As noted, I focus on strength workouts. This is due to a mix of personal preference - I enjoy lifting heavy things a whole lot more than I enjoy running or biking in place, so strength training motivates me to actually go to the gym - and my understanding of the relative effectiveness of each as part of a weight loss routine. Basically, cardio helps you lose weight, but strength training helps ensure the weight you lose is mostly stored fat rather than muscle. Both have other long-term health benefits (and also health risks that need to be mitigated with sensible training practices and proper form), and I do try to work low-intensity cardio into my daily life via walking and cycling. But the thing that gets me into the gym is lifting weights.
I generally prefer free weights over weight machines, as I think the former are better for overall health via increased use of stabilizer muscles and generally larger range of motion, but there are some exercises where I use machines due mostly to convenience. I've tried some starter bodyweight training routines, and found that I have too much bodyweight to do a lot of the progressions effectively. I can't do a pullup, for example, and for me pushups are more in the realm of maximum effort than light warmup. So I stick with weights for now, but I'd like to add in more bodyweight moves as my strength:weight ratio improves.
The key to any effective strength training program is progressive overload - increase the stress on your muscles and your body responds by building more muscle and getting better at recruiting muscle fibers, both of which make you stronger. The easiest way to do this is to add weight every session, and there are lots of fine beginner programs that follow this method - Starting Strength, Ice Cream Fitness, the Average F'n Program, any number of Greyskull LP variants, and so on. In particular, I recommend anybody interested in barbell training should pick up Starting Strength, even if you don't follow the program it's a great reference for learning technique.
That said, I don't do any of those. I tried for my first 2-3 months of lifting, and found my lifts stalled fast and hard, meaning I couldn't keep adding weight to them. For a while I thought I was doing something terribly wrong or that there was something wrong with me, but on doing some googling around I found my results weren't that unusual for people in my situation - eating at a caloric deficit, outside of the prime muscle-building years (mid teens to mid to late 20s). It's not that middle aged fat guys can't build strength, but we have to go about it a bit differently than the most straightforward path of doing sets of 5 reps and adding weight to the bar every session.
The program I eventually latched onto as a base for my workouts is called All Pro, after the screen name of the guy who first posted it. The things I like about it are that it's based on full body workouts using mostly compound lifts, but uses different weights throughout the training week and progressive overload via increasing number of reps week-to-week on a five week cycle. This means it's easier to recover from the workouts. I have modified it in several ways to suit my needs and my understanding of current knowledge about training. My version looks like this:
Main exercises: Squat, Bench, Row, Overhead Press, Straight-leg Deadlift, Lat Pulldown, Leg Raise
Isolation/Vanity exercises: Calf Raise, Tricep Pulldown, Bicep Curl
Working weight: for the main exercises, determine your 8 rep max - the weight at which you can do 8 reps with good form, but can't manage a ninth. For the other exercises, it's the weight at which you can do about 14-15 reps with good form.
Workout 3 days a week, Monday/Wednesday/Friday is traditional, I personally do Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday. For main exercises, Day 1 is Heavy Day, do two warmup sets at 25% to 50% of working weight and then two sets of 6 reps with the full working weight. You shouldn't need much rest between warmup sets - I only pause long enough to change weights. Rest between the two full weight sets is 90 seconds.
Day 2 is Medium day. Use 90% of your working weight, and do two sets of 8 instead of two sets of 6. Otherwise same drill.
Day 3 is Light day. Use 80% of your working weight, and do two sets of 10 instead of two sets of 6. Otherwise same as heavy day.
In week 2, increase the number of reps in each set by 1. So heavy day is two sets of 7, medium is two sets of 9, light is two sets of 11. Increase again for weeks 3 and 4, and again in week 5 when you'll be doing 10, 12, and 14 reps on heavy, medium, and light days respectively.
Week 5 heavy day is test day - in each exercise, if you make both sets of 10, at the end of the week you increase the working weight by 10% and start the next cycle. If you fail a set, you keep the weight the same and start the next cycle.
For the isolation exercises, in week 1 you do two sets of 12 reps on each day without adjusting the weight. Week two is two sets of 14, keep increasing by 2 reps each week until you're doing two sets of 20 reps in week 5. If you get all the reps on test day, then in the next cycle you increase the weight by 10%.
And that's about it. I've been able to make steady progress with this routine for some time now, much longer than I could on Starting Strength. It is more of a hybrid strength/bodybuilding routine than the strength-focused routines usually recommended to novices, but I find the slightly higher rep ranges (and correspondingly lower weights) are much more forgiving on my body. This also makes use of a concept called "daily undulating periodization," which basically means changing up your weights and rep ranges from workout to workout. In some studies this has lead to faster progress than straight linear programs.
So that's how I train. I plan to continue until either I start to stall in several exercises at once - in which case I'll probably move to an upper/lower split, hitting each major exercise twice a week instead of three times - or I hit my weight loss goal, in which case I'll finally stop eating at a deficit and be able to give something like Greyskull LP a try.
Next time around I plan to revisit nutrition, with some talk about macronutrients and meal planning. Be well.
No comments:
Post a Comment