What do you do in the gym anyway?

Walk into any gym anywhere in the world and there are people doing all kinds of weird things.  A lot of people must think some of the things I do in the gym are weird.  But there is a difference between weird and effective, and weird and pointless.  You need a good plan every time you enter the gym.  You should be out of there in less than an hour, feeling like you left nothing on the table. Your time in the gym should be based on intensity.  You should be working hard if you want to see results.  If you are working out for two hours, are you really pushing yourself?  

A typical workout should consist of four parts, the warm up, the heavy part, the "pump it up"part, and the finisher. Here is a brief outline of what each of these means.

Warm Up

You need to be warming up properly.  This does not mean touching your toes three times, swinging your arms from side to side and then loading three million pounds onto the bench press.  Run through a couple rounds of some bodyweight movements to get your muscles warm, and to practice some essential movement patterns.Two or three rounds of the following will do the trick.

1. Bodyweight Squats
2. Back Extensions
3. Pullups
4. Pushups or Dips
5. Hanging Leg Raises
6. Hip flexor stretches

Do as many reps as you feel is suitable for you to be thoroughly warmed up, without wearing yourself out.  This little circuit covers all the main muscle groups and should get your heart and lungs into the game too.

After getting warmed up, you need to get some mobility work in.  Hopefully you have access to foam rollers, and if you don't you can make do with a lacrosse ball (or something similar).  On lower body days roll the knots out of your glutes, lower back, IT band (the outer edge of your thigh), and the inside of your thigh.  After rolling these out, do some stretches like these to get your hips greased up.

Those stretches will mobilize your hips better than anything else. After spending some time grimacing in those positions, you should run through some of these movements to tie everything together and get your body working as a stable unit.Some good movements to do this can be seen here.

On upper body days you need to focus on your shoulders in the same way that you focused on hips for the lower body days.  Think about the postural problems you have, such as shoulders rounding forward.  What causes that?  A tight upper chest and biceps. Use this time to try to undo some of those issues, and also develop awareness of which areas need some extra attention.  This is a great general outline, but be sure to add in other stretches to address your individual problems.

Heavy Part

You're all warmed up and moving like a well oiled machine. Now you're good to start working safely.  Don't just throw your working weight on the bar and go though.  Give your nervous system a chance to get warmed up too. Start with an empty bar and incrementally add weight until you reach your working weight. The first part of your workout should be focused on strength.  Work up to an eight, five, three, or even a one rep max in one of the four main lifts.  By slowly adding weight until you reach your maximum weight, you get lots of volume done with heavy weight.  Louis Simmons of Westside Barbell has found, through years of training world champion powerlifters, that it is not necessary to do absolutely maximal weight to get stronger.  His athletes very rarely train with more than eighty percent of their one rep max, and the strongest people in the world almost always come from his gym.  An example of working up to a five rep max with 100kg would look like this,

20kg (empty bar) x 10

40 kg x 5

50kg x 5

60 kg x 5

70 kg x 5

80 kg x 5

90 kg x 5

95 kg x 5

100 kg x 5
105 kg x 5

Your goal was to get 100 kg, but you still felt strong after the 100 kg set, so you added a little bit more and went for it.  That's the beauty of this approach.  On days where you are feeling strong, push yourself.  If you are sick, or slept terribly and feel like a zombie, you may not be physically capable of giving it your all.  Listening to your body prevents injuries.

The "Pump It Up" Part

 A lot of very successful powerlifters will work up to a heavy five, three, or one rep max, do some high volume accessory work, and call it a day.  They believe that getting maximal heavy work done is the most important thing, and accessory work is done only to work on weak body parts.  For people more interested in building muscle, do your strength work first, and then work the muscles related to the main lift with lots of volume.  There are limitless ways of doing this, but the key is to do the strength work, and then move on to the bodybuilding stuff.  An example would be working up to a five rep max on the bench press, doing five sets of ten on incline dumbell bench, and then doing some tricep work.  The heavy part of your training is done to train your nervous system and muscles to work together to move heavy weight. This part of your training is done to get the muscles working and to get some blood flowing into them.  This is where you follow the bodybuilding philosophy of going for that mind-muscle connection and really feeling the muscles work with some lighter weights.  For this part choose rep ranges any where between 6-20.  For the heavy part of your workout, you are trying to break records and constantly increase the weight.  For this part your weights should be increasing over time, but you are more focused on feeling the muscles work.  Have fun here, and do drop sets, pyramids, all those things that bodybuilders love.

Finisher

After you have finished your strength and volume work, it can be fun to do a finisher to get some conditioning while you are still warmed up and ready to work. Pick a conditioning method that will take less than ten minutes, and work as hard as you can.  I wrote some ideas for conditioning in a previous post.  My personal favorites are barbell or bodyweight complexes, or a combo of the two.  This should take absolutely no more than ten minutes.  Five minutes would be an even better goal.  You've done a lot of work already, this is just thrown in to boost your metabolism a little more.

Hopefully this is a good outline to get you spending your time in the gym more efficiently.  Remember that keeping intensity up, and rest periods short is a great way to get more done in less time.  Leave the cellphone at the door.  Your Candy Crush record will never do as much for you as your squat or deadlift record.

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What Now?

The Twelve Week Challenge is over, so have I reverted back to my old bad habits?  Actually, I've stepped it up a notch.  During those twelve weeks, I wanted to show with a sensible diet, weight training, and some sprinting you can both lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, and most importantly, without killing yourself.  I believe that my progress shows that it is possible to make a lot of good progress through moderation, in terms of both diet and exercise.

The thing is, I still have not reached all my goals.  I am not as lean as I would like to be, but at the same time I also want to build more muscle.  Quite the conundrum.  Is it possible to get to single digit body-fat (visible abs) while also gaining muscle?  I don't know either, but I'm working on it now. I've changed my approach slightly, and from what I've accomplished over the past two weeks, I now believe that it is possible.  The missing ingredient is, hard work.  If I look honestly at the premise of the Twelve Week Challenge it was basically to get as much as possible with the least amount of work.  This breaks the universal law of reaping and sowing.  If you put in moderate efforts you get moderate results, not extraordinary results.

Like I said, I'm stepping it up a notch.  Everyone these days talks about how if you exercise too much, or have too much volume in your training program you will become "over-trained".  Tell this to an Olympic lifter who is doing two squat training sessions every day of the week. Or to Ironman participants, who spend upwards of twelve hours training everyday in preparation for that event.  The bottom line is that you get out only what you put in.  

As a side note  I spoke with my father the other day about my new training plan.  When he was younger he was a big strong dude.  He got there by doing pullups, pushups, and situps everyday.  No fear of over-training  no scientific programming. He just did those three exercises everyday, and put full effort into it each day.  This is not to say that there aren't more efficient ways to train, but it illustrates the point that the attitude with which you train is more important than the actual program.  People who push themselves will succeed.

After two weeks of really working hard.  I'm happy
 with the results so far

I have gone back to a powerlifting based program, called Beyond 531.  It is an awesome program for increasing strength in the four main lifts: squat, deadlift, bench press, and overhead press.  This is the foundation of what I'm doing now.  Everyday I follow this program for one main lift.  After that I choose an exercise that is related to the main lift, and work up to a heavy set of three to five reps.  Then I immediately work my way back down in a huge drop set to get a lot of volume, and also get the "pump".  This is basically a combination of powerlifting and bodybuilding approaches. This style of training is really fun, but also super challenging.  After lifting really heavy weight, the last thing you want to do is push yourself to absolute fatigue with lighter weights.

For my condition work, after upper body workouts I do a high intensity "finisher" to burn fat and get my metabolism firing. This could be as simple as doing 100 burpees as fast as possible, or it could be a series of barbell exercises done back to back without ever putting the bar down.  Finishers are a great way to work on conditioning, burn fat, and develop some mental toughness.  They are challenging, but are also fun way to end a workout. On squat and deadlift days, I do a sprint workout 8 hours later in the evening.  On rest days, I do another high intensity finisher, and go for a long walk.  I'm really pushing myself hard now.  I'm choosing to work incredibly hard in order to get incredible results.  I'm choosing not to buy into the fear of "over-training".  It's just another experiment, and you will find all the results here and on facebook.

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Five Easy Steps to Awesomeness

I have five things that I try to make a part of my daily life. These things keep me on track nutritionally, keep me healthy, keep me fit, and keep me sane. Try to incorporate these five things into your life for unadulterated awesomeness.

Macros- hit em 

Set macro nutrient goals for yourself (help can be found here) and hit those goals. This allows you to figure out what adjustments to make to your diet if you aren't getting the results you want. You've gotta be honest with yourself though. Record what you actually ate, not what you should have eaten.  If you don't have reliable data, you can't make informed decisions when adjusting your diet. Besides, lying to yourself about what you are is worse than cheating at solitaire.

Move - more if you can

Exercising a few times a week is awesome. Props to you if you are already following a sensible weight training program. But, weight training aside, try to move more. I know that a thousand people have already told you to take stairs, and walk to work, and so on, so I won't repeat it. We are a lazy generation that wants to get everything by doing as little as possible. Get out of this mindset. You know you need to be more active. Don't over-think it, just move more.

Mobility- becausing having hips like your grandmother is not cool

I think that in terms of overall health benefits this might be number one. Get a foam roller, buy this book, and learn how to live in that body of yours. We do a world of damage to ourselves by sitting for hours on end in front of computers. Spending thirty minutes doing self-care is not too much to ask. It feels so good to reclaim proper range of motion in your spine, hips, and shoulders. The actual act of doing mobility work is downright horrid sometimes, but the benefit are immediate and carry over into every part of your life.

Meditate- that's right

I thought this was a little too new age and flaky at first too. I was dead wrong. We spend all this time on our bodies, fixated on the outward stuff when inside is a constant torrent of mayhem. Get that mind of yours under control, and I guarantee the benefits will carry over to every aspect of your life. Take five minutes before you sleep to focus on all the high tension areas in your body, and consciously relax them. This will improve your sleep, help you focus, make you happier, allow your body to heal better after intense workouts...the benefits of meditating are endless, so give it a shot.

Sprint - it's probably as close to feeling like a real athlete as you'll ever get

Sprinting will kick your ass. That's pretty much all there is to it. There are a million ways to include sprinting into your life. Don't over-complicate this! Twice a week go outside, warm up properly, and then move fast. You can run shuttle sprints, suicides, hill sprints, 100m, 200m, 400m sprints, sled sprints, even bike sprints on those rainy days. I can't stress enough the need to not over-think this. Playing ultimate frisbee could be your sprinting. Just move fast, rest until you can breathe semi-normally, and then move fast again.

I think that these five things can make an enormous difference to your life.  They will all teach you to take charge of yourself, and will make you stronger in every way possible. What am I missing here?  Let me know in the comments below or on facebook.

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My Current Workout Plan

So I thought I should write a quick summary of what my exercise plan looks like.  To be honest, it is an extremely simple program.  Because I am trying to lose fat, over the course of a week I am eating fewer calories than my body needs.  There are several days where I eat more calories than I need, as is the case with intermittent fasting.  These are the days when I go to the gym and lift weights.  I do this on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Monday
Bench Press:  Work up to a max set of 5 reps
                      Take off 10% of the weight and do one more set
Incline Dumbell Press: 3 sets of 6-9reps
Dumbell Rows: 3 sets of 6-10 reps
Tricep Extensions: 4 sets of 8-12 reps
Curls: 3 sets of 6-9 reps

Wednesday
Glute Ham Raises: 3 sets of 6-9 reps
Squat: Work up to a max set of 5 reps
           Take off 10% of the weight and do one more set
Deadlift: Work up to a max set of 5 reps

Friday
Pullups: 3 sets of as many as possible with good form
Overhead press: 1 set of 4-6 reps, 1 set of 6-9 reps, 1 set of 8-10 reps
Hanging Leg Raises: 3 sets of as many as possible
Facepulls: 3 sets of 10-12
Curls: 3 sets of 8-10

All of these workouts take around 40 minutes to complete.  My goal is to go as heavy as possible on the big exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench, and overhead press.  When losing fat, you have to lift heavy to convince your body that it still needs the muscle.  The other exercises are down at lower intensity, but still with a focus on adding weight whenever it is possible.

If I were not dieting right now I would be doing a program like starting strength, or stronglifts.  I used this method of lifting before I began the 12 Week Challenge and was making consistent strength gains.  Using that style of training I went from barely being able to squat anything to squatting twice my bodyweight.  These kinds of programs only work if you are eating to grow though.  So that is why I've switched to a lower volume approach for these 12 weeks.

For cardio, I do morning walks of 30-45 minutes, five times a week. This is just brisk pace walking. After my workouts on Monday and Friday, I go and run hill sprints.  The hill sprints take about 20 minutes to complete, and they are incredibly tough.  I chose hill sprints because unlike traditional moderate intensity cardio that can cause muscle loss, hill sprints are muscle sparring and can even cause muscle growth....also hill sprints are just bad ass and fun.

That is all I'm doing.  Dieting, walking, lifting heavy weights, and hill sprints twice a week.  If I were feeling under-recovered the hill sprints would be the first to go.  Any questions, please let me know!

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Get Strong!

 My experience with weightlifting is probably fairly typical of a guy my age. I started working out in high school, and followed routines from Arnold's Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding. I did this for a couple years and made a bit of progress, but nothing special. 

What I should have been doing was squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and overhead presses. I should have done these with low reps (around five), and my only concern should have been adding more weight to the bar. That is what I do now, and it works. In one year of doing this my squats went from 50kg for five to 120kg for five. My legs grew a lot. My bench went from about 60kg for five, to 95kg for five. My arms and chest grew a lot. These weights are nothing extraordinary and I am by no means a big guy. The weights are however, way better than before, as is my physique. If you can continually add weight to the bar, you will get bigger.  It really is that simple.

I wish that I had followed this kind of program in high school. The problem is that the internet is full of terrible information, and the world of bodybuilding and weight training is notoriously bad. Too many flashy routines published by supplement companies trying to sell their products. That coupled with a generation of people who have the attention span of goldfish, has created an environment where the majority of people in the gym are spinning their wheels, or at best making mediocre progress.

Confused yet?

Doing squats, deadlifts, and bench day in and day out is not exciting or cutting edge. This is why so many people can't stick with a program like this, and why even more people can't be bothered to try. It is a shame, and I personally regret wasting so much time jumping from one program to the next.

The key to this kind of training is to get absolutely hooked on adding weight to the bar, and absolutely forbidding yourself from browsing the latest muscle building trends floating around the internet. There are days when I add 1kg to a lift, and am absolutely thrilled. If you can get into this frame of mind, a simple program can become addictive. Make those numbers climb as often as you can. When they stop climbing, deload and have another run at it.

That's how you get big biceps.

If you're dying to do some curls, or triceps extensions just do them. But, do them after you do the main exercises. If they start to interfere with your progress on the main lifts, get rid of them. Adding weight to the main lifts is far more important than a few bicep curls will ever be. If you can deadlift 400lbs you will have big biceps.

Look into Starting Strength, or Stronglifts, or Bill Starr 5x5. These are all great programs to get strong and pack on the muscle. Keep in mind though, that these programs are meant to get you big, and are not great for people trying to lose fat fast. So if gaining tons of muscle is your goal, you should be doing one of these programs, or something similar to it.  I still recommend doing intermittent fasting when doing these kinds of programs.  Fasting will allow you to pack on muscle, without getting fat during the process.  Give it a shot, and let me know how it goes.  Get in touch on facebook at www.facebook.com/fittaiwan

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