J-Ho-Fo-Show69 wrote: ↑Wed May 08, 2024 7:27 pm
SAWCE wrote: ↑Wed May 08, 2024 6:05 pm
The toning will come lower body fat levels, so you’ll have to remove a testicle and wear a dress one day a week and count a few calories :mahlady: Or you can up the cardio to burn some extra cals and just keep eating the same amount.
Swoleness will come via muscle hypertrophy. That is going to be stimulated by training to, or within a few reps of, failure on your working sets. You may put on a little bit of size with your current plan, but I would pull the rep ranges down slightly and bump those weights up a bit, and get more quality reps closer to failure with whatever weight you’re using.
My reasoning for this is two-fold:
First, hitting failure at a lower weight is harder simply because of the pain that will set in. Just for an example, let’s say that “the burn” starts when you’re 75% of the way to failure. If you’re failing at 12 reps, well that pain sets in at rep 9 and you’re pretty close to that failure point. We generally want to see within two reps of failure to grow. If you’re using a weight that you can hit 30 reps with before you fail, that 75% puts you at 22-23 reps, and you have to push through that burning for 5-6 reps to get within a close enough proximity for muscle growth to occur. Much harder for most people to do.
Secondly, since we know that we need to be within that proximity of failure for the reps to be doing anything for growth, all of the reps below that threshold aren’t doing anything for growth, but they are using a lot of energy which builds up as systemic fatigue. Not a huge issue in the short term, but can build up quick and leave you feeling burnt out.
I totally hear your concerns with joints, as I’ve been working through some joint issues and pain myself. The lighter weight/higher reps thing is a double edged sword because while, yes, more weight will put more tension on your joints and the soft tissues like tendons, it also causes a lot more wear over time as they’re used so much more. Finding a balance between the two can be hard.
Preparing to take off now, and I’m too poverty to pay for in-flight WiFi, so I’ll leave you with those thoughts to consider.. but if you think you’re interested, let me know and I can write out a sample plan tomorrow when I’m home. You can give it a test run for a week or however long and see if you like it better than you’re doing now, but I think I could get you through a workout in an hour or less.
That makes sense. I won’t be counting calories, so I guess I’ll just do extra cardio. And I’m going to up the weights like you said.
I would be interested to see your plan, I don’t want you to spend a bunch of time on, as Dan already pointed out, I didn’t pass middle school English. Plus I don’t wanna take a lot of your time. But I’m very intrigued.
Increasing the eight logic to make sure I fail earlier is my next step.
Bored, so I decided to ball out and buy the in-flight WiFi. Don’t mind spending some time on a plan. Lets me practice my skills as a coach, and gives me something to do on this flight.
I think an upper body/lower body split would work well for you and your goals. If you want to go to the gym more frequently on a regular basis, you could move to a push/pull/legs routine. Since time and efficiency are being prioritized, I’d have you do more machine and dumbbell based movements than barbell, and superset those movements using antagonistic muscle groups.
I’ll write the plan in this format to condense typing:
Movement A1/movement A2. Working sets for each, reps for each set.
Movement B1/B2.. etc.
For the supersets, do the first movement, then go immediately into the second movement. After both are done, rest 90-120 seconds and hit them both again in the same fashion.
I’m listing working sets, but I would hit 2-3 warm up sets before starting your working sets so that you can warm up, practice the movement, and make sure it’s feeling good that day. If it feels off, you can hit another warm up set to try to find the groove, or just replace it with another movement that hits the same muscle group.
With your joints in mind, I’d hit more of an isolation movement first to pre-exhaust the target muscle before getting into a heavier compound movement. This will keep the weights lower on your compound movements so we can hit failure with less weight and at a lower rep range. Once all working sets can be completed at the top end of the rep range listed for each, then I’d throw another 5lbs on for your next session. This should naturally have you back down towards the bottom of the range and give you a few weeks at each weight before being ready to move up again, also keeping your weights a little lower.
Upper:
Side delt raise (cable, machine, or dumbbell whatever your gym has, but try to use the same one each week. If you get to a point where you stall on one for 2-3 weeks, then I’d switch to one of the others. This applies to all listed options for exercises)/lat pullover (cable or machine (rare to have but great if you do)) 3 sets, 15-20 reps.
Shoulder press (machine or dumbbell)/lat pulldown. 4 sets, 12-15 reps.
Chest flye (machine, cable, or dumbbell)/rear delts. 3 sets, 15-20 reps.
Chest press (machine or dumbbell)/chest supported row (t-bar, machine, or prone on bench with dumbbells or barbell). 4 sets, 12-15 reps.
Skullcrusher/ez bar curl (or dumbbells). 4 sets, 12-15 reps.
Cable tricep extension/preacher curl (machine, ez bar, or dumbbells). 4 sets, 12-15 reps.
Lower:
Seated hamstring curl/quad extensions. 3 sets, 15-20 reps.
Stiff legged deadlift/low foot leg press. 4 sets, 12-15 reps.
Long step lunge (glute focus, you’ll get even more glutes if you lean forward in the bottom position and maximize hip flexion)/short step lunge (knee of forward leg pushing out over toe to maximize knee flexion and focus your quad, keep torso upright throughout to minimize hip flexion) 4 sets, 12-15 reps.
Calve raise (seated, donkey, or standing) 3 sets 15-20 reps.
You should be able to get through each of those in about an hour, maybe a bit longer for upper, probably quicker for lower). I threw less lower body volume at you since you didn’t mention training it, so I figured it wasn’t as important to you, and if you’re just looking for a bit of swoleness, it’s your upper body that people will notice. Same reason for arms having slightly more volume than chest/shoulders/back. People notice big arms before they notice anything else. If any of the listed exercises are inaccessible to you at your gym (home garage gym?) I’m happy to tweak this to things you do have access to. For the chest supported rows, pull with your elbows higher, closer to 90degress from your torso and focus on squeezing shoulder blades together. This will hit that upper/middle back area while the pull overs and pull downs go more for your lats.
Ask any questions you have. Tell me you want push pull legs instead. Whatever you want. I just love doing shit like this lol.
With the upper/lower split you can train as many or as few days as you’d like, but my recommendation would be to either train every other day, or go upper, lower, rest, upper lower, rest, rest.. that second option keeps your weekends free (if you start with upper on Monday), and gets you a good amount of volume each week for every muscle group while still having a lot of time to recover and live life.