Here are some tips for newbies in their first week:

Its gonna hurt. There is going to be muscle soreness, and a lot of it. You’ll have DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness), hopefully, through the whole twelve weeks. But the first weeks are probably going to be the worst and the most pervasive. There really isn’t anything to do about it either. And I find the second day after a work out to be sorer than the first day after.

You have to learn DOMS are good. They are how you tell you really worked your muscles. They are really the only sure fire way. Just because you can’t finish a set doesn’t mean you worked you muscle to failure. Your body/mind will lie to you if it thinks it can get you to stop.

Perseverance is the key.

I’m still sore on Friday from my Monday workout, should I go ahead and workout the same muscle, or skip the workout? Work out. Believe it or not it will actually help with the soreness. Also you are training your body to recover faster. It needs to know it needs to get done healing in 48 hours.

Your going to pee a lot If you haven’t been drinking half a gallon of water a day, its going to seem like you need to go to the bathroom every 5 minutes. But its ok, the water is good for you and if you’re carrying a lot of water weight, this will make you lose weight fast. I’ve heard of people losing 4 pounds in the first week because of this. Your body has been storing water because you don’t give it enough, now you do so it lets go of its stores.

How do I know I’m drinking enough? Here’s a Porter-ism I remember “This is one place you don’t go for the gold in BFL.” He’s referring to your urine color. It should be clear, not yellow. I usually achieve this by noon if I’m drinking to plan.

Caffeine makes you pee more often Caffeine and other stimulates make your body process the water faster and will make you pee more often. Caffeine is also used in a lot of diet pills, like BetaLean, so even though you’ve cut out the cokes, you may still be getting it.

It will take a couple of workouts to find your weights If you’ve never lifted weights before it will take you a couple workouts to figure what weights to use to get through the BFL lifting workouts. Don’t sweat it. Here’s what I do for planning weights. I guess for the first workout. Normally I go to heavy. If I do my first set and its a 8 and not a 5, I keep the same weight for the next set. Some times I get to my 6 rep set and have already hit a 10.(A ten for me means I can’t do another rep). It will lower the weight, or have someone help to get the total number of reps in.

Now I have some data to work with for the next workout. I look at the max weight I did and if it was near where I was doing my 6 set, I’ll make it my six. Then I fill in the rest of the sets with 5 lbs de-increments. So if my 6 set is 35, my 8 set 30, my 10 set is 25, my 12 set is 20. My first 12 is 30. In my last challenge I didn’t understand you were suppose to do a different exercise for the same muscle as you second 12, so I’d just drop 5 more pounds for that one too. This time I switch exercises and they requires a trial and error approach to picking a weight.

Planning is key to eating right, but don’t sweat variation too much. If you don’t have meals ready to eat, you will eat the wrong stuff. So you have to plan ahead to make good food available when you need it.

In my last challenge I did what I called Ron’s Bag-O-Food. I’d put the makings of a number of meals in a bag I kept at work. Then when I was time for a meal, I’d just go get one out of the fridge. I didn’t really plan what each meal was going to be and when. The bag contained things like cooked chicken and turkey breasts, cooked ground turnkey taco meat, torttias, cooked rice, spagetti, etc.

This challenge I’m writing down what I plan to eat for each meal and when. But I’m only hitting it about 1/2 the time. But I’m eating right for every meal. For instance, I don’t plan meal five, because Suanna normally cooks that one. And at lunch I may decide to get a regular Honey Burbon Chicken Sandwich at Quizno’s instead of a grilled chicken sandwich at Wendy’s.

Go easy on the meal replacements I have a protein meal replacement for meals 1 and 6 normally. In the BFL book half the meals are meal replacements. If you need the super convience of these things don’t feel bad using them, but in general real food is better.

I’m farting a lot since I started BFL, what’s the deal? It’s all the protein, especially meal replacements. Overtime you body will adjust and the gas will become less. If not, you many have to cut back on certain proteins and see if that makes a difference.

Can I really eat anything I want on free day? YES There are some sites out there that tell you its isn’t a great idea. You could lose all you worked on in the week binging on free day. I personally doubt you could eat that much and the further you get into the week, the less you will want to eat. And it is vital to the mind game. You have to know you can eat anything you want, you just have to wait for free day.

Hope those help any newbies out there. If you have questions or want support a great place to go is the Body For Life Yahoo Group. I’m a member and my challenge 1 before and afters are in the files folder.