AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

I failed the overhead lift again this morning, and then the bench.

After some thought, I decided to discontinue the barbell work for a couple of weeks, then start the official Starting Strength program on the first Monday of October. That will give me time to finish absorbing Rippetoe’s book.

By the SS protocol, I’ve been doing too many reps too many days per week, particularly since I’m a "senior". What I was doing was a mishmash of half-learned stuff from all over, factored by the stuff I could actually *do*, which was pretty limited a few months ago.

I’m still going to use the cable machine and dumbbells for the "auxiliary" exercises I’ve been doing between barbell days; there’s not a lot of overlap with the barbell stuff, and I’m still making headway in increasing the loads.

Rippetoe isn’t as annoying as the other coaches, and his Starting Strength program makes reasonable sense, though I’m not persuaded it’s the "complete program" he promotes it as. But it appears to be good enough, his videos aren’t too spazzed for me to follow, and his forum is excellent. I want to run through the "official" beginner program first, then I’ll decide whether to move to the intermediate or jump ship and do something else.

I changed my mind. Lifting has become a habit like PE. I decided to just work on form with the bare bar for the next two weeks.

What does Mrs Andy think of your changes over the past couple of years? Have you convinced her to stop eating junk?

She greatly approves of my new look, but she refuses to do even the mildest stretches or cut back on the candy and junk food she primarily lives on.

She’s in about the same shape I started with, hurting all the time and gimping around with a cane. Her response to my urging is usually a flat, "no." [sigh] There’s only so much urging you can do before it turns into a spat.

I guess you just have to carry on leading by example.

And maybe introducing her to people as your wives (pl) … there’s just more to love.

Good to read you’re still going to be lifting, in any capacity. Just showing up goes a long way to being consistent. Working on form can be boring but usually worth the effort.

I’ve got the SS book as well, haven’t read through it all but basically using as reference material and for some clarification. I know he has power cleans as part of his program but I don’t see myself ever doing those. I won’t be competing anywhere and I really don’t think there’s enough reward compared to risk for injury when things get heavy. I’m pretty much in the senior crowd as well – 60. I think he sort of looks down on using a trap bar for deadlifts but that’s what I’ve been using for years. I like it.

Rip advocates for adding weight every workout if you’re hitting all your reps as you need to have progression to get stronger. I agree but it isn’t as easy doing it as it is reading it. I think any progression is helpful, whether you add a rep to the same weight or add weight for the same reps. Don’t get too wrapped around ‘I should be adding weight, I got all my reps last time’. You might be having an off day and end up failing on the 3rd or 4th rep after adding weight. Maybe you weren’t quite ready to add the weight to begin with. Sometimes, hard to tell.

If it was a real struggle getting all 5 reps, I’ll keep the weight the same to make sure I get good solid reps with good form before I add weight. On some exercises, I’ll will also add a few extra reps to all sets or maybe just the last set if I can before adding weight. SS has good info in it but it really gets down to do what you think works for you. It helps doing lifts you enjoy doing, not necessarily what a specific program calls for. A lot depends on what you want to accomplish. I lift twice per week, it fits my schedule and keeps me consistently in the garage (showing up). I want to keep lifting for many, many years, need to make sure it isn’t a drag in any way.

I consider my workout a 5x5 but two of those are warmup sets with three work sets. Right now, it’s working for me. I’m good with three work sets but that may not be a true 5x5. So what? I don’t have anyone to impress or answer to but me. I think isolation movements are fine as long as you continue to do compound movements, just don’t make isolation the main focus.

My trap bar deadlifts have gotten heavy for me right now, I’ve had the same weight for the second week (235#) as the 10# progression seems like it would be too heavy to hit all the reps. If I feel good enough to get a 6th rep on the last set and do it, then I should be good adding to it for the next workout. If I’m stuck too long, I’ll try a cycle of lower weight and more reps but won’t keep doing the same weight forever.

Don’t know, you may already have all this rolling around in your head but thought I’d add some unsolicited info.

That might not be a good idea. She is heavily armed.

I’ve been good about being consistent. Taking a break breaks the momentum, and if you’re not careful you’ll wind up realizing you haven’t done anything for months, and you really need to get back to that someday.

The book is oriented to a much younger demographic, and focused on building strength over everything else. I’m more interested in general fitness than absolute strength, which is going to decline anyway as I get older. But I like Rippetoe’s "quantifiable results" approach. I plan to work through all three phases, then I will probably do something else for a change.

The book has been interesting. There’s a lot more to it than just yanking a barbell around. I’m working my way through "Starting Strength" and "Practical Programming" books, and I have "The Barbell Prescription" on order. I expect they’ll be worthwhile even if I wander away from the Starting Strength program.

My problem with the power clean is lack of shoulder mobility. That also hampered me in squats. I didn’t realize I had a problem until I realized I couldn’t get the bar off my neck. It would bump the base of my skull when I started. Now it rides at the bottom of my neck and sometimes touches my shoulders, so I’m making progress. I’m just doing the "rack" part of the power clean now. I’ll add the jump and connect them together as I get better at it. Fortunately my dead lifts are fine.

He doesn’t quite foam at the mouth, but he doesn’t have any use for them. His contention is that the trap bar isn’t stable, and at maximum weights it can cause injury. He’s all about the max, but as I understand it, that’s not what the trap bar is for.

He has talked about "older lifters" a few times on his forum, and has mentioned that it might be more appropriate to add weight once a week. He has also mentioned it takes longer for older lifters to recover, and it might be appropriate to lift two days a week instead of three. When I restart I’m going to go with the weekly weight increases, but I’m going to stay at three days a week until I start missing lifts. I’ll try twice a week after that.

That’s the way I see it, too. Rip is all about pushing for quick results, with various comments about "you’re not getting stronger unless you’re adding weight." I see part of this as coming from him being a gym owner and trainer; if his clients don’t see results fast enough, they’re liable to lose interest and quit paying him. And his focus is on maximum strength. I’ll be happy with "strong enough."

Exactly!

No problem; comments are always welcome.

My "workout buddy", who hasn’t showed up in a year and a half, called and wanted me to go along with him to the "community center" to check out the gym there. He’s had a membership for three years and had never been there.

Huge place; two stories. An Olympic-size(?) pool, two basketball courts, offices, and meeting rooms on the ground floor. The second floor was a U-shape around the basketball courts, pretty much stuffed with exercise machinery. There didn’t appear to be a Nautilus-style "circuit". They only had one or two of some machines, and then a dozen treadmills. They had one large cable machine, with all the attachments.

The civic center has been there for at least twenty years, and I suspect so has the equipment. We were the only people there, and I don’t think most of it had been used much. Clean, no visible signs of wear anywhere, everything worked, and the cable machine had a full set of attachments. All machines matched; "StreetArt" or something like that; I’d never heard of them.

No attendants; but there were pictures showing you how to operate the machines. A couple, I had to read the directions to figure out what they were supposed to do. They looked overly complex, but I guess they served their primary purpose. ("make it hard for the customer to wreck himself with it")

A room off to the side had a substantial collection of dumbbells and kettlebells, a couple of press benches, and a rack of barbells, both straight and EZ-curl types. But all of them had the weights permanently attached to the ends. No squat rack, power rack, or lifting platform. Given what I’ve read about safety-conscious gyms (and this one being unattended) I was surprised there were any barbells at all. Again, I don’t think anything had been used much.

My home gym is fine, but it’s not air conditioned or heated. I went out before daylight all summer before it got hot, but "Winter Is Coming", and I predict a marked lack of enthusiasm for turning blue when it gets cold.

It cost me $3 to go in as a guest of a member; they want $45/mo or $180/yr for membership, which seems awfully high considering it’s supposed to be a city service.

I haven’t read it, but if you’re into Rippetoe I recommend reading the book he wrote for older people before continuing on, The Barbell Prescription. From what I’ve gathered, the advice is different from SS, which is geared toward young guys. LIfting at 50+ is not like lifting at 20, 30 or even 40.

I also recommend not testing 1 rep maximums. You aren’t competing in powerlifting. Lighter weights for more reps are better for your joints and connective tissue. Going super heavy for max singles is a recipe for injury, more so if you haven’t gradually worked up to it. Injuries really suck. Instead, if you want an estimate of your max you can use a calculator. Here are two:

Strengthlevel
EXRX

Rippetoe has his opinions, but so do many others. Don’t get stuck on Rip as being the ultimate guru of everything related to weight training for everyone. He isn’t.

I do better sticking with lighter weights for more reps. There is nothing magic about 5 rep sets. You can progress just as much working in higher rep ranges. Work toward increasing the weight or the reps, and there are many schemes to accomplish this.

If you continue with weight training long enough, linear progression will eventually piddle out. You won’t be able to add more weight each each workout or even every week. You’ll stall or even regress. What then? You can’t just keep taxing yourself harder and harder all the time. It doesn’t work that way. Wouldn’t it be nice though if it would? For example, start bench pressing 100 lb. and add 5 lb. per week. 52 weeks per year = 360 lb. after the first year. After 10 years you’d be up to a 2700 lb.

At some point you’ll need to adopt some sort of periodization. There are different ways to go about that, but most are similar.

IMO, don’t be afraid to run through a circuit of the machines in the gym if they have a circuit training setup. Not all machines are evil, though a few can be. Keep up with the barbell exercises, but mix in the circuit stuff. Be careful though. Start out light. If something causes irritation or pain, stop doing it. Personally, I’d avoid leg extensions.

In a gym, there is nothing you should be doing on a Smith Machine. It forces unnatural linear movement. Use a barbell or dumbbells instead.

In addition to what you consider normal lifting exercises, you might consider adding some rehab/protective type stuff on a regular basis. Examples are YLTW or (IMO) better LYTP shoulder stuff, face pulls, rear delt exercises, other rotator cuff stuff, etc. Gluteus medius and minimus aren’t exercised well by most conventional lifting exercises.

Be careful of form on lat pulldowns, rows, etc. where your shoulders can roll forward. This applies to both free weights and machines. Limit range of motion to prevent shoulder rounding and work on strenghtening the rear muscles that allow more range without rounding.

It came in a few days ago. I haven’t had a moment to even glance through it yet.

I haven’t even attempted to find 1RM. When I started off, my main problem was with back pain, and then elbow and shoulder joints as I bumped weight up a bit. I mentioned it over in the exercise section, and some people recommended lots of reps at low weight, which, over a few months, helped the situation enormously.

Even with all the improvement, I’m very leery of 1RM. My problem when I started off was that exceeding some unclear-but-very-low limit would leave me wrecked for a week or more. As I understand it, 1RM would be very important for developing a maximum strength program, but I’m more interested in general fitness.

Certainly. As I mentioned earlier, his SS program isn’t what I really want, but it’s close enough I’m willing to run through it.

Right now, I’m still in the "I don’t know what I don’t know" zone, moving toward the "I need to read up some more on this and that" zone. I’ve made a long-term commitment to fitness, but randomly lifting weights and pulling on cables isn’t an effective use of my time and effort.

I’m doing that with the machine; the weigh jumps between the selectors are quite large, so I keep adding reps until I can handle the next plate. In The World According to Rip only weight matters and reps are barely relevant.

It looks like the bodybuilder/hypertrophy guys are big into the less weight/more reps thing. I had a big ass and narrow shoulders, and I’d like some more mass up top, even if I can’t press eleventy kilos. The "manboob pecs and giant quads" look isn’t my own personal idea of a proper male shape, either.

I don’t have the build for the traditional V-shape, but my goal is to get as close as possible.

That’s what I hit last week, and why I’m doing a "form only" decon for a couple of weeks before restarting. This time I’ll follow the book exactly. Then I’m probably going to go more for bodybuilding than strength training.

I’ve glanced at periodization stuff. More complexity. [sigh] I had no idea how complicated lifting could be.

I don’t think the machines at the gym are laid out in any kind of formal circuit; I was looking for that when I was there yesterday. But I don’t see any problem with just starting at one end and working my way around.

Knew better, did that anyway, did the ice packs and Ace bandages, with liberal dashes of regret.

Even though I have nothing to prove, the urge to push to the limit is hard to resist.

I have a leg extension attachment on my bench. I’ve tried it, but my knees don’t like it at all.

That’s where I started, for almost a year before I could get a bare (35#, not 45#) barbell up. I was in pretty bad shape.

A quick web search shows that I’ve been doing most of that for a while, though I didn’t recognize the acronyms.

I’ve maxed out the lateral pulldown function on the machine, though it took a while. The primary problem was my right elbow, some with my wrists. I went through various attachments; the rope and the V-bar helped that a lot.

I’m set up the same, I lift in the garage so no temp control in either direction. I’m in Oklahoma and lift in the afternoons so at it’s worst, around 105-110 degrees in the summer and around 35-40 degrees in the winter, those are the extremes but they can last for a few weeks or more.

The worst in the winter is a very cold bar, makes the hands hurt for a while. Might I suggest a salamander, which may be a slang term for a forced air heater. Mine runs off of kerosene but needs to be plugged in to operate. You’ll need to have some decent airflow so the fumes don’t kill you but it will definitely get the garage warm enough so the cold isn’t a distraction.

As nice as that community center is, I find that raw and stripped-down motivates me more. I could barely get motivated at my local LA Fitness, not just due to all the usual annoyances (music, people, etc.), but something about the abundance and fanciness of it all put me off. But pull-ups on a galvanized pipe attached to the side of my house…way more motivating for some reason.

I prefer being by myself too. But when that means turning into a human icicle…

That must be an average. Last time I passed through OKC it was snowing!

I have one of those to heat my workshop. It works quite well. It’s supposed to use "K-1 kerosene", but years ago K-1 was $4/gallon and Diesel fuel was $1.75; I started running Diesel. It emits a noticeable puff of smoke on start-up, but seems to have less of an odor than K-1 when running.