Let me begin by giving you my current stats. I am a 25 year old male. I'm 5'5"/165cm tall and weigh 151#/68.6kg. I really have no idea what my LBM is. My arms are very slim, I wear size 8.5-9 shoes, so I have a relatively small frame.

I carry most of my fat in my chest and abdomen, have a decent gut and very slight man-tits. I feel like it would be kind of deceptive to estimate my bodyfat% because I just have so little muscle. For example, I probably appear to be >30% bodyfat just because I am so out of shape, but it might be more like 22-23.

As far as my background, I haven't been athletic basically ever. I am a very sedentary individual. As far as gauging my athletic aptitude, I probably could jog (5mphish)1/4 to 1/2 a mile before being gassed, and run less than 1/4 a mile. I attempted starting strength a few weeks ago, and went at it strong for about 3 weeks, until I had a muscle strain in my left quad. I'm sure it was very minor, but it freaked me out enough that I stopped, and then immediately after that I had to go to Vegas, so I decided to take a couple of weeks off from lifting. My lifts at that time: squat-85, bench-75, dead-165, press- 55, and i couldn't even do pendlay rows with decent enough form to record a weight.

So now I'm back fresh from vegas and ready to start back. Some questions/concerns:

1. My biceps and shoulders are very weak, so I'm not sure what I should be doing in place of PC/rows. I'm obviously not able to do a pullup. Help here?

2. I know rippetoe says you're a pussy if you can't squat heavy 3 days a week. It's just that strain kinda freaked me out. Should I maybe just squat heavy on Monday and Friday? Would having Wednesday be a high rep day be counterproductive to the adaptation response?

3. I am so ****** confused on what cardio, if any, would be appropriate for me. I would think I am too unfit for HIIT at this point, but it seems like everyone just ****s all over LISS every chance they get. I would really like to not be completely gassed after a 30 second jog, so I feel like I should be doing something in this department, if only for general preparedness.

4. I'm equally confused on diet. I'm not a food addict, and I believe I could generally stick to any sort of diet. My diet while I was doing SS last month was basically 1200-1500 calories at a 50p/30f/20c split, which I believed to be a slight deficit. My long term goal with this lifestyle change is to be "in better shape," so I'm not sure if I should be eating a deficit or a surplus. As I understand it, I will stall on my lifts really early if I am not on a diet conducive to weight gain. But on the other hand, I just don't know if gaining 1/2 a pound of muscle a week is worth the 2 pounds of fat and water I'll gain with that, seeing as I'm already overweight.

5. I am completely unaware of how to stretch, can someone link me to a good resource.


To conclude, I would like for you to put yourself in my situation. What would you do?

just do it like it says. Add weight every workout. You're incredibly weak. So was I (and still am, but less so). Your body can handle it.

For now, I wouldn't sweat cardio too much. Maybe some 30-45 min walks if you like doing that. I'd worry more about getting stronger.

I'll let others elaborate on diet.

WHat's your warmup routine like? At the weights you're lifting I expect whatever strain you had was a function of cold muscles/ lack of flexibility, which could probably be avoided with a decent warmup.

couple minutes jog, air squats, then stndrd pyramid up to workset

Laying off the heroin and staying away from jailbait schoolgirls would be a good start.

1) You can do negative pull ups where you jump up and try to control your decent http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opr72q6NKTc , fatman pull ups like these with a rack or bar http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pG5LzqnOlc
You can also do band assisted pullups if you have bands but i've never been too fond of them tbh. Just work your way up to being able to do 1 pullup or chin up then just try to batter out as many singles as you can. They're tough but one of the greatest exercise you can do imo.

2) I wouldn't really mess with SS. None of us a special snowflakes and trying to individualise a w/o thats been devised by a guy whose prob forgotten more stuff than anyone on this board isn't a good idea. Especially when it's been custom designed for the likes of us.

3) Do cardio if you want. If your unfit as you sound don't bother about HIIT imo. Just have a game of soccer, basketball, a swim or whatever and you should still be making progress on the cardio front.

Yeah yeah I know. The problem is if I strain something again that would seriously jeopardize my chances of sticking with this. Like, I'm afraid that I'm in this whole other realm of weakness where squatting that often is blatant overtraining.

Oh, another question. I've heard multiple accounts of how you should choose your starting weights when beginning a lifting program. One thing I read said you should add weight until you can barely do 3x5 and then start from that point. Another thing said that you should start with a weight that is "slow." For example squat with an amount that on the first rep you are noticeably slower during the lift.

when the bar slows. If you keep adding weight until it's a huge struggle on your 1st day, your form probably started to suck bad between the set where it first started to slow and the set where you could barely lift. You'll pick up bad habits and stall shortly.

The fact that you are so weak means you won't get overtrained squatting 3x/wk for a long time. Your muscles are not the limiting factor here.

when the bar slows, i'd just take 10lb off, start there, tape myself and make sure i don't look too ******ed.

This is a form issue. Get it sorted out. I hope you own the Starting Strength book or dvd. If not, do it.

can anyone recommend a calorie intake i should shoot for?

What are you actually trying to achive as a whole?

Keeping the same kind of calorie intake but making sure you have a balanced diet with plenty of protein is probably quite important for doing SS and losing probably a little weight. By this i mean compared to before when you were doing nothing. The most imprtant thing is probably to make sure you are getting a really good balance of carbs, protein, fat etc.

Eat plenty of protein from dairy and animals. Eat your fruits and vegetables. Don't be scared of eating fat.

well im not 100% sure what im trying to achieve. I want to look better is the main thing, but I'm not sure how much better i would look if i tried gaining weight from this point. I debate whether i should do PSMF for 3 weeks or so before I take on SS all the way. It seems like in order to progressively overload 5 or 10# every other day on the squat i would need to eat a **** load.

renpwn, it's ridiculously tough to constantly be fighting the cutting/bulking battle, I've been trying for the last 3 years and finally gave up and have been bulking this year, sacrificing this year to be "fat" but finally getting strong and putting much needed muscle on my body. I think even though my waist line has expanded I do look better with my shirt on than I used too when I had skinny arms, no chest/back. Ofc w/o a shirt I'm looking a little pudgy but w/e, I figure cutting will be that much easier once I've put on 10-15lbs of lbm this year (probably low end for a n00b like you or me).

My point is you need to assess your long term goals and work from there, working out and dieting isn't some instant gratification, it's going to take a while. The sooner you get in that mindset the better, so work for the future, sets some aggressive goals, and go after them.

also...

ldo

Do SS and get to the point where you aren't making linear progress on your lifts, and then think about where you want to go from there.

The point is that right now you need to get a lot stronger before you worry about that physique contest you have coming up.

I forgot to add, in regards to legs taking a beating, I don't go m/w/f SS I do Lyle's mon/wed/fri/sat program which is lower/upper/lower/upper, because my legs compared to my upper body suck at recovering and I just didn't feel fulfilled being in the gym only 3 times a week.

so the consensus is that i should eat a good bit and try to get strong then

well no matter what if you ever want to look good (shirtless I'm assuming) you're going to need a helluva lot more muscle than you have now, so either way you're going to have to bulk. If you feel more confident bulking after cutting some unwanted poundage then I don't see too much wrong with that, but eventually you're going to have to gain weight.

If you're comfortable with doing that now go ahead and bulk, get stronger, put on some mass, then cut.

OK today I officially started.

Warmed up with 5 minutes on treadmill walking 4mph.

Squat:

Lots of air squats and a couple of sets of 5 with the bar as I revisited the SS video.

Re: form, I seem to have trouble with how far my knees stick out over my toes. It seems noticeably farther than most that I see, although a lot of the fatter people in the SS vid stick out that far and Rippetoe doesn't say anything to them about it. I assume its an issue with flexibility. Other than that, I feel like my form is good. That said, I felt pretty good about my form up till now, and then that strain happened, which TBK said was a form issue, so who knows.

Anyways then I ramped up to 75# and did 3 sets of that. I started where I was "slow" as advised, but beginning with late in the second set these were pretty tough for me.

Bench Press:

2x5 45, 1x3 55, 1x1 65, worksets 3x5 75#

These went smoothly, and cool thing is that I was able to do the same amount as my last workset before I quit for the past couple weeks (unlike ******* fckface squats).

Deadlift:

1x5 95, Workset 1x5 135#.

Cooled down with stretching like a ****** who has no clue how to stretch. This is the next thing on my to do list to learn.



Diet for the day:



Is this enough food? Too much? This is me eating deliberately more than normal. I feel like my diet in general is decent, but since I'm not experienced at cooking I invariably am not eating enough vegetables. If someone could point me to a thread that has a bunch of awesome simple recipes for making vegetables delicious that would be good.

i feel pretty ashamed that it took me 3-4 rereads to get this. I guess its been 3 years since i came up with the name

Today was a rest day. To help recovery I did all of the easy Magnificent Mobility movements for about half an hour.

Diet:

36 fl oz 1% milk
12 oz 93/7 ground beef
1 slice cheddar cheese
order of steak fajitas at taco mac
36 oz miller lite beer

didn't bother fitdaying it because i have no idea the nutritional value of the fajitas.

Good day today.

I've been absurd sore in my quads all weekend from friday's squats. I was more sore today than on sunday. I was really worried this was gonna keep me from squatting today, and I didn't think there was a chance in hell that i was gonna be able to add weight from last workout. Today's workout consisted of:

5 minutes brisk treadmill walk, even though I basically couldn't walk from the soreness. This helped it dramatically.

Then I did the first 80% of the magnificent mobility exercises on the dvd for about 45 minutes. This was very hard, and I have my work cut out for me in this area. I'm thinking about doing this whole dvd (every exercise I'm capable of at least) daily for a while.

Then I walked downstairs to the basement, and miraculously I didn't have to waddle down the stairs like a ****** (yay MM).

squat 3x5 85# - added 10# YESSSS
press 3x5 55#

I've decided I'm going to follow rippetoes novice program in Practical Programming and chill on doing cleans for a couple of months, substituting chinups instead. Problem is I am nowhere near capable of doing one. I tried a couple of fatmans and they just felt really awkward for me (not to mention painful since i was already gassed from the press and still sore from squatting).

So I decided (sigh) to do standing cable pulldowns for the first few weeks.

3x5 60#



P.S. I'm pretty sure I figured out why I strained my quad. Apparently it wasn't a strain, it was patellar tendonitis. The cause was a combination of highbar position (which puts much more pressure on this tendon apparently) and the fact that I was letting my knees get too far over my toes. Last workout I switched to the rx'ed lowbar position and this workout I stood the head of my bass amp at my toe and made sure not to touch it during my squat warmup sets. I think my form is much better now.