Beginner training

The advent of the internet has seen a great deal of information being spread about strength training. Overall, I think of this as a positive thing, as it allows trainees from around the world to share ideas, thus exposing people to methods of training they would otherwise have been oblivious to. For example, I would never have found out about any of the 5/3/1 programs without the invention of the internet, for which I am very grateful.

However, there are some aspects of the internet that have, in my opinion, led to a great deal of misinformation being spread. One of these areas is the topic of beginners, and how they should train. Before I go into my arguments about this being a meaningless term, I’d just like to touch on what the “conventional wisdom” commonly advocates for beginners.

Tell me what to do

Most beginners have no idea what they need to be doing in the gym, so they go to the internet and search up “weight training programs for beginners”, or something along those lines. Doing a quick Google search for this gives me some similar-looking programs. The general theme of a “beginner” program seems to fit the following guidelines:

1. Three days a week of lifting
2. Each workout is full-body
3. Strong emphasis on compound movements (bench, squat, dead, press, row, etc.), over isolation movements (biceps curl, triceps extension, lateral raise, leg extention, etc.)
4. Linear progression (i.e. increase the weights every session, or every week)
5. Low overall volume (as in, not many total sets)
6. Small number of movements performed

Starting Strength is a commonly-recommended beginner program, and the number of working sets per workout is between 7 and 14

I’ll touch on each of those points later, but first I’d like to ask a question.

What the hell is a “beginner”, anyway?

At first, this might seem like a trivial question. “Surely a beginner is someone who hasn’t lifted weights before”, you might say. Sure, but what did they do before they decided to start lifting weights? Someone’s pre-lifting background can have a huge impact on what I would personally recommend they do in the weight room. To illustrate what I mean by this, let’s pose a hypothetical scenario of two lifters, Alan and Bob.

Alan is an 18 year-old, who has just finished high school. Alan played sports, such as cricket and football, throughout his childhood. He has never seriously lifted weights, but regularly performed bodyweight movements such as pushups and pullups (and can do 30 and 10 of each, respectively, with good form) as part of his sports training, and just generally to stay in good shape. Alan hardly has a “bodybuilder” physique, but he is lean and reasonably muscular from his sports. Now that Alan has finished school and started working, he can no longer keep up with managing both sports and work, so has decided to take up lifting to stay in shape.

Bob, on the other hand, is a 45 year-old office worker, who has done nothing even remotely physical in the last 30-ish years. Bob may not look “fat”, but when he takes off his shirt, he looks formless and “blobby”. In the event that Bob ever needs to run (to catch a bus, or what have you), he quickly gets out of breath. Bob has decided to start going to the gym to get in shape.

Surely it is clear that these two people are considerably different in terms of their physical capability, despite the fact that both of them could accurately be described as “beginners” to the weight room. I would therefore argue that trying to find a “best beginner workout” is a pointless endeavour, as there is no clear definition of what a beginner is.

What should beginners do, then?

To be honest, I can’t really give a good answer to that question, as there are countless starting points for beginners, so I would have to know a lot about the trainee before I could recommend anything.

Okay, before I give you advice, I’ll need your name, occupation, age, marital status, credit card number, legal ownership of your firstborn. You know, the usual stuff.

To be perfectly honest, I would insist that a guy training with me has to be able to do at least 20 pushups and 5 pullups with good form before they even touch a weight (and maybe halve those numbers for women). So, going back to the examples of Alan and Bob, Alan would be good to go, whereas Bob needs to actually learn how to move his body before we throw heavy weights into the equation. For Alan, I would recommend something like 5/3/1 for Beginners, as this program alleviates many issues I have with popular beginner programs. Speaking of which…

What is wrong with most beginner programs?

Okay, I listed the common traits of beginner programs above, so I’ll dissect them one-by-one here. Some, I disagree greatly, whereas I think others are fine.

1. Training three days a week

I actually don’t have a problem with this one. I would like to make sure those three lifting sessions aren’t the only thing that lifter is doing, but if you include 4-6 conditioning sessions (maybe 2 “hard” and 4 “easy”), it should be great.

      2.      Full-body workouts
 

Again, I actually don’t have a huge issue with this. Full-body workouts are quite good on a 3/week program, as they are tiring enough to warrant the relatively low number of workouts per week.

     3.      Compound > isolation
 

Hmm. I definitely agree that emphasis should be placed on “big” movements, but I think even beginners can benefit from doing things like biceps curls, lateral raises, and calf raises. Those three don’t take a whole lot out of you, so can be “thrown in” to any workout plan without eating into recovery all that much.

    4.      Linear progression
 

This is where I start to take issue with “beginner” workouts. There are two main problems I have with adding weight to the bar every session.

1.      You will stall out very quickly. 

Think of it this way, if a lifter with a 50kg bench press adds 2.5kg to the bar every session, and benches twice per week, in a year’s time, he’ll be benching 310kg. Yeah, this is clearly not a plan that will work out in the long run. At best, he’ll manage to keep this up for a few weeks, and will then have no idea what to do when he fails to keep adding weight.

2.      This focuses on “peaking”, rather than “base building”

I’ll try not to completely lapse into jargon here, but there are two basic components to lifting more weight. One is the size of the muscles involved, the other is “neuromuscular efficiency” (a fancy way of saying how good the muscles you do have are at lifting; kind of like “lifting skill”). Focusing on lifting heavier and heavier weights for low volume is great for increasing the latter, but not so much the former. MythicalStrength has a great blog post on why this is a problem, so I won’t harp on about it here (link: http://mythicalstrength.blogspot.com/2018/06/raise-your-floor-not-your-ceiling.html)

    5.     Low overall volume

The thinking is that, as beginners are new to lifting, they shouldn’t do too much to start out with, as they risk overtraining. In reality, worrying about “overtraining” is kind of like worrying about driving to work, because you might get hit by a meteor. Sure, the possibility is there, but there are about a million other ways in which things could go wrong, all of which are more likely. Combine low volume routines with the common advice to eat like a carthorse, and you just make your bright-eyed trainee with a gigantic excess of calories, without anywhere near enough work being done to make use of them. For reference, 5/3/1 for Beginners has a total of 16 sets of barbell lifts, plus around 15 sets of assistance work. This is still not an astounding level of volume, but it is a damn sight better than 7-14, and certainly enough for beginners to build some muscle.

Apparently, one of these is supposed to be an “after” photo.

But I’m sure he’s happy he can squat more weight for 5 reps, right?

   6.    Small number of movements performed

This is another one I have mixed opinions about. I would be inclined to agree that it is better for beginners to become good at a few things rather than be mediocre at lots of things, but my definition of a "small number" seems different to the common mentality. If I had to pick a list of movements for a beginner to use, my list would be:

• Squats
• Deadlifts
• Bench press
• Overhead press
• Row
• Pullup
• Dips
• Pushup
• Biceps curl
• Lateral raise
• Calf raise
• Band pull-apart/face pull

Note: Any close variation of these lifts is acceptable (like the incline bench for bench presses). So, a total of 12 movements. A pretty small number, but more than the six or so advocated by most beginner programs.

Summary

Before embarking on a quest to get big/strong muscles, make sure you have some kind of base to build on. Bodyweight movements are great for people who lack the co-ordination to safely move heavy weights, and can definitely get you in decent shape.

And lets face it, experience doesn't always guarantee you can move weights safely

Once you do get to the stage where you're ready to hit the weights, actually put some effort into it, and don't buy into the nonsense that you have to rest for 10 minutes between each set. 

Next week: I plan to write two blog posts. First, the follow-up to my personal principles of lifting. Second, how lifting and video games can be similar and different.