Weightlifting for Kiwis - Discussion and support regarding the art of swole

VargReallyDidNothingWrong said:
Deadlift and bench press PRs today! AUGH YEAH

How is everyone's Sunday going?
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Too hungover for the real gym and did marathon training yesterday. I'm thinking more about doing a serious cut. I've fasted for 1-4 days in the past, but haven't had great results. Fasting isn't that hard if you keep up with electrolytes. I still did my shorter running routes last time. I would be really happy if I could drop from the 170s to 160s (light clothes on the gym scale. I don't have one at home). Anyone have good meal tips? I typically eat once a day unless I'm with friends or family or clients.
 
VargReallyDidNothingWrong said:
Deadlift and bench press PRs today! AUGH YEAH

How is everyone's Sunday going?
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Nice! Gotta love seeing the numbers go up.

I didn't sleep as much as I needed to, so today's a rest day. I worked out 6 days in a row, it's about time for a rest anyway.

Torque Wheeler said:
Too hungover for the real gym and did marathon training yesterday. I'm thinking more about doing a serious cut. I've fasted for 1-4 days in the past, but haven't had great results. Fasting isn't that hard if you keep up with electrolytes. I still did my shorter running routes last time. I would be really happy if I could drop from the 170s to 160s (light clothes on the gym scale. I don't have one at home). Anyone have good meal tips? I typically eat once a day unless I'm with friends or family or clients.
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I'm not a proponent of fasting. It works and it's fast progress, but it's not sustainable for long periods of time and it throws my sleep and other bodily functions off. I like to eat, even if it's only a few hundred calories, and I've cut about 10lbs in 6 weeks on around a 500-1000 deficit. Sometimes up to 1500 if I feel up to it. I don't really track it either, I just estimate.

My only real tips are to learn to cook, learn to count or closely estimate, and get enough protein. Protein shakes are your best friend, as are chicken and eggs. As long as I'm eating good, unprocessed foods, I feel great, and I'm losing weight.
 
Anyone tried the rice thing for forearms? I'm testing it out rn - just five mins per arm twice a week - but am skeptical and will probably prefer something with scalable weight at the gym for the A-side of my A/B workout schedule.
 
It has been a long time since I've been to the gym, and I've forgotten a lot of what I've learned. I do recall some things about using compound lifts effectively before an injury made it unsafe to lift for a while.

From what I understand, there's roughly 3 different ways to train with weights:
  • For strength, you need to be lifting high intensity, near your one rep max, with few reps per set, 5 or less is ideal
  • For hypertrophy, you need to be lifting at a light intensity, with a high number of reps per set.
  • For endurance, you need to be lifting at moderate intensity between that of the light intensity if hypertrophy and the near-max intensity of strength.
Further, I remember that you can't focus on any one mode above for too long, or you will plateau hard, and not be able to make much progress until you spend some time training in one of the other modes. That makes a certain sense to me; the body will adapt to how it is used. If you lift a bunch of heavy things in short bursts, your body will adapt to being able to doing short bursts of strength, but eventually, you'll hit a physical limit to how strong any given amount of muscle fiber can be. So if you want to get stronger, you have to train the body to add more muscle fiber with a hypertrophy regimen. And if you want to be able to actually use that extra mass, you need to spend some time endurance training it, so your body can get practiced at quickly and efficiently getting oxygen and fuel into the muscles and getting metabolic wastes out.

What I can't remember for the life of me is how many sets per exercise per training session you want in each mode.
 
CEO of Gay said:
It has been a long time since I've been to the gym, and I've forgotten a lot of what I've learned. I do recall some things about using compound lifts effectively before an injury made it unsafe to lift for a while.

From what I understand, there's roughly 3 different ways to train with weights:
  • For strength, you need to be lifting high intensity, near your one rep max, with few reps per set, 5 or less is ideal
  • For hypertrophy, you need to be lifting at a light intensity, with a high number of reps per set.
  • For endurance, you need to be lifting at moderate intensity between that of the light intensity if hypertrophy and the near-max intensity of strength.
Further, I remember that you can't focus on any one mode above for too long, or you will plateau hard, and not be able to make much progress until you spend some time training in one of the other modes. That makes a certain sense to me; the body will adapt to how it is used. If you lift a bunch of heavy things in short bursts, your body will adapt to being able to doing short bursts of strength, but eventually, you'll hit a physical limit to how strong any given amount of muscle fiber can be. So if you want to get stronger, you have to train the body to add more muscle fiber with a hypertrophy regimen. And if you want to be able to actually use that extra mass, you need to spend some time endurance training it, so your body can get practiced at quickly and efficiently getting oxygen and fuel into the muscles and getting metabolic wastes out.

What I can't remember for the life of me is how many sets per exercise per training session you want in each mode.
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This older advice. Sets of 5-30 reps have been proven to be roughly equal in hypertrophy if they're all taken to the same degree of muscular failure. And that's just "optimal" gains. Sets of 3 or 33 will still give you decent hypertrophy it just won't be optimal.

Lower rep sets will help with motor unit recruitment (lifting heavy is a skill you need to practice) and will cost less in muscle fatigue but more in CNS fatigue. A lot of people are championing the 6-8 reps as a good middle ground right now (not for all muscles, don't do this for your side delts for example). It's also important to consider injury. If you have a bad knee higher reps with lower weight will have less risk of injury if you're doing leg press or something similar. I's important to note that while lifting heavy will help you due to neural adaptations as well as hypertrophy, higher reps still build muscle and part of a muscle's ability to do work is the size of its cross section.

So yeah you can just kinda lift whatever you want and still gain plenty of muscle and strength as long as you go hard. If you're competing in powerlifting or bodybuilding then sure, you want to optimize things I suppose but hopefully if you're competing in that stuff you're being coached by someone who is telling you how and what to lift.
 
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CEO of Gay said:
  • For strength, you need to be lifting high intensity, near your one rep max, with few reps per set, 5 or less is ideal
  • For hypertrophy, you need to be lifting at a light intensity, with a high number of reps per set.
  • For endurance, you need to be lifting at moderate intensity between that of the light intensity if hypertrophy and the near-max intensity of strength.
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for hypertrophy the amount of reps doesn't matter that much, what really matters is how close to muscle failure you get. you can generate the growth stimulus for your muscles with heavy weights at 3 reps to failure, or light weights at 20 reps to failure.
it's a bit of a tradeoff: constantly doing very heavy sets where you hit failure at like 3 reps means a higher risk of injury.
but constantly doing light sets where you don't hit muscle failure until the 20th rep will make your workout sessions very time-consuming and exhausting,
and at high rep numbers you can run into a situation where your endurance becomes the limiting factor: your muscles could still keep going, but you are so out of breath that you are starting to hyperventilate and your heart is racing like crazy, so you have to stop the set way before your muscles get close to their limit. when that happens you don't get a good hypertrophy stimulus.

for endurance this 'problem' is exactly what you want though: you pick a weight that's light enough so that you can keep pumping reps until you hit your endurance limit, do that repeatedly and your endurance will increase over time.

for strength you want to train the specific movement that you want to get stronger at, and use heavy weights where you hit failure in like 5 reps or less.
 
It sounds like I had hypertrophy and endurance switched in my mind, then.

Am I right that you still want to switch up the different training modes to avoid plateauing early, or am I misunderstanding that, too?
 
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So the good thing I saw was the big guy doing cardio on the 17th of March. He is still going strong and I am so proud.

The bad was seeing a guy who had 435 on the bar and half squatting for singles. Had a super wide stance but a high bar so everything about it was just wrong.

The ugly was a guy who was working his way up to 245 on the bar but doing everything wrong. Pussy pad, going out of the squat the wrong way, quarter squatting everything, and using 25 pound plates until he got to 225
 
CEO of Gay said:
It sounds like I had hypertrophy and endurance switched in my mind, then.

Am I right that you still want to switch up the different training modes to avoid plateauing early, or am I misunderstanding that, too?
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training for hypertrophy and training for strength is basically the same for 99% of people, different approaches for strength vs hypertrophy don't really matter unless you're super advanced and want to go into competitive powerlifting or weightlifting, or bodybuilding.
for amateur lifters who aren't on roids, strength and hypertrophy training routines are effectively identical: pick your weights such that you hit muscle failure somewhere between 5 and 10 reps, then do your sets and push yourself to get as close to muscle failure as you can on every set you do.

as you keep this up, the reps to failure will increase, when you get to the point where you can do like 8 reps before hitting failure, you can add weight to the bar for your next session, then you'll likely hit failure after like 6 reps again. keep training at that weight until you can push more reps again, and then increase the weight again.
as long as you keep pushing yourself close to muscle failure consistently, you will gain both muscle mass and strength at reasonable speed (assuming your diet and sleep are in order)
 
Should I consider doing something other than push/pull/legs? Getting back into the gym and that's how I used to slit things up, but I'm willing to hear out other options.
 
VargReallyDidNothingWrong said:
I'm doing a weirdo split but push/pull/legs worked great for me in the past so I would just continue to do that honestly.
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I've been really enjoying upper/lower splits at the gym, bodyweight almost every day (pushup, pullups, dips, ab roller, leg lifts, etc.) and 3 or 4 days of running with a short 5k route, 5 mile route, and a 600ft up/down 8 mile big boy bend over bend over let plinkett come over route
 
Angry Shoes said:
Should I consider doing something other than push/pull/legs? Getting back into the gym and that's how I used to slit things up, but I'm willing to hear out other options.
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I do a "modified" PPL split, but it's 2 days and I do legs on both days. Day A is push (bench, OHP, squat), and day B is pull (rows, deadlifts). Add whatever other accessories to taste.

I like it because I can be sure I'm doing each movement 2x a week. It works for me, but I might switch to a more proper PPL as I progress so I can fit more exercises in.
 
Kurmudgeon said:
It's so true, people treat a fit person much better than someone who's out of shape. The work you put in is written all over you, and I think that speaks to people. Plus, you got sexy muscles. People like sexy muscles.

But it's a secret. Can't let the normies or the fats know. The mogging is an important aspect.
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This is why Jersh is transitioning from chungus to skinny queen. People legitimately treat you better - male or female.
 
CEO of Gay said:
What I can't remember for the life of me is how many sets per exercise per training session you want in each mode.
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that model is outdated
lifting weights will generate some level of hypertrophy, strength and endurance to some degree. When the muscle gets bigger it gets stronger as well, and thus it can endure more straining. Of course, if you want to lift heavier for a specific competitive movement, like the squat, bench press, deadlift (powerlifting), snatch or clean and jerk (weightlifting), you need to train those movements more, but that's more a function of specific sport training than general strength training
Some people recommend 10 to 20 sets per body part, but I find that to be excessive and recommend 6 to 8 for big muscles, and 2 to 4 for smaller muscles. In terms of reps, as little as 3 and high as 30 can elicit hypertrophy, but I prefer doing 4 to 12 reps per set, and adding weight when I reach 12. The more important thing is that you take the muscles through a full range of motion to close to failure (1 to 2 reps in reserve)
 
What are some good ways to foster the mind-muscle connection? Are there any good tips or exercises that will help with that?

Compound back exercises have historically been very weak for me, specifically mid to upper back like barbell rows, pull-ups and even dumbbell rows. I don't feel like I'm good at engaging my lats. This is a reason why I think my pull-ups are not great. That, plus the extra 10 or 20lbs of fat I'm still getting rid of.
 
Kurmudgeon said:
What are some good ways to foster the mind-muscle connection? Are there any good tips or exercises that will help with that?

Compound back exercises have historically been very weak for me, specifically mid to upper back like barbell rows, pull-ups and even dumbbell rows. I don't feel like I'm good at engaging my lats. This is a reason why I think my pull-ups are not great. That, plus the extra 10 or 20lbs of fat I'm still getting rid of.
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I use one of these every day to train my mind-muscle connection
s-l1200 (2).webp
 
Kurmudgeon said:
What are some good ways to foster the mind-muscle connection? Are there any good tips or exercises that will help with that?

Compound back exercises have historically been very weak for me, specifically mid to upper back like barbell rows, pull-ups and even dumbbell rows. I don't feel like I'm good at engaging my lats. This is a reason why I think my pull-ups are not great. That, plus the extra 10 or 20lbs of fat I'm still getting rid of.
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start with scapular retraction, then with pullwing your elbows to your torso. See video
 
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