Really #&@^(@#^% Confused Now

[quote]fr0IVIan wrote:
the progression through the movements is to take advantage of other secondary muscles for assistance that haven’t been fatigued yet, like traps+tris for presses and then traps+bis for pulls… but if you’re recommending 4x12 presses THEN 10,8,6 I guess if I’m not fatigued by then, I wasn’t going heavy enough.[/quote]

He’s not. He is recommending doing 4 sets, working up to a final set in which you get at least 6 reps. When you can get 10, or whatever he said, reps with that final weight, you go up in weight. The previous 3 sets are about warming up and preparing for your working weight.

damn board ate my edit again…

yea I figured as much after I got through my first set of 12 close-grip chins and dips. there’s no way I could’ve gone through 4x12 to start…

Some advice, get a chiropractor and some electric stim to fix your injuries, buy a foam roller. Warm up before you lift for at least 10-15 minutes… you should be sweating.
Your schedule is not bad, imagine if you did landscaping or load trucks every day, all day & then go work out. I work 12hr shifts as well, but nites. Pick 1 nite and do a lighter workout maybe something like weighted dips, barbell presses, floor presses,or pull ups. Use one of your other days as an off day and 3rd work day abs and lower back, that leaves you 4 days to train I would do day 1 upper/ day 2 lower then off day/ then day 4 core lifts deadlift or/ and squat front squat, bench. If your getting hurt doing some of these lifts you have a weak core or bad technique. do the basic lifts pick 1 or 2 exercises per bodypart. You don’t need to do 5 exercises for a bodypart. do 6-10 sets, not including your warm up sets. Do 6-8 reps and you can vary that one workout 10 x 6, another 6 x 8, amother another 10 x 8, 6 sets 8-8-8-7-6-6. Just be consistent and get in and out of the gym. Don’t have conversations, concentrate on training and getting in and out in an hour.good luck

Agree with everything Mr Popular said!

fr0IVIan, you need to take a step back and relax. I can feel the thermic effect of your brain buzzing through all this information, your cortisol levels are shooting through the roof, it’s all making you smaller! lol

As has been said, muscles respond to progression on an exercise (with adequate target tension) and over-eating. Don’t try to get the “exact” amount of calories. Over-shoot it (while not being stupid). Don’t try to do the exact amount of sets/reps and “best” workout program, just do enough over and over and over.

Bodybuilding is not a performance based sport, it is pretty straight forward. No need for fancy periodization plans, focussing more on sarcoplasmic hypertrophy vs myofibrillar, dynamic effort work, mass vs acceleration blah blah blah blah…

Of course, when things slow down, you may benefit from varying things a little (e.g. different rep/set scheme, pull back/rest a little more, switch exercise)…but this is only when you milk things dry. And even then, you need to check that you are eating enough/making weight gains FIRST.

Just remember, while you’re trying to work out the best and most “intelligent” way of doing things, others out there aren’t sweating it and simply getting things right roughly, over and over and over…but making 2x the progress.

so, even though I said I’m normally a really shitty sleeper and that any activity will make it harder for me to sleep, I should push it anyway instead of just going home, clearing my mind and getting a good, sound sleep? ok…

yup I’m trying to follow the set/rep scheme as above with safe, controlled eccentrics. definitely feels like I’m starting over again.

how often is it again that I should re-evaluate my weight gain and adjust calories in as needed? weekly? I should be gaining like a pound a week right?

[quote]fr0IVIan wrote:
so, even though I said I’m normally a really shitty sleeper and that any activity will make it harder for me to sleep, I should push it anyway instead of just going home, clearing my mind and getting a good, sound sleep? ok…

yup I’m trying to follow the set/rep scheme as above with safe, controlled eccentrics. definitely feels like I’m starting over again.

how often is it again that I should re-evaluate my weight gain and adjust calories in as needed? weekly? I should be gaining like a pound a week right?[/quote]

If your workouts are causing you to lose sleep, apart from doing them late at night, you’re body isn’t bouncing back very well. Either you need to watch your volume, and/or eat more.

Have at least 2 quality sets per exercise. Yes warmup well, but do not do tons of “warming up sets”…Go home, eat plenty and recover.

If your bad sleep patterns follow a pattern (i.e. when you reach decent PR’s/training was brutal etc), then break up your intense phases with an “easier” week or two (lower load, saving a rep in the tank), and/or more days off per week. If it’s a regular thing, your recovery is probably crap and you need to tame the training a little (e.g. train 4 days per week instead of 5+).

Weight gains are never consistent, set amounts each week. Some weeks you may gain nothing, other’s you may gain 2lbs. You need to monitor bi weekly/monthly weight gains (e.g. 2-3lbs a month). For someone much taller I’d recommend higher weight gains.

Once you gain say 15lbs (200lbs bodyweight), which would probably take around 5-6 months (at 2lbs a month), hold for 3-4 months (eat at maintenance), then trim (just below maintenance).

my sleep quality is usually shitty around work days because I normally fall asleep around 11, maybe 12 on my days off. that works fine if I sleep until 7 or 8 the next day but I have to get up at 530 for work. on those days off I sleep ok, definitely better than when I have to work. I’ve tried sleeping earlier before work days (say like 10) only to wake up around 12 or 1 and then have trouble falling asleep. I was off today, went to sleep around midnight last night and woke up before 8 feeling ok.

I take ZMA (zinc 30mg, magnesium 60mg) and that seems to help a bit. I’ve tried melatonin 5mg and then 3mg, that put me to sleep sooner but it stopped working after two weeks or so. sometimes I take ambien CR 12.5mg which helps, but I wake up feeling like I slept 5 hours even if I was in bed for 6-7 hours… but it’s an improvement over sleeping for 3-4 hours and tossing and turning a lot.

It’s a crappy schedule, I can relate since I have one early shift per week too.

Other than getting into a routine, there’s not much else you can do.

I take a power nap before my workout on the day where I have to work early…could not possibly train 100% if I don’t (falling asleep by the middle of the day!).

I take plenty stimulants for my those workouts too (caffeine and a certain substance that’s banned in the US haha)

On the night where I have to get up early, I take lots of herbal sleep aid too (it improves the quality of your sleep even if you only get 4/5 hours sleep). Another thing that helps is to eat lots on your early day (can’t explain why).

yea this is what the next few weeks looks like for me:

work tomorrow til Tuesday
wednesday - shoulders/traps
Thursday - arms
Friday - legs (might just do a single session since I can’t load my back yet)
Saturday/Sunday - out of town
Monday - chest/back combo
Tuesday - work
wednesday - shoulders/traps combo
Thursday - arms
friday-sunday - work

good thing is my sessions are usually shorter now that I’m only generally doing 2 compound and 1-2 isolation movements per session.

what sleep aids are you taking?

[quote]fr0IVIan wrote:
what sleep aids are you taking? [/quote]

I take zinc and magnesium like you, also “kalms sleep aid”.

If you google it you can look up the ingredients to get individually if you can’t get it in US

I find reading a book in bed really makes me sleepy/sleep well. Whereas being on the computer till bedtime is one of the worse things (something about electronics…probably the EMF radiating from them!)

yea I’ve done some reading on sleep and it’s the brightness and spectrum of the light radiating from the tv. it throws off your melatonin levels so you aren’t able to fall asleep as normal. supposedly if you must watch tv, then try to watch stuff with warm colors like red and orange rather than blue and white.

I never put much stock in those herbal sleep aids but what the heck… I’ll give it a shot.

I can sympathise with the work schedule problems, i am an rgn (UK) and a sp.n on an acute cae team, work 13x12 shifts every 4 weeks and that is mainly nights so my normal sleep cycle gets screwed every few days.

I do however make the effort to train on work days and what i have found is that it works for me to get a session in before start of shift --not a very long session, sometimes only 30 minutes but that is a very work dense 30 minutes eg no periods of doing nothing ie doing a second lift in the ‘rest’ period.

I don’t try to train on every work day (about half) and do build up a bit of a sleep defecit which means that one day a week has to be a rest day.
Tiring but it does get it done.

One thing to consider is having a home routine where you don’t have to travel to a gym to get some work done.

^I bought a foam roller and a set of bands to do rehab work at home.

update: since I changed my routine, all of my injuries are feeling better. I used to have really bad tendinitis in both elbows after arms days, so bad that i couldn’t straighten my arms without wincing; that’s gone. left shoulder pain? hardly bothered me on my chest day and arms day. back pain? I was doing high pulls with 35# db’s and other movements like db flips and stiff-leg deads working out with a friend yesterday; no pain.

if someone could take the time to look at my log and tell me, amidoinitrite, I would be much obliged.

bump. I added vids of my squat and deadlift. squat felt good but deadlift felt off on the descent. critique would be appreciated.

Just throwing it out there if low bar squats, aka your “powerlifting” squats, hurt your groin you have a mobility issue.

[quote]PlainPat wrote:
Just throwing it out there if low bar squats, aka your “powerlifting” squats, hurt your groin you have a mobility issue.[/quote]

I probably do because I did taekwondo for about a year about 8-9 years ago. we were all doing butterfly stretches (I think that’s what they’re called, you sit, put the soles of your feet together and bend down). my instructor pushed down on my upper back, I felt a pop, and it never healed right.

now the pain is different, it isn’t in the hip joint itself but I think it’s in the hip flexor, but that’s from a more recent injury >2 months ago.

Might want to take care of that in terms of as much stretching and mobility work as you can.

I saw vids of mobility drills by Defranco, I think he calls them the Agile 8. I’ll give those a try.