Where do I Start?

I think this is where most people fail and once the cycle starts, it generally continues. It’s not your fault, you’re only doing what you’ve been taught, read or seen but unfortunately there is a lot of ordinary fitness training information out there that continues to get thrown around no matter how hard good hearted blokes like me try to get the correct information out there. Oh well I try.

Bodyweight Before External Load

For blokes it’s all about chest and arms, for chicks it’s all about hips and arse so the first thing they’ll do is pump out the bench presses, bicep curls, abduction and adductions they can do to try and increase/decrease their area of focus.

Isn’t it funny if blokes want to build up their chest they’ll do heaps of bench presses and when chicks want to decrease the size of their hip region they’ll do tonnes of abduction/adductions and cardio? They seem to be both doing the same thing for 2 totally opposite goals.

Got a little off track there, let’s get back on track.

Bench Presses are great for upper body strength but you need to “earn the right” to do them through mastering push ups. I don’t know why push ups aren’t used more or if they are they are used for the wrong training effect. They will benefit in various ways:

• Core stabilily
• Scapula stability
• Glute activation
• Strength
• Strength endurance
• Speed strength (plyometric)
• Increasing chest muscle mass

During a regular push up from your toes, or “man” push ups, you’ll use roughly 60% of your bodyweight. If you can only do 5 man push ups using most of the muscles in the body then how do you expect a meaningful weight using basically 20% of those muscles through bench presses? Really if you can do more reps for push ups then you can using 60% of your own bodyweight on the bench press, then push ups will do more for you then bench presses.

The same can be said for chin ups over pulldowns and bicep curls, squats over leg presses and deadlifts over leg curls.

The Point – unil you can master your own body and your own bodyweight, then adding external load in the form of weights is a waste of time and will probably only hurt you as you stabilisers can’t shoulder the load the prime movers can’t.

Full Body Workouts vs Muscle Split Workouts

The age old debate of which there is no scientifically based answer but rather a universal agreement from the “good” coaches and trainers that full body workouts is the best place to start (and often to continue with).

This will mean that you will generally be training 3 days a week which is great. Most of you will be coming from doing nothing do training individual muscles 5 or 6 days a week will result in breaking you down before you even really begin and a lot of inefficient training.

Advantages of full body workouts include:

• You can train each movement more frequently
• As you’re only hitting each movement once per session, you can focus your efforts on that one exercise and not worry about the other 4 bench press variations you have following your first one
• Again as your only using 1 variation per movement each session, you’ll use more overall weight per week then you would doing all lifts on the same day as residual fatigue will limit what you can lift for the other variations.
• You’ll be training more efficiently because you’ll only be using the best exercises per movement which will be compound exercises and not wasting time on exercises that won’t deliver any results. Remember, 80% of your results will come 20% of what you do.

Bodyweight Exercises? Check.

Full Body Workouts? Check.

Program??

Cookie cutter training programs like the one’s found in muscle magazines are a thing of the past. We’re all different, have different needs, abilities and equipment so what I’ll do is list some sample exercises in groups and simply choose 1 from each to make up your workout.

Lower Body (and their variations)

·        Squats

·        Split squats

·        Reverse lunges

·        High Step ups

Upper Body (and their variations)

• Push ups
• Inverted rows
• Chin ups
• Handstand push ups (isometrics or reps)

Core (and their variations)

• Prone ab brace
• Side ab brace
• Deadbug series

 Conditioners (and their variations)

• Skipping
• Sprints (flat or hills)
• Mountain climbers
• Burpees
• Bear crawls

There are plenty of variations of each of these of which you could easily make continued progress for months on end. I will detail these in a future article. These will work best in circuits doing one after the other for sets or time.

A sample set up may be:

Monday – Squats x 15 / Hand Elevated Push Ups x 10 / Prone Ab Brace x 30secs / Skipping x 100 x 3 – 5 circuits with 30 – 60secs rest between them.

Wednesday – Split Squats x 10 each leg / Inverted Rows x 10 / Side Ab Brace x 20secs each side / Burpees x 10 x 10mins continuous seeing how many reps you can do in that time

Friday – Monday’s exercises performed for 10min training zone like Wednesday.

Monday – Wednesday’s exercises performed for 3 – 5 circuits with 30 – 60secs rest like last Monday

Wednesday – start again

So there you have it, your starting point. Where you go from here depends on your effort, dedication to eating properly and self education. Of course I’m here to help so drop me an email and I’ll answer your questions right here on the site.