Hiya, i’ve been reading this site for a number of months now and just decided why not try posting for once, i will put up pics in a while when i can afford a camera
I first started lifting weights about 4 years ago when my little bro brought home a box of weights from a local shop, i didnt really know what i was doing, just really doing bicep curls as i had seen them on tv, about a year later me and my friend started going to a local gym, and at the behest of the trainers there used only machines weights, we experienced slight strength gains but never really made much(any) progress over about 1 and a half years, though i did manage to lose the belly i had
Then last year i met with a friend of my fathers who owns a gym locally and competes as a bodybuilder and he taught me the benefits of proper structured training note taking(v. important) and so i purchased a bench and more weights for my house and set upon doing some structured training in 3 months i had got my deadlift to 310lbs and i was looking far better then my year and a half of machine weights had done for me unfortunatly as i had no spotter at home i never really trained bench press or anything else for that matter
So last may i asked one of the trainers in my gym to teach me how to power clean and he put me and my training partner on his home made olympic lifting, it was good in so far as i learned how to power clean pretty well, but it was an awful program in that it had was a 3 day split and didn’t include back squats or bench press but included plenty of oddball exercises like dumbell front raises and tricep kickbacks. I cut while doing this program and got my weight down to 176lbs at 8.5% bodyfat
I started my first proper, bulking cycle on the 20th june using a 4 day split(legs, chest/tris, back/bis, shoulders/traps) and eating about 4000 cal a day and this was also when i first properly started benching regularly and back squating and i’m now upto 196lbs at 10.5% bf as of monday 18th september my lifts are a bit all over the place however because of my mixed(confused) training history thus far they are as follows
Bench Press 200lbs
Back squat 225lbs
Deadlift 340lbs for 2 reps!
power clean 165lbs
So im gonna start rippetoes starting strength program on monday 22nd of september and give that a go for a couple of months and hopefully see even more improvement
I guess i’m just amazed that in the last 3 months ive made more progress then i did in the previous 3.5 years messing about and if i had any reccomendations for begginers it would be to pick a decent program stick to it and take notes and just keep pushing it, you’d be amazed how many guys in my gym come in every week lift the same weights and make no progress oh the difference a notebook makes