Research shows that beginners have the most to gain from simply starting to move.
Troy Moppin reached a turning point in his life when he maxed out the scale at his workplace’s health clinic. The 36-year-old juvenile correctional officer from Holton, Kansas, had to step on a laundry scale to discover he’d reached his heaviest weight ever: 353 pounds. “I was like, I can’t do this anymore,” he says. “I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without sweating profusely. I felt miserable.”
Moppin had a long road ahead of him to achieve his goals of losing weight and building muscle, but he had one major advantage in his corner: He was a beginner. As disheartening as maxing out that scale was to Moppin, it also triggered a fresh start.
The Psychology of Beginning
In her research, behavioral scientist Katy Milkman, author of How to Change, found that people are more likely to stick with a habit if they start on a day that marks a new beginning, like the first day of the year or week, a birthday, or a time with personal significance, like Moppin’s eye-opening weigh-in. Milkman writes in her study on fresh starts that your motivation strengthens by having a new beginning because it allows you to psychologically distance yourself from the person you used to be.
This doesn’t just apply to exercise; Milkman’s research shows having a fresh start has also been effective in working toward financial goals. By drawing a line in the sand between his old, sedentary life and his new, active one, Moppin consciously started a new chapter.
While you can get back on the horse at any time (like if you’ve fallen out of the habit of exercising), starting from scratch is a unique opportunity. It’s intimidating to try something new, but tapping into “beginner’s mind,” a term derived from the Zen Buddhist concept of shoshin, is a chance to explore a subject with a sense of childlike open-mindedness and curiosity that fosters growth.
In his book Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning, journalist Tom Vanderbilt describes the sensation of approaching a new pursuit with a beginner’s mind: “As you plunge into learning some art or skill, the world around you appears new and bursting with infinite horizons. Each day brims with new discoveries as you take your tentative first steps, slowly pushing the bounds of exploration.”
The process of learning a new skill can even have spillover benefits. In a 2020 study, a group of older adults spent three months learning new activities including drawing and music composition. Afterward, their performance in cognitive tasks—unrelated to their new skills—improved.
The Ability to Adapt Quickly
In fitness, gains are great. But the gains made by beginners are even more pronounced. To make just a sliver of improvement in strength or speed, elite athletes must train for hours each day, fine-tuning the smallest details of their workouts, nutrition, and recovery. On the other hand, beginners like Moppin have the potential to see huge performance upswings from exercise with minimal time commitment.
“Oftentimes people enter training with this idea of doing as much as they can and not as much as they need to,” says Josh Clay, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and Fitness Programming Specialist at Tonal. Because beginners are at an untrained baseline level, he says, three to five short but effective workouts per week will be enough to create change without leaving them so sore they won’t want to keep going.
“Intensity drives adaptation,” says Clay, explaining that intensity is a relative term. If you’ve been strength training for years, you might need to load up hundreds of pounds in your squat to gain strength, but someone new to lifting will notice change solely from doing bodyweight squats. “Beginners put on strength and muscle so quickly because their threshold is lower, so they don’t need super high stimuli in order to drive adaptation.”
