Hey! So, it’s time to lose some weight. I had a good run during summer, cycling 75-125 miles a week, but cycling season has ended. I was playing a lot of raquetball pre-covid, but I’m not likely to get into an enclosed box with another person breathing hard anytime soon. So, I’m hitting the gym.
My knowledge of working out begins and ends with Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding. But that’s like from 1985 and I’m sure the knowledge base has increased.
What’s the current best accepted method for building strength and flexibility? I know weight loss is mostly kitchen based and I’m changing my diet, but I need a decent workout routine as well
Lets try to get a name change to thinboy8 by next summer!
Just do Starting Strength. You can buy the book and just do what it says. It’s not without flaws. But it’s simple and it’s more than good enough to get started with.
One key thing is lifting with proper form. That’s hard to learn from a book alone. But there are plenty of resources on form available on the interwebs. Also plenty of places you could post vids for form checks and get good feedback.
All things considered, Starting Strength’s descriptions of the lifts helped me a lot with my form, in some ways better than just trying to copy someone doing it right would have. The words and biomechanical descriptions help a lot, and I heartily endorse reading the book.
But, uh, yeah, don’t follow the diet advice. And the brogramming, while a decent start, I’d swap out the power cleans for Pendlay rows so that you get some back and bicep work that’s otherwise absent. It’s also important to know that following that sort of linear progression, you will hit a wall eventually, and it’ll be frustrating after having been able to make such consistent and measurable progress. That doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong usually. It usually means you’re not a beginner anymore, and it’s time for a new brogram.
Thanks. This is what I was looking for. I should have mentioned - I’m not new to weight lifting. Did it quite a bit in my late teens and twenties. But again, I was using knowledge from that era, and I am pretty certain the thinking has changed since back then (was doing 2 day splits, 6 days a week back then). I worked on my form a lot back then and I think it’s still good, at least for the exercises I used to do.
I’ll grab starting strength and go from there. I’m familiar with plateaus so won’t be surprised when they happen.
I didn’t know with absolute certainty, but I always assumed this to be the case.
Here’s how I’d rationalize it. Do you like barbecue? I’m sure I can find you some MAGA, Trump-loving, gun-loving, super-racist antivaxxer, who makes some killer ribs or brisket or whatever.
Now if that guy told you how to make it, the advice would probably be solid, despite his other idiotic views.
That’s what you’re getting with Rippetoe, more or less. As mentioned above, there are certainly some suboptimal pieces of advice, but if you followed it to the letter, you would get a better result than most other advice you could follow.
Also just like barbecue savants, Trumpkins are ubiquitous. If you don’t like Rippetoe, odds are your the next person whose advice you decide to follow has a really high probability of being a Trumper anti-vaxxer. That’s just the way it happens to be.
Best solution is to just give it a few days and try again later.
If it makes you feel better, almost all “exercise science” is largely hogwash. Tons of junk science out there.
What Rippetoe (and I assume others, but definitely him) does is that he will often describe a technique of some sort that he knows works. He then tries to reverse engineer some sort of “scientific” explanation for why it works. Normally it’s garbage, but who cares.
I’m sure if you questioned him, even he would admit that he didn’t start with the science and then end up with the program. He started with the program which he hit upon through years of trial and error followed by observing what works and what doesn’t. Then when he wrote the book, that’s when the “science” part was added in.
I subscribe to the ‘go to the gym and do whatever makes you happy and keeps your body moving’ plan. I do the deads and squats once a week, but I kinda hate them, so I also do the bro lifts. Sometimes I hop on the exercise bikes, some days I go ham on the stairstepper, some days I try and do some laps in the pool, once in a while I jump in the spin class. I run outside. It’s more interesting to me to mix it up. It keeps me in great overall shape, although I don’t lift super heavy. I’m sure SS guys would scoff at tricep pushdowns or pec flys, but whatever, doesn’t matter to me. Just doing bench/deads/squats every day in the gym sounds awful imo. To each their own. And for weight loss specifically, diet is the most important part anyway.
