Am I lifting too hard, too often?

I lift on average 5 days a week, alternating upper and lower body. For the most part I do 3 sets of 10 reps with varying weights. My upper body routine is:

incline bench press, close grip BP @ 60 pds

Preacher curls, incline dumbbell press, dumbbell row, hammer curl, dumbbell curl to overhead press @ 13 pds

Overhead dumbbell extension, flat bench flye @ 8 pds

Arm curls @ 50 pds

Lower body routine (following the same 3 sets, 10 reps) is:

squats, good morning @ 50pds

Calf lifts @ 100 pds

Romanian deadlift @ 60 pds

I know I'm not quite taking in enough protein, on a really good day I get 80 grams in. I do almost no cardio. The only other thing I can think to mention is my stats, 5'6", 32 y/o, 123 (ish) pounds.

 

I'm trying to lower BF%, so I have a deficit most days but would love to get ripped! :)

Any advice is welcome!!

 

 

As long as you aren't working the same muscle group on consecutive days that I'm pretty sure that you are fine.  By the way, it is great that you are doing such a varied and strong workout routine.  Make sure you give your body at least 1 day a week of complete rest so you can completely recover.

Thanks! I usually get 2 days of rest (not always consecutive).

I was just getting concerned that I'm lifting my way to injury. I don't go to failure, but I can just barely finish some of those sets. Others I could stand to add more weight (like on the dumbbell exercises), but due to only having certain weights here at home, it's either a little less than I can stand or too much!

What about the issue of protein? Can I fully repair without having the minimum amount, which as I understand it, is my body weight in grams?

Well, if you want the exact formula it's 1.8g/kg when you're strength training. But you don't have to be really obsessive about it, as long as you're in the right neighbourhood it's good enough for most purposes.

 If you were competing in Beijing you'd need to obsess more, but for most people it's a waste of good worry to try to get it accurate down to the gram ;)

 Going to failure on most sets sounds good actually - don't always do that, it's harsh on your CNS function and can cause adrenal and neural fatigue. But you progress quicker if you do push yourself up to the edge of overtraining every now and again - check out the two-factor theory link in the FAQ for one example of a training plan that incorporates that.

 Your exercise selection looks reasonably good - think in terms of pushing and pulling movements and try to have a balance in each plane of motion and you'll be fine.

 Oh, and check out Complexes for Fat Loss by Certified Evil Genius Alwyn Cosgrove - adding that to your workouts for a couple weeks will kick your fat burning up a notch :)

Thanks for the links melkor. Out of curiosity, have you (or anyone you know) ever done Cosgroves workout? I'm wondering how long it takes- it doesn't seem like it'd take very long.

Most of the time my workout is over within 20-25 minutes of starting. I always feel like I should be there longer, but doing...what?? Does it have to be lengthy to be the most effective? I don't know what to do to lengthen it out without getting redundant. Ex, standing and seated calf lifts.

I've used those complexes as part of my workout - they're a warmup/metabolic conditioning tool and take about 10-15 minutes to do and slots neatly into most programs in place of 10 minutes of cardio as warmup or finisher, depending on your goal. I prefer to use them after the strength training part of the workout is done with, because after 10 minutes of those complexes I'm usually done for.

 So they're not a complete workout in and of themselves, but 10 minutes of complexes at the start or end of your workouts helps prod your body into fat loss mode :)

I'll give it a try...I may have to do it on lower body days only because I'm already all done in on upper body days after my regular routine!

No cardio? Looks to me like that's pretty much all you're doing, cardio with weights, that is.

Lifting weights 5 days a week is WAY too much. Sorry dakatz, but resting one day per week will NOT let your body completely recover, not even close.

No, I'm not a professional bodybuilder, but I've read enough to have a pretty good idea of what is true and what isn't. Your routine is too taxing to the system to allow you to keep growing muscle and strength.

If you want to build muscle and get ripped, you must conduct short, intense workouts followed by 4 to 7 days of rest to allow your body to recover and to allow it to grow new muscle.

At the rate you are going, you will reach plateaus on your weight amounts very quickly, if you haven't already. If you don't change the weight you're lifting, your body will adjust to it and then what you have is basically an aerobic routine. But as the intensity of your workouts increase, you must also increase the amount of recovery to keep progressing.

Don't just take my word for it, though. Read the book "High Intensity Training, the Mike Mentzer Way, and it will open your eyes, and give you hours to time to do other things besides lifting weights over and over again five days a week.

I know you may not want to be a bodybuilder, and neither do I. But I want to use my time in the gym efficiently to get stronger and help me keep excess weight off.

Good luck.

Mike Menzer was good in the early part of his career, but all of his HIT training material is just loco - there's no physiological basis for much/most/anything of what he wrote depending on how close to the end of his career you're looking.

 He had some worthwile ideas on training intensity and you can learn a few things from him, but towards the end of his life he was completely unhinged and I'd advise anyone who have any kind of physique goals to not take Menzer seriously.

 You can get results with any kind of approach, even HIT/Heavy Duty - once. Your body responds best to radical change in your workout routine, and HIT is certainly a radical change, which is why a lot of people hat a lot of success with the concept in the early seventies. But there's a reason nobody who knows what they're doing takes HIT seriously as a training concept over the long haul; it's not a training methodology with demonstrated long-term results.

  You can use it as a change from your normal program, and if you stick to using HIT-style workouts for 4-6 weeks out of every year it can be a useful tool to break up your routine and keep you from stalling by growing stale, but it's not a program with longterm success prospects. 

Original Post by doliver442:

No cardio? Looks to me like that's pretty much all you're doing, cardio with weights, that is.

Lifting weights 5 days a week is WAY too much. Sorry dakatz, but resting one day per week will NOT let your body completely recover, not even close.

 

If you want to build muscle and get ripped, you must conduct short, intense workouts followed by 4 to 7 days of rest to allow your body to recover and to allow it to grow new muscle.

At the rate you are going, you will reach plateaus on your weight amounts very quickly, if you haven't already. If you don't change the weight you're lifting, your body will adjust to it and then what you have is basically an aerobic routine. But as the intensity of your workouts increase, you must also increase the amount of recovery to keep progressing.

I do adjust the amount of weight that I lift, about every 2 weeks. After I get so that it becomes a little bit easier, I add some weight to it. Most of the time I'm lifting alone, so I don't want to get more than I can handle, especially on the bench press.

By 4-7 days of rest, do you mean total body rest, or just the areas that I was working on, as in, lift upper body only once or twice per week, same with lower body?

So, should I be lifting upper once per week, lower once per week, cut down my reps to about 6 per set and lift to my absolute limit? And less exercises? ( by that I mean only do one thing that works my biceps, one for triceps, one for forearms, etc, instead of doing several different ones that all target the same muscles?)