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Gym Routine


olboydave

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Hi all. I just need a bit of advice. I've recentley joined my local gym after thinking about it for a while.

I consider myself to be fairly fit, I ride to work every day, go running occasionally and so on.

I want to build up my upper body strenght a bit. Not Arnie style but a bit more toned I guess. Stronger arms/chest etc. What are some good workout routines in order to achieve this? Should I just concentrate on certain areas each day? How long should I go for etc?

I've looked on the internet and there is so much stuff with various people saying contradicting things it makes it very difficult to decide.

Can anyone offer any advice?

Thanks

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Pull ups are your friend. Buy a pull up bar (I recommend iron gym) and a cheap set of weights or resistance bands, do it from home and thank me later. Gyms are expensive and, unless you want to get super strong/bulky don't offer much more than home exercise.

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Pull-ups, press-ups (both with proper form). So simple but so effective. Gyms are maybe better if you want to focus on specific areas, but even then a cheap home dumbbell set is probably just as effective and far cheaper in the long run.

For me, this guy is the best on the internet for upper body gain and general fitness. He may be a bit of a fitness Nazi in his suggestions but take on board some of his ideas and work-out routines (for any level of fitness) and I bet you it's as, if not more effective than bench pressing over and over again.

Remember your diet as well! No point having a good session in the gym or wherever and then going out on the piss afterwards.

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OK. Cheers.

Unfortunately I'm tied into the gym but I don't think that's a bad thing although do appreciate that many exercises can be completed at home.

On the posted link, under workout suggestions there is a routine for each day and at the end of each it says 'Weights: 60 mins'. What does this mean?

Obviously lifting weights but how, what method etc? If anyone has any routine or proven methods that they use then it would be great to hear! Thanks again!

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OK. Cheers.

Unfortunately I'm tied into the gym but I don't think that's a bad thing although do appreciate that many exercises can be completed at home.

On the posted link, under workout suggestions there is a routine for each day and at the end of each it says 'Weights: 60 mins'. What does this mean?

Obviously lifting weights but how, what method etc? If anyone has any routine or proven methods that they use then it would be great to hear! Thanks again!

I'll say it again. Starting Strength.

The site I linked lists the routines, how to do the lifts, how many reps, how many sets.

It tells you how to work out what weights you should start with, and how much weight to add each session.

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Im mid way through a good routine for bench pressing with my mate. If your new to it then start at a low weight. 18 reps @ 30kg, rest a minute, 16 reps @ 35kg, rest a minute, 14 reps at 40 kg, rest a minute, 12 reps @ 45kg, rest, 10 reps @ 50kg, rest 8 reps @ 50kg, rest, 6 reps @ 55kg, rest, 4 reps @ 60 kg, rest, 2 reps @ 65 kg, rest, 1 rep or as many as you can manage @ 70 kg.

Each week add 5kg to the starting weight. Remember the bar weighs about 20kg. Alternating with a mate take about 45 minutes. For a particularly heavy session you when you get to the end you can start going back down the scale, taking 5kg off each time and doing as many reps as possible each time til failure. Will hurt afterwards.

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High reps for that many sets are pointless.

You want lower reps, higher weight.

You're putting in far too much effort there for no gain at all. You're doing far too few reps in your working sets, and far too many in your warm up sets.

Here's an example from the starting strength wiki:

45lbs x 5 x 2 <--Empty bar

85 x 5 x 1

125 x 3 x 1

155 x 2 x 1

175 x 5 x 3 <--Work Sets

20 warm up reps tapered off in 5 sets, then 15 working reps.

Doing 1 rep is pointless. Doing 2 reps is pointless. Doing 70 reps of no weight at all is pointless.

Your body can lift a small weight for a huge amount of reps, whoopee, all you're doing doing that is running down the glucose store in your muscles. You're not actually working your muscles to the point where they'll build strength. You only do that when they're actually working to lift something that's actually heavier than they're used to.

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Starting from basically scratch, i've had really good results with just a set of dumbells using this.

I've upped the weight a bit now as i've been doing it for a while but I feel a lot stronger and i've paid about Aus$40 total for the dumbell bars and weights.

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I started back at my local gym about 2 months ago, my personal trainer told me there are 4 phases of training and you should start off at the 1st of these for the best results. The 4 phases are: strength endurance, hypertrophy, max strength and extreme power. So for best results in the long term, you should start off with strength endurance, that's if your going for actual strength and not just to look good :)

Strength endurance involves higher reps at a lower weight and at a slower speed, up to 20 as long as your technique stays good. Should take you around 4-6 weeks to get to full reps, then you either move on to the next phase or stay with strength endurance but put the weights up slightly continuing to keep the technique and slow speed.

My programs aimed at all round strength, so deadlifts, chest cable fly, single arm cable pull, lunges, reverse woodchop with medicine ball, dumbell overhead push off a swiss ball and pull ups are what I'm doing. 2 sets of each, getting up to 20 reps per set.

I've been advised to do from 45 mins to an hour 3 times a week, any more than that and you don't give your muscles enough time to mend and grow inbetween workouts.

If you want to do it properly you'll probably need a personal trainer, mines been brilliant tbh.

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^ This ^

You shouldn't be able to complete more than 15 reps, if you can you need to up the weight. People tend to think that doing more reps is a good thing, i.e. "I could only do 10 reps of this weight when I started, now I can do 25! I've made progress" - once you can comfortably do 15 reps it's time to move up a weight.

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I started back at my local gym about 2 months ago, my personal trainer told me there are 4 phases of training and you should start off at the 1st of these for the best results. The 4 phases are: strength endurance, hypertrophy, max strength and extreme power. So for best results in the long term, you should start off with strength endurance, that's if your going for actual strength and not just to look good

Strength endurance involves higher reps at a lower weight and at a slower speed, up to 20 as long as your technique stays good. Should take you around 4-6 weeks to get to full reps, then you either move on to the next phase or stay with strength endurance but put the weights up slightly continuing to keep the technique and slow speed.

My programs aimed at all round strength, so deadlifts, chest cable fly, single arm cable pull, lunges, reverse woodchop with medicine ball, dumbell overhead push off a swiss ball and pull ups are what I'm doing. 2 sets of each, getting up to 20 reps per set.

I've been advised to do from 45 mins to an hour 3 times a week, any more than that and you don't give your muscles enough time to mend and grow inbetween workouts.

If you want to do it properly you'll probably need a personal trainer, mines been brilliant tbh

Sorry but your personal trainer (like most of them) is talking shit. He's just regurgitating from his nvq in personal training which taught him shit.

For one machines are a poor substitute for free weights. If you want to go for actual strength then you want to be using free weights.

Cable pulls are crap, woodchops are crap.

Benchpress, press, deadlifts, squats, rows, power cleans. These will work way more of your body than what you're doing, you'll get far more benefit from them as they're compound lifts that will work your entire body.

Seriously, the secret to getting strong is simple: Lift heavy things.

Sure if you want to build endurance then you need to lift for more reps, but why the hell do you want to build endurance when you have no strength? Building your endurance when you can't even lift much weight is pointless. Endurance training actually REDUCES your strength unless you're actively training for strength as well.

Now I'm not saying you won't get results doing what you are, you will, you'll get results from anything. But you're really not getting the OPTIMAL results that you could be getting in the time you're spending.

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I started back at my local gym about 2 months ago, my personal trainer told me there are 4 phases of training and you should start off at the 1st of these for the best results. The 4 phases are: strength endurance, hypertrophy, max strength and extreme power. So for best results in the long term, you should start off with strength endurance, that's if your going for actual strength and not just to look good :)

Strength endurance involves higher reps at a lower weight and at a slower speed, up to 20 as long as your technique stays good. Should take you around 4-6 weeks to get to full reps, then you either move on to the next phase or stay with strength endurance but put the weights up slightly continuing to keep the technique and slow speed.

My programs aimed at all round strength, so deadlifts, chest cable fly, single arm cable pull, lunges, reverse woodchop with medicine ball, dumbell overhead push off a swiss ball and pull ups are what I'm doing. 2 sets of each, getting up to 20 reps per set.

I've been advised to do from 45 mins to an hour 3 times a week, any more than that and you don't give your muscles enough time to mend and grow inbetween workouts.

If you want to do it properly you'll probably need a personal trainer, mines been brilliant tbh.

Forgot to say, free weights are the way to go, rather than machine weights if you want to work on your all round strength with compound exercises.

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I started back at my local gym about 2 months ago, my personal trainer told me there are 4 phases of training and you should start off at the 1st of these for the best results. The 4 phases are: strength endurance, hypertrophy, max strength and extreme power. So for best results in the long term, you should start off with strength endurance, that's if your going for actual strength and not just to look good

Strength endurance involves higher reps at a lower weight and at a slower speed, up to 20 as long as your technique stays good. Should take you around 4-6 weeks to get to full reps, then you either move on to the next phase or stay with strength endurance but put the weights up slightly continuing to keep the technique and slow speed.

My programs aimed at all round strength, so deadlifts, chest cable fly, single arm cable pull, lunges, reverse woodchop with medicine ball, dumbell overhead push off a swiss ball and pull ups are what I'm doing. 2 sets of each, getting up to 20 reps per set.

I've been advised to do from 45 mins to an hour 3 times a week, any more than that and you don't give your muscles enough time to mend and grow inbetween workouts.

If you want to do it properly you'll probably need a personal trainer, mines been brilliant tbh

Sorry but your personal trainer (like most of them) is talking shit. He's just regurgitating from his nvq in personal training which taught him shit.

For one machines are a poor substitute for free weights. If you want to go for actual strength then you want to be using free weights.

Cable pulls are crap, woodchops are crap.

Benchpress, press, deadlifts, squats, rows, power cleans. These will work way more of your body than what you're doing, you'll get far more benefit from them as they're compound lifts that will work your entire body.

Seriously, the secret to getting strong is simple: Lift heavy things.

Sure if you want to build endurance then you need to lift for more reps, but why the hell do you want to build endurance when you have no strength? Building your endurance when you can't even lift much weight is pointless. Endurance training actually REDUCES your strength unless you're actively training for strength as well.

Now I'm not saying you won't get results doing what you are, you will, you'll get results from anything. But you're really not getting the OPTIMAL results that you could be getting in the time you're spending.

Yeah ok.

Who said I didn't use free weights? I only use 2 machines, one to isolate pecs, for a specific reason and the other for my lats, the rest are good compound exersises. The rev woodchop is done with a med ball, not on a machine.

The secret to getting strong quickly may be by lifting heavier things, but the secret to getting strong and staying strong is to do it slowly. Hence strength indurance to begin with.

Core strength is also a good way to go. Core strengthening and pilates gives you a strong center that you can build from.

I should be a personal trainer myself ;)

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You said your program consists of, and then listed, with the exception of deadlifts, a load of crappy exercises that won't build strength. Forgive me for you know, assuming that's what your program consisted of.

Slowly is slowly, you do slowly by starting at a manageable weight (that's well away from your theoretical one rep max) and then build up gradually.

Slowly isn't by starting with a crap program that won't do much of anything before moving into a real program.

Once again, training for endurance when you have no real strength is a BAD IDEA. Endurance training comes at the COST of strength, not in addition to it.

Here's wiki's say on endurance:

Training for endurance can have a negative impact on the ability to exert strength unless an individual also undertakes resistance training to counteract this effect.

Guess how you build both endurance and maintain strength? By following a program like starting strength!

Seriously personal trainers love to get people on machines and doing fancy isolation exercises that people don't need. Before people need to isolate they have to have weak points, to have weak points you have to have strong points. When you're starting out your entire body is a weak point and by the time you get to the stage where you have actual weak points that need training in isolation you've already surpassed 99% of personal trainers.

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You said your program consists of, and then listed, with the exception of deadlifts, a load of crappy exercises that won't build strength. Forgive me for you know, assuming that's what your program consisted of.

Slowly is slowly, you do slowly by starting at a manageable weight (that's well away from your theoretical one rep max) and then build up gradually.

Slowly isn't by starting with a crap program that won't do much of anything before moving into a real program.

Once again, training for endurance when you have no real strength is a BAD IDEA. Endurance training comes at the COST of strength, not in addition to it.

Here's wiki's say on endurance:

Training for endurance can have a negative impact on the ability to exert strength unless an individual also undertakes resistance training to counteract this effect.

Guess how you build both endurance and maintain strength? By following a program like starting strength!

Seriously personal trainers love to get people on machines and doing fancy isolation exercises that people don't need. Before people need to isolate they have to have weak points, to have weak points you have to have strong points. When you're starting out your entire body is a weak point and by the time you get to the stage where you have actual weak points that need training in isolation you've already surpassed 99% of personal trainers.

My PT only has me doing one isolation exercise on a machine mate and that's for a specific reason. He doesn't like stack weight machines at all, hence he's given me compound exercises to do.

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This is why I needed advice. So many different opinions of what is right and what is wrong. I just want to find myself a set routine which I can follow for a few weeks.

E.g. 3 sets of 10 x ?

3 sets of 10 x ??

3 sets of 10 x ???

Rest

Repeat Monday, Wednesday, Friday....

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Starting from basically scratch, i've had really good results with just a set of dumbells using this.

I've upped the weight a bit now as i've been doing it for a while but I feel a lot stronger and i've paid about Aus$40 total for the dumbell bars and weights.

That site looks great. Would the workout at the bottom though be done as one workout say three times a week?

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