Starting weight lifting, help with Routine

Hello there Men's board.  Having reviewed alot of the postings here, I see there's alot of men who are pretty heavy into weight lifting.  I did some lifting in high school, and just after I graduated, but it's been over 10 years since then.  Now that I've lost some weight, and am released to begin lifting, I'd like some suggestions as to routines I can start.  I have access to a community weight room which has circuit machines and free weights.  I have an elliptical machine I've been using for cardio. Thanks in advance for any/all help or advice from the community-- --Dave

For starting out, I think the circuit machines are a perfectly valid way to go.  Just go around the circuit, do 1 set each, and make sure you keep going until you fail on your last rep (one of the advantages of machines is that it is safe to fail, even without a spotter).  I don't like to do more than 15 exercises.  Skip the ones that work out very small muscle groups or muscles that are already hit by the bigger exercises (rule of thumb: skip the machines that look like they were put there to make women happy). Bring a small notepad to take notes on how much you lift on each machine, so that you know where to start the next week.  Starting out, if you can tell after one or two reps that the weight is way wrong, adjust the weight and start over.  I recommend picking weights that result in failure in the 7-14 rep range.  Notes are essential to make sure you are progressing each week. When do you lift again?  When you're not sore.  At first, this may take longer than later, as many as five days.  After a month or so, you should be able to get in 2-4 workouts a week.  If you feel the need to workout more days than that, do cardio. If at some point you think you have exceeded the machine's capabilities, either because you are bored or you've maxed the machine's weight, you might consider moving to free weights and/or a split routine.  But I think most people can make a lot of progress on circuit machines.  I occasionally use some circuit machines even after I've been lifting for over a year nonstop.

Thanks for the advice.  I took you up on it and had a pretty good workout today on the circuit.  I have a feeling I'm going to be hating life tomorrow, but that's par for the course with getting back into weights. 

P.S. You can use the search feature to find a lot of old threads on this subject.

Send me an e-mail and I'll ship you a .pdf of what my personal trainer just hooked me up with. Most of the movements are w/o a machine, so they're easy for most people to do. If you've got some basic weights, a swiss ball, and time you can do it all.
--Jake
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Challenge yourself while maintaining safety....you can't go wrong.   Sonny