I am 15 years old and I have been working out for about 2 years. I weigh 165 and I am about 6 feet tall. My goal is to try to get as strong and as big as possible but to stay tone. Should I first work on getting tone then getting big or get big then tone up. When I say getting big I mean like gaining about 10 lbs and adding about 50 to my bench press. Please Help Please !!!
Brandon…get big and strong first, then tone up. Chances are, because of your age, you can gain size and strength and still stay tone. Gotta eat bro…alot.
Brandon, first go to T-mag and look up the “Youth Gone Wild” article, plus the past few “Dawg School” columns. Then make like a sponge and suck up all that info. That’ll be a good start.
That article is pretty good! I bet that if we older weight room warriors could go back and regain all of the lost years of foolish training, we would pay dearly. The first thing I would do is forget I ever saw flyes, smith machines, lateral raises, etc. At 15, you should be hitting another growth spurt soon, and the worst thing is to confuse all of the gains that will naturally happen and credit them to isolation exercises and other triple giant set w/drops sets alternated with facial stretching and other crap. There really is no secret to getting you to your goal, no secret at all. Lift with precision, with purpose. Longer is not better. More often is not necessarily better. muscle confusion theory can be shot in the head, worthless. What is your bench press now? At 165, I could see a 15 year old 6 footer at about 1.5 BW. Have someone who has a clue look at your form. Are you doing mostly complex, multi-joint movements? Are you squatting? Deadlifting? I pray that you aren’t spending (read WASTING) valuable time doing leg pressing and leg extentions, seated military, pulldowns behind your head, kickbacks, cable crossovers, front raises, smith machine anythings. You wanna bench a lot of weight, learn by doing it 1) correctly, 2) heavy, 3) breifly 4) without diluting it with exraeneous bull poop.
hey jay, what’s wrong with seated military and leg press? these are just good exercises to add to those compound exercises. Dont confuse the guy, doing anything at that age wit the right form will get him bigger. The main thing is dieting so eat alot and eat good.
And rather than using the word “toned”, use ‘cut’, ‘shredded’, ‘ripped’, or even plain old ‘lean’. Unless you’re a chick of course… gotta get the jargon right! Oh, I’d say to gain muscle first too. Cheers.
yea like mark is saying despite last issues refferences, you can’t tone muscle, you can lose fat and have better definition, but can’t tone. BTW muscle tone is the ratio between activated and unactivated (relaxed) muscle fibers in a given area, it has NOTHING TO DO with seeing your abs and so forth.
Nothing is wrong with the seated military nor the leg press but their alternatives, standing military and squat and deadlift are far superior, and doing both in the same workout will not enhance the training effect. I see poor souls doing squat, front squat, hack squat, leg press all in the same workout. Its a waste. No I don’t espouse the (s)HIT principle, just that training from different angles, drop sets, super sets, giant sets, preexhaustion, post exhaustion all have minutely limited value, near none, for youngsters and >90% of nearly all trainees. This myth that something mystical needs to be done to get bigger and stronger sells magazines and supplements but is barely better than solid training information that you can pull out of manuals from the 1920’s
When i was your age, i did a basic program designed by Bill Starr. I made fantastic gains. It was three days a week program and focused on basic lifts. Its is well worth the effort.
He dude i’m also 15 and am 6’ 186 lbs the best way to get your weight up is to use the POW diet just search for it in the back issues section also try one of the routines there susch as the 1-6 principal or tc’s wave loading program, i forget the name.After the 1-6 principal is completed follow up with a higher volume program such as GBC’and change your diet by lowering the carbs slightly no need to fat fast.This way you will gain muscle and considerable strentgh and then loose any fat you gained whilst doing that.Hope this helps’I know it worked great with me.