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I've been told 5/3/1 would work best for beginners, or very experienced powerlifters. I'm a 5:11, 185lb. My max is 255 bench, 355 squat and 430 DL. Pretty intermediate. Comments?

 

Just did some elevated big yoga ball pushup sets, lunges and shrugs at home. 6 sets, feel the burn, consume extra proteins. Tomorrow pullups, shoulder flyes. My cardio is off now that its fuckin hot so early here in the dustbowl.

FWP: My local gym is boring. Not sure why, I just get bored silly and my brain just wants to move on out of there after 20-30 min. No amount of whatever is on T.V. or earbudding will help. Plus I just get bored thowing my shit together to get there....and its so close. Only really using it for a few exercises I don't have at home like dips, roman chair, some others.

FWP: I have a set of Powerblock adjustable dumbbells, they are apparently the O.G. model and no more expansion sets are made for like 10-15 years. I have the 55 per side now, really need a 70lb expansion but only option would be to sell these, keep the stand and buy a whole other new set. Powerblock out of stock forever, and CL listings are priced at the "everyone is now working out from home" level. lol. I'm committed to the brand and will just add reps until remedied.

 

Starting to mix straight whey and casein. Casein, is the Peavey to Marshall.

 

35lb Kettle bell
2x15lb kb

Cycling 5-7miles 3x week since I have more time thanks to WFH.

3 sets of 35+ swings with the 35. I do this every day no matter what.

3x a week with the 15lbs:
3 sets of kettle bell cleans right handed
3 sets of Kbcleans left handed
3 sets of halos 20+ reps each
3 sets of curls 12 reps each side per set
Idk what it’s call but it’s an overhead lift with the on from behind the head to above it. 3 sets.

With the 35 - 3 sets of DEEP SKWATZ. 35 each.

The biggest/most important exercises are the squats and swings. Everything else is auxiliary. So no matter what I do those two.

Only thing I do at a gym:

Deadlifts 1x per week at my nearby gym. Sets of 10 until I’m wiped. I legit don’t count beyond the first 3 sets or so. Just focused on form and my next ten reps. Super light weight though (beginner) so it’s roughly the trap bar + 80 atm. But I’m the only one who wears a mask so I skedaddle immediately after that one exercise.

 

I've tried 5/3/1, a bunch of other programs. Got a lot of info from Barbell Medicine, Brian Alsruhe, and alan thrall etc... Before covid hit I would do 3 days a week (used to do 4, but..i'm getting old and i don't recover as fast as I used to)

day 1
squat 3 sets.
squat 3 sets assistance
bench
2 supplementary bench (flies, incline, decline, etc.. changed all the time)
2 supplementary back exercises (changed all the time)
1 tri's exercise (varied)
sometimes calves

day 2.
deadlift 3 sets
deadlift assistance
Press
2 supplementary shoulder exercises
bi's
forearms
abs/traps

repeat. ABA BAB

sometimes i would do cardio on my off days. it just depended on how i felt. Seemed to work pretty well for me.

I haven't lifted since the initial lockdowns though...now I am weak...now I am puny... makes me sad..

 

A
Incline Bench/Dumbbell bench and supplemental pec stuff (pec fly or decline) - Min 3 sets each (reps and weight vary depending on the day)
Dips- til failure. This is the master of tricep pumps imo. Diamond pushups are pretty good too though.
Skullcrusher/overhead tricep press- min 4 sets (usually light weight since this is how I end my chest day)
Back Squat - Been focusing on endurance to prep for ski season so I usually do 225+ lbs x 8-12 reps for minimum 4 sets. Usually by the time December rolls around I'm up to 315lbs for 8-10 reps x 3 sets. I tend to drop the reps and up the weight when spring rolls around since ski season is over.
single leg squat - minimum 8 reps x 4 set, usually alternate sets with back squat just to really destroy my legs in preparation for skiing.
lunge/rear lunge - random distance depending on how bad I'm dying from the squats.

B
Dead hang Pullups/assisted pullups (for extra torture) - Go til failure.
T-bar Row- 6-10 reps x 3-4 sets. Depends how dead I feel.
dumbbell shrugs- usually 60+ lb dumbbells for minimum 15 reps and 3 sets.
Dumbbell Row- usually go super light since I'm smoked from pullups and t-bar. I try to sneak in at least 2 sets of 8 but it depends how dead I feel.
Preacher curl- I'm usually lucky if I can hold a damn bar at this point, but if have something left in the tank I do like 6 reps x 2-3 sets of negatives.
Tricep press - at least 8-12 reps x 3 sets w >70 lbs to help prevent the dreaded T-Rex arms.
Deadlift (alternate between trap bar and standard barbell) - Like squat I'm going for endurance, so I usually do 225+ for minimum 10 reps and min 4 sets.

C
Row or running/walking
Row is usually minimum 30 mins-1hr at random pace (I don't usually do row because I hate it. a lot.)
running is 7-8min/mi for min 4 miles. If walking then minimum 15min/mi pace x 6 miles.

I usually go ABCABC.

I fucking hate cardio but I know I need to do way more. I might just add some extra cardio in on the A and B days, but later in the day so I'm not completely useless at work.
I spent all of lockdown doing my old army routine (leg raises/situps and pushup ladder where you start diamond and end on wide grip) so I managed to maintain my chest and triceps/abs, but everything else pretty much went to shit.

 

I hate cardio do what I did: get a bike. A gym bike is efficient but boring imo, and a real bike doesn’t have to be expensive to let you get some sunlight a few times a week. $0.02. There’s options especially used.

 

Nah. I hate biking even more than I hate rowing.

 

You coukd try bare assed wind sprinting along interstate easements. Won't be boring.

Edit: make sure to wear a sports watch.

 

Whaaaaaat?!?! You literally prefer running over cycling?! With your own two legs?! Like a sucker?!

Wow bro. Wow. And rowing is super fun. Throw on the tv and realize just how many torso muscles can burn at once. Also “why are my hamstrings on fire”? Lol.

 

- Lift cheesberger to face.
- Chew
- swallow
- breathe
- lift cigarette to face and light it.
- smoke cigarette
- lift guitar
- play guitar
- put down guitar
- lift body into bed
- fall asleep.
- repeat.

- Feel the burn!

- Seriously though. Trying to get as fit as I was in my 20's is a long term goal. I'm in 40''s now. Slowly getting there. Maybe by the time I'm 50.
- Already made big improvements in health through diet, though not perfect. Eliminated almost all red meat and replaced with chicken breast, started eating greens, beans, seeds. Eliminated almost entirely all processed meats, grasses, processed and concentrated oils, candy, ice cream, dairy almost entirely, and cut smoking back by about 80-85%.
- Started doing stretching again and will eventually lead back in to my basic calisthenics then back to a customized workout I use to do for myself.

 

I feel like my diet is pretty good. I've ran the gamut from 170lbs to 190lbs and decided to stay at around 180lbs since it's fairly easy for me to maintain (er....precovid...I've dropped to 173ish since i'm not lifting right now)

breakfast
1 serving oats
1 banana
75 grams blueberries
1-2 scoops of peanut butter
sometimes some cinnamon and ...*gasp*...sugar
1 scoop protein shake in 2 cups of milk

lunch
1 serving whatever meat
1 serving rice
1 serving veggies

dinner
1 serving whatever meat
1 serving rice
1 serving veggies

that's for 173ish lbs.

if i want to go to 180-185lbs, I'll add in 2 servings of yogurt, 1 serving orange juice, a bunch of spinach.. scoop of protein. blend it up into a shake. I forget how many calories that was. But it was a pretty good amount that was easy to down.

I sometimes eat cookies and chocolates, but if i notice myself getting too soft I'll back off on those.

190lbs was a lot harder... i had to eat non stop.... too brutal for me.. It became stressful, and lost it's fun lol

edit: potatoes are good too instead of rice. they just take more effort to make if I did something like mashed potatoes so I usually just stick with rice.

 

Nah, cycling sucks compared to a good run. I can hit the bike at the gym until my ass feels numb, but it takes 10x as long to get tbr same workout and feels like I only did half as much as I really did; I never finished a ride and felt nearly as proud of myself as when I finish a new PR for a run, it was always just, "yup, I certainly did go that far in that amount of time."

I have a rower at my parents place thats currently going unused, and its a notch above cycling in my book.

 

anyone do squats and lunges in the same workout? I'm scared of blowing out a critical part.

EDIT: surprisingly easy, must be just enough variation in the target muscles to not march forward and collapse. leg blast ftw.

 

Also, after a few decades of doubt, giving creatine an honest try. Older I get the quicker the gains disappear. Not doing the loading method, just the slow daily thing.
Also looking into HMB.
That's it, though, no anabolic roids or painkillers to get me through the comps. None of my blood is stored in the fridge for packing day either.

 

The older creatines worked best loaded, like EAS Phosphagen. I like some of the newer stuff like kre-alkalyn. And I haven't seen HMB mentioned for a long time. I know there was a lot of placebo effect surrounding it, but one of my buddies swore by it.

 

You guys talking about hating biking are mad. Best way to see the world, and riding can be a killer cardio workout. And it's a lot more FUN than running, if you have any level of comfort on a bike.

I've been mostly ignoring this thread since it's so focused on gym workouts, but since I'm here...

I spent a lot of the summer focusing on short, extremely hard maximal effort attacks - KOM hunting on Strava, if any of you are familiar with the app. A KOM is the fastest recorded time on a "segment" on Strava, or a user-defined stretch of road that's notable for some reason, so I spent my summer going after KOMs on some of the shorter "sprint" climbs around here. I'm built like a sprinter more than a climber - low 180s, 6', high power output and high burst power, but power-to-weight I'm not going to compete with someone built like a racehorse jockey on a long climb. On short uphill sprints, though, maybe 1:15 or so and under, I can just unload tremendous amounts of power to hit the bottom of a climb at apeed and maintain that on the way up, so I'v e been putting in a strong showing on a lot of the short steep climbs around here - I live along the ridge of Winter Hill in Somerville, so I've taken the KOM on a bunch of the climbs running up it, as well as a few further out in the area (I think I picked up about 20 or so this summer).

As we're transitioning into indoor trainer seasn, though, I'm getting back to working on my sustained power output. I'b basically doing four types of workouts, if I'm going to generalize horribly - long "endurance" rides where I'm not going especially hard, just building base conditioning (these are probably best at burning fat and keeping/taking weight off), interval workouts where I'm either doing short, very hard efforts with easy recoveries in between, to build VO2Max and neuromuscular power output, over/under interval workouts where the hard parts aren't quite as hard, but the recoveries have me dropping down to only just under my lactate threshold, with the idea being forcing my body to adapt to recover and burn lactate at still fairly high intensity efforts, and then occasionally dropping any sort of structured training and going after my PR on one of the virtual hill climbs on the Zwift virtual training platform I use, and doing a max effort attack of anywhere from 3-8 minutes on the shorter climbs, to a bunch that - for me - clock in around 20 minutes, to two extremely long ones - Zwift modeled Alp d'Huez and Mt. Ventoux from the Tour de France and I'm due for another max effort run up the Alp (current PR around 52 minutes, I should be able to take a few minutes off that) and while Ventoux was only released this summer I've only ridden it to the top twice and now that I have some idea how to pace the climb, I'm hoping to knock some time off my 1 hour 28 minute PR, as well.

For those of you who give a shit about cycling at a high level enough to care about this kind of stuff - one of my training goals for this season, once it became pretty clear that most/all of my events were going to get cancelled due to Covid, was to try to crack 4 watts per kilogram at FTP. I came into this season with an FTP of 310w as of year end, lost some ground with Covid in March, and then started working my way back and as of Saturday when chasing a PR on the reverse direction climb on the Zwift replica of the Innsbruck UCI Worlds course from 2018, managed to - after warming up with a reasonably hard run up on my first lap - open up and hold a 344w average for 19:30 on the climb, which translated to a 20-minute max of 343 and an estimated FTP of 326w. I THINK I could do a little better than that too, there were a couple short flat sections where I had to shift chainrings and my bike wasn't shifting especially cleanly, so my next proper FTP test I'm going to have to see if I can hold a 350w average for 20 minutes. That would translate to an estimated FTP of about 332 (95% of 20 minute max is a common estimation) which would, well, it would depend on which end of my typical weight range I was in, if that was enough to break 4.0k/kg. But that's a pretty big gain in raw power for a single season for a fairly highly trained cyclist, so either way I'd be stoked.

For perspective - your typical "athletic, but not training on a bike" layperson main would probably have a functional threshold power in w/kg of around 1.5-2, whereas if your FTP is around 6.5w/kg, you're not only a pro cyclist, you're probably on the short list of contenders to win the Tour de France or another Grand Tour stage race. I don't race, but 4.0w/kg would probably be enough to have me doing some damage in the local race scene.

 

FWP? I dont' know but I finally got a new set of Powerblocks put together. Was stuck on my O.G. set that couldn't be expanded due to obsolesence so had to buy a new, current set.
Due to availability on a weekly basis at random, bout the expansion set first, then the core set then then 2nd expansion set. so I can rock 90 lbs each with caution lol.

 

Man, I miss being able to lift. I haven't touched a weight since the lockdowns. It's almost been a year...a year! I've never ever gone this long without lifting since I started.

Doing calisthenics sucks. It's been brutal finding the motivation to just do some pushups and bodyweight exercises lol

@Seabeast2000 - for your squat/lunges question: when I was able to lift I would do lunges as accessory work after doing squats.
3 warm up sets of squats
3 working sets
3 sets of lunges

They wouldn't be crazy heavy lunges though. Just moderate weight as it was accessory work. (i wouldn't do them every workout either. I'd rotate accessory work every so often)

 

Dumbbell and Barbell complexes. I just can't get away from them. The idea is you do the whole circuit without putting the weight down. That is a "set". Rest a minute or two between sets. I add stuff and modify all the time.

So a dumbbell complex would look like this:

20 lbs dumbbell curls -> overhead press -> squat -> bent over rows -> romanian dead; 10 reps, 4 sets. So go straight from curls to overhead press to squat, etc.

Barbell complex:

75 lb bar dead -> upright row -> press -> squat (front or back) -> good morning; 10 reps 4 sets.