Advice For Plan Of Attack

First a bit of history. I started training in middle school and then high school under a basic program, never really went too hard since the instructor was afraid of going too extreme. I never really made any progress in those times.

Then in college at age 20 I got motivated. Went on a rampage doing a self-designed program 3 times a week for about 15 weeks. I plateaud at week 11 and totally lost my motivation when I couldn’t change up to make what I deemed progress. I made badass improvement for that 11 weeks going from 135 to 185 bench and similar improvements (incremented 5 or 10 pounds per week) in legs as well. I did squats and/or leg presses to be well up over 500 press and approxamately 250 squat by 10 reps. I was feeling awesome with the progress till I plateaud.

During this timeframe I saw no real size improvement even though I felt my strength was going through the roof. When I plateaud (as I saw it then) I lost all motivation when after 5 weeks I couldn’t even tack on 5 pounds.

Fast forward 10 years to current day. I’m 5’11" 225 lbs, and what I’d assume as 20% BF. Hopefully I’m overestimating as even after getting the freshman gut I was only at about 10-12%.

I’ve been reading T-Mag for a few months, following as many links as I can and reading as much as possible. I’m finally comfortable with my knowledge and feel I’m ready to tackle this monster and take advantage of any genetic potential I have and then some.

Thinking back now in college I had two main problems. First one being obvious that I was probably severely overtraining as I was doing all body parts 3x a week at 10x3 for sets. No wave, no pyramid, nothing but flat sets. Second major problem that limited my hypertrophy had to be lack of protein/kcal ingestion as I was still eating a college kids diet and not increasing what I should have. A weak grocery store bought protein supp once a day wasn’t near enough.

Now, armed with my new found resouorce of T-mag(which I waste at least 5 hours a day pouring over, seriously) and having the flame ignited under my ass, I’ve cut out what I felt was limiting my ability to hit the gym and am now ready to assault my physique. I’m going to get a membership at the local Y next week if they’ve got the equipment necessary(if not I’ll likely sell out for 24hr fitness or some other spandex-fest gym within walking distance, I live in SF without a car) and have armed myself with Alpha Male, Red Bands, and just ordered some Grow! to add on. I started the Alpha Male and Red Bands already to try and get my system functioning in a T elevated and metabolism cranking state before throwing the weight/strength training on top so as to shock it into a fuel burning mass producing machine.

I’ve decided to slowly transition myself to the T-Dawg diet (I’m a glutton for pizza and beer and know I’ll have slip-ups, I figure this is the most adaptable for a protein and carb freak like myself) but want some suggestions for what workout plan to aim for.

I can’t decide if I want to go for powerlifting goals ala westside, or physique goals with a little bit of power ideas. West-side for skinny bastards sounded like a decent plan of attack yet today I stumbled across ABBH and the article on EDT, which both sounded like nice programs to slim down and approach strength/size gains. However, not having the base strength to hit one of those programs full force I can’t decide if I should try a cutting program or a pure strength program and rely on the type of diet I’m shooting at to do the cutting for me, with a little help from the supps.

Please help me pick a workout to get me started. Thanks.

WSSB and ABBH are both fantastic programs. Since your strength levels are low, I would suggest either starting with WSSB and then doing ABBH, or start with another strength program (TTT or SFM) and then go into ABBH and WSSB.

Or, you could go into a major fat loss program first and worry about strength and mass later.

But I find that strength really should be your number one concern, even if wanting to lose fat fast.

Agreed with Nate Dogg. I think you should get your body fat down first, so something like Mutation Series would probably be pretty good, then work on strength, its a lot harder to gain muscle when your strength isnt very good.