After you've mustered up the willpower to finally check out the gym for the first time, plenty of questions remain: What should you wear? What workout should you do? How does this machine even work? Here's a primer on how to make your first gym experience awesome.

When I took a dance class with my husband years ago, the instructor told us that any couples in the class should split up and dance with others. "We have a tendency to say things to our partner that we wouldn't to other people," I remember her saying. "Like, 'Honey, you're doing it wrong.'"

You made a New Years Resolution to get in shape, you signed up to the gym went a few times and then you stopped. It happens. Now's the time to get back to the gym.

Everybody at the gym has their own plan, their own path. In a perfect world, these paths all crisscross and interweave without any collisions. One person hops off the treadmill, another hops on. One person sets down a weight, another picks it up. Record scratch, here's the real world: five different people across the gym are killing time on machines they don't care about, glaring at the guy who won't stop doing curls in the squat rack.

How long do you spend at the gym? There's an optimum amount of time you should be spending on your daily workout, and chances are it's a lot shorter than you think. Think of what you'll do with all that extra time!

Ever wanted to hang off a big hog with your 24-inch pythons like our mate Hulk Hogan, brother? Of course you have, brother. If you've ever wondered about which exercises you need to do to grow those biceps, triceps and forearms - look no further, brother. Here are the best exercises to master those arm muscles.

Zero exercise is not enough. Going for a walk every day is probably a good thing. And if you're training for a marathon, you'll be on your feet for a couple hours of hard workouts every week. But what is the benchmark for a human being just trying to squeeze enough healthy exercise into their life? Let's break it down.

To get the most out of your personal training sessions and workout classes, it helps to be a good client who knows how things work. Plus, it's always nice to be nice and make things easier for your instructors. We asked several fitness professionals what they wish their clients knew going in and this is what they said.

Getting ready to hit the gym in January? Here's your starter pack of all the information you need to walk into the gym with confidence and build a habit that will last all year long.

Australian gym-goers are the first in the world to take advantage of Apple's new GymKit technology, which launched earlier this week. Fitness First members at select gyms can tap their Apple Watch to compatible cardio equipment for seamless transfer of their workout stats.

Good health is a truly priceless thing, but maintaining a decent level of fitness - especially in big cities - can cost a pretty penny. Gym memberships in particular can hit your wallet hard. And personal training sessions? Forget about it: Those can run over $100 an hour, easy, and that's often on top of a gym's monthly membership fee. That's fine, though - because you don't have to pay a dime if you play your cards right.

By now your regular workouts are as second nature as breathing or wearing pants before you leave the house, but now something -- an extended family holiday or an injury perhaps -- has ripped away your routine from you. Not working out for a day already makes you antsy. Not working out for a week or more? Oh, no, panic!

Some days I just don't want to work out for an hour at the gym. And you know what? Sometimes workouts don't even need to be that long. Whenever I want to be in and out of the gym but still build strength and endurance, my go-to is this challenging, make-you-gasp-for-air workout called a barbell complex.

When you don't feel like exercising you can come up with all kinds of excuses. We get it: Exercise is the worst. There are so many things you could be doing instead. You don't have time. And so on, and so on. But exercising regularly has too many benefits for us to stand idly by while you pretend these are good reasons for not working out.

The last time you pried yourself out of bed at 6AM for that morning workout felt great: You heard birds chirping; coffee tasted especially amazing; you had the energy to run laps around your family and coworkers.

Push-ups look so deceptively easy. Everyone knows how to do them in theory, but when asked to do one, most people make various little mistakes that can cause problems and injuries down the road. These subtle mistakes are common and simple to fix once you're aware.

Too often people make the trek to the gym but only to go through the motions of a workout, without really working out. This is fine if you aren't really trying to improve, but you should understand that the best workout program in the world doesn't do squat if your workout lacks purpose and intensity.

We've written about the benefits of adding kettlebells to your workouts and how the kettlebell swing exercise boosts your leg strength. Now the caveat: the kettlebell swing is hard to get right, with people making little mistakes that put them at risk of injury. Learn to avoid a world of hurt by knowing what not to do.

If doing a single pull-up (or more) is one of your goals in life, you're in luck. Here's a game plan you can follow, even if all you can do is dangle like a sack of meat.