Also, for those interested shoot me a DM and I will get you a link for 5 free workout programs through Axios Fitness, the founder is one of our guys and knows what he is doing.
As someone pushing 50 who does heavy barbell training, great post. And I second it... Squat, Press, Dead, Bench. Be consistent, push yourself. Stress with intensity not reps. The barbell is the way.....
1) How do I find a weight to start at for each exercise? Starting with a bar and adding 5lbs of weight every work out sound tedious and wasteful as weeks tick on to find a proper working weight. Or maybe this is necessary to get joints and non-muscle body parts safely used to working, I don't know.
2) Previously when I was regularly in the gym I was doing 2 warm-up sets at 60% and 80% working weight respectively. This article suggests more sets and that's fine. But I spent a lot of time calculating warm up weights. Is there an easier way to go about this? An excel sheet that exists or maybe I need to make one myself?
3) There's a lot of advice for smaller guys here, but I'm a bigger guy. I calculated my TDEE as suggested in the comments here. For Sedentary it says 2,345 calories per day and Light Exercise 2,687 calories per day. Do I stay close to one of those? Decrease? STILL increase?
(copied from my response to your DM so other people can see it)
So, a good place to start with your working weight will be a weight at which three sets of five is difficult, but doable. Your last one or two reps on your last set should be somewhat difficult. The last rep will probably be a decent grind on the way up.
Actually finding this magic number can be a bit difficult at first, but you just need to ballpark it, you don't need to add five pounds every workout until it actually gets hard; if squatting 150 for 3 x 5 is super easy, go ahead and try 165 or 175 the next time. If that's still easy, make another similar jump. You will know when you have hit a good working weight when three sets of five is difficult, but doable, and the last couple reps on the last set are difficult. That's how you know you're walking that fine line of stress that will promote adaptation.
It is certainly a skillset and will come with time and practice. I have had a lot of periods in my life where I was unable to work out for some period, and therefore had to do a bit of a "reset" on my lifts. The first workout back in the gym after some time off (usually field training when I was in the military) required some guesswork, but I would do my normal warmup routine and then pick a working weight some amount less than I was at previously. Sometimes I would make a good choice, sometimes it was too easy, other times I would miss my last couple reps because it was too heavy. Then I would adjust accordingly the next time I hit the gym. I always carry a physical notebook (I try to stay off my phone at the gym) in my gym bag and use a new page for each workout with the date. It helps me track my progress and if I have to do any resets, I can make more accurate estimates by looking at how much I was lifting, and when, and you'll begin to see patterns with your own body and breaks
Personally, for warmups, I religiously start with an empty bar, which helps me focus on my form and get stretched out/comfortable with the proper range of motion. Likewise, I add weight in increments of about fifty pounds religiously. After my first set with the bar I always do a dynamic stretching routine (which I did not write about in the piece). The first two or three warmup sets, in addition to warming the muscle tissue up, stimulating bloodflow, etc, also serve to stretch me out and get my body ready to hit full range of motion at the heavy working weight. I find that I am always very tight when I go to the gym and the full nine yards of warming up helps tremendously.
That being said, stronger lifters usually start their warmups with more weight, and sometimes take bigger jumps in weight across their warmup sets. That's more of a personal preference thing. Certainly if you're squatting 400 for 3 x 5, you can probably afford to do something like that. Even so, I would still start with the bar, but there is no wrong way to do it as long as you are properly warmed up by the time you hit your working weight and your chosen warmup routine does its job of preventing injury
Since you're a bigger guy, you don't need to be packing on tons of calories. With enough time lifting you will probably end up losing body fat and gaining muscle, since more muscle means you will need more calories to maintain it. So if you start getting absolutely shredded (IE very low body fat percentage) you will want to increase your intake. For athleticism and strength building, you generally want to have a little bit of excess fat. You don't need to be FAT, but attempting to stay shredded and maintain six pack abs will negatively impact your ability to gain muscle and strength (you can always lose the fat, but you can't gain muscle without it). But for right now if you're already a bigger dude, that higher number, around 2,600 is probably good.
That's just my guesstimate though. Everybody is different and it might take some time/playing around to find the sweet spot for your calorie intake. What I will say though, if you're trying to lose fat, don't try and do it in leaps and bounds. Try and keep your calorie intake at your maintenance level and don't starve yourself. Your excess fat will make it much easier to build muscle, and as your build muscle your overall body composition will move in the right direction. If you're naturally a bigger guy, you're always gonna be a bigger guy, but in a year or two you'll have packed on a lot of muscle and trimmed a lot of fat, even if the number on the scale hasn't changed a bit (odds are it will go up, even as you look skinnier, since muscle is so much denser than fat).
Thank you for this very adequate reply, almost an entire post of its own! I'll pick up a notebook and be in the gym Monday. I'll report back in a few weeks probably in a DM if that's fine.
It's a good method to try, especially for young beginners. However, once you hit the limit of your initial linear progression, it's a good idea to look elsewhere for intermediate training guidance.
The main problem with SS, Stronglifts, and other similar programs is that they are strictly low volume and high intensity. People with average or better genetics can grow a lot of initial muscle on this type of program... below avg or older trainees, not so much. They just get whatever strength they can get with small muscles and get stuck. Beware self-selection bias in partisans for any method. YMMV.
At some point, many will need to transition to periodization and working in more bodybuilding style training: lower intensity and higher volume. Some people just don't go far on 5 rep sets, and get better results with higher stress-to-fatigue exercises, way more sets, and reps in the 10-30 range.
The most reliable mainstream source I know is mostly bodybuilding oriented: Mike Israetel at Renaissance Periodization. Barbell Medicine is similar, but more strength training oriented. Alexander Bromley and Alan Thrall are also good youtubers for more powerlifting/strongman oriented training.
I've read both. Those books still follow the low volume high intensity plan. He never gets into hypertrophy-specific training. If you can’t see that, you still don't know anything about it, apparently ignoring my description above as "useless" while remaining ignorant. The programs for old people in the later book and spinoff Greysteel guy's book are just more of the same thing with lower frequency, thus even LOWER volume, which is the opposite of what I was talking about. RIppetoe's advanced programs are still all powerlifting style programs, with even higher intensity, accumulating even more fatigue, across multiple workouts and even weeks. No incorporation of stress-to-fatigue ratio exercise selection, no high rep higher frequency work... An entire world of training never even mentioned in favor of his narrow monomaniacal training dogma.
I tried running an SS LP in my 40’s, since I had never tried it: I gained a tiny amt of strength, a lot of fat, zero muscle, and got an acute back injury. Took months to rehab and diet off the results. I tried the lower volume prog for older people after that and got no results at all. I got stuck for years thinking I had to blast my system almost exclusively with heavy compound lifts and HIIT. It’s only one of many productive ways to train. It simply does not work well for some people and has unnecessarily high injury risks. Even the people for whom it does work could do better by breaking out of Rippetoe's orbit.
As someone whose been strength training for years now, I'd strongly advise against a newbie eating more than 3000 calories a day at max (and absolutely don't make the majority of it milk, despite how vitamin rich it is). If you are new to the gym you will put on muscle extremely easily assuming you go to anywhere near failure eating at a caloric maintenance or slight surplus (400-600). I know this is less based than mogging everyone around you as you walk down the street, gallon of milk in one hand and 16 oz. Ribeye you bite chunks out of in the other, but you don't need to fight in the civil war in 3 months, you have time to build muscle and strength without having to carry 50 extra pounds of mush on you to do so. Fact is, your body will only turn so much protein into so much muscle, any extra beyond that simply becomes fat
This is a marathon not a sprint, if you attempt to eat like an amateur powerlifter on day 1 you'll gain much more fat than you'll have needed to and your cardio and endurance will go to hell unless you balance that with a lot of intense high heart rate activity (which i know many of you as untrained newbies will skip, be honest.)
If you're reading this, go search what your TDEE is. Take that number and add 750 calories to it to find out what you should be eating per day (assume the lowest or 2nd lowest activity level, always). Use Chronometer (Or some other food tracking app with a barcode scanner) to LOG ALL YOUR FOOD NO CHEATING. Eat 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight (over that has no effect unless you're on steroids). Split the rest between fats and carbs. Fats for hormones to function properly (among other health benefits) and carbs for the actual energy to workout and go about your day. If you just go all or almost all protein you will feel like shit and I will laugh at you.
Last bit of advice is I'd aim for 1 pound of weight gain a week on average. Keep track of your overall week to week increase to be sure you're gaining steadily. If this begins to stall or slow down add 250 more calories to each day. Titrade up so your metabolism and blood pressure adjusts with your training.
I strongly recommend learning how to cook food yourself as well. Your endocrine system will thank you for bulking up eating (majority) cleanly rather than stuffing fast food hamburgers and chipotle into you just to get weight up. You are young so you can tolerate the latter more but please just try to get a green vegetable and a fruit in you once a day at minimum. Also get your vitamin C, helps with brain fog and energy levels.
Great info, except for GOMAD, which involves more extra calories than you can use to get stronger, and which will therefore go to fat. LOMAD (liter of milk a day) is justifiable for "hard gainers" though.
GOMAD is entirely appropriate for underweight males, the target demographic, and competitive trainees. So no, it is not recommended for everyone. But, you knew that; you only wanted to post this standard NPC comment to an old effective idea.
Also, for those interested shoot me a DM and I will get you a link for 5 free workout programs through Axios Fitness, the founder is one of our guys and knows what he is doing.
I just finished the first month of Starting Strength.
Went out bought a rogue rack and it’s been a great addition to my day.
As someone pushing 50 who does heavy barbell training, great post. And I second it... Squat, Press, Dead, Bench. Be consistent, push yourself. Stress with intensity not reps. The barbell is the way.....
Three Questions-
1) How do I find a weight to start at for each exercise? Starting with a bar and adding 5lbs of weight every work out sound tedious and wasteful as weeks tick on to find a proper working weight. Or maybe this is necessary to get joints and non-muscle body parts safely used to working, I don't know.
2) Previously when I was regularly in the gym I was doing 2 warm-up sets at 60% and 80% working weight respectively. This article suggests more sets and that's fine. But I spent a lot of time calculating warm up weights. Is there an easier way to go about this? An excel sheet that exists or maybe I need to make one myself?
3) There's a lot of advice for smaller guys here, but I'm a bigger guy. I calculated my TDEE as suggested in the comments here. For Sedentary it says 2,345 calories per day and Light Exercise 2,687 calories per day. Do I stay close to one of those? Decrease? STILL increase?
Any help here would be appreciated.
(copied from my response to your DM so other people can see it)
So, a good place to start with your working weight will be a weight at which three sets of five is difficult, but doable. Your last one or two reps on your last set should be somewhat difficult. The last rep will probably be a decent grind on the way up.
Actually finding this magic number can be a bit difficult at first, but you just need to ballpark it, you don't need to add five pounds every workout until it actually gets hard; if squatting 150 for 3 x 5 is super easy, go ahead and try 165 or 175 the next time. If that's still easy, make another similar jump. You will know when you have hit a good working weight when three sets of five is difficult, but doable, and the last couple reps on the last set are difficult. That's how you know you're walking that fine line of stress that will promote adaptation.
It is certainly a skillset and will come with time and practice. I have had a lot of periods in my life where I was unable to work out for some period, and therefore had to do a bit of a "reset" on my lifts. The first workout back in the gym after some time off (usually field training when I was in the military) required some guesswork, but I would do my normal warmup routine and then pick a working weight some amount less than I was at previously. Sometimes I would make a good choice, sometimes it was too easy, other times I would miss my last couple reps because it was too heavy. Then I would adjust accordingly the next time I hit the gym. I always carry a physical notebook (I try to stay off my phone at the gym) in my gym bag and use a new page for each workout with the date. It helps me track my progress and if I have to do any resets, I can make more accurate estimates by looking at how much I was lifting, and when, and you'll begin to see patterns with your own body and breaks
Personally, for warmups, I religiously start with an empty bar, which helps me focus on my form and get stretched out/comfortable with the proper range of motion. Likewise, I add weight in increments of about fifty pounds religiously. After my first set with the bar I always do a dynamic stretching routine (which I did not write about in the piece). The first two or three warmup sets, in addition to warming the muscle tissue up, stimulating bloodflow, etc, also serve to stretch me out and get my body ready to hit full range of motion at the heavy working weight. I find that I am always very tight when I go to the gym and the full nine yards of warming up helps tremendously.
That being said, stronger lifters usually start their warmups with more weight, and sometimes take bigger jumps in weight across their warmup sets. That's more of a personal preference thing. Certainly if you're squatting 400 for 3 x 5, you can probably afford to do something like that. Even so, I would still start with the bar, but there is no wrong way to do it as long as you are properly warmed up by the time you hit your working weight and your chosen warmup routine does its job of preventing injury
Since you're a bigger guy, you don't need to be packing on tons of calories. With enough time lifting you will probably end up losing body fat and gaining muscle, since more muscle means you will need more calories to maintain it. So if you start getting absolutely shredded (IE very low body fat percentage) you will want to increase your intake. For athleticism and strength building, you generally want to have a little bit of excess fat. You don't need to be FAT, but attempting to stay shredded and maintain six pack abs will negatively impact your ability to gain muscle and strength (you can always lose the fat, but you can't gain muscle without it). But for right now if you're already a bigger dude, that higher number, around 2,600 is probably good.
That's just my guesstimate though. Everybody is different and it might take some time/playing around to find the sweet spot for your calorie intake. What I will say though, if you're trying to lose fat, don't try and do it in leaps and bounds. Try and keep your calorie intake at your maintenance level and don't starve yourself. Your excess fat will make it much easier to build muscle, and as your build muscle your overall body composition will move in the right direction. If you're naturally a bigger guy, you're always gonna be a bigger guy, but in a year or two you'll have packed on a lot of muscle and trimmed a lot of fat, even if the number on the scale hasn't changed a bit (odds are it will go up, even as you look skinnier, since muscle is so much denser than fat).
Thank you for this very adequate reply, almost an entire post of its own! I'll pick up a notebook and be in the gym Monday. I'll report back in a few weeks probably in a DM if that's fine.
Absolutely
It's a good method to try, especially for young beginners. However, once you hit the limit of your initial linear progression, it's a good idea to look elsewhere for intermediate training guidance.
The main problem with SS, Stronglifts, and other similar programs is that they are strictly low volume and high intensity. People with average or better genetics can grow a lot of initial muscle on this type of program... below avg or older trainees, not so much. They just get whatever strength they can get with small muscles and get stuck. Beware self-selection bias in partisans for any method. YMMV.
At some point, many will need to transition to periodization and working in more bodybuilding style training: lower intensity and higher volume. Some people just don't go far on 5 rep sets, and get better results with higher stress-to-fatigue exercises, way more sets, and reps in the 10-30 range.
The most reliable mainstream source I know is mostly bodybuilding oriented: Mike Israetel at Renaissance Periodization. Barbell Medicine is similar, but more strength training oriented. Alexander Bromley and Alan Thrall are also good youtubers for more powerlifting/strongman oriented training.
What an entirely useless post. Hey look, there's a book about programming after the novice program:
https://aasgaardco.com/store/books-posters-dvd/books/practical-programming-for-strength-training/
Oh look, there's a book for older people, too:
https://aasgaardco.com/store/books-posters-dvd/books/the-barbell-prescription-strength-training-for-life-after-40/
Again, another NPC comment. "AKCHUALLY, it's low volume, high intensity ::snort::"
I've read both. Those books still follow the low volume high intensity plan. He never gets into hypertrophy-specific training. If you can’t see that, you still don't know anything about it, apparently ignoring my description above as "useless" while remaining ignorant. The programs for old people in the later book and spinoff Greysteel guy's book are just more of the same thing with lower frequency, thus even LOWER volume, which is the opposite of what I was talking about. RIppetoe's advanced programs are still all powerlifting style programs, with even higher intensity, accumulating even more fatigue, across multiple workouts and even weeks. No incorporation of stress-to-fatigue ratio exercise selection, no high rep higher frequency work... An entire world of training never even mentioned in favor of his narrow monomaniacal training dogma.
I tried running an SS LP in my 40’s, since I had never tried it: I gained a tiny amt of strength, a lot of fat, zero muscle, and got an acute back injury. Took months to rehab and diet off the results. I tried the lower volume prog for older people after that and got no results at all. I got stuck for years thinking I had to blast my system almost exclusively with heavy compound lifts and HIIT. It’s only one of many productive ways to train. It simply does not work well for some people and has unnecessarily high injury risks. Even the people for whom it does work could do better by breaking out of Rippetoe's orbit.
Meesa must get stronk (love your mommas) - https://files.catbox.moe/9gaxxh.jpeg
As someone whose been strength training for years now, I'd strongly advise against a newbie eating more than 3000 calories a day at max (and absolutely don't make the majority of it milk, despite how vitamin rich it is). If you are new to the gym you will put on muscle extremely easily assuming you go to anywhere near failure eating at a caloric maintenance or slight surplus (400-600). I know this is less based than mogging everyone around you as you walk down the street, gallon of milk in one hand and 16 oz. Ribeye you bite chunks out of in the other, but you don't need to fight in the civil war in 3 months, you have time to build muscle and strength without having to carry 50 extra pounds of mush on you to do so. Fact is, your body will only turn so much protein into so much muscle, any extra beyond that simply becomes fat
This is a marathon not a sprint, if you attempt to eat like an amateur powerlifter on day 1 you'll gain much more fat than you'll have needed to and your cardio and endurance will go to hell unless you balance that with a lot of intense high heart rate activity (which i know many of you as untrained newbies will skip, be honest.)
If you're reading this, go search what your TDEE is. Take that number and add 750 calories to it to find out what you should be eating per day (assume the lowest or 2nd lowest activity level, always). Use Chronometer (Or some other food tracking app with a barcode scanner) to LOG ALL YOUR FOOD NO CHEATING. Eat 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight (over that has no effect unless you're on steroids). Split the rest between fats and carbs. Fats for hormones to function properly (among other health benefits) and carbs for the actual energy to workout and go about your day. If you just go all or almost all protein you will feel like shit and I will laugh at you.
Last bit of advice is I'd aim for 1 pound of weight gain a week on average. Keep track of your overall week to week increase to be sure you're gaining steadily. If this begins to stall or slow down add 250 more calories to each day. Titrade up so your metabolism and blood pressure adjusts with your training.
I strongly recommend learning how to cook food yourself as well. Your endocrine system will thank you for bulking up eating (majority) cleanly rather than stuffing fast food hamburgers and chipotle into you just to get weight up. You are young so you can tolerate the latter more but please just try to get a green vegetable and a fruit in you once a day at minimum. Also get your vitamin C, helps with brain fog and energy levels.
what is axios fitness
https://oldgloryclub.substack.com/p/an-introduction-to-weightlifting/comment/66094688?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2r94pv
Its an online based training program
Here’s the link for Axios. https://axios-remote-fitness-coaching.ck.page/31d9738d88
Great info, except for GOMAD, which involves more extra calories than you can use to get stronger, and which will therefore go to fat. LOMAD (liter of milk a day) is justifiable for "hard gainers" though.
Gaining a bit of fat is ideal for gaining muscle. The road from skinny to ripped passes through pudgy. You cant get big while having low BF%.
GOMAD is entirely appropriate for underweight males, the target demographic, and competitive trainees. So no, it is not recommended for everyone. But, you knew that; you only wanted to post this standard NPC comment to an old effective idea.
This is great practical advice, and we need a lot more of this in our sphere.