Never Worked Out Before, Help

[leontreeon]

I'm a newly 20 year old female who has never really worked out before. I'm 5'4 and weigh 127 pounds.
I occasionally do a 5 mile hike every two weeks or so and that's about it.

I noticed that I have no muscle whatsoever. My legs, thighs, and arms, are "flabby". I was flexing my calve today and it was squishy haha. I really want to get rid of all the "flab" and get muscle.


Is running 2 miles, doing sit ups, push ups, and squats everyday good enough to get me some muscle?

 

[Goldfish]

Yes, but in saying that, there are much better approaches. If you've been doing nothing as your standard level of exertion, anything is more than that, and muscles are built when you demand more from them than what they're accustomed to, so what you've proposed will very likely develop some musculature in the short term.

In saying that, muscles need energy (calories; food) in order to do much growing, and they need rest. You don't grow while training, you grow while recovering, so you might be better off doing push ups, squats and sit ups every other day than every day. Those three exercises mostly work the front of the body, and the posterior chain needs work as well. If you're limited to body weight exercises, inverted rows, chin ups, supermans and glute bridges are all good exercises for balancing out squats, push ups and sit ups.

If you aren't used to running, I wouldn't do it every day, either. For about the first 3 weeks of acclimatising to running, the connective tissue around the body actually becomes weaker (while the cardiovascular system becomes stronger), and it takes another 3 weeks for the musculoskeletal system to return to normal before it starts becoming stronger. It's a lot safer, then, to only run 2-3 times per week without progressing the distance or duration for the first 6 weeks, and then slowly increase either frequency or distance (but not both at the same time). Because of this dip in structural strength in the first 3 weeks and a rather dramatic increase in cardiovascular fitness in the same time period, a lot of injuries happen right on the 3 week mark, when runners go: "Hey, this is suddenly easy, I know, I'll run twice as far today!"