New Workout

Once again, Lord melkor, you have me convinced.  Gonna start with the 5X5's tomorrow.  But I do have a couple of questions. 

First, my last weight sessions we're a day of push lifts, rotated with a day of pull lifts.  I think I can continue like this while doing the unevern sets.  But wanted to check.

Second, should I plane a certain length of time to plan to do the weights.  Such as 3 weeks on, and one week of rest.

Third, I plan to keep doing my cardio as I have been doing in on off weight days.  But what about weight days.  I was thinking that on weight days I mights start with a good stretch, the hit the weight machines, then get some cardio by water walking. 

Still don't understand whu my upper body seems to get weaker as the resy of me gets stronger.  But I'll keep to the plan. 

Thanks melkor

That would actually be perfect; you'd arrange it like so:

                heavy   medium   light

                5x5        4x10    3x15

Workout:  push     pull        ; push

Workout:  pull       push      pull

Or potentially swap the medium and light days so you'd go 5x5,3x15,4x10 if you find that the heavy days are heavy enough that you're still sorta fried on the next lifting day. That means going heavy once a week, coasting to let your nervous system recover while doing some volume work, and then getting a hypertrophy stimulus just before the weekend with the medium day.

 In principle it's the same idea as your current heavy/light rotations, but much shorter periods - and remember to have a week off every 8-12 weeks to give your joints a break. You'll notice that you'll only repeat the same exact set/rep scheme once every 2 weeks with this - a more advanced version you can try once this stops working is to make up two different push/pull workouts too(a/b) and put them into the rotation. Then you'd have 4 individual workouts (push a, push b, pull a, pull b) and 3 set/rep schemes, and you wouldn't repeat the same workout for 4 weeks - like so

                heavy   medium   light

                5x5        4x10    3x15

Workout:  push A    pull A    push B

Workout:  pull B      push A     pull A

Workout:  push B    pull B    push A

Workout:  pull A      push B     pull B

Don't do that until the first version stops working though, you never want to make your workouts more complicated than you absolutely have to in order to see progress. Otherwise, once progress stalls and you're already doing everything, what can you add in to get moving again?

 Avoid static stretching before lifting unless as a precursor to dynamic mobility drills -this article from Mike Boyle gives one example for how to arrange your workouts, though personally I tend to do dynamic mobility work before lifting, static stretching afterwards. You'll have to think a bit about which of these dynamic mobility drills you can safely do, like these, these or these; not all of them are appropriate for you but the main idea is to warm up by moving all your joints through their full range of motion to loosen up and prep for loading.

 And yep, sounds like a good plan. Post-lifting, your system is flooded with adrenalin, growth hormone and other goodies that mobilize fatty acids from reserves, so it's a good time to get in some low intensity cardio to burn off the energy your weights workout will have liberated. Given what your muscles will be needing post-lifting it might be a good idea to get in a bit of protein between the lifting and the cardio, but if you've been doing proper pre-workout nutrition it's not real critical. It might improve results with a few percentage points though and if you're an optimization geek like me that's worth noticing ;) In real life there's no perceptible difference between 90% and 92% efficiency, we can't tell the difference without keeping logs. But since I'm the type that does keep logs and feel pretty chuffed when I can wring an extra percentage point from my efforts, I thought I'd mention it ;)

Hey melkor,

Day 2 of the new workout plan.  Went with a Push day, btw the more difficult of the two workouts, and went with the 4x10 today.  Reducing the weight by about a third of the last time I lifeted using the Cybrex machines. 

I started the workout by doing a half set of cardio.  I plan to add some of the dynamic mobility drills to the pre weights cardio starting Friday.  The cardio was 10 minutes on the bike, and 6 minutes on the stepper.  The I hit the Cybex machines for 40 minutes.  Then 20 minutes of stretching, followed by 30 minutes of water walking. 

It was an excellent workout.  My muscle were shaking like jello during my stretch< and I'm feeling it pretty good .

The only thing that really bugs me is that the chest press, and overhead press, are both eating me up on very low weights.  I think I ended up doing tthe overhead at only ten pounds.  And Monday I was only able to do 30 pounds on the arm curl.

But then I can lat 170, and the arm extention was pretty good at 50 pounds.  Just don't get what's going on with my arms. 

Going to do my regular cardio tomorrow, and then the 3x15 Cybrex on Friday.  And the cardio again on Sat.

Eeexcellent! I'm liking this schedule - warmup, mobility drills, lifting workout, stretch, cardio, right? Yup, looks good.

Hmm, could be you're just using them a lot more what with your new building projects, so they're already good and worn out by the time you hit the gym. You're doing a lot of work with your new projects and that takes it toll too; exercise doesn't just happen in the gym. Or it could just be that particular day was a bad training day; some workouts just aren't happening the way they "ought".

What are mobility drills, what do they accomplish, and how do you do them?

I plan on googling, but, Melkor, I like to hear your explainations of things.

Moving your muscles and joints through their active range of motion - where static stretching increases passive flexibility, mobility drills increase the active range of motion in a muscle/joint. Mike Boyle outlines a theoretical framework for it in Joint-by-Joint Approach to Training and has some suggested exercises in Essential 8 Mobility Drills - though I'm not too sure about that tennis ball thing; I prefer using overhead squats for thoracic spine mobility. One of the warmup routines I use a lot when I'm not doing something from "Magnificent Mobility" is the mobility complex which is a lovely lead-in to training of any kind ;)

Yeah I saw that article, with the tennis balls. I was confused, lol. The others seem to make more sense. Thanks!

The 3rd day of lifting went pretty well yesterday.  I have come up with a rule of thumb that seems to work.  Lifting as heavy as possible for the Monday 5x5 workout.  For Wednesday's 4x10 I lifet about 75% of the Monday's weight.  Then Friday's 3x15 is 50% of Monday's lift. 

Seems to work pretty good right now.  I'm feeling strong and flexable today, with just a bit of muscle soreness.  I think that I have finally made it back to the shape I was in before I had pnemonia.  The bad news is that I'm about 30 pounds heavier now.  Ahh well!!  On the right track.

Melkor, this is a really useful thread.  Thanks again for putting so much thought, effort and detail into your responses.  Could it perhaps be added to the links in the FAQ thread so it doesn't get lost in the graveyard of CC threads gone by?

melkor is Da Man

So today was the heavy push day.  Leg press, glute extension, leg extention, etc.  I feel like I'm walking around on jello, so I think the workout went pretty well.  And then the water walking started out pretty painful, but got alot better in the last 15 minutes. 

Question. should I plan in a week of rest after two full rotations (about 4 weeks)?

BTW, a nice drop in weight today!!