Help with Routine!!

[fortunatesun]

I've got Waterbury's stuff right here . He's just now putting out a 3 part series. So far there's only the first two:

Hammer Down- Strength

Hammer Down- Endurance

Of course these are MMA sport specific so it may or may not be what you want. It might be smarter to go with the basic strength link Al420 already posted to rebuild the foundation first. At the least these will help you set some useful goals.

 

[carlsuen]

i gotta admit.. when i first saw the title of the thread i thought it was another high school kid asking for advice again.. i'm ashamed...

u came to the right place!! there are very good bros here and the ripptoe 3x5 is an excellent program to start with!! good luck and keep us posted..

 

[jackdeath]

Thanks everyone for the help, and I will let you know how it goes. Appreciated all the help!

 

[Madcow2]

Thanks everyone for the help, and I will let you know how it goes. Appreciated all the help!

Welcome. Like Biggt said, this isn't complicated stuff and it's pretty straightforward. Unfortunately there is a huge massive blot of horrendous information out there almost totally clouding out the sun - you will find it in BBing mags, websites, a lot of forums.

I'd highly recommend Starting Strength. Not a single person who has ordered it has regreted their purchase or not learned a good amount, and we are talking some highly seasoned elite lifters among them. It's a great starting point that will give you the technique to train properly and safely while also providing the underlying science behind it (and not some voodoo or loose extrapolation of studies on untrained novices or starved rats). Being new to this, you stand to make huge benefit as it's basically a manual for coaching novice lifters.

And for the record, I am not someone to endorse a product or tell people to go buy something if a bit of intelligent effort will get them there only slightly slower. As evidenced by the overwhelming majority of people in commercial gyms and the paid trainers not really having much of a clue - I don't think many people are pulling the "self-taught" or "internet researched" or "watched and learned" angle off at least without a ton of time waste and gross inefficiency.

Plus - it's a lot easier to help someone if they have a foundation of knowledge or information. And that's basically the book right there.

 

[SgtSlaughter]

Lots of good bros on this thread

Keep on reading Jack, you'll learn daily around des pahts

And.. Welcome to EF

 

[jackdeath]

Thanks, I was thinking about that book, and will have to give it a go~
Man there sure is a ton of info on here.... now all I have to do is absorb it all... time and work with tell..

 

[Madcow2]

Thanks, I was thinking about that book, and will have to give it a go~
Man there sure is a ton of info on here.... now all I have to do is absorb it all... time and work with tell..

One thing, you can quickly get into analysis paralysis if you start considering all sorts of exotic layouts and program variables. It's a lot easier - and far far more effective to think about the basic theme "Lift bigger, eat bigger, get bigger."

Big lifts that load the body heavily through a fundamental range of motion. Get those up systematically and eat to move the scale. It is that easy and all the complexity etc...comes from an experience and capability level rising to where raising those lifts becomes more difficult and requires a bit more planning.

This is kind of a basic primer understanding that I wrote the other day. It covers things in a lot more detail, but a lot more accuracy, than you will find in a lot of places. There are 4 large posts on the first page but that will give you a kind of 10,000 foot view of the landscape and what is going on. http://www.bodybuilding.net/training-forum/hypertrophy-and-strength-not-so-different-2972.html. That's about 15 minutes of reading max (i.e. this isn't that hard ). Between that and Starting Strength - you will basically be covered for a few months - that will give you great technique on the core lifts and just follow Rippetoe's program inside it. As you are implementing that over the first few months of your training, spend some time poking around here and my website http://www.geocities.com/elitemadcow1/table_of_contents_thread.htm specifically the Training Theory topics marked essential. That will probably give you quite a bit. Once you stall on the Starting Strength program, change some things and you'll continue to progress.

But don't lose site that all of this comes down to lift bigger, eat bigger, get bigger and all changes made and fancy training methodology and theory, is all about progression in the big lifts. If you keep that very narrow focus and then do whatever you need to do in the kitchen - well, you'll be very surprised how easy this is and how quickly you make progress and get to your goals. Then you'll take a hard look at what people are doing in the gym spinning their wheels and all the bogus info in BBing and fitness mags, and like most of us, you'll wonder what in the hell is going on with the world.

 

[Madcow2]

Preface to appreciative rant below -

BTW, as said further up it is so nice to see a normal mature human being post one of these "Help with Routine" threads. Generally you get the teenage know it all with a year on Dad's bowflex who really wants to be told he's the master uber huge program designer after reading an issue of Muscle and Fitness rather than learn and get decent advice. There is a lot of help here for people who are interested in learning and if you are willing to put in the time in the gym, greatly accelerated progress for yourself and better understanding of how what you do there drives you forward toward your goals.

People are here because they genuinely enjoy discussing training and helping other people. For some reason weight training is very similar to religion for a lot of guys, they don't get training or understand it fundamentally so suddenly it becomes this faith based voodoo thing where they just want others to tell them they are great. It's very important to believe in what you are doing but people have blind faith when they should still be learning the basics and don't understand anything. Unfortunately, faith isn't about believing or deciding to believe, it's about knowing how it is at the very deepest level through and through. And unfortunately, their version of faith blinds them and binds them until they can't see or hear anything that isn't in agreement with their own particular flavor of delusion.

Along those same lines this is something that some have found helpful in understanding this stuff:

That's basically the problem. Everyone thinks there is a static best way that will work from beginner to advanced and that this is the magic program. Essentially they want it simple, a golden program, that they can just "do" and will transform them to whatever their goal is.

Unfortunately, it is simple and it's not. There is no golden program. But there is a golden theme, progression. Programming is just a way of going about getting progression and systematically improving capacity. Muscles aren't going to grow from getting "worked" they are an adaptation to increased demands on the body's muscular systems. So it's still simple, just improve things that matter.

Obviously the fastest way to improve is to just add weight to the bar as often as possible. Problem being, the ability to pull that off at a beginner rate diminishes with experience. So then you do things a bit different out of necessity but the goal is still the same. Instead of adding weight to the bar once after a hard week, they might add once after a hard month or a longer block of training all geared around that next increment of performance.

The real problem is that people want the golden program. They want to believe there is some magic element that they are missing that will tie together that magic order of exercises and days of the week and make them huge or strong or whatever. So lately I've told a few people this, that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's 5x5, or WSB, or XYZ, HST, Blah blah blah - the real core is progression and improving. That's the training element in a nutshell. And then they have a moment of reckoning which I liken to the red and blue pill from the Matrix. They can take the blue pill, close their browser, go read Flex and keep looking for that elusive perfect element that no one seems to have but so many promise. Or, they can take the red pill, figure out what they need to get better at, come up with a reasonable plan to get there and start working. Funny thing is - it doesn't really matter because eventually after taking the blue pill enough times they will realize it's all bullshit and just go take the red and get to work. Just a matter of how long one wants to persist in delusion.

 

[stevius]

Fundamentally, the routine you create hinges on establishing correct technique- this is impossible to communicate verbally or with pictures. Two people doing the same movement may look exactly the same but the big difference is in the quality of contraction, which can only be achieved by practice. The quality of contraction dictates how well you can workout, so for a good experienced lifter more work can be done in less time, and this in turn will define how long to workout.

The feel of lifting takes time, but for each individual specific bodyparts respond differently due to innate qualities. For me, as an example, it took several years of (incorrect) practice and (incorrect) study before I even began to understand how complex the back is. A bodybuilder works muscles that- on a normal body- are naturally small and weak, so training exposes the lifter to a series of unnatural or unnacustomed pressures. For some this is a humbling experience, others may not be so willing to accept that, while able to move weight in a partial range of motion the rest of the motion is hampered by *weak points* - thereby, many beginners thwart their own training efforts by altering the mechanics of a lift using surrounding- and stronger- muscle tissue to aid a lift by swinging to compensate for a weak area. In a pushing movement- for example- weakness is most apparent where the arms are drawn in to the chest. For a pulling (rowing) movement the latissimus dorsi seem to be very weak naturally and, while I can easily pull a great deal of weight into my abdomen during a rowing movement I don't think it's really the lats that are doing most of the work until the elbows are almost fully 'drawn back'. In reality a weight I can move part the way to my abdomen becomes too heavy where muscles in a previously strong mechanical position become redundant, thus transferring stress onto smaller less used areas of the body.

Start light and the complex mechanisms involved as your body moves into different position become apparent, which translates to a better quality of contraction or in other words a stronger mind to muscle link. Without the right feel and understanding of the role of each muscle- how much stress each muscle must go through- gains in size will invariably be limited. No amount of work will fix this so you must get perfect form, especially for compound movements.

It is that easy and all the complexity etc...comes from an experience and capability level rising to where raising those lifts becomes more difficult and requires a bit more planning.

I think we're on the same track here.

 

[jackdeath]

Thanks again everyone, seems I have alot of reading to do, but that is the only way to learn... appreciate all!