mythil

If that's what you like then sure. I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to race a sprinter or marathon runner.

Everyone says that Was thinking of doing it with the bodyweight assists.

Oh I see, it wasn't the spreadsheet not working, was my office program not working

No I don't have the spreadsheet yet but I think I know what you're talking about.. Seems to help now that I'm looking at it but it's a bitch to work out KG to lbs and telling the sheet to work in 5 and 2.5k

Heh, I get it now, I feel so dumb as it was quite easy.. You only do the 5/3/1 lift on week 3 and the rest you do 4x5 or 3 or whatever. I've got to the end of the week for this routine and then I'll try the 5/3/1 with bodyweight assist for now. Only issue it, on odd kg weight you can't really (at least at my gym) put that number on the bar. What do you do, round to the nearest 5?

So you're always working off of your 90% max?

Bookmarked that page. I did want to do 5/3/1 but I don't think I was advanced enough for it so doing 4x5 until I can work my way up. I didn't quite understand the part of the book where he talks about splitting 1 rep max percentages on the 5/3/1 lift.

Ah so you meant 3-5 sets of 10-15 reps? That's almost what I do already

When you say 4-5 reps and 10-15 reps, do you mean alternating them or doing either or? As you see what I'm doing now is Main lift: 4x5 heavy (90%) Lift 1 Lift 2 Lift 3 - All at 3x10 (70%)

Okay today was fine using a more traditional 3x10 at 75% and 4x5 at 90% on the one big lift. The biggest annoyance are the DB lifts as I can't do 75% of my one rep from the main lift on one arm so I end up halving that for the DB so it's split between the two. This may end up being different for things like DB rows. I should also look into doing more cardio and planning when I'm going to cut any excess fat I put on.

But you won't be using heavy weight at all if you're looking at doing 20-30 reps? What are your goals that you want to achieve from your training plan mate, anything else apart from looking and feeling better like you said a few posts above this one? There are elements of it that don't make any sense to me ~ no offense intended at all btw! Feel free to take a look at my journal, it's pretty detailed on the training side of things and might give you a few ideas (possibly). Thanks, and feel free to yell out of you need anything MF. Just building muscle mate, that's about it. Just looking good really. I had a look around and I took the high rep sets out because I don't really need them to build endurance right now. Training for my sport I tend to do a lot of swings with the sword that ends up being high rep sets with a weighted sword. I found I was doing far too much of that so I could end up just using the sword training for endurance. I switched it to 4 main compound lifts a week using 90% of my one rep max on a 4x5 then all the other work is done at 70% of my one rep using 3x10 to build muscle. Hoping to build muscle but keep a bit of strength too. I'm still a bit new to weight lifting for muscle instead of general "keeping fit" so I think there will be quite a few tweaks before I get it right Though all advice will be welcome

Well today was good, added another 5kg to my squat. More tweaking though, I found that taking 10% of my max lift can be a bit too light, 30% is a bit too heavy on some of them. I've fiddled with a few things and I came up with something simple, it looks complex but isn't really. Going to look at low weight and higher weight, see what works for me.

I don't mind cardio machines, I use the cross trainer every morning. I don't mind machines, I don't use them as I prefer free weights.. However, I don't see why free weights should suffer for it. Every time I talk to someone in the room between sets they always tell me that this place is too small..

Well today was a learning experience. On the plus side my deadlift has gone up to 80kg, though I've realized that I've become a grunter, heh.. Something else that needs tweaks, the 30% thing. I found that my main lifts are quite heavy and 30% of that is still quite heavy, a bit too heavy to get to 20 reps let alone past that. So I've decided to take the weight down to 10%.. A little light you may think though it means I can actually do the plan of 20-30 reps, it gets pretty hard around the mid 20's.

Weatabix with bananas... What I'm lazy >.>

You know it just came too me.. Even if the people makes these decisions don't know jack about gyms, why don't they go and watch a gym at different points of the day, look at what things are used the most and update those things or add more. To my rough count there are 20-30 different machines for cardio (not including the spinning class thing) and I have never seen all of them taken, I've never once seen one whole line of treadmills, bikes, cross trainers or anything taken. The weight machines are used, such as the lat pulldown and so on but how long does that take, five minutes depending on your sets? Do you know what is always in use.. Free weights, barbells and so on.

Wow, three lots of light lifts, that's 180 reps.. my arms and shoulders are on fire, well they were, back to normal now

Well it's only been about a week doing it so I couldn't tell you if there are any physical results yet, however it has had some effect, my muscles are worn out by the time I leave the gym but recover pretty fast so I'm not as tired as I used to be for the next gym visit. I started doing that in the hope that I wouldn't be tired by Saturday when I have Kendo training.

Okay, so far my plan of upping the weight on the big lifts by 2.5 to 5kg a week is currently working. However, I may need to move some stuff around.. Look at my other post here viewtopic.php?f=46&t=28513

It's a stupid ass idea as well. There are PLENTY of cardio machines and weight machines already, I've never seen them all in use at the same time but the free weights area was always in use. Also, if you put all those benches, the squat rack and so on in there then you can't move something out of the way without blocking something else..

Well the annoying thing is that I don't have much choice, it's the only gym anywhere near me. So I'll either have to wait longer to get some sort of space to use free weights or just drop them altogether and use machines *sigh*

Okay so I went to my normal workout today and realized that they had moved the free weights to a new room.. Okay so I get on with my squats and so on and then I realize that the room is half the length of the old free weight area. This became more apparent when a handful of other guys were trying to do their lifts in the same area and were having to rotate in a small bit of free floor space.. I looked around, trying to find or make a free area to do my deadlifts but I couldn't find anything.. It seems the gym has added half an hour onto my workouts by moving the weights.. Okay.. I wasn't too happy but I thought "maybe they are going to double up and put some new weights in the old area too".. Nope.. I went to talk the people on the desk and was told "Didn't you read the floor plan? That's what we are doing now.." added with "We're putting some machines in the old place and some lighter dumbbells for "the girls", and anyway the new space is the same width as the old one".. Yea.. Same width but half the length and when you add in the floor space needed for the squat rack, benches (which take up all the wall space) and several guys trying to do their lifts it's more than a tad bit smaller than the old area... So what now.. I don't really want to wait around to try and get some floor space in the new area, but then again this is the only gym anywhere near me.. I don't seem to have much choice in the matter.

This is a great line. Permission to steal? Baby Herc You may, also unlike a lot of things on the internet, it's true.

Funny thing that, the gym I go to is pretty strict about putting weights back and people messing with stuff they aren't supposed to. I have seen one or two twenty young something hit the weights like they were the next big thing to come into body building though they always seem to remain skinny as hell and flex the muscles they don't have. I don't lift much on the deadlift (my best lift) but I can get to just under 200lbs if I really, really want to and it's fun watching them look depressed as the semi albino guy with glasses and a three foot pony tail lifts more than they can. You have to break or slightly fracture peoples attitudes some times

So true. Baby Herc True. What kinda gets me is when you see hugely muscled guys using momentum in their lifts, really big swings. I'm sitting back thinking "What are you doing and how is it working?" because it shouldn't.