Workouts

Mike

Mike

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Jun 27, 2006
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On the firing line
The fat man is working out and losing weight. No congrats necessary, my body is already feeling 100x better and that's congrats enough.

Basically, just keeping it simple. Watching what I take in, how many calories, carbs, fats, protein, and also trying to hit the gym every week day. Taking weekends off.

So far have dropped about 15 pounds in 10 days.

My workout plan is also pretty simple: alternate upper and lower body days.

Just did lower body today, tomorrow is upper.

I try to hit as many muscle groups as possible. Free weights mostly, but if there's just too many people in the way, I'll use the machines.

I go in with a loose plan of attack usually. Like tomorrow I plan on doing compound rows (or t-bar rows), upright rows, barbell shrugs, cable crossovers, hammer curls, incline, decline, bench, tricep pulldowns, close grip lat pulldowns... I think that's about it.

Yep, I lift. Not as much as I did in high school, but you gotta start somewhere.

So, any suggestions, workouts, thoughts you want to share? I'd love to hear what's worked for you.
 


I lost 100 lbs. Eating healthy is the largest factor.

Here's my tip to you: DO NOT OVERDO YOUR CALORIE DEFICIT.

You can damage the FUCK out of your metabolism by eating too little. I did this twice. I lost about 25-30 lbs... got stuck... had to gain 5-10 back to fix my metabolism.... lost 25-30.. got stuck... and eventually I forced myself to get my diet in line. The weight just fell off... and my skin looked tighter/healthier.

Eat oodles of protein and take plenty of resting days if you are lifting heavy weights. Since you're doing an upper/lower split... you should be doing upper on day 1, lower on day 2, and then taking a rest day on day 3 before starting over. You can even go a little more advanced and do back/biceps, chest/triceps/shoulders, legs (3 day split).

Keep gettin' it in. Weight lifting is the very important so you don't look like this (this is not me):
attachment.php
 
Buy the book Starting Strength, read it, love it, follow the program. Ditch all the machines and use free weights only, unless you have injuries. Even then unless they are crippling injuries, you should still only use free weights.
 
Oh and another tip: write out your workout plan or figure out a routine that you can memorize and stick to. Keep at that same routine for a month or two and then switch to a new one whenever you feel like it. It's too easy to walk around the weight room and skip exercises or lose focus (which might make you decide to skip a workout).
 
Been working out for 4 years now, best decision of my life. Posted my 'before and afters' somewhere in STS, probably sometime during last summer. My goal is basically to look like a boss naked, giving zero fucks about strength.

Best advice I can give is make diet your priority, even over lifting weights itself. Too many fuckers go in the weight room with a plan of just tossing heavy shit around but completely disregard their diet and wonder why they look the same every year.
 
You're doing a full body workout each day for upper body? Nigga you need time to rest.
 
As a new lifter, if you can lift 5 days in a row, you are not lifting heavy enough. It normally takes a while to get use to lifting on a regular basis, and get your diet in line.

You should probably only be looking at 3, maybe 4 days a week. I do suspect, it will catch up with you in the next week or two. If it doesn't there is something wrong, because lifting on a cut should leave you pretty tired.

I'm not sure how heavy you are Mike, but generally the bigger you are, the faster it can come off, at least at first. However, like someone said, if you cut too fast you are just going to stall, and 15 lbs in 10 days is beyond extreme. A general rule of thumb is to not cut more than 20% below what your calridic maintenance is. It's normal to stall though, all you have to do is raise your cals for a couple week until your motab goes back to normal and start cutting again.

As for a good workout plan, and I can send you my workout sheets that I use every day:

1) Back/Bicepts
2) Legs
3) Chest/Tricepts
4) Shoulders/Abs

Makes a good all around workout. Someone else mentioned Starting Strength, and that's all good and fine, having done it myself I would say not on a cut. It really is a strength/bulking program, which means you need to eat over your maintenance to actually follow it. Since you're trying to cut weight, it just doesn't make a ton of sense. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do compound moves like that (because you should), just you have different goals if you're cutting this hard.
 
Jcraig83 said:
Buy the book Starting Strength, read it, love it, follow the program. Ditch all the machines and use free weights only, unless you have injuries. Even then unless they are crippling injuries, you should still only use free weights.
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+1
Starting Strength is a great program, beginner or not. It's very controversial because it requires you to squat multiple times per week.

If you want to mix up your programming a little bit, I would suggest giving Power Hypertrophy Adaptive Training a try.

The tl;dr version of PHAT is that you have 5 workout days.

Day 1 - Upper body power - Heavy weight, high sets, low reps
Day 2 - Lower body power - Heavy weight, high sets, low reps
Day 3 - Rest
Day 4 - Back/Shoulders hypertrophy - light weight, high reps, low sets
Day 5 - Lower body hypertrophy - light weight, high reps, low sets
Day 6 - Upper body hypertrophy - light weight, high reps, low sets
Day 7 - Rest

I've got a full routine logged out in a Google drive spreadsheet that I can share with you if you're interested. It was designed with the above programming in mind. I've been lifting for 5 years now and this has by far been my favorite programming and the one that I have stuck with the longest. I normally change out my compound lifts every month or so and then sub in new isolation exercises just following the same programming.

Give it a try, and good luck!
 
Rage9 said:
I'm not sure how heavy you are Mike, but generally the bigger you are, the faster it can come off, at least at first. However, like someone said, if you cut too fast you are just going to stall, and 15 lbs in 10 days is beyond extreme. A general rule of thumb is to not cut more than 20% below what your calridic maintenance is.


Makes a good all around workout. Someone else mentioned Starting Strength, and that's all good and fine, having done it myself I would say not on a cut. It really is a strength/bulking program, which means you need to eat over your maintenance to actually follow it. Since you're trying to cut weight, it just doesn't make a ton of sense. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do compound moves like that (because you should), just you have different goals if you're cutting this hard.
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I agree, don't bother with Starting Strength if you're on a caloric deficit. Especially with squatting three times per week.
 
@Rage9 and jhoffy22 : I'd love copies of your workouts.

Still reading and learning, so I'm sure there's a lot that I'm not doing right, but like everything else in life, I've found the only way to do it right is to start doing *something*.

Rage9 said:
As a new lifter, if you can lift 5 days in a row, you are not lifting heavy enough.
Click to expand...

How can I determine what is heavy enough, but not dangerous? I want to push it, but my lack of experience concerns me in that I don't want to go too gungho and do actual damage.

Suggestions for determining how much I should be eating right now? I'm eating about 2400 calories a day and about 200 - 250 grams of protein. Supplementing with [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Species-Nutrition-Isolyze-Chocolate-Peanut/dp/B0065TBJCS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364872183&sr=8-1&keywords=species+whey"]Species Nutrition Whey Protein[/ame] and a NO booster. Drinking a ton of water (about a gallon a day) and coffee (1 or 2 cups - down from 6). I'm always hungry, and figured that was a good sign that my body was burning fat like a mutha. Maybe I'm too calorie deficient.

Current height / weight: 5' 8" and 382 pounds. Short and wide. Want to be short and with a V shape someday. :)
 
I semi-recently changed my entire eating and also started with body weight workouts (push-ups, chin-ups, planks, squats).

I had started by finding nerdfitness.com (searched for multiplayer fitness programs) and then through there found marksdailyapple.com which is pretty killer. For inspiration/motivation I highly recommend checking out the success stories and looking through the entire before/after thread in the forum.

I bought The Primal Blueprint 21 day transformation from there. Basically cut most of the processed garbage out of my eating as well as grains (most controversial depending on who you talk to) and I stick with grass fed/free range meat/poultry, vegetables, fruit, eggs, seeds, nuts, dark chocolate. It's been a lot easier than I thought. Some of my go-to stuff is Jerky, macadamia nuts, Ritter Sport dark chocolate (extra cocoa). I still have some cheat meals but to be honest I don't crave a lot of the stuff I did before.

Just the eating change along I dropped a quick 10lbs. I'll post some before/after once there's more to show but so far so good!

Here's my favorite success story from that site: The Unconquerable Dave | Mark's Daily Apple (I love the fact the dude didn't end up with flabby skin).
 
Mike said:
@Rage9 and jhoffy22 : I'd love copies of your workouts.
Click to expand...

Here you go:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/n3ejf5uygt4axp0/PHAT Templates.xlsx

Drop the majority of the isolation exercises for the first month or so. Add them in when you feel like you need more volume.

Mike said:
How can I determine what is heavy enough, but not dangerous? I want to push it, but my lack of experience concerns me in that I don't want to go too gungho and do actual damage.
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Just depends on your goals. If you're lifting for hypertrophy (toning and definition), you should be doing high repetitions and burning out in the 8-12 rep range. Adjust your weight accordingly so that you burn out in the rep range. If you're doing a lower rep range (3-5), adjust it so that you burn out in that rep range. You should have very little left in the tank either way.

Mike said:
Suggestions for determining how much I should be eating right now? I'm eating about 2400 calories a day and about 200 - 250 grams of protein. Supplementing with Species Nutrition Whey Protein and a NO booster. Drinking a ton of water (about a gallon a day) and coffee (1 or 2 cups - down from 6). I'm always hungry, and figured that was a good sign that my body was burning fat like a mutha. Maybe I'm too calorie deficient.

Current height / weight: 5' 8" and 382 pounds. Short and wide. Want to be short and with a V shape someday. :)
Click to expand...

I wouldn't worry about counting your calories or macros right now. A lot of people try to go all in at once (not missing a workout day, taking every supplement in the book, counting cals/macros, etc) and they end up burning out after the first month or two.

I don't know what your current eating habits are like, but I would suggest just cutting out the obvious food that is bad for you. Track your calories and your weight and establish a baseline of what your caloric maintenance is. Monitor this over the course of two weeks or so and you should have a good idea of what your caloric maintenance is. Once you figure this out, cut out 100-200 calories daily off of your maintenance. At your size, drink as much water as possible. Probably wouldn't hurt you to take some omega 3 fish oil too. Dem fish burps.

And lastly, supplements are just that - supplements. If you've got the discipline, money, and time to eat a healthy diet, don't worry about taking protein powder. You're able to get everything you need through your food. I only take protein powder when I'm limited by one of the above factors and not able to eat a wholesome diet.
 
Mike said:
How can I determine what is heavy enough, but not dangerous? I want to push it, but my lack of experience concerns me in that I don't want to go too gungho and do actual damage.
Click to expand...

Well you shouldn't be low rep/power lifting, which is 1-5 reps. You should be able to complete 3 sets of 8-12 reps for each exercise/lift. This is just a soft rule. You want to keep it challenging but not too easy. If you're hitting 15+ reps on a set you're way too light. It will take you a few sessions of each workout to probably dial in on a proper weight.

Suggestions for determining how much I should be eating right now? I'm eating about 2400 calories a day and about 200 - 250 grams of protein. Supplementing with Species Nutrition Whey Protein and a NO booster. Drinking a ton of water (about a gallon a day) and coffee (1 or 2 cups - down from 6). I'm always hungry, and figured that was a good sign that my body was burning fat like a mutha. Maybe I'm too calorie deficient.

Current height / weight: 5' 8" and 382 pounds. Short and wide. Want to be short and with a V shape someday. :)
Click to expand...

A quick rule of thumb is weight x 14-16 cals, which is like 5348-6112. That's your maintenance, which is the amount you need to eat to not lose weight. However there are other factors like your age, height, whatever.

There are more complex formulas out there, you can find them on bb.com forum in the fat loss section. This calculator here is also good to give you an idea:

Calorie Calculator - Daily Caloric Needs

The thing is, these formulas aren't that accurate for someone with so much fat. In fact the fatter you are, the less accurate they are. However if you're skinnier they can still be way off.

Regardless, the best way (and really only way) to figure out what your maintenance calories are, is to simply track every cal you eat for a couple of weeks. Because we are all different, there is no one size fits all solution. So track everything, and every week weigh in. There are 3500 cals in a pound of fat, although the way you're losing you will also be losing muscle (well what little bit you have), but it should give you an idea.

At this point, due to your goals and size, you probably don't have to worry much about any other macros. Other optimized macros like 1g of protein per lb of body weight, is for keeping muscle on a cut. Since you are cutting hard, and have not been lifting prior, it's pretty useless (as well as hard as hell to eat that much protein). You however may want to eat .4-.45g of fat per lb of body weight to keep your testosterone up.
 
Every body has an opinion on thin subject and <Can't think of another, not even politics>

I am also a n00b. Rank n00b.. And here is my customary Opinion in a fitness thread.. :)


After I posted in Jan about how great the past year have been and how I have renewed my gym membership, on the 1st Feb, I dropped a heavy ass dumbbell on my chest and fractured a rib. Lost all my strength that I gained.

But injuries are good IMO, unless they are crippling. Makes me introspect. Also makes me question my form etc.

And makes me want to Kiss Rippetoe's ass.

Read starting Strength. Everybody who questions the wisdom of Rippetoe has never read the book, and haven't bothered to run his program to the Tee for 1 year or more.

His methods are simple. Complete your sets and reps without support. If your spotter as much as waves at the bar, your rep is missed. Lift the same weight again next time. If you miss a again. Reset by 15%.

Work back up again. Your muscles get a chance to recover. And it again adapts to increasing load.

I don't see the point of any training, at least for a newbie ( as someone rightly said, you are a n00b until you can bench 1.5 times your body weight and squat twice your weight), if you are not able to lift with more intensity (or volume) every other workout (beginner) or every other week (Intermediate).. Or if you are strictly into looks/sarcoplasmic hypertrophy (maybe monthly) but you should be lifting more after every set period.

If I were a to start body building all over again, I would follow this:
AllPro: A Simple Beginner's Routine part III - Bodybuilding.com Forums


But, I want to gain some strength so I will be running strength routines for at least another year or so. The idea is that, at some point of time, if I were to do Hypertrophy based work-out at higher rep range, I want to be able to bench 300 lbs as my light set, for 12-15 reps.. :-)

That said, I lost the most weight when I was doing a Upper Body, Lower Body everyday like you are doing.. with 30 Mins High intensity cardio following the workout..

If I were to restart I would only do Core lifts and learn to squat though.
 
I've attached my workouts to this message. Keep in mind they are not super detailed, as there is always more on my list than I can do in a typical hour workout. I normally only hit like 5-6 exercises, because normally there are compound lifts as well.

Furthermore some exercises are cryptic. For example you'll see 'shrugs', well you can do either barbell or dumbbell shrugs. Or on Back/Bicept you'll see penlay rows and just rows. I do that to emphasis to do a row no matter what.

The only ones I would say you must hit are the compounds. Deadlift, squat, chest press (either bench, incline, or military). I also have power clean in there, but if you are not trained for it, you should not do it. I guess I wouldn't recommend anyone do those lifts though, unless they are properly trained. So if you have the cash get a personal trainer for a month or two. Granted most of them can't teach compound lifts well, but it's better than going at it alone and getting yourself hurt. And although I say don't do Starting Strength, you should read it. Simply it's an excellent reference on how to do the compound lifts, and why to do them a certain way. So mix that with a mediocre trainer and you should be good to go.
 

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