[quote]Aragorn wrote:
[quote]fisch wrote:
Aragorn I appreciate the write up. One thing I’m always curious about for experienced lifters, how to you feel those who are fairly weak/undeveloped should train? Do you think they should train differently starting out if their goals are just being as strong as possible vs. being as aesthetic as possible?
Basically, what is your belief for how newer people should train? Would the type of workout change depending on their goals?[/quote]
Man you opened up a can of worms with that question! Lol. I have a lot of thoughts on that, but in my attempt to curtail a novel length answer I’ll say 1) it very very much depends on goals. ALWAYS. 2) I firmly believe the new guys need frequency and volume more than heavy intensity. Now, I’m defining heavy as heavier than 5 RM here, so I’m not recommending “light” weight, and I am assuming you don’t have access to a coach. I consider 5 rep maxes “normal”, not heavy.
Things I do with people I can personally coach are different by necessity from general guidelines obviously. Also, I’m not saying that intensity is unnecessary–remember in the book length posts earlier I mentioned I pretty much started Westside from scratch as a brand newb. That included maxing every week to a single. I’m saying if you had to pick 2 of the 3, go with frequency and volume.
I define volume as a weekly thing, not necessarily a per workout thing. Honestly that question is hard to answer because of two things: I believe Starting Strength is incredibly, incredibly undertraining people for the most part (some exceptions), and I believe that body part splits are next to worthless for a brand new trainee (not that they’re worthless for everyone). This is because they can’t do enough weight on these isolation exercises to really really make a big difference at first.
So somewhere in the middle. I’m a fan of whole body workouts and upper/lower splits for new guys. That was one thing Westside did perfectly for me. Intensity, 2x weekly frequency, and volume of assistance work.
In general we have two extremes of brand new people–those that are paranoid about this “overtraining” thing they’ve read/heard horror stories about, and those that would work themselves into a coma because “more is better brah!”. Starting Strength for me is bordering on reinforcing some of those silly notions about overtraining, and body part splits are just asking for a guy to do 15 different exercises of worthlessness without a plan.
So long/short answer I guess: Upper/lower split or whole body, and definitely definitely depends on one’s goals. People can handle so much more than they think they can it’s silly–but they also tend to get super distracted if there is not a solid limit on some things (cough isolation exercises cough) and just spin their wheels.
There are 10 year old kids that can olympic lift 5 days a week. Why would a 24 year old die if they tried that? Ya dig? Bottom line–overtraining is real, but overrated. HOWEVER, you need to spend the time as a new guy hammering the basics with frequency because of a lot of science reasons I won’t touch on (if you ask I will, but that means a longer post haha).
[/quote]
Thanks man. If you want to go into all the science reasons I’ll read every word 10 times lol, and I’m sure others would too.
I’m not new to lifting, but I’m coming back from a couple major surgeries and some health problems over 3 years and am basically starting from a newbie state because of those issues. Though, I basically read something training related every day and have been doing that since I started 5 years ago so lots of information in my head but was too injured to use it.
I’m starting to shift my mindset similar to yours it seems about how newer people should train. Hell, reading through your posts here it seems like my whole belief about training is similar to yours, new people or experienced. Since coming back from my injury I’ve been doing a body part split and while I have improved some, it’s slower then I think it should be. I switched over last week to a upper/lower split, trying to focus on bringing up my strength while still focusing on aesthetics. I figure very few people ever look big without putting up somewhat respectable numbers.
Anyway, please keep responding to everyone’s questions! And write as much as you want, I seriously doubt anyone is complaining about learning more.