Well I just finished typing a response to someone’s question and I ended up telling my whoel damn life story so I decided to post a log.
Without getting too much into my past, I have a penchant for rambling anyways, I’ll start with when I got serious about training which was the end of December 2006. At the time I was a 20 year old smoker who spent alot of nights out of the week drinking.
I for some reason picked up “The Body Building Bible For Men” and decided to get in shape. On December 28th I crushed my packs of cigarettes and quit, then I started the program.
Starting out I pretty much followed the program very closely except I ran a mile every morning before going to the gym at 6 a.m. Pretty soon though I started changing small things up things up to work on my weaknesses.
My weaknesses have been my calves, hamstrings, glutes, lower back, stomach, upper back, forearms, arms, shoulders, traps, and neck. Yeah, pretty much one big weakness except for a large chest, which is really just large in comparison to the rest of me.
A month into it I had an accident and messed up my knee in one of the most embarassing and ridiculously stupid injuries ever. I had to lay off legs for a few weeks, but got back to it as soon as possible. When I did I changed the program for the first time.
I felt like I should try a lower rep, higher weight program for squats and deadlifts. I also added in a little extra shoulder work, a little extra back work, and I added in shrugs.
My lifts are embarassingly low. When I first started squatting heavy (no more 15 reps of 135) I struggled with 5 reps of 205 for 4 sets, now 205 is a warm up thank God.
In about Mid March I started training at West Texas MMA where we have a local instructor who is a part of Team Brasa (BJJ), and instructors that come every couple months from Brazil, also Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt and Striokefore Super Heavyweight Rex Richards who’s 6’5 and 300+ pounds, you may not have heard of him yet, but you will the dude’s a badass.
We also have had Paul Buentello come and do a seminar with us and that was one of the cooler experiences I’ve had. Unfortunately my knee is still causing problems, and every time I think it’s good enough to get back into rolling it tears open and I’m bleeding all over things. It’s extremely annoying and is not helping with my lack of an even halfassed decent ground game.
When I started the MMA I had had my carbs very low, and since the increase in activity I’ve added quite alot of calories, alot of carbs, and more fruits. It’s also gotten me to change my training a little bit more.
When I started lifting heavy on the squats and deadlifts I had been on the program that had me doing both lifts on the same day twice a week. There was just no way I could do that, so I switched to having one squat day and one deadlift day a week, though both days I worked calves and lunges.
At that point my program hardly looked anything like the one set out in the book. I was doing pull ups, dips, bench, and was having to improvise set and rep schemes. I couldn’t do more than 5 pullups at a time so I had to do more sets, and my calves just weren’t responding so I’ve been hitting them extra hard.
For someone with a naturally large chest my bench was ridiculously low when I first started doing it, but after a while I realized my chest wasn’t as caught up as I had thought, and I realized that the dips and other excercises that indirectly hit my chest was causing the lower portion to bulk up more than the top portion, which is funny because that’s what I’d been trying to do at the advice of my brother and it turned out I really just needed to make my whole chest bigger. SO I’m doing less weighted dips now, and incline bench.
Also, I am only doing one main chest excercise now…the incline bench, since I still think my back needs to be brought up the most and I feel like I can hit it harder if I don’t work my chest quite so hard. I would love to have a ripped frickin’ back, so I’m concentrating very hard on barbell rows, pull ups, chinups, and what little I can do in wrestling and BJJ.
Here’s what my current program looks like:
Monday:
Pullups-4 sets of 5 reps holding a 10 pound db between my feet.
Incline Bench-warmup set of 15 reps with the bar, 10 reps at 135, 8 reps at 155, 6 reps at 165, 8 reps at 155, and end with another 10 at 135.
Barbell Bent Row-3sets 10 reps 125lbs. (in two weeks I’m changing this set rep scheme)
Calves- Monday only 2 sets one legged raises on the smith machine with a 45 on each side and finish off with as many double leg calf raises as possible.
Chinups-3 sets of 5.
Close grip pushups- 2sets of 15, and then finish off with 12 body weight dips.
Hammer curls-3sets 10 reps with 25lbs.
Standing Tricep extensions-3sets 10 reps with a 50lb. db.
Tuesday I made myself a sprinting program in place of a heavy leg day, hence why I have calves on Monday with my upper body because I don’t directly work them again until Friday. Currently I’m switching off, every other week doing squats and the weeks inbetween deadlifts.
Most times my legs just can’t handle doing both in the same week so I substitute one day with sprints. It seems to be working so far and both my squats and deadlifts are improving alot even though they’re not done in such high volume.
Wednesday I do weighted situps and leg lifts on a decline ab bench, some rotational excercises and I also consider this my “cardio day”. I do some about everyday, but I just add an extra mile on wednesday.
Thursday is the same as monday excet no calf work.
Friday, like I said, is either squat or deadlift day. I did the same warm up, 4x5, cool down program for about 6 weeks with decent results. Like I said, originally I struggled with 205 for 4 sets of 5, and the last time I did that workout 4 sets of 5 with 245 was a bit too easy, and I decided to switch it to a pyramid type scheme like I did with my bench.
I can’t remember what I did last time…that was 2 weeks ago today.lol, but I squat today so I’ll se how I’m doing.
Calf raises- sets of 10 with 2 45’s on each side of the smith machine.
Walking Lunges-I’ve been supersetting them with the calf raises, and doing them with a 45lb. plate in my hands. 12 steps with each leg.
Shrugs-I had been using dumbbells, but the largest my gym has are 70lbs. and one day I couldn’t find them so I used a barbell. Thank God I’m not being held back by dumbbells anymore and I can use alot more weight.
Bent over Side Raises-I want big shoulders like you wouldn’t believe, but when I had all the extra shoulder work in, plus fighting…I was having alot of pain and I realized how many excercises were working my anterior delts already. Now I’ve cut out the extra front work and just do 3 sets of these with 25lbs in each hand.
Saturday is some more cardio, and sometimes I’ll go fight then too.
There are a few things in my program that are somewhat similar to the first program I started out on. I change my rest times, never resting more than 90 seconds, but mostly 60 seconds between sets, I use some supersets, and every two weeks on most excercises I will increase the sets (until I get to four) and decrease the reps unless I’m adding weight to the bar like I have done with my bench and squat/deadlift.
Monday and wednesday is MMA from 7:30-9:15, Tuesdays and Thursdays are beginners Jiu Jitsu classes until 7:45 and then MMA until 9, usually I don’t go on Friday, and sometimes I’ll go to kickboxing and MMA on Saturday.
Sunday is a complete jack off day. I try not to do a damn thing but sit on my ass and relax. I haven’t taken any planned rest since I started, just every once in a while, like this last wednesday, I didn’t feel like training os I didn’t do anything but take it easy. I think after the next two weeks I’m going to take one week off from weightlifting and then come back to it with a few things switched up.
I kinda have a theory that what added 40 pounds to my squat in a month will work with my bench and rows, though maybe not as drastically.
I also am going to do more sprinting and interval work and less jogging. I can run 2 miles and not be out of breath, but last night during MMA I was sparring with a BJJ black belt, he shot in and I sprawled as hard as I could and threw some body shots while I was at it. I avoided the take down, but felt like puking afterwards…I need to work on my anerobic endurance obviously.
My more short term goals are to get stronger, and maybe stay at a lean 195 for a while. I am going to fight as soon as I have a ground game, and I want to be a hard 185, Nathan Marquardt is my height and the most ripped 185 I can think of. In the long run though I’d like to be just as ripped at 220 or so.
I guess I’ll post some progress pictures as well. I feel like I’m doing alright, but I’m not nearly where I want to be, especially when I have pictures of me in regular clothes. My forearms look pathetically small and so do my calves, which brings me to something I’ve been struggling over, whether I should add in direct forearm work or not.
Common sense says that if you want to bring a body part up you work it hard, but most of my workouts both with weights and in the MMA gym work my forearms and I’m not sure if they’re just not growing as fast as I would like them too, and I would hate for my other lifts to suffer because of worn out forearms.