For this reason, it’s always helpful (though not always easy) to practice caution when starting an exercise regimen. As cliché as the saying has become: slow and steady wins the race.

This article will review some of the significant considerations one should make when deciding how often to go to the gym as a newbie.

Floors and Ceilings
In general, exercise can be seen as having a dose-response relationship. This means the more you exercise, the more benefits you’ll realize, and vice versa.

However, researchers have noted some critical cut-off points that indicate an ideal volume of exercise that one should shoot for.

Concerning cardiovascular exercise, evidence indicates that most individuals should strive to accumulate 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise each week. This can be split up any way you like. For instance, you may perform three 30-minute bicycle rides and two 30-minute walks each week to achieve your minimum.

For weight lifting and flexibility exercise, the minimums are much less clear. However, decent evidence points to a minimum of 2 days a week for each mode of exercise to encourage good musculoskeletal health.

These minimums can be considered floors or the bottom of the range where an individual will notice a significant health improvement. For those well-versed in research, I’m not using the “classic” definition of the floor and ceiling effect here. Instead, I’m using a basic, lay definition.

Ceilings are the maximum amounts of exercise recommended, after which most individuals will not see much benefit. Some people may even suffer harm. There aren’t any widely agreed-upon ceilings for exercise. Therefore, the best guidance is to listen to your body and start by achieving the minimum required levels of exercise, taking rest days as needed.

Benefit Vs. Harm
In the previous section, we briefly discussed the topic of too much exercise potentially causing harm.

As you might imagine, performing very intense exercise daily can, and often will, lead to injury. Muscle strains, ligament sprains, and even conditions such as rhabdomyolysis can result if gym newbies aren’t taking enough rest days.

For this reason, you must be very careful about how hard and often you work out. If you suffer one of these injuries, you may be sidelined for many weeks, if not months, while you recover.

Conclusion
Some people think that one “can’t work out too much.” However, this is far from the truth. While under-exercising may lead to health problems, over-exercising can also cause issues such as injuries and prolonged recovery times.

Gym newcomers should strive to achieve 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio exercise and 2-3 days of resistance training/flexibility exercise each week. As time goes by, these numbers can be increased as tolerated.