[quote]EyeDentist wrote:
It seems I oversold my ability to keep the workout post brief! Apologies for the logorrhea. I’ll stop here for now, and make a separate post about the specific workouts (and conditioning/aerobics stuff) I’ve been doing during my cut.[/quote]
Not at all. As far as I can tell you wrote things as concise as you possibly could.
I’m enjoying the read.
[quote]LoRez wrote:
[quote]EyeDentist wrote:
It seems I oversold my ability to keep the workout post brief! Apologies for the logorrhea. I’ll stop here for now, and make a separate post about the specific workouts (and conditioning/aerobics stuff) I’ve been doing during my cut.[/quote]
Not at all. As far as I can tell you wrote things as concise as you possibly could.
I’m enjoying the read.[/quote]
I am certain that you will get no complaints about too much detail here. Please continue writing.
Keep an eye on that fundi!!
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I have “brachialis pain” as well. It is such a minor thing that I haven’t even really logged it. I train back hard in 4 of my 6 workouts. I am now realizing that perhaps I need to reschedule my lifts within my plan…
Excellent summary and descriptions of the how’s and why’s. I think most people who have been in the game a while, or have had any type of injury come to the realization that the way we are all usually instructed to train when we start out (heavy compound work first, when you’re fresh) isn’t always the best course of action in terms of either progress, or longevity.
S
Good stuff! I am enjoying the detail, please continue.
awesome.
I definitely learnt the hard way as well thart starting my workouts with a big heavy compound exercise wasn’t the best idea
Thanks again for the positive feedback. I’m really enjoying this, and look forward to feedback from those wiser and/or more advanced than I. And if anything I’ve written isn’t clear, or if questions arise, please feel free to ask.
As for what I’ve been doing of late…Of course, like most lifters I’m constantly tinkering with the details (it so happens I’m experimenting with a slightly increased frequency program at the moment). That said, my baseline program looks like this:
My workout ‘week’ is eight days long. It is designed for upper-body muscle maintenance and bodyfat loss/control, not bulking. (Based on both my appearance and the occasional whole-body impedance testing, I can say with confidence that I have not gained an ounce of muscle in the past few years.) The overarching strategy is simple:
I use two different bodypart splits; each has advantages/disadvantages. I’ll describe them both below.
Day 1: Upper Body A; Calves
Day 2: Run 1 hr
Day 3: Upper body B; Calves
Day 4: HIIT/LISS
Day 5: Upper Body A; Calves
Day 6: Run 1 hr
Day 7: Upper Body B; Calves
Day 8: Core interval work/LISS
Lather, rinse, repeat.
The splits:
Split 1: ‘Push/Pull’
–Push: Chest, front delts, rear delts, triceps
–Pull: Lats, lateral delts, rear delts, biceps, forearms
Advantage: Tendon-friendly
Disadvantage: You lose out on the fascial-stretching benefits of simultaneously pumping antagonistic muscle groups (particularly Chest/Back, and Bis/Tris).
Note that I divvy up the heads of the delts. I do this because the deltoid muscle as a whole simply cannot be pigeonholed as a ‘push’ or a ‘pull’ muscle. Further, you may have noticed that ‘rear delts’ are listed under both Push and Pull. That’s not a typo. I define an exercise as ‘push’ or pull’ based on whether it involves the triceps (= push exercise) vs the biceps (= pull exercise). Some rear-delt exercises (eg, bent-over lateral raises; cable rear-delt raises) activate the triceps, whereas others (eg, face pulls; Haney rows) involve the biceps. And because rear delts are a problem area for me, divvying up the exercises in this manner allows me to work them frequently without putting undo stress on either the biceps or the triceps.
Split 2: ‘Antagonists’
–Chest, Back
–Delts, Arms, Forearms
Advantage: Get the fascial-stretching benefits of simultaneously pumping antagonistic muscle groups
Disadvantage: Tendon-unfriendly (ie, bis and tris are getting worked every other day)
If anyone wants to drill down re specific exercises, sets, reps, etc, for a given bodypart, just ask.
A few random comments about training upper body for aesthetics:
–If you want an upper body that elicits positive responses from the lay (= non-weightlifting) public, get abs. (Yeah, I know–‘Abs on a skinny guy are like big breasts on an overweight woman–not impressive.’ Tell it to Ryan Gosling. So long as you aren’t cachetic, your abs will impress the lay public.)
–Speaking of abs:
–Looking broad is far more important than looking thick. As a lifetime member of the Underclavicled Club, this was a lesson I absorbed early. Emphasizing flat bench and OHP can make you strong as hell, but the increasing anterior-posterior thickness will make you look narrower. (Remember, outside the gym, no one ever says ‘Wow, look at the bench press on that guy!’) So after abs, the priority is to widen the appearance of the shoulder girdle by thickening the lateral delts and upper chest. (And there is such a thing as upper chest; it’s comprised of the pec fibers that originate along the clavicle and from the manubrium.) Most guys (including me back in the day) train their chest and delts in the manner opposite they should–ie, they dedicate their Chest efforts to flat-bench work, then toss in a couple of half-hearted sets of upper chest at the end. Likewise, they’ll do set after set of OHP variations, followed by some perfunctory lateral raises before calling it a day. IMHO, this is suboptimal programming, from both a joint/tendon health and aesthetics-producing perspective.
–If you told me I could do only one upper-body exercise for the rest of my life, it would be lateral raises. (But I would secretly squeeze out a few sets of crunches when you weren’t looking.)
Another patience-testing post. In the next, I’ll talk about my aerobic/conditioning work, and why I don’t train Legs anymore. (And I will eventually get to Diet, I promise.)
Nice.
I’d be interested in learning about your specific approach to shoulders (specifically lateral/rear delts), like a typical workout (exercise, sets, reps). Especially since you don’t devote an entire day to them, I’m curious as to how you use your “blueprint” for a muscle group that you’re doing in the middle of a workout.
Though I’m perfectly happy to wait for your answer until after you’ve finished talking about conditioning/diet as I’m sure they’ll be just as interesting as your posts on training so far.
As an older trainee (I’m 53), I’m always interested to hear how others my age are training. Thanks for taking the time to post this.
–Brian
[quote]staystrong wrote:
Nice.
I’d be interested in learning about your specific approach to shoulders (specifically lateral/rear delts), like a typical workout (exercise, sets, reps). Especially since you don’t devote an entire day to them, I’m curious as to how you use your “blueprint” for a muscle group that you’re doing in the middle of a workout.[/quote]
I generally don’t work bodyparts straight through–ie, I don’t do all my Back sets, then all my Lateral Delts, then Rear, Biceps, etc. Instead, when feasible I will work 2 (or even 3) bodyparts simultaneously by alternating sets between them. So on a Pull day, I will do a set of Lats, then a set of Lateral Delts, then another Lats, another Lateral Delts, etc. Structuring the workout like this lets me get more work done in a given period of time, while simultaneously providing a decent rest interval between sets for a given bodypart.
So, bearing in mind that I would be alternating sets with another bodypart (in this case, Lats), a typical lateral-delt workout would look like this (set numbers do not include warm-up sets):
–For the first phase, I would do either DB or machine lateral ‘peaks,’ meaning the ROM would be from the upper (ie, fully contracted) position down to where my upper arms are just below parallel to the floor. The weight would be light, allowing me to get 20-30 slow, controlled reps for 4 sets.
–Next I would do some partials (a movement I learned from Meadows, and which I have come to really rely on). The main purpose of this exercise is to fatigue my lateral delts so I don’t need as heavy a weight on the next exercise. I do these on the seated lateral machine. The movement starts with my elbows at my sides, and stops when my upper arms are about halfway to being parallel to the floor. I pyramid the weight for 4 sets, with the reps dropping from mid-20s on the first set to low teens on the last.
–Now that my lateral delts are fully pumped, it’s time to work them! My heavy ‘compound’ movement is DB laterals. I’ll do a warm-up set or two, then grab the heaviest DBs I think I can get ~10 good-quality reps with. (As with all my main exercises, I will reverse-pyramid the weight, dropping as needed to be able to do 8-12 quality reps.) I’ll do 4-6 sets here, taking plenty of time in between. (Note that I’ll be alternating this movement with the main exercise for Lats, so I’ll want plenty of recovery time between sets for both.) On my last couple of sets I’ll employ an intensification technique, either a drop set or partials.
–As for the third phase, lateral delts present a problem in that they can’t safely be worked in the stretched position. Thus, my final lateral-delt exercise is usually to burn them out with high-rep band laterals. Four sets does it.
On a Pull day, at this point I will be finished with both Lateral Delts and Lats, so I would do 4-6 straight (ie, no alternating) sets of either face pulls or Haney rows for Rear Delts. Then it’s on to Biceps.
[quote]befoley wrote:
As an older trainee (I’m 53), I’m always interested to hear how others my age are training. Thanks for taking the time to post this.
–Brian[/quote]
My pleasure. Us mature lifters have to look out for each other. Feel free to toss some ideas into the mix.
We have a LOT in common. Very good stuff here, thanks for posting the details!
Looking forward to the diet stuff.
Couldn’t agree more with your comments on width vs thickness for visual impact, high reps for abs, lateral raises until the cows come home, and not starting with heavy compounds.
Keep up the great work!
Wanted to comment on your thoughts on split design. I don’t think higher frequency is always necessarily tendon-unfriendly. It depends on exactly what you are asking the tendons to do.
I’ve trained biceps daily for weeks at times … As long as I mix up my angles and contraction styles and keep the compressive and shearing forces in the tendons to a minimum, my joints and tendons seem to respond well to very high frequency.
I just throw that out there because you mentioned it as a drawback in your second split option…I think pushing past frequency thresholds way for guys like us (who are open to alternative methods and looking to stay healthy) to bring up lagging areas.
Keep in mind this comes from a guy who has seriously considered ways to do lateral raises with bands at his desk!
I like your split rationale. Ever tried chest, bis, and front delts together? There is some good pump synergy there, especially if the chest work is fly/squeeze/cross-body dominant.
Awesome writing EyeDentist, your writing style is enjoyable to read. Thanks for all the info so far, excited for the diet portion.
So if I’m reading this correctly, you don’t work Quads/Hams directly? What is the reason for that? HIIT is enough?
[quote]Serge A. Storms wrote:
Wanted to comment on your thoughts on split design. I don’t think higher frequency is always necessarily tendon-unfriendly. It depends on exactly what you are asking the tendons to do.
I’ve trained biceps daily for weeks at times … As long as I mix up my angles and contraction styles and keep the compressive and shearing forces in the tendons to a minimum, my joints and tendons seem to respond well to very high frequency.
[/quote]
I don’t doubt that, so long as parameters like intensity are carefully modulated, it’s possible to work a muscle every day. (After all, the human body was ‘designed’ to work every day.) But is it the best way to induce hypertrophy? That’s the question for me.
[quote]
I like your split rationale. Ever tried chest, bis, and front delts together? There is some good pump synergy there, especially if the chest work is fly/squeeze/cross-body dominant. [/quote]
Oh yeah, I loved me some flies back in the day, and can see how they would synergize well with biceps work. Unfortunately, they’re hell on my biceps tendons. (IIRC, Tom Platz was doing heavy flies when he ruptured his distal biceps tendon shortly before the Olympia one year.)
[quote]Spidey22 wrote:
Awesome writing EyeDentist, your writing style is enjoyable to read. Thanks for all the info so far, excited for the diet portion.
So if I’m reading this correctly, you don’t work Quads/Hams directly? What is the reason for that? HIIT is enough? [/quote]
Hi Spidey, and thanks. It so happens I’m writing that portion up even as we ‘speak.’ Hope to finish it this morning.
Great read so far. I’m really interested in the ROM progression you employ throughout the workout, and also the ideas on ab training, since, imo, your abs are easily one of your most impressive assets.
Thanks for taking all the time to outline it.
OK, conditioning/calorie-burning. But first: Why no Legs? I realized years ago (in my early 40s) that I could train Legs intensely, or I could do frequent leg-based conditioning work, but I couldn’t do both–neither my knees nor my recovery capacities were up to it. Further, I sustained a serious orthopedic injury to my left leg in early 2011–complete rupture of the distal quad tendon necessitating open repair. (Did I do this squatting a heroic amount of weight? No, I slipped and fell, like Grandma in the Life Alert commercials.)
[photo]35200[/photo]
Even so, when I decided in summer 2011 to make my big push to get lean, I tried to keep Legs alive. My original split was as follows:
Day 1: Upper Body A; Calves
Day 2: Run 1 hr
Day 3: Upper body B; Calves
Day 4: HIIT/LISS
Day 5: Upper Body A; Calves
Day 6: Run 1 hr
Day 7: Upper Body B; Calves
Day 8: HIIT/Legs
On Days 4 and 8, the HIIT was performed on a stationary bike. The protocol I followed was relatively modest: a 5 min warmup, then 5 repeats of 10-s all-out sprinting followed by 50-s recovery, then a 5 min cooldown. On Day 4, I would hop off the bike and onto a StepMill for 25-27 min of LISS (I would step until I had burned 300 cals per the machine’s readout). On Day 8 I would go from the bike straight to the weight room, where I would do a full Legs workout based on the ‘light peak ROM/heavy midrange ROM/pump and stretch FROM’ blueprint discussed above. However, after 6-8 weeks of this (and the running, and in the context of a chronic caloric deficit), it proved too much for me–I was exhausted, and dreaded the HIIT-based workouts (a sure sign of over-training/under-recovering for me). I knew I had to give something up–had to ask less of my legs. And because getting lean (and therefore burning calories) was my priority, I decided to stop working Legs after HIIT on Day 8. Instead, it became:
Day 8: HIIT/LISS/Core
So Day 8 was now identical to Day 4, except I would perform core conditioning immediately after completing the StepMill LISS. The core work consisted of alternating 30 seconds of KB swings (= 17 swings for me) with 30 seconds of hanging knee raises (= 25 knee raises for me). I would rest 30 seconds between exercises; ie, 30-s KB swings–>30-s rest–>30-s knee raises–>30-s rest–>etc. I would do this for 20 minutes (so 10 sets each of KB swings and knee raises). I did this for a while, but once again found myself exhausted and dreading the workout. (I remember one day putting it off in favor of mowing the lawn–as sure a sign of overtraining as I can imagine.) So, I dropped the LISS component, and Day 8 became:
Day 8: HIIT/Core
Nope. Still felt crappy. It took long enough, but I finally got the message–I can’t do HIIT every 4 days. That’s when Day 8 evolved into its final form:
Day 8: Core/LISS
Re the 1-hr runs, briefly: Distance-wise, it’s a little over 6 miles (~10K for our metric friends). Those of you with basic math skills will quickly recognize that this works out to just under 10 min/mile, a pace more accurately described as jogging rather than ‘running.’ I know long bouts of LISS are frowned upon as muscle-sapping by many trainers, and there’s no question my legs are thinner than before. That said, I find running to be a really efficient calorie-burner, which is why I’m reluctant to give it up. So for now at least, I’m going to continue running, and pray that short-shorts on men do not become fashionable again in my lifetime.
Epilogue: Spidey asked about quad/ham training, and it so happens I’ve been trying to figure out a way to work them again, but without either sacrificing the calorie-burning component of the conditioning sessions or frying my recovery abilities. With respect to hams, I feel pretty good about the KB swings–one of the many benefits of these is how effectively they hit the hams/glutes. Obviously, I’m not going to get John Meadows’ posterior chain via KB swings alone, but I feel they have kept my backside from shriveling away to nothing. Quads are a different matter, and one I have been experimenting with of late. I have been trying to come up with a quad version of KB swings; ie, a simple quad exercise that can be performed for multiple sets of high reps. The one I’ve settled on is bodyweight sissy squats. Here’s what I’m doing now (BTW, I’m also experimenting with a 6-day split, which is why the conditioning sessions fall on days 3 and 6):
Day 3: Stationary bike warm-up (no HIIT), then Core/Quads consisting of 30-s KB swing–>30-s rest–>30-s knee raises–>30-s rest–>30-s sissy squats–>30-s rest–>30-s knee raises–>30-s rest–>etc, x 30 minutes (So it’s the same basic conditioning workout as before, except half the KB sets are replaced with sissy-squat sets, and it lasts 30 min instead of 20.)
Day 6: Stationary bike warm up (again, no HIIT), then Core/Legs consisting of 30-s leg press–>30-s rest–>30-s crunches–>30-s rest–>etc, also x 30 minutes.
I literally started doing this a week ago, so have no idea how it will play out.
Done with Conditioning. Deep breath, and then it’s on to Diet.
Great read. A few questions.
How do you feel about being a slow runner these days? (you look like you were fairly quick back in the day). I ran competitively for about 7 years won road races etc. I like to run on occasion, but it definitely hurts the pride running slow and getting passed frequently.
Second question. I might have missed it, but how do you target your upper chest?