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Gym Routine


olboydave

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2 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

Can any of our knowledgeable gym goers ( @JB I'm looking at you) recommend a good routine that focuses on Chest?

Obviously I still want to hit everything else, but I'd like to pay a bit more attention to my chest.

Any ideas?

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Should do the trick!

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I go to the gym 2-3 times a week, on one day I work on my arms (biceps, triceps etc) and chest. One day is for back, shoulders and abs and one day is just for the legs. Been going since late april, and slowly and steadily my performance has been going upwards. I try to keep 5-7 days rest every about 4-5 weeks, which seems to be working for me.

I've noticed that I haven't lost as much weight as I did in may, june and july, but my weist, chest etc have still slimmed down, muscle has probably replaced fat, which is a great thing.

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On 11/10/2017 at 11:13, Stevo985 said:

Can any of our knowledgeable gym goers ( @JB I'm looking at you) recommend a good routine that focuses on Chest?

Obviously I still want to hit everything else, but I'd like to pay a bit more attention to my chest.

Any ideas?

I can't think of a specific chest program off the top of my head but all any focus routine does is manipulate volume. Based on my experience, the best way to bring up any muscle group is to increase the weekly number of sets performed. So say if you're currently doing 12 weekly sets for chest, try bumping it up to 15-16, best spread out over 2 weekly sessions. However, you'll need to ease off on other body parts as your body can only adequately recover from a certain number of total sets for all muscle groups. 

I've been reading quite a bit about these principles over the past few months and have been focusing on trying to find my own maximum recoverable volume for both specific body parts and my body as a whole. I've found that I can go as high as 25 weekly sets for some muscle groups, whereas I'm as low as 14 on others. My MRV on some body parts is a lot lower than I expected, which kind of ties in with the observation that some of the smallest guys in the gym are the ones who do about a million sets per session. Obviously with 'assisted' lifters, all bets are off...

So I reckon it would be a good idea to start by taking some time to figure out how much volume your chest can handle and push it to its limits for 4 weeks before deloading with around 40-50% of the volume for a week. Repeat as necessary. Either take 4 weeks to work up or pick a number of sets that you would expect to be challenging based on your current volume, for arguments sake say 16 sets over two sessions. Then adjust as appropriate. One heavier and one lighter session is a good idea. For example:

Session A:

1. Bench press 3 x 6-8

2. Incline DB bench 3 x 8-10

3. Pause DB fly 2 x 10-12

Session B: 

1. DB bench 3 x 10-12

2. Machine incline press 3 x 12-15

3. Machine fly 2 x 15-20

That's almost exactly what I'm doing at the moment, only slightly lower volume. 

No need to do any more exercises - just add sets as appropriate and use progressive overload. Use a full range of motion with all exercises, using dumbbell and machine exercises in particular to get a really nice stretch at the bottom of each rep. Maybe even pause for a second. At some point drop sets/supersets etc. could come into play but don't worry about them for now. 

Ease off on triceps (6 sets), front delts (0 sets) and back (12ish sets), doing enough to maintain during this time. Obviously if you can handle more volume on chest, increase back as well by maybe one set for every extra two of chest. 

I'm doing a pull/push/legs split at the moment, training chest with triceps and middle delts, back with biceps and rear delts and quads with hamstrings and glutes, three day on/two days off. I do a couple of weeks high volume focus on one muscle group and drop back to maintenance for its antagonist. So for example, I'm currently doing 24 weekly sets for chest and 14 for biceps, with about 14 for back and 7 for triceps. I'll switch around in a fortnight.

Taking some time to experiment and find your volume landmarks is really worthwhile IMO. There's an excellent series of articles on it here.

Give a routine similar to what I've outlined above a shot and see how you get on. Happy to help with volume adjustments or post my current full routine if that helps.

 

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I like the pull push legs split.

I can really only make it 3 times a week to the gym now. That worked perfectly for the Stronglifts programme I've been doing, but since my holiday in June I've not been going regularly enough to the gym. Still been going but really not as often as I should. 

 

Do you think if I did a push/pull/legs routine such as the beginner one here (beginner purely because it's 3 days) it could be incorporated with your suggestion above?

So, say I did Day 1 Push, Day 3 Pull, Day 5 Legs. But on legs day add in a bit more chest work as per your suggestions above.

I need to switch up my routine. You can probably tell from my posts in here that I get bored quickly, so need something to stick to

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I don't think there's anywhere near enough volume for any muscle groups in that program for someone who's been training as long as you have. You'd be spinning your wheels.

Is three days the absolute maximum you could train? Even adding a fourth session would make a big difference. Would mean that everything got trained twice within 7 days. 

Alternatively, have you thought about doing an upper/lower split? Would involve a few compromises but could work. Something like:

Upper 1: Chest heavy/back reps

1 Bench 3 x 6-8

2A. Incline DB press 3 x 8-10

2B. Incline DB row 3 x 12-15

3A. Pause fly 2 x 10-12

3B. Reverse DB fly 2 x 20-25

4 Pulldown variation 3 x 15-20

5A. Skull crushers 3 x 8-10

5B. Incline curl 3 x 12-15

Lower:

1 Front or back squat 4 x 6-8

2 Hack squat 4 x 10-12

3 RDL 4 x 6-8

4 Hamstring curl 4 x 15-20

5A. Leg extensions 2 x 15-20 

5B. Walking lunge 2 x AMRAP

Upper 2: Back heavy/chest reps

1 Pull up variation 3 x AMRAP

2A. Barbell bent row 3 x 8-10

2B. DB bench 3 x 10-12

3 Incline machine press 3 x 12-15

4A. Fly machine 2 x 15-20

4B. Reverse fly machine 2 x 12-15

5A. Rope tricep pressdown 3 x 15-20

5B. Cable curl 3 x 12-15 (+ 2x drop sets 80,60%)

Weekly sets: chest - 16; back - 12; quads - 12; hamstrings - 8*; biceps - 6-8*; triceps - 6*

*extra work from compound lifts.  

There are compromises with that as sessions would be quite long, some muscle groups neglected, not much room for adding volume (which I expect you might need to do) and legs only trained once a week. It's hypertrophy-focused but you should get stronger within the rep ranges. 

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I sometimes struggle to get there 3 times a week so I wouldn't want to try for a 4 day week as I don't think I could stick to it.

I like the look of the upper/lower split though. Might try that.

 

Cheers.

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On 9/28/2017 at 13:17, sexbelowsound said:

Put 10kg on my 1rm and only did 8 weeks of the program first time around.

Starting again now.

So its my 4th week of this now and this week i do no deadlifts, in my last set of deadlifts i thought I'd see how 80% of 1RM felt, smashed 5 sets out the park, felt good, didn't feel taxing.  I'm liking the progress.

I wonder if something similar could be done for bench press, the 100kg lift is like my ceiling, there's some psychological shit which takes over, if not too fatigued i can do 1 rep without assistance but if fatigued I just struggle to lift the weights back up.  Not overly worried as i mainly do dumbell work for chest, but maybe its an ego thing lol, would be good if i could do 4-5 reps without assistance.

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19 minutes ago, supermon said:

So its my 4th week of this now and this week i do no deadlifts, in my last set of deadlifts i thought I'd see how 80% of 1RM felt, smashed 5 sets out the park, felt good, didn't feel taxing.  I'm liking the progress.

I wonder if something similar could be done for bench press, the 100kg lift is like my ceiling, there's some psychological shit which takes over, if not too fatigued i can do 1 rep without assistance but if fatigued I just struggle to lift the weights back up.  Not overly worried as i mainly do dumbell work for chest, but maybe its an ego thing lol, would be good if i could do 4-5 reps without assistance.

Aren't you supposed to being doing 5x1 at 80% of your 1 rep max anyway at week 3?

I'm sure it would transfer over to bench press. Can't see why it wouldn't.

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I don't do gyms.  I used to, but now I just don't have the time.

I do however do press ups and sit ups etc and I walk around a lake which is 1.6m on my lunch and I play football once a week - so probably not loads, but enough for me to easily maintain weight. 

Anyway, when I first started press-ups, I could do 5.  Then I got to 10, then 20 and I decided to get to 50 press-ups (in a row). 

I usually get to 30/35 and my arms just stop.  Yesterday, I felt really good at 30 and kept going. 

I got to 49.. 

I stopped for about 3 seconds at 45, and it cost me I think.  I went down on the 49th, but my arms physically couldn't get me back up to count.  So 49.5 :lol: 

I'm still pissed off about it. 

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I've been back at it. Experimenting with a 'concurrent' periodisation approach, i.e. 4 days a week, first two days are upper and lower 'heavy days', the second two days are significantly higher volume upper/ lower days, borrowing somethings from GVT (i.e. high volume day bench is 10x10 with 90 second rest in between sets). So far so good, just need to bolt the diet down, still too sporadic, probably not eating enough consistently. 

Edited by Dr_Pangloss
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1 hour ago, sexbelowsound said:

Aren't you supposed to being doing 5x1 at 80% of your 1 rep max anyway at week 3?

I'm sure it would transfer over to bench press. Can't see why it wouldn't.

Yeah I kinda forgot the specific figures that day so ended up doing 75%x5x4 sets and last set of 80%x5, so hoping it hasn't messed with the plan too much

Edited by supermon
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1 hour ago, lapal_fan said:

I don't do gyms.  I used to, but now I just don't have the time.

I do however do press ups and sit ups etc and I walk around a lake which is 1.6m on my lunch and I play football once a week - so probably not loads, but enough for me to easily maintain weight. 

Anyway, when I first started press-ups, I could do 5.  Then I got to 10, then 20 and I decided to get to 50 press-ups (in a row). 

I usually get to 30/35 and my arms just stop.  Yesterday, I felt really good at 30 and kept going. 

I got to 49.. 

I stopped for about 3 seconds at 45, and it cost me I think.  I went down on the 49th, but my arms physically couldn't get me back up to count.  So 49.5 :lol: 

I'm still pissed off about it. 

What's your goal?
Are you just trying to increase the amount of pressups you can do?

There's very little other benefit.

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1 hour ago, Dr_Pangloss said:

I've been back at it. Experimenting with a 'concurrent' periodisation approach, i.e. 4 days a week, first two days are upper and lower 'heavy days', the second two days are significantly higher volume upper/ lower days, borrowing somethings from GVT (i.e. high volume day bench is 10x10 with 90 second rest in between sets). So far so good, just need to bolt the diet down, still too sporadic, probably not eating enough consistently. 

I was doing something similar to this a while back but would do it week by week. First week would be heavy weight and reps around 8. Next week would be about a 50% weight drop but doing rep ranges of 15/5/5.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Oh my god, new levels of bullshit being talked by some guy in my gym right now. Loudly telling his training partner so everyone can hear that when doing incline dumbbell presses, to "focus on the outer shoulder cavity"! WTF?! Then telling him not to press all the way up to "focus in on the inner chest"! Insisting that his mate has constant intra-set pauses with specific numbers of reps in between as if there are some magic **** numbers. Such **** bollocks being espoused with such utter confidence, using faux-scientific language to try and sound smart. 

Obviously it's ok to not know stuff but don't have the blind confidence to think that your utter bollocks that you've seen on instagram is the magic formula and try and spout it for everyone to hear. 

It probably goes with saying that this guy has had his hood up throughout his session, like he's some sort of gym gangster. Prick. 

Edited by JB
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Should preface this with Kenneth Williams pic.

So I go to spinning class at my local gym on a tuesday, it's enjoyable nonsense and not too arduous. This week I did boby combat on monday and my body ached a little, then I did spinning yesterday and now my body is dead, it has given up.

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