In Beginning Weight Training 2, I examined in some detail what some of the primary goals of beginner weight training are including developing an overall base of strength (and/or muscularity), developing work capacity, learning how to perform the lifts, etc.

Finally, in Beginning Weight Training Part 3, I looked at some of the research (and experience) dealing with the loading parameters that are appropriate for beginners.  I’ve summarized them below as a launching off part for today’s final article where I’ll lay out three different basic weight training programs and talk about things like progression, when to change things, etc.

1. Intensity (percentage of 1 rep. maximum): 60% or a weight that could be done for ~20 repetitions to failure
2. Volume (# of sets): 1-3 sets per exercise/muscle group.
3. Reps/Set: Variable depending on the circumstances and both high and low reps can be appropriate here
4. Frequency: 2-3X/week
5. Workout design: Generally a full body routine
6. Exercise Selection: Highly variable depending on the circumstances

And with that I want to jump straight into examples of three different beginner programs.  The first is the Starting Strength program as developed by Mark Rippetoe (and reproduced here in full with his permission).  The second is a beginner program as outlined by my mentor, it would represent another standard approach to a barbell based routine based around the big compound movements.  Finally, and primarily to offend the barbell purists, I’m going to reproduce the basic machine-based program that I used with the majority of my beginners.

For each routine, I’ve indicated the overall routine (in the case of Rip’s Starting Strength, there are two workouts alternated each day) and the sets and reps used.  I’ll make some comments below the chart before getting into other topics relevant to beginners.

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Notes on the Above

Sets and reps in the Starting Strength Program only include work sets, warm-up sets (ranging from 1-3 sets) are not included.  I’d strongly suggest that anyone interested in that program purchase Mark’s excellent book Starting Strength 2nd Edition.

For the basic barbell program, generally only one movement would be picked from each place there is a list.  Note that, initially, deadlifts would be performed at each workout, as the weights got heavier over time, deadlift would be alternated workout to workout with shrug.  One could easily set up a more ‘balanced’ routine with more movements as well (e.g. squat, deadlift/shrug, flat bench, rowing, overhead press, chin up/pulldown, abs).

The numbers next to the exercises in the machine routine are the workout at which I taught them.  So in workout 1, they’d do leg press, chest press, row and crunch (which I’d note pretty much hits everything).  In workout 2, they’d perform the first 4 movements and add the movements with the number 2 after them (calf raise/shoulder press/lat pulldown).  In workout 3, they’d add the final movements of leg curl, arm work and low back.  At that point, what happened depended on whether or not I was still working with them but building it up in this fashion allowed me to get them performing the full set of movements by the end of a single week of training without feeling like they were being completely overloaded with information or exercise.

Before you leave me nasty comments below, please remember this routine was being used typically with older folks with no previous (or bad experience) with exercise and my goal was to break them in without breaking them.  So I used a very gradual and easy progression to ensure that they didn’t feel overwhelmed and weren’t wrecked with soreness.  As well, in many cases, I never moved them past a single work set.  This allowed them to complete the entire routine in roughly 30 minutes leaving time for cardio/etc. without requiring endless time in the gym.  For those individuals with those goals, this was an appropriate approach.

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General Comments on the Above Programs

If you look at the above three programs, you can see that they all share some basic generalities.  They hit the entire body in some form or fashion and use a variety of movements. Certainly the number of movements varies a bit from routine to routine.  Starting Strength uses the fewest movements, the generic barbell routine more and my machine approach the most (since I’m a bit obsessive about balancing out pushes and pulls and people always bitch if you don’t give them direct arm work).

Perhaps the biggest visible difference is the choice of sets and repetitions per set: Rip’s Starting Strength using multiple sets of low repetitions, the barbell and my machine program use fewer sets of higher repetitions.  I discussed the relative merits of each approach in What’s the Best Way to Teach/Learn a New Exercise – Q&A and, as always, there are pros and cons to each.

In terms of overall volume (total sets), the Starting Strength and general barbell program are closer than they look; the first uses more sets of lower reps (and again warm-up sets aren’t indicated above) on fewer movements and the second uses fewer sets of higher reps on more movements.   This is especially true by the time you factor in warm-up sets for the Starting Strength approach.  As well, and as discussed in the highly recommended Starting Strength 2nd Edition, there are other movements (Romanian deadlift, rowing of some sort etc.) that can be added to the basic Starting Strength program later on to make it a bit more ‘well rounded’.

As noted above, my machine based program was aimed at total beginners seeking, usually, general health/fitness.  They were generally older, had no previous experience in the weight room and had limited time to exercise.  So I needed something that was time efficient, got the job done and that I could get them to a basic level of competency on quickly without overwhelming them.  Again, in different contexts, either with individuals with different goals or who had had previous lifting experience, or what have you, a different approach was used.

And if you’re wondering why I’m beating this particular dead horse, it’s because I predict with 99% certainty that someone will read this article series and state that “Lyle McDonald only advocates a single set of machines for everybody.”  And that’s simply not the case.  Rather, it’s simply that I take into account the Importance of Context when it comes to training.  And the context of a 35 year old female with no training experience and limited time to exercise is different than a 19 year old male who eventually wants to compete in powerlifting.  And what I’d do in that each situation would be completely different.

Finally I’d note again that all of the above assumes an injury free individual with no major imbalances coming into the gym, an assumption that is often incorrect.  In specific cases, very different approaches (with more remedial work on stretching or almost rehab type movements) might be indicated or necessary but that is far beyond the scope of this article.

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Warming Up: General

One thing I briefly mentioned  above and want to touch on again is the topic of warming up.   Now, I did a rather detailed look at warming up for the weight room in Warming Up for the Weight Room Part 1 and Warming Up for the Weight Room Part 2 but want to touch on it again here.  Generally speaking, some type of general warm-up (cardio, body weight movements) would be done to generally warm-up the body.

With beginning clients, I often had them go ahead and get their cardio out of the way at the front of the workout.  Yes, this is usually thought of as taboo, certainly generating excessive fatigue with cardio prior to lifting isn’t usually a good idea.  But it was a way to ensure that they did it, gave me time to talk to them about various topics relevant to training (e.g. explaining fundamental concepts to them), etc.  As well, many couldn’t do a full 20 minutes at the outset anyhow, by doing 10 minutes of cardio up front and another 10 minutes at the end of the workout, they were able to accumulate 20 minutes at that first workout without feeling overwhelmed.  Over time, they would work up to a full 20 minutes continuously.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t have them do cardio on alternate or off-days, the simple fact is that I learned that most wouldn’t do it.  Sure, they’d tell me that they would but it would somehow never get done.  So I’d make them do it while I was there.  Yes, it’s a waste of their training time to pay me to watch them on the treadmill but that’s better than it not getting done at all.

Now, at the time, the major types of flexibility imbalances that many see these days didn’t seem as prevalent (or I wasn’t smart enough to recognize them) and I never actually did any sort of mobility or stretching work with clients.  To a degree, at least, full range weight training acts a stretching stimulus but, in the modern world, given the situations many deal with, this would be the place for any type of dynamic warm-up or whatever to come.

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Warming Up: Warm-Up Sets

Which brings us to warm-up sets for the exercises themselves.  As I discussed in the warming up articles linked above, warm-up sets serve a number of purposes not the least of which is technical practice.  However, for rank beginners, effectively the warm-up sets are the work sets.  That is, the weights are and should be so light to begin with that there is really no major difference between warming up and work weights.

Of course, over time, as trainees grow stronger, this will change.  Put differently, looking at the general barbell routine above the three sets of 8-12 or what have you are all the sets that are being done.  In the initial stages,all three sets are effectively warm-ups; this is especially true in the first few weeks of training where the focus should be on proper performance of the movements rather than weight increases.  After a month or so (may be more, may be less), one of the three sets may become a true warm-up set prior to two heavier work sets.

The same basic concept held for my beginner machine routine.  Even in the case where I didn’t add a second set (and I often didn’t for total beginners simply seeking general health and fitness), when things started to get heavier a month in, I’d add  a single warm-up set to the main movements (leg press/chest press/rowing).

For more about warm-ups for the Starting Strength program, I’d suggest you get Rip’s book since the topic is discussed in some detail there.

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Where to Start?

As I discussed in Beginning Weight Training Part 3, beginners not only should start with light weights and a relatively low volume but will make rather significant strength gains from doing only that.  Which brings up a question about starting weights and what to begin with.  While I have seen various systems that gave specific suggestions for starting weights (e.g. squat with 1/2 body weight or whatever), I don’t think they are a good idea for total beginners.  Because even if they represent some reasonable average of where to start, they can’t possibly represent everyone.

And, since I tend to be rather conservative in a lot of things, I always believe in erring on the side of too little than too much.  You have little to lose and everything to gain and it generally doesn’t work in the opposite direction.  Basically, if  you start too light, you can always add weight over the first couple of workouts (or even first couple of sets of that first workout if more than one are being done).  Start too heavy and things go wrong fast; the person might get injured, or they get so sore that they never come back to the gym or they simply have their form go down the toilet which is demoralizing (which also might drive them out of the gym).

So where to start?  Even that depends and what I’d start with for a young male would be very different than for an older female.  In the first case, starting with a 45 lb bar for a bench press might be appropriate.  For a female a 45 lb bar might be far beyond what she has any chance of lifting and I often started beginner females with 5 lbs per hand on DB bench press or on the lowest setting for the chest press.  But, again, this is very context dependent.  Age, gender and whether or not the person has a competent coach all feed into this.

I’d note that in some cases, going too light can be detrimental to proper technique.  I’ve found that some trainees simply have trouble ‘feeling’ what’s going on when things are too light (e.g. a young male might find that squatting with just the bar is harder than squatting with some weight).  In that case, adding weight until they can feel what is happening is necessary but the weight may not be increased very much beyond that initially.

Finally, there is one major exception to starting weights that I should mention and that is the barbell deadlift (a similar comment could apply to the powerclean from the floor).  For proper performance of either movement, it is critical that the bar start at the appropriate level; starting too low (as a function of using small plates) simply won’t allow the trainee to use proper form.  If training plates (either wooden plates or light plates with the same diameter as 20 kg/45 pound plates) aren’t available, then the trainee either has to find a way to start the bar at the right place (e.g. off of blocks or pins in the power rack) or start with 135.  What won’t work is starting with 85 lbs with a 45 pound bar and 10′s on the end; the bar will be too low to do the movement correctly.

When in doubt, in the beginner stage, I would suggest starting lighter and building up as appropriate.  The weight needs to be heavy enough that the trainee can feel what’s going on but not so heavy that they can’t handle it in good form for the entirety of the sets.

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What to Add and When to Add It?

The name of the game in improving all aspects of fitness is progression.  Essentially the stimulus that made you fitter the last workout (or week, or month, or year) may no longer be sufficient now.  Something has to increase at some point in time; that doesn’t mean every workout necessarily but if nothing ever progresses, fitness will never improve.

Now, how often and what to increase would be the topic of another series of articles since there are many options that are relatively more or less relevant depending on the situation.  With regards to strength training specifically, I’d highly recommend  Mark Rippetoe, Lon Kilgore and Glen Pendlay’s excellent Practical Programming for Strength Training as one of the better written and more easily accessible looks at progression in the weight room.

But specific to beginner training, I’m going to focus primarily on increasing volume and/intensity while ignoring other possibilities (frequency or density mainly).  Now, whether or not you progress the number of sets really depends on where you start.  In the case of Starting Strength and the general barbell program described above, increases in volume would be inappropriate since they both start at a volume that is more than sufficient for beginners. That is, since the trainee is starting with roughly 3 work sets for each exercise, there would be little point in increasing that, especially in the first weeks or months of training.

In the case of my machine program, you’ll note that it lists 1+ sets of 8-12 repetitions and I should probably explain that.  With that population, a single set was generally more than sufficient given their goals and time demands.  But in other situations, increasing volume (to a maximum of 3 sets per movement) would have been appropriate. In that case, my approach would have been to first build them up to the full set of exercises over the first week of training.  Then in the second week, I’d have added a second set to the 4 main movements (indicated by the #1) in the fourth workout, then a second set to the #2 movements, etc.  Basically, it would take about 3 weeks to build them up from a single set of 4 movements to 3 sets of all of the movements (and I’d probably stop at 2 sets on stuff like arms and crunch/back extension).

An example of that might be an older individual (in their 40′s) with no previous exercise background.  Even 3 sets of 6 exercises on the first day might completely destroy them and I do not find that to be a good way to introduce people to the weight room or exercise in general.  In contrast, a single set of 4 movements done after a bit of cardio on the other hand is more than tolerable and gets them started on the right foot.  It might only be 30 minutes of activity but that’s 30 minutes more than they did the day before, they come out of it without feeling exhausted or miserable and, sometimes, even look forwards to the next workout. And that’s how you get them to keep coming back.   Increases to volume can follow later as they adapt to the training.

But outside of that specific situation where you start with a single set and build up to multiple sets over the first few weeks, that is, when you’re starting with multiple sets of a bunch of movements, the main focus will be on increasing the weight on the bar.  Which brings up a discussion of how best to do that and when and by how much.

In my mentor’s barbell program, his suggestion was this:

Don’t add weight to any lift until you can complete all of your sets while maintaining good form. It is normal while learning to have some wobbling, and it would not be unreasonable to stick at the same weights for a month (when you first start) before adding weight. You want to be in control. After you have that control, you should be able to add weight at least once per week.

Essentially you would be working with relatively light weights and perfecting form for the first month.  After that, you might move to increasing weight once/week (e.g. every Monday) and then keeping it the same for the entirety of that week.  Then you’d increase again.

In  contrast, Rip’s Starting Strength Program typically focuses on adding some weight to the bar at almost every initial workout.   I’d mention that, by and large, it tends to be easier to add weight to lower repetition sets and this explains at least part of the discrepancy between the routines.  As well, there is a huge difference here in the coached vs. un-coached lifter.  Having a coach watching and cueing you on every set, and knowing that you can safely add weight to the bar is far different than adding weight to the bar yourself when you’re completely out of control technically.

As noted in previous parts of this series, clearly both approaches can be effective depending on the situation.  My experience is that most (especially young males) have poor impulse control and always add weight far in excess of what they can handle properly; before they know it, they’re ‘moving’ a lot of weight but in terrible form.   They may benefit from only attempting a weight increase weekly and/or using a higher repetition range to protect themselves from themselves.  In contrast, people with a good coach and/or with better self-control may be able to make lower repetitions and adding weight more quickly work.

In my machine approach, you might have noticed that I gave a fairly broad repetition range of 8-12 reps per set and this ties into this bit of the discussion.  A relatively generic approach to progression in weights is something called a double progression.  In that approach, you first add repetitions to the set; when you hit some top end of reps, you then add weight.  And that’s what I did with the program: when the trainee got to 12 repetitions:

1. In good form
2. Without massive struggle on the last 2 repetitions

I’d add weight at the next workout.  Depending on the movement and the amount of weight added, they might get to 12 again or be dropped back to 8-9 reps (very occasionally lower).  Over the next workout or two, I’d have them build that back up to 12 and apply the same rules.  Basically, it was sort of auto-regulating, their actual performance on the exercise determined when they went up.

I’d note that #1 above is the key, I always taught my trainees to only perform the number of repetitions that they could do properly; that they should never break form to get the next rep.  If that meant that they only got 10, so be it.  When they got to 12 with a repetition or two left in the tank, the weight would go up.  If they got to 12 but it was clearly still a struggle, I’d usually have them repeat the weight again at the next workout; at that point it would always be much easier indicating time for another increase.

This actually ended up having a number of benefits relative to this article series.  First and foremost, it provided for fairly easy progression.  With a handful of exceptions (usually overhead press and leg curls), folks would make progress at every workout.  Not only would their form improve workout to workout, they’d see that they were getting stronger as weight on the bar built.  That provided a massive amount of positive reinforcement which was so key in keeping them coming back.

As well, over the first few weeks of training, I’d start to gradually push them a bit more out of their comfort zone.  So while the first two weeks were invariably super easy, at about week 3, I’d start pushing them a bit harder encouraging them to get one more rep where they might have previously stopped.   As well, as they learned the movements and got better at pushing themselves a bit harder (and they usually wanted to get to 12 reps to get the next weight jump), they’d start to develop that ability to push.  But it would happen so gradually that they never felt overwhelmed or exhausted; this was another aspect of ensuring that they kept coming to the gym long enough for it to become habit.  Invariably by the end of 8 weeks, they were working harder than they ever thought possible, but had never really noticed that increase in intensity.  It just sort of happened.

Which isn’t me saying that that’s the best way to do it, clearly the approaches discussed above regarding Starting Strength or my mentor’s approach work.  And, again much of it depends on the technical complexity of the movement (e.g. squat takes longer to learn than leg press) and whether or not the person has a coach.

A related question is how much weight to add to the bar when you do go up.  Again, I recommend conservatism, there is usually little to be lost by adding weight in smaller increments initially (e.g. I’d rather see someone add 5 lbs per workout and do it three times per week than to throw on 15 lbs at one workout and have their form fall apart).

Certainly, younger males tend to be able to add more to the bar than older females (or females in general).  As well, the movement being done affects things (primarily as a function of how much weight the person is using).  You can add more weight to a 135 lb squat than to an 65 lb overhead press.  This ends up being a judgement call; I’d only suggest that, when in doubt, add less rather than more.  It may simply mean that you add weight more often but that’s still not a bad thing.

.Variety for Beginners

It’s taken as almost an article of faith that ‘variety in training’ is required for optimal performance.  This is something I’ll write about at a later date, for now I want to focus on beginners.  For the most part, I don’t advocate variety in training for beginners, at least not over the first 2-3 months.  The reason, again has to do with motor learning and this is especially true if you’re performing complex exercises like squats, deadlifts, etc.

In the initial stages, nearly constant practice is needed on those movements to learn and start to perfect technique.  At the same time, some trainees do start to get bored and I mentioned that one goal of the beginner stage (especially for physique oriented folks) is finding out what movements work best for them.

Now with my general health/fitness trainees, since I didn’t usually teach them complex stuff and their goals were different than other folks, I wasn’t so concerned with keeping them on the same movements forever; let’s face it, you can do a competent leg press in a workout or two.  Usually around week 8 or so, after they’d basically mastered the first set of movements I’d showed them and made some nice gains, I’d introduce them to some other movements or variants of the same movement.

So a chest press or dumbbell bench press would get swapped out for an incline dumbbell press or a flye movement.  Or if I had started them on machine chest press, I’d teach them the DB equivalent.   Shoulder press would get swapped out for lateral raises. I’d show them some other arm movements or abs or low back.  Or whatever.  Sometimes I’d swap out everything in total, other times I’d swap out one of the workouts and keep the other one the same.  In some cases, if they had decided that they wanted more intensive training than general health/fitness now would be the time to start the process of teaching squats and such.  It simply depended on the specifics as to how I approached it.

But what about other goals, the aspiring physique competitor or powerlifter or what have you?   If after 2-3 months of basic training someone is still progressing/shows affinity on the big movements, my tendency would be to keep them in to at least some degree and some coaches simply stick with those big movements seemingly for eternity with the main variety coming from differences in loading and programming.   Technical training is ongoing and keeping practice of the big movements in only continues to reinforce good technique.

However, swapping out one of three weekly workouts for a different set of movements would be appropriate as well.  If nothing else, the new movements will have to be programmed lighter and this would make the third day (perhaps Wednesday on  Monday/Wednesday/Friday approach) a light day surrounded by two heavier days.  This tends to allow a bit more recovery and may help to keep the heavier days progressing better.  For folks still oriented towards the major barbell movements, front squats, Romanian deadlift, variations on rowing (bent over barbell row) or what have you could be brought in on the alternate day to provide variety not only in movement choice.  In some routines, where the rank beginner might have been doing both squats and deadlifts in all three workouts, they might continue to squat on Monday/Friday and deadlift on Wednesday.

Another approach would be to add a single set of an alternative movement after the big movements.  So back squats could be followed up by a single set of leg press or front squat, flat bench by an incline pressing movement.  Note that this wouldn’t even be considered until maybe 3 months of consistent work on the basics had been performed but would start to represent a bridge towards higher volume intermediate routines.  I’d mention that this can lead to really long workouts depending on how many movements are being done.

Alternately, someone who just wasn’t built to squat or hadn’t made much progress on it despite doing everything ‘right’ might consider dumping the big movements (yes, I know blasphemy) and trying something else.  This is especially true for physique oriented types who don’t have to do any exercise beyond that which makes them bigger.  Anyone interested in PL’ing and to a lesser degree strongman better learn to deal with squats/bench/deadlift or pick another sport.

If you simply suck at squatting and aren’t ever going to not suck at squatting, find something else.  Could be leg press, could be one of a million one legged barbell movements (that often corrects for poor back squatting mechanics), could be a lot of stuff.  But if you don’t have to squat by dint of your sport choice, and only care about being buff, now is the time to find out if your more suited to other movements.

Even in that case, if someone is at the stage where they have given the big compound an honest effort and simply aren’t cut out for them, I don’t recommend massive variety at this stage.  Pick a new set of movements (or at least swap out one workout), start them light to learn them and stick with them for 6-8 weeks to see if they work better (you can gauge by progress in terms of weight on the bar or growth or whatever).  Then, if desired, you can consider swapping out again for another 6-8 weeks block.

This also has the benefit of putting in an informal de-loading period since you always have to start the new movements lighter.  I don’t generally worry about deloads for rank beginners, at least not in a structured fashion.  Rather, they should be allowed to progress (or not) as they get used to training.  But swapping out at least some movements at the 8-12 week mark can introduce a brief delaoding period since the weights on the new movements will become very sub-maximal again for at least the first few workouts.

I would note and this is just because I saw the question come up on a forum regarding this series that applying the type of gradual progression I’ve outlined above is really all that is particularly important in terms of the connective tissue adaptations that I mentioned as being important in Beginning Weight Training 2.  With continuous progressive stress (that doesn’t exceed the tissue’s capacity), those tissues will adapt. But the key is keeping your ego in your pants and adding weight gradually over time.  As mentioned, connective tissues adapt the most slowly and the main criterion in being able to handle heavier loading later on is simply patience and time.

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Other Stuff: Cardio and Stretching

A quick word on other stuff relevant to beginning training.  Although it depends entirely on goals, the inclusion of moderate amounts of low intensity cardio at this stage can help with overall training tolerance and improve recovery and such.  For those eventually seeking size gains (and especially those who have a poor appetite), some cardio can often help to increase appetite (as discussed in Cardio and Mass Gains).  As well, for those seeking fat loss, the introduction of cardio not only burns some calories (not nearly as many as you’d hope) but can start to get sluggish fat burning pathways working again.

Stretching can also play a role, as I’ve mentioned in toher parts of this series.  Many folks these days have massive inflexibilities or imbalances (e.g. tight hip flexors and tight pecs/anterior delts are common) and fixing these is part of  the whole package.  That’s on top of often being required to perform certain exercises safely in the first place.  Stretching can be performed at various times around workout or on off days (or before bed), and each has it’s pros and cons that are beyond the scope of this article.

Moving to the Next Level

As I noted in Beginning Weight Training Part 1, a true beginner may remain in the beginner stages of training for a solid 3-6 months (with some variance depending on the specifics).  In the above, I outlined at least the first 2 blocks of 8-12 weeks (if you count the second block as being a place where you potentially switch out some movement).  At that point, 6 months down the road, the trainee would either be a very advanced beginner or ready to move to the intermediate stages of training.  For some, the beginner stage might last as long as a year.

Again, this would depend on the specifics of the individual and their goals and all the rest.  But, as a generality,  if someone were still making solid progress with beignner routines (progress = increases in strength and/or size), I wouldn’t change anything. If gains had slowed or stopped, a variety of things could be tried.  One would be a simple deload, backcycle the weights for a few weeks and build back up.  That often gets people past early plateaus and making progress again.

If not, moving to a split routine or more volume or slightly heavier loading might be considered (at some point I’ll put up my intermediate bulking routine in article form).  I’d only remind people of the comment I made in Beginning Weight Training Part 1, training should always be focused around making the most gains from the least training.  Don’t move to an intermedaite level of training simply because you want to.  Do it because beginner stuff has stopped working.

I’d make the point again that one huge assumption that is going into what I’m going to write is that the individual has no underlying issues (such as muscular imbalances or injury) that are oh so common in the modern world.   In those specific cases, an ‘imbalanced’ program may be required to fix things.  But since I can’t cover that in any detail, I’m going to draw up what is basically a ‘balanced’ beginner routine.

Today, I want to look at some issues related to loading parameters for beginners including intensity, volume, frequency and exercise selection.  Quite a bit of research has actually looked at these topics in beginners (I’m unaware of much on exercise selection) and that goes a long way towards guiding the development of proper beginner programs.

Since I ran a bit long (as usual) today, on Friday, I’ll finally put all of this together and present some fairly ‘standard’ beginner routines along with suggestions on how to start, progress, when to change things up, etc.

Intensity

As I discussed in What is Training Intensity? there are a number of different definitions of intensity that are often used in the weight training world; for the purposes of this article, I’m going to be using the definition of intensity as percentage of 1 repetition maximum (1RM).  Now, 1RM refers to the absolute maximum weight that you can lift for one repetition.  You can think of it as 100% of capacity.  Training loads have often been set relative to that in terms of the percentage 1RM used.

And in the context of beginning training, research has routinely found that beginners will make the same strength gains whether they work at 60% 1RM or 90% 1RM.  That is, heavy or light doesn’t matter, it all generates the same strength gains.     And this fact ties into several of the comments I made in the earlier parts of this article series.

First and foremost, recall from Beginning Weight Training Part 2 that most of the initial gains in the weight room are strength gains due to neural adaptations with the real growth coming later.  Second, it’s usually easier to learn technique with lighter weights (I’d note that often a weight that is too light can be more difficult because lifters can’t feel what’s happening).  Third, lighter weights are safer for joints and connective tissues which have to adapt to handle heavier loads (a slow process that occurs primarily through consistent gradually progressive training).

Basically, there are a lot of advantages to working at lighter weights (but increasing them over time) in the initial stages of training and, as it turns out, beginners will get the same strength gains regardless of what they do.  60% of 1 repetition is very light (most could do 20+ repetitions with it if they had to) but, as noted, will generate the same strength gains as working with 90% of maximum (which most might get 3 repetitions with).  In that vein, being able to do more repetitions with a given weight (a topic I’ll come back to in a second) is a good way to get in a lot of practice and that’s a huge part of the motor learning that goes on with new skills.

I would note that, over the first weeks and months of training, weight will need to be added to the bar as the trainee gains strength and conditioning.  Depending on how progression is performed, the percentage of 1 repetition maximum the trainee is actually using will tend to gradually go up over time.  Still, there is likely to be no real benefit for folks in the beginner stages to be working much over 80% of 1 repetition maximum (a weight most could do 8 reps to failure with).  Essentially, start light and add weight gradually as long as technique stays solid.

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Volume: Number of Sets and Reps/Set

In the same way that training intensity can have multiple definitions, people use volume to refer to different things.  For some it refers to the number of sets, others count reps, others count tonnage (sets * reps * weight on the bar).  Here I want to first discuss the number of sets and then look at the issue of repetitions per set.

And, in general, research in beginners has found that a single set of an exercise will provide the same basic strength gains as multiple sets of an exercise. I’d note that not all studies find this and some still support the idea that multiple sets provide better gains than a single set even in the initial stages (I’m not going to touch the issue of number of sets for non-beginning trainees in this article).

Now, both a single set and multiple sets of an exercise can have benefits for total beginners.  Single sets are time efficient (a full body workout may only take 20-30 minutes) and an easy way to break into training without getting broken for those with a low fitness background.  At the same time, multiple sets provide more times to practice the movement which tends to facilitate motor learning (assuming the trainee can do all sets without becoming too fatigued).

Multiple sets of an exercise also go towards building up work capacity (i.e. the ability to handle higher volumes of training).  A practical compromise on this issue might be to start with a single set at the first workout (this is what I always did with beginning personal training clients) and then add sets over the first few weeks of training.  I’ll come back to this a bit more on Friday.

Moving on to sets per repetition, a general tendency for beginning weight training routines was to use highish repetitions; with beginners, I generally used a rather standard 8-12 reps per set with beginners but some advocate even higher.  The basic idea is that this keeps the weight on the bar low and allows the trainee to get more reps (e.g. 3 sets of 20 gets 60 repetitions per exercise).

The problem, as I discussed in What’s the Best Way to Teach/Learn a New Exercise – Q&A, is that high reps, even with very light weights can cause a lot of fatigue and form breaks down.  Some advocate using multiple sets of lower repetitions (e.g. Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength approach uses sets of 5 with anywhere from 1 to 5 work sets depending on the movement) to avoid this problem.  As I noted in the linked article, the danger with that approach (especially for un-coached macho trainees) is going too heavy too quickly.

So what’s best?  I’d say if you have poor impulse control, staying with a lower number of higher rep sets (e.g. 1-3 sets of 8-12 repetitions) may keep you from doing something stupid like going too heavy too fast.  If you have decent self-control or a competent coach (to keep you from doing something stupid), more sets of lower repetitions can clearly be very effective and may be the way to go.

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Training Frequency

Training frequency refers, rather simply, to how many days per week a given type of training is performed.  As you might guess, this impacts on a number of different things relevant to beginners.  Research on the topic suggests that, contrary to more advanced individuals (who seem to get the best strength gains with an average training frequency of 2X/week per muscle group), beginners get better strength gains with a frequency of three times per week.

Research has also found that lifting twice per week for beginners will provide approximately 80% of the strength gains of lifting three times per week (I’d note very tangentially that cardiovascular training needs to be done three times per week to generate adaptations).  I can’t recall seeing anything to suggest that lifting more often than 3X/week is better for beginners in terms of gains in strength.

From the standpoint of motor learning, a higher frequency is probably better; the more often a trainee can practice something, the faster that they’re going to learn it (again, assuming that practice is occurring under non-fatigued conditions).   I’d mention here that the most common approach to training beginners is to use the same full body workout (e.g. the entire body is trained at once) at each of the three weekly workouts.

Of course there are exceptions (Mark Rippetoes Starting Strength alternates two basic full-body workouts so that each workout gets done 3 times every 2 weeks) and, again from a learning standpoint, I think there is much merit to this approach.  Performing the same basic set of exercises at each workout gives beginning trainees the most practice on them, this is key to proper motor learning.

For the most part, I don’t like split routines (where the body is split into various parts) for beginners  for a number of reasons although they can be appropriate under the right conditions..  A basic upper/lower split type of routine can be made to work but trainees have to keep the volume and intensity well under control in the beginning stages or they will get themselves into problems.  As well, split routines do reduce the opportunity to learn the movements with frequent practice.  This may be outweighed by other potential benefits.

I would never use a typical bodybuilding split (where only one or two muscle groups is hit at each workout) with a beginner.  NEVER.  Of course, I’d almost never use them with anybody but for beginners they accomplish nothing relevant to beginner goals.  They allow volume to be far higher than necessary and they don’t give the trainee sufficient practice since each exercise is being done perhaps once every 7 days.

Drawbacks to training three times per week are scheduling, especially when a full body routine is being used.  That generally necessitates training on alternate days per week (e.g. Monday/Wednesday/Friday or Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday) and for some trainees that causes problems.  Moving to twice per week avoids this as more training flexibility is allowed.  A basic split routine can also avoid these problems since they tend to allow a little more flexibility in terms of what days can and cannot be trained on.

I’d also note that training frequency is probably a place where differences may be seen depending on the ultimate goals of the weight room.  Someone only looking for general strength health/fitness may be more than served by only lifting weights twice/week with no need nor desire to move past that.  Other days are then freed up for cardiovascular conditioning or other types of exercise. The gains obtained by adding that third day of weight training may be more than outweighed by the time requirement/scheduling or what have you.

Athletes using the weight room to improve performance may also be well suited by only lifting twice/week although this depends massively on the demands of their sport and what else they have to do each week.  If nothing else, they may simply lack the time to get into the weight room more often than that, even in the beginning stages.  Once again, this depends on what else is being done in training.

For those aspiring to either the physique sports or powerlifting/strongman or what have you down the road, getting into the weight room three times per week is probably mandatory.  Since lifting makes up the primary training in those types of activities, developing good technique/work capacity/etc. in the weight room is going to be relatively more important.  And unless trainees get used to training three times per week in the early stages, they’ll have trouble adding a fourth or fifth day later down the road.

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Exercise Selection

And finally we come to exercise selection.  I made a few comments about this in Beginning Weight Training Part 2 and, again, don’t want to do a hugely detailed look at the topic in this article.  For now, I’m simply going to repeat my comments from Part 2 in that exercise selection for beginning trainees is a bit more complex than ‘compound is better’ or ‘isolation is better’ or ‘free weights are better’ or ‘machines are better’.  Honestly, I’m not aware of much research on this topic and rather want to look at some of the pros and cons for beginning trainees.

Certainly, compound free weight exercises (e.g. squat, bench press, deadlift, etc.) have most commonly been used for beginning weight training programs.  The Starting Strength program, for example, is a rather classic example of this  and is based around squat, bench press, deadlift, power clean, and overhead press.  And for anyone who’s been involved with weight training for as long as I have, it’s hard to see problems with those exercise selections.  Other programs (and the ones I typically use) often include more movements such as rowing or chinning/pulldowns; mind you, (male) trainees always want to know where the direct arm work is.

Make no mistake, I’m a huge fan of squats, bench press, deadlifts, overhead press, RDL, etc.  These are movements that I think most should have at least some competency with and the beginning stages of training are a good time to get that competency.  How much of a given training program they will make up down the road, of course, depends but at least learning how to do those movements is important.  If for no other reason than to learn that they aren’t a good fit for a given trainee (you won’t know until you try).

Yet, for many trainees, trying to do so may be an exercise in either futility or pointlessness.  And, as noted in Part 2, unless someone is competing in powerlifting (where squat, bench and deadlift must be done) or Olympic lifting (where clean&jerk, snatch must be done), there is no single exercise that anyone must do for either general strength or hypertrophy.  Rather, the optimal exercise for a given trainee for a given goal simply depends on so many factors that I’m not going to get into much detail here.

Some of this is simply one of levers.  As I discused in Squat vs. Leg Press for Big Legs – Q&A, some trainees have horrible levers for squatting and get very little leg stimulus out of it for either leg strength or size.  In that case, another movement or *gasp* a properly performed leg press can be superior.   There are plenty of other examples and I’m sure I will lose much credibility by admitting that, when I was personal training, I almost always started beginners with machines.

Now, before you jump down my throat in the comments section, I want folks to honestly consider something as I go off on a bit of tangential rant: in all the time you’ve been in the weight room, how many people have you ever seen with good squat, deadlift or bench press form (I’m assuming here that you know what good form is yourself)?  How about power cleans?  Ever seen much of anything in most commercial gyms that didn’t make you cringe?

Because unless you train in a serious powerlifting gym or with Olympic lifters, the odds are that you’ve seen very few people performing those movements anywhere close to correctly.  But honestly take the time to count them up in your head, the ones who were doing it even close to correctly.  How many have you seen.  10, maybe 20?   If that.  And that’s out of how many hundreds of people you’ve seen training.

Hell, I’ve been training since I was 15 and coaching since my early 20′s in one form or another; I can’t imagine the thousands of people I’ve seen attempt those movements.   And the number using proper form…let’s say that most of them I coached myself and the exceptions are just that.  But let’s be generous and say that 1% of people squatting, benching or deadlifting are using anything approximating decent form.

I’m probably being very generous here since I can remember most of the exceptions I’ve seen explicitly (I always go talk to the person to find out where they learned how to do the movement so well); that’s how few of them I’ve seen.  With one or two exceptions of people who managed to self-teach themselves proper form, invariably every one of them had had a competent coach in their past making them learn proper form.  Or I was training them.

The sad reality, and if you step back from dogma that ‘squats and deadlifts rool’ for a second, is this: most wouldn’t know proper form on a squat or deadlift if it bit them on the ass.  Personal trainers sure don’t know how to teach them as a matter of course; the reality is that most personal trainers don’t even have good technique themselves.   Hell, go look at Youtube, there are plenty of ‘strength coaches’ that couldn’t teach a competent powerclean if their jobs depended on it (which, if you sort of think about it, should, but I digress).

And while there is an enormous amount of information on how to learn those movements out there, the fact is that teaching yourself anything is very difficult.  Can it be done?  Sure.  Can it be done by most?  Well…..

Of course, you can use terrible form on machines as well and the real fact is that the form seen by ~99% of trainees on ~99% of movements in ~99% of commercial gyms is usually crap.  But, assuming that the person is going to be using crappy form at least machines will keep them from getting crushed under a bar or (probably) blowing out their low back like a poorly performed deadlift will.

Which brings me back to my point about exercise selection and why I typically used machines with beginners.  Some of this was, mostly, practical.  I often had only three sessions with trainees before they were going off on their own.  And you can’t get someone to level of safety and competence in complex movements like a powerclean, squat, bench or deadlift in that time frame.   But I could do it with leg press, chest press and row machines or whatever.  And since most of those trainees had general fitness/health as a goal, I wasn’t terribly concerned; that they got into the gym was arguably more important than what they did.

When I knew I had longer to work with someone (e.g. the powerlifters I trained in Austin or one of my current trainees who can’t decide whether she wants to Olympic lift, powerlift or just be buff), or someone had loftier goals, mind you I would take the time to teach the big movements.  But only because I knew I’d have the time to get technique to where I wanted it with those people.

This is actually a point I’ll come back to in Part 4 in terms of deciding how to set up a beginning weight training program: are you being coached (competently) or not. Because someone who is being coached hands-on for their first 3-6 months of training will likely be doing something very different than someone who is going it on their own from Day 1.  And I’d make different suggestions/recommendations for those different situations.

As well, many beginners, especially folks who are older (and especially if they are overweight) are intimidated enough going into the weight room in the first place.  Giving them activities that they could ‘get’ quickly was part of providing the positive reinforcement that they needed to keep them coming back.  Put differently, if at the first workout you give a brand newbie trainee something that does nothing but make them feel like an uncoordinated spaz, odds are they won’t come back.  So you have to give them tasks simple enough to do well right off the bat.

Mind you this gets into a whole separate discussion of psychology and personality.  My experience is that those who aspire to bodybuilding or performance sports are often a bit more driven and, in that situation, even starting with more complicated things may not be so offputting. Given their ultimate goals, I’d be a lot more adamant about teaching them the big movements first (and, again, starting to determine optimal assistance movements down the road).

Basically, the point I’m trying to get at regarding exercise selection for beginners is that it depends.  And you will probably see the most variance here depending on the ultimate goal.  Do I think learning the big compounds are useful for most trainees?  Yes, of course.  However, that doesn’t mean that they are always appropriate in the beginner stages.  Issues of technique, coaching, psychology go into that and what I’d suggest for someone would depend very much on the specific circumstances.

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Summing Up

And that wraps up Part 3 where I looked at loading parameters for beginner training routines.  Since there is no benefit to be gained by going heavier compared to lighter (and many benefits in terms of going lighter), that’s the best approach: start light and gradually add weight as technique and strength improve.

In terms of volume, anywhere from 1 to 3 sets can be effectively used and both low and higher volume training have benefits in terms of time requirements, motor learning, work capacity, etc.  A reasonable compromise is to start with a low volume of training and build it up (if that is required by the ultimate end goal of training).

In terms of sets/repetition, both higher and lower repetitions can be used depending on the specifics.  higher repetitions keep the weight on the bar lower and may allow for more practice; this is offset by the potential for fatigue to make technique go badly.  Lower repetitions avoid issues of fatigue but people who have poor impulse control or who aren’t being coached tend to add weight too quickly and get themselves into trouble.

Frequency of training for beginners should be between 2-3 workouts/week generally of the full-body type.  There are exceptions to this but I’m going to stick with generalities here.

Finally there is exercise selection which, Internet dogma be damned, is more complex than ‘do squats, deadlifts and bench presses’.  I addressed some specific issues relating to exercise selection here and this will hopefully all make more sense on Friday when I truly wrap it up with some specific workout examples along with guidelines on how to progress things over the beginning stages of training.

Read Beginning Weight Training Part 4

Not only is this not terribly productive, it can actually be detrimental to long-term progress.  Even if the person doesn’t get injured or burned out by doing too much too soon, they run into another big problem: by using advanced methods early on, trainees are limited when they do manage to reach a more advanced stage.  That is, if someone jumps into high volumes or advanced training methods right out of the gate, they run into problems later on when they actually need to increase something.  If volume is already high, increasing it further is difficult if not impossible.  And if advanced methods are being used too early, there’s nothing left to break plateaus when they occur later on.

Put a little bit differently, one goal of all training should always be to get the most adaptations/gains in performance with the least amount of training.  That way, when gains slow down, there is actually room to increase things.  Start too high to begin with and you’ve got nowhere to go when you actually need to do it.

Put a bit differently, if you can get the same gains out of 3 hours/week of training vs. 6 hours/week of training, you’re better off training 3 hours/week.  That way, when 3 hours/week stops working, you have room to increase to 4 hours/week then 5 hours/week then 6 hours/week.  If you start at 6 hours/week and stop progressing, you’ve got nowhere left to go.

An additional factor contributing to this problem is this:  a lot of beginners (and this holds for non-weight room activities as well, runners and cyclists do the same thing) tend to fall into a trap of thinking “If I want to be as good/big/fast/whatever as [insert name of currently top level individual here], I should do what they do in training.”

But what’s forgotten is that what said top level individual is doing now, 10-15 (or more) years into their career is absolutely not reflective of what they did when they started.   Rather, assuming they were coached in some fashion or another, they started with a very beginner approach to training and have only built up to their current level of training (in terms of volume, intensity and frequency) over years and years of training.   But since folks rarely see or hear about what those folks did when they started, and only see what they are currently doing, they tend to assume that that is the proper way to train.

Of some relevance to this article is the fact that top level athletes in almost all activities often have periods where they ‘return to the basics’.   So they might spend some amount of their year or season training in at least a similar fashion as they did as rank beginners.  That’s on top of the fact that, almost without exception, top level individuals in all sports are always working on the fundamentals to one degree or another (a topic I’ve discussed variously on the site).

In fact, I might go so far as to argue that, in most activities, a big part of what separates the top level guys from the wannabes is the willingness to always work on the basics.  That is, wannabes tend to want to only do the sexy and fun stuff; it’s the guys who reach the top who consistently and constantly hammer away at the fundamentals.  If you don’t believe me, find a place where athletes of different levels train.  One difference will be that the higher level guys always do the basics: they warm-up properly, do their drills with attention and focus, pay constant attention in training, cool-down correctly, etc.  The guys skipping all of the stuff that isn’t fun are the ones who not only don’t make progress but usually waste their careers looking for Training Secrets.

And while we might argue that many activities done in the weight room (with the exception of the Olympic lifts) aren’t nearly as technique heavy as many sporting movements, the fact is that proper performance in the weight room does impact results.  The folks flailing about with the weights are not only putting themselves at a higher risk of injury but probably aren’t training the target muscle effectively in the first place.

You can contrast that to successful bodybuilders who often have some of the most beautiful technique you’ll ever see (I should mention that it’s not uncommon to see really big guys with totally awful technique).  If you ever get a chance to watch a good powerlifter train, you’ll see what I’m talking about: laser focus and absolutely dialed in technique (that they continue to try to improve throughout their career).  And if you know anything about Olympic lifting technique, you’ll know when one is training in your gym; he’ll be the one squatting and pulling with form more impressive than you’ve ever seen.  And while I’m not saying that you have to spend eons figuring out how to do the ‘perfect rep’, developing good technique in the early stages of weight training pays massive dividends later on (ask anybody who’s had to fix technique after years of doing it wrong).

But I’m getting off topic.

My point with this introduction is that, whether folks get into the weight room for general health/fitness purposes or to pursue bodybuilding or strength training (e.g. powerlifting) or are simply using the weight room to improve their performance in some other sport, the same dynamics tend to hold for rank beginners.  Folks want to be more advanced than they are and jump into advanced routines far before they have developed the fundamentals of training.

So, for the purposes of this article, I’m going to talk about all forms of beginning strength training as sort of a generalized whole, whether the ultimate goal is bodybuilding (or physique changes more generally), general health/fitness or some strength sport.  I’ll make comments about differences in each activity as necessary since there are some.  Since this will get long, I’m going to divide the article into three parts.

Today I’m going to focus on some of the basic ideas about why people get into the weight room in the first place in terms of goals along with what defines a beginner.  On Friday, I’ll look at the major adaptations that beginner routines are trying to achieve.  And finally on Tuesday of next week, I’ll look at how to set up a good basic beginner routine and how to progress it until someone is ready to move to the intermediate stage.

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Body Composition vs. Strength vs. Performance vs. Fitness/Health

People lift weights for a variety of reasons.  I imagine the majority reading this site do it to improve body composition, usually to look better naked.  Some of course eventually want to compete in one of the physique sports, whether it be bodybuilding or fitness/figure.  Some may want to get into something like power or Olympic lifting (probably not a lot of the latter and I won’t make many comments about that).  Some may be doing it only for general health and I imagine some do it because they feel that they are ‘supposed to’.

Now, there are certainly differences in training for each of those goals and I want to make a few comments about them before moving on (I’ll make more comments as needed throughout the article series as well).

Clearly the goal in physique/body composition oriented activities is primarily geared towards increasing muscle mass and/or losing fat (for more commentary on that, please read Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1 and Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 2).  Those who eventually want to compete in the physique sports have to worry about other things such as symmetry, balance, etc.  Getting their diet in order is clearly a big key.  Of course, fitness competitors have to worry about the fitness routine itself but that’s far outside of the scope of this article.

Those who eventually want to pursue something like powerlifting have as their goal lifting the most weight for a single repetition in the competitive lifts (squat, bench, deadlift or bench/deadlift if they go that route); at some point the gear/raw question comes up as well.  Folks eventually targeting something like strongman also need a base of strength although they will eventually need focus on the implements (and the huge strength/endurance component) that are required in competition.  Olympic lifters are in a similar position with learning the competition movements along with building base strength also required.

Weight training for athletes gets more complicated as what’s needed depends on the requirements of the sport, the individual, weight classes, etc.  For the general health/fitness lifter, the goals are typically much more modest, developing a basic level of strength fitness along with developing bone health, staving off negatives associated with aging are typical goals and I’d only note that weight training for general fitness/health tends to be the least intensive/extensive of all weight training programs.  They are often kept short and focused (even if some ‘optimality’ in terms of gains are sacrificed) to take into account the goals.

And clearly each of those goals will ultimately require a different approach.  However, for the most part, I’d argue that most of those differences are completely academic at the beginning stage of training.  Most beginners needs the same basic things out of training initially (which I’ll discuss on Friday) and the routines will, by and large, look more or less identical.  Although I won’t say much more about it, beginning Olympic lifting routines would tend to be the most divergent from what I’m going to describe but your coach should be handling that.

Rather, the differences will start to become more relevant/prevalent once trainees get out of the pure beginner stage of training and start moving into more involved and focused training as an intermediate level trainee.  Essentially, all trainees, regardless of ultimate goals need to develop a base of training while achieving a number of adaptations that I’m going to discuss below.  That base will provide a launching off point for more specialization down the road.

So, for the most part I’m going to treat beginner training for all of the above more or less identically.  Slight differences will tend to be that (slight) and I’m sure I’ll be addressing questions about it in the comments section.

.What Defines a Beginner?

Perhaps the first question to cover is what actually defines a beginning trainee.  Clearly anyone just starting out in the weight room is a beginner and what I’m going to write would apply there; in that situation, beginner training might be done for 3-6 months before anything more advanced was either appropriate or needed.

I’d also suggest that, as I discussed in Returning to Training After a Layoff – Q&A, anyone who has had a large break from training (perhaps 3-4 more weeks or more) should start back to training with a beginner type routine.  The biggest difference in the second situation is that the time spent performing beginner training would be much shorter.  Perhaps 2-4 weeks of complete beginner training might be necessary before that person (assuming that was their goal)  moved into something more advanced.

Individuals who were once trained but have taken a very extended period of time off (say a year or more) should consider themselves rank beginners again.  They may not need the full 3-6 months of beginner training but they should expect to take proportionally longer on that type of training before moving into anything more advanced.

I’d also offer and I know that people reading this won’t like it, that most trainees out there are not nearly as advanced as they thought.  Even someone who has been ‘lifting weights like a bodybuilder’ for 2 years may still be, strictly speaking, a beginner in that their form sucks, they’ve made little to no gains in actual muscle mass, their overall training structure sucks, etc.  This is more common than you think and I’ve seen it for years in the weight room and the forums.  Despite the apparent training age, those folks have to train like beginners for a while before being allowed to do anything more advanced.

To give specific examples, one client of mine, who had literally 20 years of weight training under his belt, had atrocious form on everything he did.  Quite literally none of it was correct and it was limiting his ability to make progress.  So despite the 2 decades in the weight room, he was essentially a beginner in many ways.  And I trained him as such in many ways, forcing him to fix his technique and form (at least on key exercises) before going heavy again.

Another trainee, despite having lifted for 2-3 years by herself was in a similar situation: except for RDL’s, her form on everything was horrible (she made the mistake of mirroring the form she saw in her own weight room, which was all fundamentally awful).  So, in addition to fixing some injury stuff, she trained basically as a beginner until it was fixed.

I’d finish by noting that, even if it seems like you’re taking a step backwards, even ‘really advanced’ folks often benefit from returning to the fundamentals for a while.  As I noted above, many athletes do this in other sports and reinforcing the basics for a bit never hurts. So all of you super advanced Internet trainees, the ones who keep looking for harder and more intense and more advanced, at least consider a short phase of training on the basics.  You might learn some useful stuff.

A follow up question to “What defines a beginner?” would be “When do I know when I’ve moved to the intermediate stage?”  This latter question is a bit harder to answer.  Generally speaking, I’d expect a beginner to show proper form in the major weight training exercises  and be capable of handling a full workout (which would typically last from 60-90 minutes) without getting murdered with fatigue.

Some muscle mass would clearly have been gained at this point but, as discussed in What’s My Genetic Muscular Potential?, a beginner might still be gaining at a fairly nice rate of 2 lbs muscle/month (females might get half that).   When that slows (and a beginning male has gained perhaps 10-12 pounds of muscle (again, females cut that in half) over a 6 month period), the person should probably start considering an intermediate routine.

This would tend to assume that bodybuilding or one of the performance oriented goals of weight training was being pursued.  A general health/fitness trainees might be happy with a few pounds of the good stuff at appropriate places on their body and not want to make much more in the way of muscular gains.

Perhaps most simply, the time to move to an intermediate program is when beginning training is no longer stimulating progress or gains.  Basically, milk the beginner gains for all they’re worth; it’s one of the few times when you get to make progress without having to work depressingly hard.  When those gains dry up, it’s time for something more intense.  But, in my opinion, there’s no real hurry.  As I mentioned above, the goal should be to get the maximal gains out of the least training (this holds for all training mind you).  Increase training volume, intensity, etc. when you need to do it, not simply because you want to (or read some really cool routine in a magazine or online).

And with that I’ll wrap it for today.  On Friday, I’ll look at some of the specific goals of beginner training which will lead into a discussion of how to set up a beginner routine next Tuesday.

Read Beginning Weight Training Part 2.

On which note, to facilitate discussion, I’ve turned off comment moderation for this article.  Alan will be checking in on the comments regularly and this way folks won’t have to wait for me to get around to moderating them for their comments to appear.  I only ask that people keep it civil and no trolling.  I can and will still manually delete inappropriate comments after the fact if people get rambunctious.   I will not be responding to comments, this is Alan’s piece not mine.

And for those of you who aren’t swayed by the marketing hype and want more scientifically based information on changing body composition, I’d refer you to Alan’s monthly Research Review.  He examined both new and older studies of relevance in detail and you won’t be disappointed by the content.

Supplement Marketing on Steroids

by Alan Aragon

Bold claims vs. realistic expectations

A T-nation article was recently brought to my attention by a flood of emails. Folks expressed everything from awe to outrage, but the biggest sentiment was disbelief. “I, Bodybuilder” is in the form of a conversation between staff writer Nate Green and the owner of Biotest, Tim Patterson. It’s a prelude to the formal release of an upcoming supplement called Anaconda.

Is the article unintentionally humorous to discerning minds? Yes. Is any of it supposed to be tongue-in-cheek? Probably not. Does it read like one big, hairy advertisement? Yes. However, to the majority of the T-nation forum members, it probably reads like the Second Coming of the Lord.

To quote the video on the article’s opening page, the product/protocol was “developed out of a black-ops bodybuilding project” where the user can experience “muscle mass being built as fast as humanly possible.”

This hyped-up marketing script is business as usual. But, make no mistake about it; a lot of kids are going to be staking their entire sense of self-worth on the effectiveness of the magic bullet. Here are the claims made in the video on the article’s opening page as well as in print on the 3rd page:

• Christian Thibaudeau gained 27 lbs of muscle in 6 weeks and increased seated overhead press to 375 pounds for 5 cluster reps.
• Sebastien Cossette gained 20 lbs of muscle in 8 weeks and added 100 lbs to his front squat.

In contrast to the above, here’s a review of what I’ve observed as realistic rates of muscle gain according to training status. Keep in mind that these figures are based on what I’ve seen in the last 15 years in the field working with mostly drug-free athletes:

Realistic Rates of Lean Body Mass Gain Based on Training Status

*Women can expect to achieve the lower end of these ranges at best.

My note: The issue of realistic muscle gains was discussed in more detail in the article What’s My Genetic Muscular Potential.

The Cream of the Physique Crop

As you can see, the T-nation claims are infinitely more exciting than the expectations I’ve set for my clients and students. Some quick math reveals that they’re promising muscle gains averaging at roughly 3.5 lbs per week, or about 14 lbs per month. That’s over 4 times the typical rate I’ve observed in novices, and at least 15 times the rate I’ve observed in advanced trainees.

Let’s step back for a second and look at the big picture. It’s rare for a fully-grown, skeletally mature adult in his early twenties or older to put on more than 50 lbs of muscle during an entire training career.  Just imagine a college graduate weighing a relatively lean 185 transforming into a muscular 235-pounder by the time he’s in his mid to late 20’s. This is a very formidable feat.

Just how respectable is it? I’ll list the competition stats of all 12 Mr. Olympias (for those living in a cave, the Mr. Olympia is the most prestigious title in bodybuilding):

The Mr. Olympia Winners

*These heights and weights are averages from various sources online.

For anyone who disagrees that our lean 235 lb example is impressive, consider the fact that only 3 of the 12 Mr. Olympias had a competition weight that significantly exceeded 235 lbs. Keep in mind that there’s a very good chance that NONE of the Olympia winners were drug-free. When you consider that these guys won the genetic lottery to begin with, then enhanced their supernormal potential with multiple drugs, the sobering limits of the drug-free, genetically mediocre majority become apparent.

So, looking back at the T-nation claims, it’s downright comical that they’re claiming about 2-3 year’s worth of gains in 2 months or less. If they didn’t flat-out fabricate, they definitely exaggerated while omitting a few important details. It’s possible for a scant handful of genetically blessed individuals to gain lean mass at the rates they listed, but the majority of these cases are rebound weight gains after prolonged dieting phases involving substantial weight loss.

The said rebound weight gain is typically accompanied by the honeymoon phase of creatine and/or drugs. However, one of the claims is that Kevin Norbert lost 14 lbs of fat while 24 net lbs was gained. So, we’re talking 38 lbs of new muscle in 8 weeks? Give me a frickin’ break, guys. Later on in the article, the exorbitant claims relent a little bit. I’ll quote Patterson directly:

Specifically, from using these methods, we expect the average lifter to gain about 20 pounds of muscle from his first 15-week program — hopefully more — and keep all of it.

I’m defining our average guy as an in-shape 175-pound lifter who’s accustomed to hard training, who’s totally committed to working hard, and who wants to build a lot of muscle mass as fast as humanly possible.

Research Shakes its Head

Now their attention-grabbing 14 lbs per month claim at the start of the article (illustrated by the results of the 3 ‘gifted’ bodybuilder dudes) is reduced to about 5.3 lbs per month on the last page. Still, this figure is about double the average I’ve observed in rank novices, and they’re setting this expectation for trainees “accustomed to hard lifting”. Fine, but how does this hold up against the research? Let’s compare these expectations with the results of athletes on anabolic/androgenic drugs. Let me quote a comprehensive review by Hartgens and Kuiper [1]:

Although many strength athletes frequently report increments of about 10–15kg of bodyweight due to AAS administration, such alterations have not been documented in well designed prospective studies. Most studies show that bodyweight may increase by 2–5kg as a result of short-term (<10 weeks) AAS use. The most pronounced average gain of bodyweight was reported by Casner and coworkers after 6 weeks of stanozolol administration [7 kg in 6 weeks]. However, in a case report, an increase of 12.7kg over a 2-year AAS administration period was registered.

The above quote is worth re-reading enough times until it sinks in. The key point is bolded. The greatest drug-enhanced gains seen in the scientific literature are 7 kg (15.4 lbs) in 6 weeks, or about 2.5 lbs per week. This is roughly a pound less per week than the claims made at the start of the article, and a pound more than the expectations set for the ‘regular guys’ at the end.

However, it’s not at all fair to use the highest recorded drug-enhanced rates of gain as a benchmark. Reiterating the above review, the norms for drug-enhanced gains in the short term (within 10 weeks) are 2-5 kg (4.4-11 lbs), and roughly 12.7 kg (27.9 lbs) over 2 years. The latter two figures collectively average out to a monthly gain of 0.9-1.1 lbs. Let me repeat, all of these figures were achieved with drugs.

To single out the population we’re discussing, I combed through Hartgens and Kuiper’s review for studies strictly on drug-enhanced bodybuilders, and the average rate of gain was 3.4 kg (7.5 lbs) in 8-10 weeks This amounts to 0.83 lb per week, or 3.3 lbs per month.

Assuming T-nation’s expectation of the ‘regular’ population’s gain of 5.3 lbs per month (1.3 lb per week), this rate is still about 38% faster than what’s been observed in drug-enhanced bodybuilders. Keep in mind, creatine supplementation for roughly 12 weeks has been demonstrated to cause an average gain of about 2 kg over non-supplemented conditions [2].

So even if we assumed an additive effect of creatine plus anabolics/androgenics, we’d be looking at a gain of roughly 3.7 lb per month. The gains T-nation promises are still roughly 30% faster than this.

Another research example of drug-assisted gains is a year-long case study by Alén and Häkkinen, who examined the stats and details of an elite bodybuilder [3]. During the course of a year, his fat-free mass increased from 83 to 90 kg (182.6 to 198 lb), which is a gain of 15.4 lb. He used anabolic/androgenic drugs throughout the study, with the exception of 4 weeks off in the middle of the 12 month period.

So, if 15.4 lbs of lean mass in a year is all this genetically gifted, drug-enhanced, international-level bodybuilder can muster, what makes the genetically average, drug-free, non-newbie, non-rebounding trainee think he can exceed that in less than 4 months? Only the Biotest staff knows the secret.

Back Down to Earth

Let’s bring things back to reality. If we’re figuring on a 5-year span with minimal lapses in program compliance with the goal of going from a mortal 185 to a Olympian 235, then the simple math is about 10 lbs of muscle gained per year on average. Can a novice gain double that rate in his first year? Yes.

However, heading toward the advanced stages, gains happen at half of this rate, and progressively less as your genetic potential draws closer. Speaking of which, perhaps the most exhaustive work on the topic of genetic potential for muscular gain in drug-free trainees has been done by Casey Butt.  You can read more at his website The WeighTrainer – Your Maximum Muscular Bodyweight and Measurements.

A similar topic was recently discussed by Lyle McDonald in an article titled What’s My Genetic Muscular Potential?

Last but not least, here’s one of my favorite sections from the article that may or may not be a jab at my Objective Comparison of Chocolate Milk and Surge Recovery:

Nate Green: Nick ended up gaining 20 pounds of new muscle and increasing his bench press by 55 pounds, and that’s addictive.
Tim Patterson: After experiencing these kinds of results, from week to week, it’s impossible to be satisfied with anything else. These guys are hooked — we’re all totally hooked — and simply refuse to train any other way.
Nate Green: I can’t give you any failures, because there are none at this point.
Tim Patterson: Oh, I’m sure there will be a couple of dozen pus-filled Internet moron-trolls who can’t wait to prove how they ‘got nothing from loaded insulin surges and HTH, and all you really need is ‘chocolate milk and a banana.’

See, scientifically unsupported talk is cheap. On the other hand, buying into bold marketing claims can be expensive; it’s $80 bucks for a bottle of Anaconda. The name’s appropriate, since it sounds like a good way to put your wallet in a chokehold.

References Cited

1.Hartgens F, Kuipers H. Effects of androgenic-anabolic steroids in athletes. Sports Med. 2004;34(8):513-54.
2.Persky AM, Brazeau GA. Clinical pharmacology of the dietary supplement creatine monohydrate. Pharmacol Rev. 2001 Jun;53(2):161-76.
3.Alén M, Häkkinen K. Physical health and fitness of an elite bodybuilder during 1 year of self-administration of testosterone and anabolic steroids: a case study. Int J Sports Med. 1985 Feb;6(1):24-9.

Now, it should go without saying that nobody can really say upfront what someones genetic potential actually is.  Until we live in the world of Gattaca where we can do a full genetic scan and know what it means, nobody can say ahead of time what someone can or can’t achieve.  Well, not unless you look at some pretty ludicrous extremes (you’re not going to see someone at 400 pounds ripped any time soon for example).

And, of course, worrying about such things before you even start training is sort of missing the point in my opinion.  At a fundamental level, trainees should train and eat properly and let the cards fall where they may.  Worrying abut what you might or might not accomplish is putting the cart far before the horse.  But that’s another topic for another day.  And, of course, doesn’t really answer the question in the title of this article.

I’d note that while I do believe trainees should simply get into proper training and not worry up front what they may or may not accomplish, I also believe that there are genetic limits set by underlying biology (again, modulated by behavioral choices and patterns). That’s just reality and recognizing them can save people from a lot of mental anguish about what they think they should be able to or could be able to accomplish if they just worked hard enough.

Which is a long way of introducing the topic of today’s article, what is the maximum amount of muscle that someone can gain over a career of proper lifting and nutrition.  I’m going to look at it from a few different perspectives but I think you’ll find that, on average, they all end up with pretty similar results.

I’d note that most of what I’m going to talk about applies to male lifters, data on females being much more difficult to come by.  Just realize that the average female potential for muscle mass gains is even lower than that in males.

The McDonald Model

I’m not sure if I came up with this idea on my own or stole it from somewhere else (probably a combination of the two) but, in a slightly different context (how quickly can someone gain muscle), I have often thrown out the following values for rates of muscle gain.

Again, these values are for males, females would use roughly half of those values (e.g. 10-12 pounds in the first year of proper training).

Please note that these are averages and make a few assumptions about proper training and nutrition and such.  As well, age will interact with this; older individuals won’t gain as quickly and younger individuals may gain more quickly.  For example, it’s not unheard of for underweight high school kids to gain muscle very rapidly.  But they are usually starting out very underweight and have the natural anabolic steroid cycle called puberty working for them.

Year of training also refers to proper years of training. Someone who has been training poorly for 4 years and gained squat for muscle gains may still have roughly the Year 1 potential when they start training properly.

Now, if you total up those values, you get a gain of roughly 40-50 pounds of total muscle mass over a lifting career although it might take a solid 4+ years of proper training to achieve that.  So if you started with 130 pound of lean body mass (say in high school you were 150 pounds with 12% body fat), you might have the potential to reach a level of 170-180 pounds of lean body mass after 4-5 years of proper training.  At 12% body fat, that would put you at a weight of 190-200 pounds.

Again, that’s a rough average, you might find some who gain a bit more and some who gain a bit less. And there will be other factors that impact on the above numbers (e.g. age, hormones, etc.).

The Alan Aragon Model

In discussing this topic with Alan Aragon, who’s book Girth Control should be read by anyone interested in this topic.  In his monthly Research Review, he addressed the issue of rates of muscle gain a bit differently although the results end up being pretty similar.  He has found that that the following rates of muscle gain are roughly achievable for natural lifters.  Note that this ignores things like creatine loading or temporary glycogen supercompensation which can cause rapid changes in ‘lean body mass’ but don’t represent actual skeletal muscle tissue.

So a 150 pound beginner might be able to gain 1.5-2.25 pounds of muscle per month (18-27 pounds per year).  After a year, he’s now an intermediate at 170 pounds and might be capable of gaining 0.85-1.7 lbs per month (10-20 pounds per year; I’d consider 20 lbs. an exceptional gain).  After another year, he’s an advanced lifter at 180 and might only gain 0.5-1 lb per month (a true 1 lb/month gain in muscle mass for an advanced athlete would be pretty rare).

So he might top out at 190-200 pounds or thereabouts after another year or two of training, at 10% body fat, he’d have 170-180 pounds of lean body mass.  Pretty much identical to my model even if we got there by a slightly different path.

Casey Butt’s Frame Size Model

Of course, both my and Alan’s model for maximum muscle growth are pretty simplified and don’t take into account some of the other factors that can go into determining maximum muscular potential.  One that has been argued to impact on overall size and strength gain potential is frame size, usually assessed by wrist and/or ankle size (or other measurements).

Natural bodybuilder and all-around smart guy Casey Butt has done an exhaustive analysis of top level natural bodybuilders and developed a calculator that will predict maximum muscular potential based on height, ankle and wrist size along with goal body fat percentage.  He’s also written an extensive, math heavy book showing how he came up with his model.  You can find it here.

Casey Butt’s Maximum Muscular Potential Calculator

I’ve run a lifter of different heights with a 7″ wrist and 8.75″ ankle through the calculator to show his predicted body weights (at 10% body fat) and lean body mass.

Of course, variations in ankle and wrist will change the numbers but you can go plug in your own numbers.  I’d note that Casey’s calculations end up being a bit more conservative than mine or Alan’s but they are all at least within shooting distance of one another.  You’d need to be towards the taller end of things to reach the highest levels suggested by my or Alan’s method.

And while some might argue that frame size has nothing to do with this, there is research to support the idea (I’d mention again that Caseys analysis is based on examination of real-world bodybuilders, arguably the group that you’d expect to surpass any supposed limits if it were possible).

At least one study showed that light framed individuals gained less muscle mass compared to heavier framed individuals on the same training program and, at a more basic level, hormones such as testosterone/etc. impact on things like bone growth and frame size.  So there is a biologically potential link between frame size and hormone levels that would contribute to trainability and ultimate gains in muscle mass.

It’s also no accident that top strength athletes typically have large frames and robust joints (or that those with relatively smaller frames tend to be drawn/succeed in endurance sports).  Some of this is simply so they can handle the level of training needed to succeed at their sport; but some of it is probably indicative of overall hormonal status as well.

Martin Berkhan’s Model

Martin Berkhan of Leangains.com has a somewhat simpler model than Casey’s, also based on his observation of top level natural bodybuilding competitors who are contest lean (e.g. 4-5% body fat).

His equation is:

Height in centimeters – 100 = upper limit of weight in kilograms in contest shape.

So take your height in inches and multiply by 2.54, that’s your height in centimeters.  Subtract 100 and that’s your predicted maximum weight in contest shape (which is 5% body fat or less for males) in kilograms.  Multiply that value by 2.2 to get pounds.  So let’s look at body weight at 10% body fat using the same heights I used for Casey’s calculator. I’ve also calculated out lean body mass at 10% body fat.

While not identical, these values are certainly right in line with Casey’s calculator.  I would note that contest lean bodybuilders are often highly dehydrated and may be glycogen depleted and this will tend to lower the measurement of lean body mass.  We might realistically add 5-10 pounds of lean body mass to the above values to account for dehydration/etc.  With that adjustment, they are more or less identical to Casey’s values.

A Final Reality Check

As I noted in the introduction, a lot of lifters get fairly angry or upset over the above types of estimations, assuming that they don’t take into account individual differences in motivation, work ethic, etc.  To that I say nonsense.

Both Casey and Martin’s equations are based on top level natural bodybuilders, the group that you’d expect to surpass such limits if they existed (and who’s dedication and work ethic is pretty hard to question).  Mine and Alan’s are based on years of experience in the field.  If a massive number of exceptions to the above existed, someone would have seen them by now.

Now I think part of this has to do with exceedingly skewed ideas about what’s achievable, a problem driven by pro-bodybuilding.  After seeing a pro-bodybuilder stepping on stage at 260 pounds or more and shredded, the idea that a natural may top out at 180-190 pounds of lean body mass (if that) can be disheartening.

Of course, to the general public, an individual at a lean 180-190 pounds is still pretty enormous.  It’s just that compared to the absurd size of a pro bodybuilder, it seems absolutely tiny.  But it is reality.

People forget that Arnold Schwarzenegger competed at perhaps 230 pounds (assuming 5% body fat, that’s only 220 pounds of lean body mass) and that was with (admittedly low doses) of anabolic steroids in the mixture.

The simple real-world fact, which can be verified by going to any natural bodybuilding show is that you simply don’t see naturals coming into contest shape much above 200 pounds (the exceptions can usually be counted on one hand) and few even achieve that level of size.  It’s always the lighter classes (e.g. 165 lb class) that have the most competitors at natural shows with fewer and fewer coming in at the heavier weights, especially in contest shape.

Now, some guys on stage may weigh more than 200 pounds but they usually aren’t lean enough.  At even 10% body fat, a guy at 220 pounds only has 200 pounds of lean body mass.  By the time you got him contest lean, he’d likely come in with less than that.

Even when people point to large natural strength athletes who might be 270-280 lbs. natural, by the time you figure in 28-30% body fat, that still puts them right back at a maximum lean body mass of 189-196 lbs.  Certainly near the higher end of things but not by that much.

And while many will argue that improvements in training methods and nutrition should change the above values, that simply doesn’t seem to be the case.   Human genetics have not changed and you still don’t see natural bodybuilders or other athletes coming in with more lean body mass than would be predicted by the above models.  They might get there a bit faster but the overall size of natural bodybuilders doesn’t seem to have changed much, if at all, in decades.

To quote from Casey’s site:

Over the years I’ve also received many emails full of unsubstantiated claims, hostile remarks and even personal attacks because of the information presented here. But in that time, though many have told me they’re easily going to surpass these predictions, I haven ‘t received any legitimate, verifiable statistics that significantly exceed the results of the equations presented above …including correspondence with some of today’s top-ranked drug-free bodybuilders upon which the equations were partially based.

I anticipate a similar response in the comments section of this article and I’d just refer you to what Casey wrote above.

I’d finish by only saying that I’m not writing this in an attempt to be negative in any way shape or form, as I noted in the introduction, I would rather see people put their energy into their training and nutrition than worrying ahead of time about what they might or might not accomplish.  And while I certainly wish that everyone reading this is the lone exception to the values calculated above, well…that’s not what an exception is.

At the same time, a failure to recognize that there are genetic limitations can lead people to do some very silly things in terms of their training or diet.  Folks nearing their genetic limits, in an attempt to gain muscle at a rate that simply not achievable will put on enormous amounts of fat in hopes that it will net them a ton of muscle gain.  And that just doesn’t ever end up being the case.

I’d only note in closing that the above calculations also has some real-world implications in terms of diet (e.g. what kind of weekly or daily surplus should be attempted to maximize muscle gain without excessive fat gains) but that will have to wait for a future article.

I find that lifters, especially new lifters often get so fixated on magic, complicated approaches to training and diet (including mine) that they forget to get the basics in place.  The simple fact is that the basics and fundamentals are where every diet and every training program should start.

Why?  Because they always work.  More advanced approaches should be brought in when they are needed, not just because the trainee is bored or wants to do them.

The bottom line is this:  Before you worry about advanced approaches, get your fundamentals straight. That’s what The Baseline Diet is all about.

Introduction

I’m going to start this article with a few questions. How much mass have you gained in the last few months (or years as the case may be)? If you’re like the average lifter, the answer is assuredly ‘Not as much as I’d like’.

Ok, next question: how much money have you spent on exotic supplements hoping they’d be the secret to freaky mass? Again, if you’re the average lifter the answer is probably ‘Way more than I should have’.

Next is a series of questions: How many meals are you eating per day? How many calories? How many grams of protein?  Carbs?  Fat? When’s the last time you ate fruit or vegetables?  Consistently? How much water are you consuming on a daily basis. If you’re an average lifter (and want to stay such), your answer is probably ‘Umm, I don’t know.’

This brings me in a roundabout way to the topic of this article (and it’s continuation which I’ll put up on Monday): while people are always interested in cutting edge new esoteric approaches to mass gain and nutritional strategies, the simple fact is that there isn’t much new under the sun when it comes to bodybuilding or athletic nutrition.  There are only three major nutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat) and you can only arrange them in so many ways.

We may know a lot more about optimal nutrition than we did thirty years ago but human biology is still the same as it ever was.  The same basic rules still apply and in this article and the next I want to talk about those basic rules.

A Quick Word on Supplements

I’ve written a lot of columns and Q&A’s for various magazines (print and online) over the years and, by far, the biggest question revolves around supplements.  A majority deals with basic stuff of course: protein powders, thermogenics, creatine but a number also deal with the more esoteric stuff on the market.

Bodybuilding magazines are in the business of convincing lifters that taking a lot of expensive supplements it mandatory to reach their goals; because that’s how they make money.  Telling a lifter to follow a basic progressive training program with a good nutrition doesn’t make money, getting them to buy a product for $45 per month month-in/month-out does.

The simple fact is this, your diet (and of course your training) will determine 90-95% of your success in bodybuilding (or any sport).

At most, supplements can add 5-10% to that level. Unless you’re planning on competing, and that 5-10% may mean the difference between winning and losing, spending a small-fortune on supplements is a waste. As well, until you get the 90-95% of your training and diet in order, the other 5-10% won’t make a damn bit of difference.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-supplements even if I get painted as such.  Sure, I think 99% of what’s out there is crap (and history supports me in that).  More importantly, I see too many lifters and athletes focusing on the wrong thing: they want the magic pill that will make them great, but they forget to worry about the stuff that actually matters.

Put differently, echoing my mentor: I’m anti-anything that detracts trainees from the stuff that really matters.  And supplements all too often do exactly that.  Lifters try to make up for failings in the important stuff with a magic pill, and the magazines and companies know and pander to this.

Ok, enough of that, let’s get to the article.

What is the Baseline Diet?

Most simply defined, the baseline diet is what every athlete needs to determine and put in place before they go mucking about with any supplements, or any goofy diet interpretations (including mine). That is, you should establish AND follow the baseline diet for at least a few months, to track your body’s response, before you try anything else.

Because until you determine what your baseline response is (and have the fundamentals of your diet in place), you can’t make any sort of objective conclusion about the complicated stuff in terms of results.

Now, much of what I’m going to discuss has been said many times before, as I said above there’s not much new here. But I still see enough lifters making the same basic mistakes in their overall daily nutrition that it’s worth repeating the basics again (and again and again).

I’m going to divide the baseline diet into six distinct categories which are meal frequency, caloric intake, water intake, and protein, carbohydrate and fat intake.  I’ll discuss the first three in this article and the second three in Part 2.

Meal Frequency

Meal frequency may be one of the more hotly debated areas of nutrition these days. While it’s always been  dogma (and in earlier versions of this article, I basically reiterated that dogma) that you must eat 6 times per day or more for optimal gains (or weight/fat loss), more recent research has called that severely into question.

Recent work into caloric restriction and intermittent fasting suggests that lower meal frequencies may have additional benefits. Some people are even fasting for many hours per day prior to food consumption with many claimed benefits (such as improved insulin sensitivity, calorie partitioning and fat loss).  I can’t do intermittent fasting justice in this article, again I’d refer people to Martin Berkhan’s Leangains.com for more information.

As I’ve discussed at some point in most of my books, there are more factors which go into choosing meal frequency than any absolute statement (e.g. you MUST eat 6 small meals per day) can cover. How many calories per day someone is consuming, along with several other variables all interact here.

A small female consuming 1200-1500 calories per day may prefer to eat fewer smaller meals (so that each is larger and more satisfying) whereas a large male bodybuilder seeking mass gains (who may be consuming 3000-4000 calories/day or more) may need to eat 6 times per day to get in the required food.

As I discuss in detail in The Protein Book, any given meal will maintain the body in an anabolic state for somewhere between 4-6 hours depending on its composition and form (a solid meal takes 5-6 hours to digest for example) and the idea that you have to eat every 3 hours or your muscles will fall off, or you’ll go into starvation mode, is simply nonsense. I discuss this in some more detail in the article Meal Frequency and Energy Balance.

Now, as many like to point out, higher meal frequencies have been found to improve various aspects of health (notably glucose tolerance and blood cholesterol) but many of these studies use a very unrealistic feeding pattern (e.g. 17 meal/day compared to 3). Whether 6 meals per day has a true benefit over 3 meals per day in terms of health is massively debatable.  As noted, emerging research is finding that intermittent fasting and lower meal frequencies may have major benefits.

But since this article is about a baseline diet for bodybuilders and athletes, who usually have a fairly high daily caloric intake, a higher meal frequency is probably still going to be preferred.  This is just a practical consideration, an athlete with a large caloric requirement will probably find it easier to get them in eating more frequently.

Just realize that it isn’t absolutely mandatory. As long as you’re eating every 3-5 hours (assuming large-ish solid meals), you’ll remain in an an anabolic state. Obsessing that it’s been 2.5 hours since your last feeding is simply silly; stressing out over nothing will do you far more damage than going 4 hours between meals.

For more details, you can read the full discussion of meal frequency in The Protein Book.

Nutrient Timing

Beyond the global issue of meal frequency, an area of major interest and debate is that of nutrient timing.  The original version of this article repeated the basic idea that breakfast was a key aspect of halting overnight catabolism, but the research and practical experience of the intermittent fasting folks calls that into question.  So I won’t repeat that particular bit of readily accepted dogma.

However, nutrient timing around training is currently a massive area of interest with some researchers going so far as to say that timing of nutrients (especially protein) around training is more important to overall results than total protein intake itself.  Maybe.  There are a lot of issues surrounding the studies (not the least of which is that most of them are done in the fasted state which means they have limited relevance to athletes who have eaten during the day) to date but the simple fact is that the research is fairly clear: nutrients consumed around training are critical to stimulating optimal gains in muscle mass.

Now, how soon after training is debatable, one study found that whether nutrients were taken an hour or three hours after training, the results were the same (in older folks, it’s critical that they be consumed soon after training).   So the whole focus on ‘You MUST eat within 47 seconds of finishing your last set or your workout was waste.’ is basically a lot of internet nonsense.

But the general point still stands, lifters should be eating something around training. Whether it’s before, during, after or a combination of the three, nutrients (and that means carbohdyrates and protein) around training promote better gains in muscle mass.

I can’t possibly give sufficient details on amounts in this article.  Again, The Protein Book has a 35 page chapter dedicated to the topic of around workout nutrition for those who want to know all the details.

Eating at Bedtime/During the Night

In the original version of this article, I made some comments about the practice of consuming nutrients right before bedtime and/or in the middle of the night.   The idea was that the time between the last meal of the day and breakfast was one of catabolism and the theory is that eating at this time might help with growth.  Maybe.

There is data that the gut needs ‘rest’ for optimal function (e.g. that around the clock feeding causes problems) but it’s all based on studies of folks in hospitals so it’s relevance to athletes is debatable.

Another consideration is that sleep should not be compromised to get more nutrients into the body.  Sleep is critical for recovery and forcing yourself to wake up to eat something probably does more harm than good.  I originally said simply this: If you wake up in the middle of the night (e.g. to pee), eating something might be worth considering.  If not, don’t worry about it.

Basically, I’m torn on this one.  Of course, as I mentioned above, the reality is that a solid meal takes at least 5-6 hours to fully digest.  If you eat a particularly large dinner meal, that will actually be providing nutrients through a good portion of the night anyhow.  I’m just not sure it’s worth worrying about, moreso if it means interrupting good sleep.

Total Caloric Intake

Although macronutrient composition affects success in bodybuilding and athletics, caloric intake is arguably as important. Invariably the lifters I’ve met who wanted to gain mass (but couldn’t) were either overtraining (or training stupidly) or simply not eating enough.  Usually it’s both.

In the late 90′s, we saw the rise (and subsequent fall) of the lean mass gainer, a low calorie drink that magically caused you to gain mass. In all cases, these products contained creatine which causes rapid water weight gain.  It was a neat trick but served only to confuse lifters who apparently thought that they could build muscle out of hopeful thinking and thin air.

On top of that, there is a pervading belief (perhaps we should call it a desire) to gain mass while losing fat at the same time. While fat beginners can pull this off, as can those returning from a layoff, anyone past the beginner stage will find this generally impossible without the use of repartitioning drugs or complicated diets which alternate distinct periods of over- and under-eating (such as the mass variant in my Ultimate Diet 2.0).

The strategy I regularly advocate is the alternation periods of specific mass gain (accepting fat gains) with specific fat loss (minimizing muscle loss). This avoids the buildup of excessive bodyfat levels, while allowing one to gain mass.  I discuss this more in the article General Mass Gain Philosophies.

The bottom line is this: building muscle requires a surplus/excess of two things: the building blocks of muscle (protein/amino acids) and energy (calories).  You can’t build muscle out of nothing and, without both in sufficient amounts, nothing happens.  I’ll discuss protein intake in Part 2, here I only want to look at total caloric intake.

Bodybuilders always want to know “How many calories for mass gains?” to which the simplest answer is “Enough.” In principle, for mass gains calories should be high enough that a small fat gain is seen (as measured by calipers) every couple of weeks. This should be more than sufficient to support muscle mass gains.

As as starting point I usually suggest 10-20% over maintenance calories for mass gains.  Of course, this assumes that you know what your maintenance calories actually are.  If you do, just add 10-20% to that.

If not, a caloric level of 16-18 calories per pound is usually a good starting place for mass gains; this then has to be adjusted based on real world results in strength, mass and body fat.   I’ve also known individuals who had to consume 25 cal/lb to gain weight/mass.

Why the variance?

The big variable here usually has to do with non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) which I discuss in some detail in Metabolic Rate Overview.  In short, NEAT refers to activities that aren’t exercise that burn calories.  Fidgeting, moving around, etc.  And people vary drastically in how NEAT responds to overfeeding with some people (the stereotypical ‘hardgainer’) often shown massively increased NEAT when they try to eat a lot.  So calories that would go to support muscle growth just get burnt off with excess activity.  But I’m getting off topic.

In any case, I suggest trainees start at that calorie level and make adjustments depending on biweekly body composition measures. So start at say 18 cal/lb and see how your caliper measurements (men should probably use abdominal, women thigh as these tend to be most representative of body fat levels) change after 2 weeks.

If they went up a little (maybe a couple of millimeters over 2 weeks) and you’re gaining strength in the gym, you’re probably at a sufficient calorie level to maximize growth without excessive fat gain.  More calories probably won’t increase muscle gain but may give disproportionate fat gain.

If neither weight nor body fat has increased, calories are too low.  At that point, I’d suggest adding another couple of hundred calories per day to your diet. Eventually you’ll find that calorie level that starts putting weight on you. Obviously, as you get bigger, you’ll have to add more calories as well.

Of course, if body fat has gone up significantly more than that, calories are too high and should be scaled backwards slightly.  I’d note that, if you start at the low end of my calorie recommendations, too many calories shouldn’t generally be a problem.

And as noted up above, my general experience with folks who can’t gain muscle mass is usually an issue of too few calories (or truly absurd training schemes) rather than too many.

Water Intake

While it should be a no-brainer, water intake is another place where trainees make basic mistakes (I am guilty of this myself). The effects of dehydration range from minimal (at 2% dehydration, strength and performance decrease) to painful (can anybody say kidney stones) to worse (at 10% dehydration, death can occur).

While there are many generalized water intake equations (such as 8 glasses per day), these may not be correct for everyone. To poach another guideline from my mentor, a good rule of thumb is 5 clear urinations per day, and 2 of those should come after your workout. Yes, that means looking in the toilet when you pee.

This gives trainees a way of individualizing water intake. Obviously someone who lives in a hot, humid environment (or trains in a non-air conditioned gym) will need more water than someone who lives in moderate temperatures and trains in a posh gym.

I’d note that, despite more dogmatic rhetoric to the contrary, all fluids contribute to hydration state (as do many high-water foods such as fruits and vegetables).  Yes, even caffeinated ones; research clearly shows that the small amount of fluid lost from the caffeine is still much less than the amount gained by drinking the drink.

It’s worth nothing that recent research has found that plain water is actually the worst drink for rehydration following exercise.  Milk was actually shown to be superior to either plain water or Powerade/Gatorade type drinks, most likely due to the potassium and sodium content.  You can read more about this in the artilce Milk as an Effective Post-Exercise Rehydration Drink.

Finally, thirst is a poor indicator of hydration state. By the time you’re thirsty, you’re already a bit dehydrated.

Your Assignment

So between now and Monday, I want you to take a look at your overall nutrition (I know it’s only a few days, I originally wrote this article and it’s second part with a month between them), looking at your current meal frequency, total caloric intake and water intake.

This means keeping a food log of everything you eat and drink during the day. You should keep such a log for a minimum of 3 days (including one weekend day, where most of us let dietary discipline lapse) up to a full-week. You’ll also need a basic calorie counter to determine caloric intake.

Now check what you came up with against the guidelines above.  Are you eating at a suffiicent frequency (~4-6 times per day with 3-5 hours between meals), are you getting sufficient calories to support mass gains, are you getting sufficient hydration (check your pee) daily.

If the answer is ‘yes’, you’re ahead of the game.  If the answer is ‘no’, you need to work on fixing those issues before you worry about anyting else.

Read The Baseline Diet 2009: Part 2.

If you had to pick a single repetition range to train in for growth, what would it be?

That is, imagine some very strange situation where you could only train within a certain range (and let’s make that range something a little less vague then ‘Between 1-20 reps’ by limiting it to a 3 rep range) for the rest of your lifting career, what would it be?

I used to ask this of friends of mine in the field and, almost with exception, the answer was pretty much the same.  This was true regardless of whether or not they had arrived at that value from experimentation and experience or just looking at the research.

I’m going to take a quick look at the research (including a bunch of seemingly disparate topics) to tell you what I’d pick.

What Makes Muscle Grow?

I asked a job supervisor that question once once; he was a smart-ass like me and told me “It needs lots of sunlight and water.”  Close but not quite.

The mechanism of muscle growth has been under heavy scrutiny for years and a lot of theories and ideas have come and gone in terms of both the mechanism of growth as well as what stimulates it.  Semi-amusingly, about 98% of the actual answer was known back in the 70′s.

In an exceptional paper (which I recommend the reading of to any nerds in the field) titled “Mechanism of work induced hypertrophy of skeletal muscle” a researcher named Goldspink pretty much laid it out concluding that:

It is suggested that increased tension development (either passive or active) is the critical event in initiating compensatory growth.

Basically, the development of high levels of tension within the muscle is the key factor in initiating the growth process.  I’d note that there are also some elements of fatigue that may be contributing to what ‘turns on’ the growth response.  Finally, I’d note that in order to keep stimulating growth beyond an acute training bout, there has to be an increase in tension.  Basically, over time you have to add weight to the bar.

Which as another great scientist in the field (Ronnie Coleman) summed up thusly:

Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.

The simple fact is that, outside of heavy drug users (steroids having the capacity to stimulate growth without even training), the biggest bodybuilders are the strongest.  They grow because they provide, over time, a progressive tension overload (of course there are more variables that go into this, total workload per workout, frequency of training and diet all interact here).

But as I have been pointing out for years and years and years, if you’re not adding weight to the bar over time, you’re simply not growing. You can focus on the feel and the pump and the squeeze all you want; if you’re using the same weights 6 months from now that you’re using today, you won’t be any bigger.

Which doesn’t mean that you have to add weight at every workout (the fallacy of HIT), simply that over time you have to be lifting more weight.  But progression over time is a whole separate article.

Anyhow, the summary of this section is that a combination of tension overload (with a possible contributor of fatigue) within skeletal muscle fibers is what turns on the growth response. Just remember that, what stimulates growth is tension and fatigue (with tension playing a relatively larger role in terms of actual contractile growth).

Which brings us to the next question: what’s the best way to develop that combination of tension and fatigue within skeletal muscle (or a given fiber)?

A Quick Tangent into Some Neurophysiology

When you look at strength production, the body has essentially two methods to increase force output which are

1. Muscle fiber recruitment
2. Rate coding

Muscle fiber recruitment is exactly what it sounds like, how many of the fibers within a muscle are actually being recruited.  Contrary to the exceptional silliness which is endlessly repeated in books and on the internet, most people can actually get pretty close to 100% fiber recruitment (it’s a little bit lower in the lower body but, in the triceps for example, people can get near 100% recruitment).

Rate coding referes to how quickly the body is sending electrical signals to that muscle.  As rate coding goes up, the muscle fires harder.

Now, in the muscles we’re interested in from a sports or bodybuilding standpoint, the body will generally use recruitment to increase force production up to about 80-85% of maximum force output (in the lab, this is measured with Maximal Voluntary Isometric Contraction or MVIC, which is effectively 1 rep maximum weight).  Beyond 80-85% of maximum, it uses rate coding.

I’d note for completenes that this isn’t true for some muscles in the body, notably stuff like the eye muscles and finger muscles.  In those muscles, recruitment is used up to about 50% of MVIC and rate coding handles the rest.    Which is a lot of why studies looking at the thumb muscles aren’t really relevant to most training applications. But I digress.

Anyhow, now we have the next part of the picture, the body will recruit more fibers up to about 80-85% of maximum; above that point, there is no further recruitment and force output is improved via rate coding.

I should note that even at lower intensities, as the individual goes to fatigue, eventually all muscle fibers will end up being recruited.  But they won’t have been recruited until fairly late in the set (e.g. the last few repetitions).

Putting it Together

And this leads us to our answer to my original question.  For most people, 80-85% of maximum is roughly 5-8 repetitions there is variance in this between individuals and perhaps muscle groups (for example, some people find that they can get 12-15 repetitions at 85% of maximum in some leg movements).

Now let’s put that together with my comments about tension and fatigue from the earlier in the article.

Imagine that you put 95% on the bar, which will let most people get about 2 reps.  You wouldn’t increase fiber recruitment (remember, it maxes at 80-85%) but you would drastically decrease any fatigue because you would be getting a lot less reps per set (and most people couldn’t do many sets of 2 at 90% so their total volume per workout would be much lower).

Or say you wanted to do 15 repetitions which, for most is about 70% of maximum.  If you take it to failure, you will in fact end up recruiting all muscle fibers; however many of them (and this especially holds for the highest threshold fibers, the ones with the potential for the most growth) won’t have been recruited until near the very end.  So those highest threshold fibers won’t be exposed to high tension and fatigue for very long.

In contrast, imagine that you work in the 5-8 rep range with 80-85% of maximum.  First and foremost you will get full muscle fiber recruitment from the first repetition.  Secondly, you will maximize fatigue/metabolic work/volume within that range.   Basically, that range of reps and intensities is the one that will give an optimal balance of tension/recruitment and fatigue/metabolic work.

And that’s the answer that repeatedly comes up among people in the field who aren’t clueless: 5-8 repetitions.  If you had to pick a single rep range to work at to optimize the growth response, it would 5-8 reps per set.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t valid and valuable reasons to work in other repetition ranges, mind you.  But that wasn’t the original context of my weird hypothetical.

In this article, I want to look at warm ups, specifically focusing on weight room performance, I want to look briefly at the goals of the warm up along with how to practically program a warm up for optimal performance and results.

Purposes of Warming Up

As with most aspects of training, warming up is done to achieve a certain set of goals and looking at them is a good first step to determining what an optimal warmup should be.

The first purpose of warming up is exactly what the name suggests: warming the body and/or tissues that are going to be trained. There are a number of reasons that this is important.

One is that warmer tissues tend to be less likely to injure as they tend to be more pliable when warm. A second is that warmer tissues generally perform better than colder ones.  Related to this is establishing sufficient ranges of motion such that the movements being trained can be done safely and effectively.

An additional aspect of warming up is to practice and reinforce good technique and ‘groove’ movement patterns. This tends to be relatively more important for beginners and intermediates but it’s interesting to note that you’ll usually find top level athletes going through basic drills daily as part of their warm up.

It’s also important to note that those same athletes put just as much focus into doing their warm up drills properly as they do during the workout itself.  This is a key aspect that I find is often missed, too many people simply ‘go through the motions’ when they warm up rather than using it as an excellent time to accumulate more perfectly done reps (which is a key aspect of motor learning).

Finally, there is an aspect of warming up the nervous system that is often ignored in warm ups. Many find that nervous system activity ‘ramps up’ gradually with progressive sets. Getting the most out of a workout, and this tends to be more important for individuals handling very heavy loads or those using lower repetitions, means ensuring that the nervous system is firing effectively.

Parts of the Warm Up

Traditionally, warm ups have been divided into a general warm up and a specific warm up and I see little reason to deviate from that terminology.

The general warm up is exactly that and encompasses any general activities that are done to prepare the body for the upcoming workout. This might include low level aerobic activity or some form calisthenics; I’d also place any pre-workout stretching here. A somewhat recent addition to the general warm up is the use of foam rollers to work on connective tissue or trigger points.

The specific warm up are those activities specific to what is being done and generally entails progressively more intense variations of whatever movement is going to be done. In terms of the weight room, this generally means the performance of several sets of the exercise to be performed during that workout.  I’ll address the specific weight room workout in Part 2 of this article.

The General Warm Up: Cardio Portion

Most people, for their general warm up will do some type of aerobic activity although this is far from universal. Whether it’s walking on the treadmill, a few minutes on the bike or jogging or whatever, some type of light cardio-type activity is commonly done. This is done simply to raise body temperature and, in general, is unlikely to hurt anything unless it’s done to excess.  Many, of course do this, they try to get in a full cardiovascular workout prior to lifting and then wonder why they don’t perform well.

Generally speaking, I feel that the least amount of this type of work that is done, the better.  Go until you break a light sweat or ‘feel’ yourself warm up and then stop.

Usually, 5-10′ of low intensity activity (or until a slight sweat is broken) is sufficient at which point this portion of the warm up can be stopped. I’d note that, in colder weather, it will often take relatively longer for the body to warm up. By the same token, when it’s warmer, it will often take only a few minutes of light activity to break a sweat.  This is why using a specific endpoint like ‘breaking a light sweat’ is probably better than some fixed time.   If you’ve broken a sweat after three minutes, you can stop; if you haven’t broken a sweat at the 15 minute mark, you should keep going.

I’d note that empirically, older trainees tend to take longer to get through their general warm up; as well, the more highly trained (especially aerobically) an individual is, the longer this part often takes before the body warms up.

I’d also point out that there is no fundamental requirement to do aerobic type activities for a general warm up. Sled dragging, bar circuits or calisthenics can also be used; one trainee of mine would swing a sledgehammer against a tire and that would warm him up just fine.   Many lifters warm up by simply doing a couple of high rep sets of their first exercise and this can work just fine under certain circumstances.

The General Warm Up: Foam Rolling

Depending on what types of things you read and what type of gym you train at you may or may not be familiar with foam rolling. In short, it described a variety of movements performed by rolling around on a fairly hard piece of foam to work kinks out of connective tissue; it can also be used to release trigger points.

Rather than try to describe it in much more detail than that (or try to describe the movements verbally), I’ll simply link out to an excellent article by Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson about the topic.

Foam rolling can be useful, especially when trainees have long-standing injury or connective tissue problems and can be a useful way of checking for any small problems before they become larger problems.  I’d only note that foam rolling can’t take the place of the general warm up (as it won’t do much to warm the tissues) but should generally be done (if at all) prior to stretching.

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The General Warm Up: Stretching

If there is a single aspect of training and warm-up mired in more argument and debate these days, it’s the issue of stretching prior to workout.

To understand why, I need to define a few different kinds of stretching. They are:

• Static Stretching: this is what most think of as stretching and entails holding a stretch for extended periods (15-60 seconds or longer) without movement.
• Dynamic Stretching: This is a type of stretching involving controlled movement where the body is taken through progressively greater ranges of motion for a number of repetitions. Various walking lunges, Spidermans and the other host of active mobility drills that have become popular could probably be placed under this heading as well.
• Ballistic Stretching: often confused with dynamic stretching, this type of stretching entails essentially ‘throwing’ a limb through a given range of motion without control. This type of stretching has generally fallen out of favor in recent years.

The United States has long had an almost pathological obsession with static stretching and claims that you need to stretch for 10-20 minutes before training are still heard; it’s quite common to see folks going through extended static stretching routines prior to all manners of workouts as well.

In contrast, there has been a recent backlash against static stretching prior to training with emerging research that extended static stretching can impair power and strength production. Based on this research, many will state without qualification that static stretching should never be done prior to lifting weights and that only dynamic stretching should be done.

Admittedly, there are merits to the idea of using dynamic stretching pre-workout and saving static stretching for later (either after the workout or later in the day); research certainly supports that idea.  Without going into excessive detail, excessive static stretching appears to ‘damp down’ certain neural processes involved in optimal strength and power performance.

At the same time, there are a few problems with the dogma that static stretching is always bad. For example, many studies have used fairly excessive amounts of stretching, at least one study found that only extended static stretching (longer than 30 seconds per stretch) had a negative impact on performance, shorter stretches cause no problems; other research suggests that any length of static stretching can impair performance.

Another issue, however, is that many of the study protocols often don’t really represent a realistic approach to training in the first place.  Typically, the subjects are given extensive static stretching routines and then expected to perform some type of maximal strength or power test; this isn’t usually how people train in the real-world.

Rather, most would perform their stretching following a general warm-up but would follow the stretching with some type of specific warm up such as progressively heavier sets of an exercise that should, in premise, reactivate any inhibited neural mechanisms. To my knowledge, that type of sequencing hasn’t been tested.

Additionally, there are times when static stretching may be absolutely required prior to weight training; usually this occurs when someone has a severe flexibility limitation that prevents them from performing an exercise in good form.

A common example would be someone for whom tight hamstrings or glutes might cause low back rounding in the bottom of the squat. Another would be someone who, due to poor posture (from sitting in front of a computer for example), had problems properly performing a safe and proper bench press without static stretching their pecs and delts.

Clearly, in this case, any small loss in strength or performance is far outweighed by being able to perform the exercise safely and effectively.  In the short-term, avoiding injury is far more important than any acute loss of performance.

That said, my general preference is to use dynamic stretching pre-workout and save static stretching for post-workout or later in the day (a hot shower followed by gentle static stretching can be a good way to relax the body and prepare for sleep). Just keep in mind that the whole ‘never static stretch before workout’ isn’t quite as absolute as many are making it sound.

I’d also note that the need for stretching can vary drastically. Someone with a large number of major inflexibility issues will need proportionally more stretching prior to training than someone who has no such limitations and relatively good flexibility.

The former trainee might need a fairly extensive stretching program prior to training while the latter might need, at most, a quick spot check of the muscles to ensure everything is as loose as it needs to be.

Summing Up the General Warm Up

So a full blown comprehensive general warm up might consist of the following:

1. 5-10 minutes of low-intensity aerobic or full body activities (bar complex, calisthenics, rope jumping)
2. Foam rolling (under specific circumstances)
3. Some type of stretching

Overall, this might take roughly 10-20 minutes to complete prior to the main part of the workout.

However, I’d like to note that, for some trainees, none of the above may be necessary in the first place and many trainees (especially those without joint injury or flexibility issues) find that they can use the first warm up sets of their weight exercises to accomplish everything I’ve described above.

It’s fairly rare to see most strength athletes going through extended warm ups of the cardio/stretching type, although, as trainees get older it tends to become more prevalent and necessary.

For younger trainees with no major inflexibility issues or other problems, simply starting light and performing slightly higher repetitions for their first sets (a topic I’ll address in more detail in Part 2) will serve to warm the tissue by increasing blood flow. Ranges of motion can be progressively increased at the same time; you might argue that this stretches the tissues in a way far more specific to the movements being done in the first place.

That is, compared to performing dynamic stretching for the quads, glutes and hamstrings, performing several sets of progressively deeper squats will stretch everything involved in squatting in a far more specific way. Performing one or two light sets of bench presses with just the bar for high reps both warms and stretches the pecs, delts and triceps in the fashion that they are going to be used.

Continued in Warming Up for the Weight Room: Part 2.

You can worry about being lean and having a six pack when it’s warm and you don’t look stupid being mostly nude. The winter is a good time to pack on some muscle mass and justify all that Halloween candy (“I’m bulking, bro”).

But in the same way that many diets fail for a lot of reasons, there are equally common reasons that trainees fail to make the muscular gains that they desire. I want to look at several of them, addressing potential solutions along the way

Not eating enough

Outside of poor training (which can be either too much or too little), not eating enough is the number one mistake I see most trainees making who can’t gain muscle. This is true even of individuals who swear up, down and sideways that they eat a ton but no matter what they can’t gain weight. It’s been said that ‘hardgainers’ tend to be overtrainers and undereaters and there is much truth to that.

Almost invariably, when you track these big eaters, they really aren’t eating that much. Research has routinely shown that overweight individuals tend to under-estimate food intake (e.g. they think they are eating much less than they actually are) but in my experience ‘hardgainers’ are doing the opposite: vastly overestimating how much they are actually eating in a given day, or over the span of a week.

Similarly, although such trainees may get in a lot of food acutely, invariably they often compensate for those high-caloric intakes by lowering calories on the following day (or even in the same day). So while they might remember that one big-assed lunch meal, they won’t remember how they ate almost nothing later in the day because they got full.

Some people simply lack the appetite to eat sufficient amounts to gain muscle (or any weight at all). While they may be able to force feed calories for a little bit, their appetite regulatory mechanisms kick in and they unconsciously reduce calories. Their bodies also tend to upregulate metabolic rate better than others, so they burn off more calories (a phenomenon called non-exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT).

But the simple fact is this: if such ‘big-eaters’ were actually eating as much as they think they are, they would be at least gaining some body fat, even if they were gaining zero muscle. If a trainee swears he’s eating a ton, but he’s not even gaining body fat, I know he’s still not eating enough (or even as much as he thinks he is).

Since I’m talking about body fat, I might as well address another very common cause of poor muscle gain and that’s trainees who fear putting on even an ounce of body fat. They’ll deliberately keep their calories low all the time and then wonder why they aren’t magically synthesizing muscle mass out of thin air. At this point, I’m not even including the folks who want to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time.

The simple physiological fact is that, to gain muscle, you have to provide not only the proper training stimulus, but also the building blocks for the new tissue. This means not only sufficient protein (see below) but also sufficient calories and energy. While it’s wonderful to hope that the energy to build new muscle will be pulled out of fat cells, the reality is that this rarely happens (there are some odd exceptions such as folks beginning a program, and those returning from a layoff).

And while there are extremes (such as my Ultimate Diet 2.0 or some of the intermittent fasting schemes) that allow people to put on muscle while remaining lean, they always invariably alternate periods of low and high calories. With the high calorie part of the diet (e.g. the weekend on the UD2) providing sufficient protein and energy to drive muscle mass gains.

Now, although this is a slightly different topic, I entreat trainees not to take the ‘Eat enough to gain’ to the opposite extreme. While GFH (look it up) can work for many people, eating so much food that a trainee gains a disproportionate amount of fat is just as much of a mistake as not eating enough in the first place.

Unless you’re a sumo wrestler or football lineman, eventually the fat has to come off; the more you put on while gaining muscle mass, the longer you have to diet. Which is not only a psychological chore but often results in performance or muscle mass losses (especially if you diet badly).

What I’m getting at is some optimum level, an intake sufficient to provide sufficient calories and protein for muscle growth without becoming a total fat-ass. Which isn’t very helpful without some starting points which I’ll present now.

Muscle magazine claims notwithstanding, a natural trainee is usually doing damn well to gain 0.5 pounds of muscle per week (and a female might gain half of that). Yes, you’ll occasionally see a faster rate of gain but much more than that (especially for sustained periods) tends to be rare.

And while that may not sound like much, realize that a 0.5 lb per week muscle gain over the course of a year comes out to 26 pounds of lean body mass. And most won’t get that past their first year of training.

However, to get that rate of muscle mass gain will usually require some amount of fat gain, depending on how much over maintenance you’re eating, this might be an additional half pound of fat per week. So a reasonable weekly or monthly weight gain rate might be 1 pound per week or 4 pounds per month of which about half should be muscle and the other half fat.

Short dieting cycles can be inserted to take off the fat of course, a number of people on my forum have been using the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook to strip off fat between short bulking cycles so that they can get back to normal training.

I’d note that this shouldn’t take a huge number of calories over maintenance. Assuming a trainee is not burning off excessive calories through either a ton of cardio (or NEAT), you’re not looking at much more than 500 calories over maintenance to support about the maximum rate of muscle gain for a natural lifter. I’d suggest putting a majority of that on training days (and around training) with a lesser surplus on non-training days. That should help keep fat gains down somewhat.

Of course, this will have to be adjusted based on real world changes in body composition. If you’re not gaining any weight, you need to up calories. If you’re gaining a disproportionate amount of fat, you need to cut things back.

Problems with Protein Intake

While less common than simply not eating enough, I have found many individuals to have problems with inadequate protein intake when it comes to the desire to build muscle. Although they don’t usually want or need to gain a lot of muscle, endurance athletes tend to be the worst in terms of not getting enough protein, since they frequently overemphasize carbohydrates to such a ridiculous degree. But even among weight trainers, occasionally you find someone who simply won’t eat sufficient protein to support gains in muscle mass. Considering the rather high protein intake of even the average American, anywhere from 2-3 times the RDA, this is a little odd.

What usually happens is that these individuals have fallen into the trap of the endurance athlete and overemphasized carbohydrates to the point of neglecting protein (and usually fat as well); this was a much bigger problem in the 80′s and 90′s when sports nutritionists overemphasized carbs but isn’t heard of now (now, the opposite extreme, carbs are the devil, is more often seen).

Sometimes, in their quest to eliminate dietary fat from their diet, trainees quit eating meat, this seems to occur a lot among female trainees. Vegetarians can have greater problems but even eggs, fish and chicken can fulfill protein requirements easily. And while there is the occasional claim of someone building a lot of muscle with a true vegan diet, I’d say that most who claim veganism turned to that AFTER building up their muscle mass with a more traditional diet.

Occasionally you find someone who just doesn’t like protein very much. Women, moreso than men, tend to underconsume protein and overconsume carbohydrates. As low as the RDA for women is (44 grams/day), I’ve still run into women who aren’t even getting that much protein a day in their diet. You get the idea.

The point being that some people just don’t get enough protein. As with sufficient calories, adequate protein is critical for gains in muscle mass. The common number that is thrown out is 1 g/lb body mass and this is a good starting place. As I detail in The Protein Book, raising protein to 1.5 g/lb (another common value) may have small, cumulative benefits that current research can’t turn up. It usually can’t hurt unless it prevents sufficient intake of the other nutrients.

I would note that, for natural lifters, I don’t see much point to intakes over 1.5 g/lb. An exception is hardcore diets but I’m talking about muscle gain here. As caloric intake goes up, protein requirements go down and suggestions to eat 2 g/lb for naturals seems more of a ploy to sell protein powder than anything physiological.

As a final comment on protein intake, it’s very common to find wannabe bodybuilders taking protein intake to the other extreme, and making it the entirety of their daily diet. This ultimately sort of ties into the first problem I talked about: inadequate calorie intake. For the kinds of caloric intakes that many people need to gain muscle/weight at any decent rate, it’s nearly impossible to consume enough protein to do it. It’s also inefficient as hell, both metabolically and financially but those are separate issues.

For example, a 170 lb male may have a maintenance caloric requirement of around 2500 calories/day. To gain weight, he may need three thousand or more calories per day. Three thousand plus calories or more from protein alone is nearly impossible to achieve.

This is on top of the fact that protein calories aren’t used as efficiently for energy as calories from carbohydrates or fats (this can be great for weight control but is a real detriment for weight/muscle gain). That’s on top of the fact that protein plus carbohydrates is far more anabolic than protein or carbohydrates by themselves. Studies have shown that, once protein requirements are met, more muscle is gained by adding dietary energy (from carbs or fat) than from just plugging in more protein.

Is sufficient protein crucial for muscle mass gains? Yes.

Is it all a lifter should be eating? Absolutely not.

I suppose, for completeness, I should discuss the issue of protein quality, an issue that trainees (and especially bodybuilders) get themselves endlessly wound up about. In short (and, this is discussed in massive detail in The Protein Book), at an intake of 1.5 g/lb. from varied high quality sources, it just doesn’t matter. Quality matters hugely when you have someone eating a small amount of some single shitty protein. This describes conditions in third world countries, this doesn’t describe conditions for an American athlete eating plenty of protein from meat, fish, dairy, whey, casein, etc.

Which isn’t to say that different proteins don’t have varying pros and cons or aren’t more or less appropriate around training or what have you. I’m simply saying that, given sufficient protein and energy from high quality sources, protein quality isn’t nearly the issue that people (read: supplement companies) make it out to be. It certainly won’t be a deal breaker for muscle gains.

Training Issues: Cardio

Of course, diet isn’t the only place trainees run into problems, there are also issues related to training. To get it out of the way, let me talk about cardio training and mass gains, an area where opinions vary widely. Some say to do no cardio, some suggest it daily; the current fad of ‘intervals are the best for everything’ has people doing intervals multiple times per week while trying to gain muscle. What’s going on?

Frankly, for all but the most extreme hardgainer types (the guys who burn off a ton of calories when they try to gain weight), I think the inclusion of some cardio can be beneficial. It can help with appetite (by increasing it), keep conditioning up a bit, tends to improve recovery and may help alleviate some fat gain. Perhaps most importantly, it keeps the fat burning metabolic pathways running so that, when dieting is resumed, fat loss seems to occur faster.

However, too much will certainly hurt things. Reams of data suggest interference effects of excessive cardio on strength (and muscle mass gains); I won’t even bore you with the molecular mechanisms here (you can read AMPk: Master Metabolic Regulator for the details). But it’s only when it’s done excessively or at too high of an intensity (cough, cough, intervals) that it’s a problem.

I know that everything on the internet is true but this fad of keeping in lots of intervals when you’re trying to get stronger and bigger is frankly pretty stupid so far as I’m concerned. 20-30 minutes of boring old standard low to medium intensity cardio done 2-4 times per week is plenty and, surprise surprise, your legs might actually grow because you aren’t overtraining them with two weight sessions and two interval sessions per week.

Training issues: Weights

Of course, where the real problems usually start in terms of training is the weight room. To say that the training being performed by most individuals in most weight rooms sucks is an understatement. The problem is that much of the advice being followed is coming out of the professional bodybuilding ranks at least as it is disseminated through the bodybuilding magazines.

Yes, the internet has helped out with this and there’s a lot more realistic information out there but a lot of people are still trying to follow programs based on the training of elite drugged out bodybuilders. And, contrary to popular belief, 99% of internet trainees are not elite, or advanced. A lot of them aren’t even intermediates. But they are trying to follow programs aimed at those folks.

In my experience, the typical approach of blasting a muscle group once per week for an insane number of sets and exercises simply doesn’t work for the majority. Yes, fine, there are some who do fine on it. They usually have good genetics and hormones. But the number who failed completely with that type of training is legion. You can’t use the minority who succeed on it and ignore the majority who didn’t.

There’s a lot of reasons that type of training isn’t ideal for most people, this isn’t the place to discuss it. Fine, you get real sore, and you’re real tired coming out of the gym. But who cares if you aren’t making progress? Being sore and exhausted wasn’t the goal of this the last time I looked.

I should note that many fall at the opposite extreme of training, hitting a bodypart for one set once per week or what have you. They’ll go to complete muscular failure, hit the hard isometric hold and be blown out and shaking when they leave the gym. Again, since being tired isn’t the main goal, who cares. This can be just as big of a mistake for another set of reasons that I’m not going to discuss here.

The bottom line is that, in my opinion, in my experience, and in the realm of a lot of good research, something in between those two extremes appears to be best. A weekly training frequency of 3-4 times per week is usually quite doable although, for many (older trainees especially), four days may be pushing it unless the workouts are kept very short. And yes, some people get away training six days per week but they are usually in and out of the gym very quickly.

This will allow each bodypart to be hit roughly twice per week or, at the least, once every 5 days (about the lowest frequency I recommend for naturals). Upper/lower splits are popular but there are other ways to approach it as well.

A moderate number of sets, perhaps 4-8 per bodypart (more for larger, less for smaller) is usually about right as well. Research suggests that 40-60 contractions per bodypart per workout seems to give the optimal response. 4 sets of 10 would be at the low end of that, 8 sets of 8 (perhaps 2 exercises for 4 sets of 8 reps each) would be at the high end. A typical workout might last 60-90 minutes depending on how it’s split up.

One final comment on training before I wrap this up: an insidious (and stupid) idea that is out there (especially in the realm of bodybuilding) is that trainees should focus on irrelevant things: the feel, the squeeze, the pump. This is crap and guys who do this, unless they are on drugs, simply don’t grow. Muscle grows as a function of progressive tension overload, if you’re not adding weight to the bar over time, you’re not growing. This doesn’t mean that you have to add weight at every workout, but if you’re not gradually going heavier over time, you won’t be growing either.

In this article, I want to look at three of the more popular hypertrophy programs that are out there on the internet. The first is Doggcrapp (or DC) training which is the brainchild of Dante Trudeau (he also runs Trueprotein.com). The second is Bryan Haycock’s Hypertrophy Specific Training or HST. Finally, of course, I have my own approach to muscle mass gains which I’ll talk about a bit too.

As you’ll see, while each program shares certain commonalities (as all programs that ‘work’ will), they also have a lot of differences. This simply reflects the realities of training, every program out there has to make some concession depending on the overall philosophy and approach of the designer. The variables of interest here are intensity, frequency and volume and, as you’ll see, each program has to concede one aspect in order to emphasize another.

If this reads a little bit roughly, it’s because I originally made it as a post to a forum, basically pointing out that they simply approach the main issues of training (frequency, intensity, volume) from slightly different places. Here’s what I wrote:

IMO, a lot of it depend on where you fall philosophically in terms of training, physiologically you can argue for various approaches a lot of different ways. Looking at three approaches to hypertrophy training, for example: a lot of it comes down to the interactions between frequency, intensity and volume.

1. Bryan’s Hypertrophy Specific training: looking mainly at gene expression, Bryan trades intensity and volume for a higher frequency. You train 3X/week but only max out about once every 2 weeks or so. This would be similar to Pavel’s Grease the Groove approach approach.

2. Doggcrapp trades intensity for volume and frequency and focuses primarily on progressive overload (the goal is to beat your previous workout poundages at every workout) in addition to trying to stimulate that maximum amount of growth with the minimum volume (DC uses rest pause training to accomplish this). Volume is lower, frequency is cut to about once/fifth day but the intensity is very very high with the rest pause and loaded stretches. Many people burn out badly on DC but the guys who thrive on it grow very well.

3. My generic bulking program is stock in the middle because I’m a middle of the road kind of guy. I generically like to see a bodypart hit about 2X/week with slightly lowered intensity (relative to DC) although higher than Bryan’s HST. I recommend about a rep short of failure so that the volume (which is higher per workout than either DC or HST) can be accomplished. I’m trying to strike a volume between the issues of frequency (for gene expression and protein synthesis), recovery (failure training can burn people out) and progression (I want to see the poundages going up consistently over the cycle).

Is one ‘better’ than the other? In the long run, I doubt it. If, at the end of 2 years of training, each trainee has hit roughly the same place in terms of absolute strength (weight on the bar), I bet size will be the same.

So a lot of the choice then becomes which approach to hypertrophy training:

a. Fits the trainee’s psychologically. Fore example, someone who ONLY feels good about training if they blow themselves out will hate HST and absolutely LOVE DC. Someone who hates training a given lift as infrequency as DC might prefer HST (you train a lift 3X/week) or my approach. etc. Someone who wants to be in the gym more often than 3x/week might prefer mine (or one of Bryan’s HST modifications that lets you train very distributed volume 6X/week, very much like Pavel’s GTG stuff)

b. Fits their individual recovery pattern . I’ve seen a lot of people say that DC just blew them out. And I’m NOT saying this is a drug thing. A lot of DC’s guys are juiced and a lot are not. But no everyone seems able to train that intensely and recover. In which case, HST or my approach might be a better ‘fit’ physiologically.

And I’m sure there are other considerations. If you’re a cellar dwellar (someone who trains in the basement), you might not be able to rotate exercises like DC recommends (he usually says pick 3 movements per bodypart and rotate them, switching out whole exercises wen they stall). If you train at home and have limited equipment, that’s not workable and a program centered around the same lift for any given cycle might work better.

I’m sure I’ve left out many many other considerations (injuries, individual biomechanics) but that’s just a quick look at some of the things that might go into deciding which approach to hypertrophy is best.