I have a great interest for physical fitness since I like to look good and feel strong. To do that I go to the gym in between classes at school. The number of times I go there varies from week to week as it largely depends on how much schoolwork there is to do, but I keep it at an average of 3 to 5 times per week. I am far from being an expert on the subject of physical fitness, but after having trained on and off for 5 years, I have developed a technique of my own that seems to work very well.. here's a typical workout at the gym for me:

• I ALWAYS start off with cardiovascular exercises to strengthen my heart and augment my blood's oxygen intake capability; the other reason for always starting with cardio is that you avoid cold muscle injuries on the anaerobic part of the workout.
• I move on to the anaerobic (force training) part of the workout, taking good care to exercise only certain regions of my body per training session. What I mean by that is to never force train your whole body in one session. So I would do legs/biceps one day, pecs/triceps/shoulders another day and so on. I always take care of exercising my back and abdominal muscles everyday unless they are hurting because of training; in fact you should never train a muscle that is hurting from training in the past days because that may cause cumulative injury in the muscle and atrophy. Most of the time, this part of the training lasts 45 minutes on the whole if I am by myself and not taking time off between different exercises.
• I stretch a little after the muscular workout while my muscles are still warm to prevent becoming inflexible.

As for the specifics in the exercises themselves, it's quite hard to describe but one learns from doing it by themselves or watching some show all about exercising. The reason why I also like training so much is that it really helps me cope with the high amount of stress that my life imposes on me sometimes, and I always feel so good after a workout.

There is extra special care to take if you are just starting to train using weights:

1. When it is the first time you are doing a specific exercise, start off using light weights just to make sure you get the movement (form) right. Don't worry about looking like a wuss, you are just warming up...
2. Do a warmup set with light weights before switching to good weights, and when doing so, try to get a friend to spot (look after) you.
3. When you are doing the movement, make sure not to go fast... it's useless anyways...
4. It is always good to know about your muscular anatomy when using force training. This way, you won't be in the dark as to which muscles you are training when moving in a certain way.

If you follow these guidelines, you are sure not to injure yourself out of sheer ignorance and stupidity. In other words, you will be able to go for another workout without fear of injury. Of course it is always possible to injure yourself when you are weight training but usually not if you are careful and concious.

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