Greg Nuckols has a good beginner program: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/program-bundle/

It’s like $10, and you can customize 3 to 5 days per week. It also comes with intermediate to advanced programs once you’ve gotten all the mileage out of the beginner program.

Definitely take it slow - every day you’re out of the gym sore is a missed opportunity. Gym gains are made over years, not weeks.

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For five days a week, I do an upper-lower split. I tend to do lower body Monday, Thursday and Saturday, and upper body Tuesday and Thursday, taking Wednesday and Sunday off (I may do cardio stuff those days).

My priority at the moment is legs, due to a bad knee which I’m focused on keeping stable and strong. You could switch this to having three upper days per week with two lower, if you’re more focused on upper body growth. Or you could even do a push-pull-legs, but then you’d only maybe hit legs once a week, which I think is too little personally - again, all depends on your goals.

With any split, you can easily find a free starter program if you look around. Then you can tweak it based on your own needs. As an example of the content: for my upper days I focus on hitting upper back, lats, some lower back, chest, front, side, rear delts, as well as biceps and triceps. And I add abs at the end. For lower body days I do glutes, quads, hamstrings, calves, adductors and abductors. Sometime o add abs on leg days too.

Which exercises you specifically want to do for each muscle is really down to preference. If you’re very new to it, you could start off with machines, and over time you can tweak your programme to be more varied e.g. with free weight, cables etc. The main thing at first is to learn the form of each exercise, and to track your reps and weights, so you and progressively increase those over time, for growth.

It’s common knowledge that Tuesday is best for eccentric muscles.

Haha I’m sorry, I’m also keen to see answers to this question.

I need to get back into it myself.

I think an equal component to number of days you can go, is how long you can go each day.

That being said, I’d recommend the StrongLifts 5x5 program to begin with. It’s an A/B program, meaning in just two workouts you get a total body workout. There’s no reason you can’t use it 5 times a week. Week 1 would look like A/B/A/B/A and then Week 2 would be B/A/B/A/B and so fourth. I’d put the rest days after every B exercise.

The downside of this is StrongLifts does squats every day, so you’d be doing squats two days in a row.

It’s still a great beginner program. You may chose to only lift 3-4 times a week and throw in some very good cardio on additional days.

This program will probably take 1:15 the first few times you do it, but you should be able to get it down to an hour or less for each workout.

I use StrongLifts as a beginning program but also modified it over time. Now I’ve moved to PPL which is technically a 6-day a week program but you can just do 5 days a week and keep up the rotation the next week. It’s a longer workout. I’m lifting for at least 1:30, but usually 1:45 each time. It’s a lot more volume but the gains are large. I would start with PPL because it’s lot to jump into as a beginner.

I am basically using the templates from RPstrength (They now have a cool app). For 5 days it is:

• Chest, Shoulders, Triceps
• Back, Traps, Biceps, Forearm
• Quads, Glutes, Hams, Calves, Abs
• Shoulders, Chest, Back, Triceps, Biceps, Forearms
• Glutes, Hams, Quads, Calves, Abs

I’m not a gym person yet, but does it really matter so long as you are not getting muscle fatigue/actual pain?