Hi-

I've been lifting weights for the last 30 months and seen limited results. Basically, I have focused on all the wrong things. I have done chest and biceps one day, triceps and shoulders the next, while mixing in cardio, abs, and other bodyweight exercises (air squats, pushups, dips, etc). I workout 4 days a week.

I am 5'10", 175 pounds and would like to add 10-15 pounds of muscle mass. I know I need to begin squatting, dead lifting, etc.

I have poked around the forum quite a bit the last few days. Should I begin by hiring a personal trainer for the first month or two to help me with my form? I looked into SS. I am not sure if that is the correct workout plan for me as I have been working out 4 times a week for 30 months. On the other hand, I don't have much experience with squatting, DL, etc.

If you can find a trainer who is understanding explicitly what you want, then it is not a terrible idea. But finding one at anything other then a true garage/powerlifter gym might be near impossible.

Many standard commercial gym trainers are a lot of upper-body-bro types.

Depends very much on the trainer. Most are awful. If you can a legit one who will actually coach you the movements then that is a great option. As for SS not being the right option due to 30 months, well it certainly would be the right option for squatting and deadlifting and you can always do a hybrid program where you use intermediate programming for the upper body whilst following standard SS routine for the three lower body lifts. What are your numbers though? Plenty of guys in my gym have been training for like 5 years and can't bench BW no joke. This is actually fairly standard across the world which is quite depressing really.

i learnt good form from reading SS and the SS wiki page, and by taking videos of my lifts and posting them for comment here. Also watching other lifters videos and watching what advice they were given.

if you have a decent powerlifting or black iron gym nearby, they might do coaching that would be leagues better than you'll find in a globo gym.

I generally work out alone. My workouts have traditionally been 3 exercises for each muscle with three sets of 10. For example, during a chest and bicep day my chest exercises are bench, incline bench, and flys.

On the bench my sets are 155 lbs. I am not sure what my max bench would be (because i haven't tried), but I would guess 185-190 given I do 155 30 times.

Shoulder press 110 pounds 30 times.
Curl 35 pound dumbbells 30 times.

I have no idea with squatting and deadlifting as I have no experience.

Thanks for the advice so far.

You do 30 reps of each exercise? For how long? What has your upper body programming generally been like, extremely high reps always?

Just do Starting Strength straight up imo. You will get a hell of a lot out of sets of 5's if you have been on a super high rep program. Even if you only squeeze a month or two out of it it will increase your strength rapidly. Then you can branch out to intermediate programming to more suit your goals on upper body and keep up the linear progression (adding weight every workout) to your lower body exercises for quite a while after.

I think he meant his three sets of ten. But he should still do what you say imo

Ok, I think I will do the 3 days of SS like explained and then one day of arms. I think I should be able to handle 4 days a week.

If a woman who was once very overweight lost approximately 100 lbs but still has 30/40 to go, is it advisable to start lifting weights or do any kind of calisthenics? Should she wait until she loses more and focus on aerobic activity?

Good friend who has a had a lot of health problems over the past few years starting to take her health more seriously. Can't afford a personal trainer and doesn't know where to go. She asked me because I am very active and work out, but I really don't want to give her bad advice.


She is concerned about building muscle on top of fat, but I don't know if that is possible? She also needs to get rid of stomach fat, that is her biggest problem.

I know she would really appreciate any help at all. I have to admire how far she has come.

Here's a pretty good article that addresses some concerns many women have about lifting weights.

http://www.thespartanwarrior.com/pos...sdontbulkwomen

Ask her if she wants to be toned - or wants to "tighten up" the loose skin that is more then likely there.

If she answers yes then you start building muscle because that's what "toned" is. Well, its both the presence of visible muscle mass as well as lower body fat. But lower body fat alone just gets you the stick look.

If she has real health problems, you should really advice her to see her doctor... The muscle on fat is pretty much a non-issue though, I'd look at more from the perspective of using weight training if she is able to as a way to lose more body fat since your body will burn both fat and muscle for energy on a cut otherwise (and lifting weights would not ensure against any muscle loss, just that it would be minimized compared to straight dieting)...

You could just do your arm accessory stuff at the end of each day 3 days a week, but try it and see. I wouldn't go crazy on arm day youdon't want to harm your bench and press progress.

Anyone want to help with programming for a 34 year old woman that has degenerative disc disorder? She's interested in gaining strength but I don't think she should do anything to compress her discs.

I'm thinking something like this:

3 sets 10 bodyweight squats

3x5 bench

Then next workout:

3x10 bw squats

3x5 light overhead press

any suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

Just saw this. Thank you for the kind offer.

I decided to just have my wife wake me up at 6:30 am regardless of what time I fall asleep, and I seem to be adjusting ok and starting to get to bed earlier.

Thinking about putting a treadmill in my room...should I worry about my room smelling like sweat 24/7? Or should it be fine as long as I open my window for a few hours after working out on it?

Do you live in a one room efficiency or something? Why would you put it in your (I assume) bed room?

and unless you sweat like a hog and drip, its not going to smell.

Nowhere else to put it in my house...and I do sweat a lot when working out actually

Upgrade from the couch IMO.

Spray w cleaning agent and wipe down when you're done?

I usually feel a bit of a pain in my right shoulder when I OHP and especially with dips.
It's probably a tendon issue (tendintis) and I was told to rest my shoulder for few weeks but I don't want to stop SS over this.
My plan is to stop doing dips and to bench on OHP days.
I feel the shoulder a bit when I bench and squat though so is this a good idea or should I just put lifting on hold until shoulder feels better in order to prevent more serious injury to it?

IMO

Stop what hurts. ICE/Aleve etc

DO everything else that doesn't hurt.

Post some vids so you can be sure you don't have form issues causing the problem.

I see all these fitness models giving away their daily meal plans and all of them eat so much protein which is way above the 1g/lb of lean mass recommended everywhere. They eat poultry and fish at least three times a day while consuming 5-6 scoops of whey protein every single day. Now I consume slighly less than 1g/lb and that's with counting protein from nuts and carb sources. Any thoughts on this?

Being sponsored by supplement companies changes many of those guys' advice quite a bit, not to mention half of them don't know what they're talking about anyway.

You're fine.

examine.com has a good discussion of the science about protein requirements