I got fairly out of shape my first year in college, not putting on much weight, but not playing sports anymore affected me. I have been working out consistently about 4-5 days a week for 2 months now, and have seen some results in terms of how much i lift, but not very noticeable improvement in muscle tone. If i want to improve both size and tone is this an ok workout or is it terrible, i admit to knowing very little about lifting. im not in bad shape currently, but pretty mediocre.

Im 5'10" and weigh 160.
Max bench- 185 (really need a lot of improvement in chest)
Pretty weak back as well, needs a lot of improvement.
I have decently strong biceps and triceps i think, and decently large, but not much tone and definition, which id like to improve.
Im not looking to be some kind of body builder type, just improve size and tone in my upper body.



Day 1- Chest

- 7 sets of bench (sometimes use machine if i go alone after class)
- 2 sets at 115, 10 reps
- 2 sets at 135, 8 reps
- 2 sets at 155, 6 reps
- 1 set at 115 until failure

- 4 sets on fly machine
- 1 set 90, 12 reps
- 2 sets 110, 8 reps
- 1 set 90 until failure

Day 2- Biceps, Triceps

- 7 sets barbell curls
- 2 sets of 40, 12 reps
- 2 sets of 50, 10 reps
- 2 sets of 60, 8 reps
- 1 set of 40, until failure

- 7 sets tricep pushdowns (not sure on name)
- similar to bicep workout, not sure on weight amounts because there are two different machines i use that say far different weights


Day 3- Back and Shoulders

This workout i do a bunch of different stuff and dont have a set plan. Really need help on it. I tend to do a lot of military presses for shoulders and lat pulldowns for back.



I also do ab workouts every other day, and am unsure what the best ones are. I usually just do crunches and use the ab machine.

I usually do 20 minutes of cardio a day on bike machine, sometimes mixing in running.


My question is where can i improve the most here, and is there anything that is noticeably bad? Thanks in advance for any help.

-Kevin

read the faq

to make any sort of gains you have to add weight. doing the same thing over and over even until failure is pointless.

i have added some weight, not much though, just what i do currently

faq. oh yah and to answer your question...terrible. Even for a crappy bodybuilding routine this is beyond terrible.

-Mike

do you have legs?

the 2p2 HF forum is the default forum for mid 20 year old cripples that need advice on how to get strong upper bodies in order to push around their wheel chairs...duh...legs? INSANITY!!

A beginner BB routine is SS, a intermediate BB routine is some version of weekly periodized compound program.

I haven't read any posts, but plz read the faq and do starting strength.

This is a terrible routine.

You're gonna get tons of "just do SS" here, which is valid since it works better than anything else. I'm gonna play devil's advocate, though.

If this guy truly doesn't care about his lower body, does he need to do SS? Like, OP, if you really don't care about having a big strong upper body and chicken legs, I guess you could just do the upper body SS stuff in the resource section and drop the squats and deads. And add chins/pulls/dips and probably curls since you're gonna do those anyway.

That said, you'll never get the GH release you get doing heavy squats and deads, so your upper body gains will be comparably small versus what you would get doing the full program. At any rate, your program as it is sucks. Too much volume and going to failure is not good.

ATAT,

No. No. No. You veer off track, but correct yourself at the end. If your upper body is small, I'd dare say that just doing squats/deads will get you a bigger upper body than doing some ridiculous circuit training variant of low weight high rep/lactic acid/******/failure training.

Thremp--Just wanted to offer an antidote to the kneejerk (though correct) response of "just do SS." Like, it is possible to build a big upper body without doing the big two lifts--I see it all the time at my gym, Hulked-out bros who do nine different kinds of curls and DB presses with the legs of a nine-year-old girl.

Do I personally think this is an attractive or desirable look? No. Would it be easier for this guy to get bigger overall doing anabolic GH-releasing compound leg lifts? Yes. But if all he wants is a bigger upper body, I think he can get it more efficiently doing a heavy linear progression program sans leg stuff than by doing the ******o zillion rep program he's currently on.

That said, OP, just do SS.

The GH-phenomenon effect from compound movements is probably an overrated thing in training. Compound movements are significantly better than the smaller movements, but mainly for other reasons, not necessarily GH-release. So, yea, you can get some size without doing anything for the lower body, but not nearly as much as you would if you were simultaneously doing the lower stuff. And, like I said, not necessarily because of GH release, but other factors associated with lifting heavy stuff using the biggest muscles in your body. Things that affect rate coding and your body's inhibitory mechanisms, amongst other things (definitely things no one on this forum probably cares about).

Also, a good point to make about GH is that there a gazillion things you can do to stimulate its release. Take a cold shower? GH release. Sit in a sauna? GH release. Starving? GH release. Take a nap? GH release. You'd be a lot better off worrying about adding weight to the bar in your workouts than thinking about the GH response you're gonna get from a set of deadlifts.


www.alexmaroko.blogspot.com

I'm definitely interested in any material you have on inhibitory mechanisms and whatnot.

Alex,

Aren't there a variety of endocrine responses just beyond GH release that are caused by heavy lifting?

lol

For some true ectomorphs, the hormone release triggered by heavy full-body compound movements can make an amazing difference.

Absolutely, they're well-documented and easily found with a quick google search. I'm just saying that the amounts of these hormones released aren't nearly enough to have the profound effect a lot of "gurus" would have you believe.

For instance, people taking growth hormone exogenously are taking in much, much larger amounts than the amount your body releases in response to heavy lifting. I mean, I'll still take it, but it's just not as important as a lot of people would have you believe.

Simply, between your muscle spindles and your Golgi Tendon Organ, your body will literally shut off its muscles when it feels like it's going to hurt itself. So, if you try to bench a supra-maximal load, it's not so much that you're not strong enough to lift it, but that your body won't let you, for fear of injury.

Lifting near-maximal loads (85%+) consistently can help your body, albeit very slowly, learn to shut off those mechanisms that are getting in the way of you moving some heavy ****.

Also, doing things that will greatly stimulate your sympathetic nervous system and the associated catecholamines it sends out, can help you over time to have better control of your arousal levels (not those arousal levels!), helping you continue to move heavy weight, since when you're really psyched up, your body will lower it's inhibitory response.

For instance, when a mom's kid is stuck under a car and she somehow obtains the strength to budge the car and save the kid. That might be a 350 lb. deadlift (just a number, I have no idea what it actually is). Do you think if that woman was in your everyday, commercial gym she could DL 350 lbs.? Probably not, unless she is a trained PL'er.

So, how was she able to move the car to save her kid? Her sympathetic system sensed the urgency of the situation and acted accordingly, releasing a ton of epinephrine and nor-epinephrine etc., getting her arousal levels sky-high, shutting off her GTO and muscles spindles, allowing her to lift the car. Turn off your body's inhibitions and suddenly that ball-and-chain is detached.

The ectomorph, endomorph, mesomorph stuff is overrated too. If you eat enough and at the right times and lift with a solid plan based on progressing, you'll grow. Different genetic make-ups will have certain people growing faster than others, but if you're consistent, you'll grow.

Too many people use the fact they're naturally skinny with a lightning metabolism as a crutch. The truth usually is that they just don't eat enough.

For a plain beginner, the hormone response induced by heavy lifting can make a difference at the very beginning, because it's such a disruption to their body's level of homeostasis, but that dries up pretty quickly. I don't have the book in front of me, but I remember reading a book by W. Kraemer, where they had done studies showing that the associated hormonal responses that society usually thinks about (Test, GH etc.) take a good two years for most people before they start getting any kind of real response, and even then, it's not really enough to make some huge difference that some people like to think and promise to others.

I've read this with less detail many times related to Olympic weightlifting. Boris Sheiko also mentions it when discussing his programming and the percentages he employs and the concept of peaking.

It also seems to be implied that this effect becomes more and more minimal with training. You come closer to realizing the real strength potential of the muscles by repeatedly telling the body that there is a near maximal load that it has to lift or be crushed or w/e.

Maybe if I actually allow the barbell to fall on me and crush me for a few seconds as a regular part of my training there will be some sort of training effect generated? Only one way to find out

QFMFT

You just don't know.

Eating a lot is easy as pie. It's the least of a true ectomorphs's problems. I could out-eat my dad 3x as a 12 year old and it didn't matter. Not consuming enough calories, as a problem, is a joke for what I would guess is most ectomorphs.

How stupid or self-unaware do you think being an ectomorph makes someone?

Absolutely wrong. This is way much too much of a lazy and sloppy blanket statement.

First of all, it assumes a sort of lock-step among types. In real life, people do different things, no matter what type they are. Diet, exercise, stress, sleep, etc., are all individual. And ectomorphs either exist or they don't. If they do, then we can fairly discuss variance among types. If they don't, or if you are arguing they don't, then we are on a whole different plane of argument.

If they do, then their results vs. those of others are distinct. And according to existing science (screw my opinion) they are indeed distinct.

Time for anecdotes? Seem so, and why not.

In my own case (f*ck me!), as a very active ectomorph from 8 years old on, there isn't a single friend I saw not advance in weightlifting further than myself. Yes, this is the age at which I started resistance training.

In fact I introduced ALL OF my friends pre-20-ish years old to weightlifting. And not a single one didn't progress further in terms of either strength or mass than I did, and in short order. This despite the fact that I ate like crazy. My parents even told me I needed to cool down, because from about ten years old on, I ate twice as much as my dad if not more, and was hungry again about two hours later(if not one hour later!). And then later again that same evening. I was not proud. I was not finicky. And I was eating them out of house and home.

Luckily, I had indulgent parents in this respect for the most part, and my mother went out to local chicken/egg farms and got me big slabs of eggs, in either 6 x 6 flats if I recall correctly, four stacks at a time. I ate like a fiend and gobbled raw eggs like Rocky (I'm old) every single day, sometimes multiple times per day, before Sylvester Stallone was Rocky.

The result? Pretty much nothing. I watched as my friends within weeks or a couple of months achieved great results on the programs I had designed for them and did myself.

It was a lifelong slap in the face until I started deadlifting.

Blarg has over twice as many posts as me. And his (sans some rare gems in SB) likely have more content. This does not bode well.

I'm curious about the hormonal thing since its really not a very easily documented thing. Hormones interact in weird and freaky ways with absurd canceling or synergistic effects. I think its all silliness, but I'm sure lifting heavy stuff does good ****.