Does your gym have a football bar by chance? The neutral grip might help with your wrists while still being able to train the movements.
1 Like
I wish… Unfortunately it doesn’t.
Ah bummer. Hope it’s a quick heal time then, you’re making excellent progress dude.
1 Like
Thank you man!
I guess that it won’t be the end of the world if I don’t train the bench and the press for a month. I can still do neutral grip db presses, flyes, all kinds of shoulder raises, and use machines. Maybe the specific skill with those movements will temporarily take a hit but I’ll still be able to build muscle, which is kinda the primary goal.
2 Likes
Bench
62 kg x 3
72 kg x 3
80 kg x 9
84.5 kg x 3
87 kg x 3
92 kg x 2 (lifetime pr)
62 kg x 3 x 5
Machine chest press 70 kg x 19, 75 kg x 10-5 (50% set)
Low to high cable fly 10 kg x 20, 15 kg x 15+ dropset
Triceps pushdown 30 kg x 12, 25 kg x 12,8,6 (R/P)
I did it guys. Today, for the first time in my life, I benched 2 plates on the bar. Unfortunately the bar weighs only 12 kg so this was a 202.5 lb bench on my last joker, but I’m getting close. 4-5 months and I’ll be benching 225.
My problem is that I still don’t feel super confident with the form. I make an arch, squeeze the hell out of my back and push chest up and out, but when the weight gets heavy I just lose all my focus and can only think of pushing with everything I have. My shoulder rolls forward and it actually kinda hurts during the set, and I definitely don’t feel much in my pecs.
Do you have any tips to fix this?
On the other side, I get a really good involvement of my pecs with the assistance exercises. I have turned this program into kind of a body part split, pairing delts and biceps with the press, back with the Deadlift, chest and Triceps with the bench, and legs with the squat. Right now this keeps me more interested and motivated to train.
For the assistance, I’m really liking what @flappinit wrote on some other thread. I work up to one set to failure, and then I do another set to failure with an intensity technique. This destroys me and I love it. I’m not doing a ton of exercises though because I wanna take it easy with the volume, being on a cut. If I feel good, I might ramp up to two exercises for the bigger body parts next week.
2 Likes
Also decided to take the shirt off and film my cable fly dropset. Thought I was looking jacked in the mirror, but the video and angle don’t do me any justice 
I swear that looking from the front I looked very vascular and I had striations on the chest and everything lol
My advice (as someone currently weaker than you, take it with plenty of pinches of salt), is upper back work and making sure all back off sets and warm up sets are done perfectly. I used to feel like my form went to shit at heavier weights. Once I lowered the weight on back off sets and focussed more on quality of movement and “hitting the groove” with every rep I did, my heavier sets felt much more stable and controlled.
2 Likes
Same here. I remember my first time doing 3/5/1 and feeling like I “cracked the code”!
1 Like
Squat
90 kg x 3
102 kg x 3
115 kg x 7
120 kg x 3
125 kg x 3
130 kg x 1
90 kg x 20
Was pressed for time once again and after the jokers I thought there was no way I was gonna be able to do 3 FSL sets and then one or two assistance exercises, so I did a windowmaker set. The first one in a long time, I had almost forgotten how bad it feels during the set lol.
Also those 20 reps are my way to celebrate the news I got today: I’m currently doing my exams to graduate from high school. There are 2 written tests and an oral. I finished the written ones yesterday and today right before I got to the gym I was told that I got 20 out of 20 on both! Now I just need to get 20 in the oral test and I’ll graduate with max grades–100 (yeah numbers add up in an odd way in our school system)!
I just read your article about getting “antagonistically strong” on your blog and I would like to thank you because I found it really inspiring.
As per the content, I have been trying to figure out how to apply those kinds of principles to my own journey, and I would like to ask you a couple of questions in that regard.
-
Do you believe the principle of finding your way in training “regardless” of what other people deem to be ineffective is applicable to someone that doesn’t have a whole bunch of experience yet (and hence by extension, doesn’t know what’s best for them yet in terms of training and nutrition)? Would someone like me (so with only a handful of years of experience and really only a year or so of actually smart training) benefit from following the paths that time has proven to work for my goal of getting as muscular and strong as possible, until I have enough self-perception and knowledge to look to find my own way?
-
You mentioned running in your article and it appears to be one more physical capacity that you’re really good at.
I have always left running behind, because I hate it, feels bad, and a whole bunch of excuses that have always kept me away from doing it. Now, although it might not be the priority n1 for one whose goal is to build muscle, I always felt that maybe I was lacking something by not having a running background. I mean, I don’t know if I should follow the principle of specificity and train for what I want to achieve (and running seems to have little to do with that. I still do lots of walking as my conditioning though, like 40-90 minutes at a brisk pace but that’s still different from running) or if I should aim to be good all around. In your opinion, how much of a role does running hold in all of this?
Once again, thank you for the insights and content. I swear that if you were offering an online coaching service I would pay for you to help me with my journey lol
I’m not @T3hPwnisher, but in my opinion what you are doing is working, and working well.
1 Like
That article was awesome! Thanks for posting the question about it. Not sure why I don’t keep a tab open on his blog.
Reading that really makes me want to keep doing what I’m doing
1 Like
Glad you enjoyed the blogpost man. Per your questions.
For 1, keep in mind that I don’t write from a perspective of having the goal of optimal results. I think there’s an immense amount of benefit to be had in going about your own way, but that’s primarily because I find the benefit to be had there IS the benefit that arises from failure. We’re stupid, stupid creatures, and we learn so much better from failure than from success. Great example: take a small child, sit them down, and explain to them how, if they touch a hot stove, it will burn and hurt. You will see this kid keep reaching for the damn stove, and each time you pull them away and explain to them that it’s hot and will hurt. They’ll nod in understanding, and then reach for it again. However, the first time they actually touch that stove, they’ll now KNOW that it’s hot and will hurt, and they’ll never touch it again. So many folks want to go about things academically so that they never have to experience actual failure, and they think that they can just intellectualize and conceptualize everything, but the truth is that 1 failure is more valuable than 10,000 successes.
So I think just putting your head down and throwing stuff on the wall to see what sticks is a GREAT idea, but I also acknowledge it’s most likely not going to get you as big and strong as possible because of the amount of time spent failing.
As for 2, I should clarify that I’m NOT a really good runner. I get into ok running shape for about 2 months a year, but even then it’s mostly “good for my size”.
I liked running back when I was 40lbs lighter, but these days it’s just a lot of demand on my body. I did a lot of it when I was rehabbing my knee, because it was the only physical activity I was allowed, but otherwise I like a variety of conditioning. I’d prefer hitting a heavy bag, prowler pushes, circuits, etc.
3 Likes
Press
38.6 kg x 5
44.6 kg x 5
50.5 kg x 9
38.6 kg x 3 x 5
Plate front raise 1 x dropset (20 kg x 12, 10 kg x 15)
Lean away db lateral raises 1 x 20, then 1 x dropset
Incline Cable lateral raises 2 x 15
Hammer curl 1 x double dropset
Cable curl 2 x 15
Deadlift
95.5 kg x 5
112 kg x 5
125 kg x 13
95.5 kg x 3 x 5
Lat pulldown 60 kg x 18, 10-5-3 (R/P)
Low row machine 80 kg x 13, 11
Felt awful to train today. Average temperature has been 30° C / 86° F and the weather is so fucking damp that doing ANYTHING absolutely sucks, let alone train. My workout started with a 10-minute nose bleed right after the first warmup set and I really couldn’t make it stop until my nose just decided it had enough of bleeding. I thought I was gonna blow a blood vessel in my head during the last 3 reps or my pr set as well. To top that off, I learned that you don’t train back the day after biceps. All my arms are so sore, and the feeling I had throughout my back sets was that my biceps were gonna tear off.
But, as @T3hPwnisher would say, I turned this rant Wednesday into a victory Sunday, carrying through all my planned sets despite feeling awful. And I also got the reps I was shooting for on the Deadlift. It’s so satisfying, as I’m now writing this post in my car with the AC on, knowing that the last effort for today will be to cook dinner and eat it. Man, feels so good.
2 Likes
So @anna_5588 I thought a little bit about your limitations and I think that we could make do with a 3-day split, using 5/3/1 model of progression with the lifts you can perform. We’ll use assistance exercise that train the muscles that are involved in the exercises you can’t perform using a different movement that doesn’t cause pain. I will be assuming that you know how 5/3/1 works, but I’ll include a brief explanation at the end if anything is unclear.
Day 1 delts and back (military press day)
Press 5/3/1
Press FSL 5x5 alternating with chin ups 5x10
Chest-Supported Row 3x10
Lateral raises 3x15-20
Face pull 3x15-20
Day 2 off - conditioning (LISS is best here)
Day 3 legs (front squat day)
Front Squat 5/3/1
Front Squat FSL 5x5
Db Bulgarian squat 3x10-15xside
Db leg curl 3x10-15
Hanging leg raises / sit ups / crunch 50-100 reps in however many sets you want
Day 4 off - conditioning (again, LISS is probably better around leg days)
Day 5 chest, biceps, triceps (bench day)
Bench 5/3/1
Bench FSL 5x5 alternating with curls 5x10-15
Dips 3x10-15
Hammer curl 3x10-15
Rope pushdown 3x10-15
Days 6 and 7 off - conditioning (here you can do harder conditioning like sprints etc.)
So the main lift of the day is gonna follow the basic 5/3/1 scheme (you can find it on here in an article called “how to build pure strength”), then you will perform 5 sets of 5 with the weight of the first set of the day (FSL means “first set last”), and between each one of those sets you’ll do one set of the exercise listed as “alternating with,” if there is one.
The rest of the exercises (the assistance work) are there to help you build muscle and strengthen your weak points in the main lifts. It’s not a whole lot of sets, but that’s good: this means that you can push them hard and to failure (like we talked about in the other thread).
A note on the db leg curl: if you can add a band to the mix, you can make the exercise more effective (look up the setup).
If anyone more experienced wants to chime in and give their two cents on this routine that could be helpful. There are obviously other ways to go about this but lately I’ve been into the “body part split” thing.
Thanks! That looks good, but it’s a lot less lower body work than I’m used to (I’m a girl). Will that be a problem?
Also, I can’t do chin ups
Having recently undergone surgery and knowing that you can’t perform certain movements and that legs machines aren’t available at your gym, I think that you should focus on “making that work count,” as in pushing your sets harder so that they still create a training stimulus despite technically being “less work.”
You can sub chin ups for lat pulldowns if that machine is available to you.
I can and have been doing BB lunges, could I add in a “lunge day” in lieu of deadlift day?
Also, what weights should I be using?
I don’t think it’d be a good idea to add a whole extra training day just for those, but you can add some sets of lunges on any training day. If you wanna do them frequently you could do a couple of sets every training day.
For the main lifts, 5/3/1 is based around knowing your “training max” ( TM) and basing your weights around percentages of that weight. I suggest that you spend one week finding the most weight you can do for 5 perfect reps on the bench, front squat, and press. Those weights will be your TM’s. Then you need to use the correct percentages of those weights according to the week you’re in. Read the article here about 5/3/1 and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
For the other exercises (assistance work), use a weight that is challenging and lets you hit failure or get close to it in the rep ranges I gave you, and work from there. Don’t kill yourself in the gym just yet as you’re recovering from surgery.