A grand hurdle to starting a strength program is establishing the sufficient mobility necessary to perform the classic strength lifts without hurting yourself. Going from office warrior or couch potato to performing the best strength building exercises requires a baseline amount of mobility that will require some weeks to develop. Much of the stretching necessary will involve hamstrings, hip flexors, and stretching of the abductors and adductors of the hips. It's also a good idea to start doing planks to help protect your spine from damage from having a weak core. Third world squats will also help to open up your hips, which will help when you squatting with a barbell.
The prelude to a strength program that incorporates external weights is the use of body weight exercises. A good pull-up bar is a great place to start. Work up to being able to perform several pull-ups and push-ups first, in combination with body weight squats. In the first month preceding starting the actual strength program, it's a good idea to start moving your weight in the right direction. If you are overweight, start counting and calories and you calories below your maintenance. The larger the amount of weight that you have to lose, the greater the caloric deficit that you should be eating at. For most people, a 500 calorie deficit is all that you'll need. If you're underweight, focus on gaining at a rate of about 2 pounds per month. Small caloric surpluses are ideal because you don't want to be gaining unnecessary body fat during this process.
Once you have built up the prerequisite mobility and strength for a real program, it's time to pick one. I recommend Stronglifts to start off with, because it does not require you to learn to do power-cleans and because of the greater amount of volume in the program which will help you to make greater growth. You can go to stronglifts.com and find their 5x5 program. They have videos to go along with each of the lifts and a complete description of how to run the program. The only changes that I would make is to advise you to use wide stance high bar squats in place of low bar squats because they are safer for your back. While you are running the program, be sure to continue to stretch before workouts and continue to do planks, which will remain important in protecting your spine.
When you are eventually no longer able to make progress on the program, you're going to need to do something more complicated. I encourage the use of a conjugate style training program, which will ideally reduce the amount of sheer placed on your spine by reserving the conventional lifts that you just built up for max efforts attempts and places emphasis on smaller movement for the hypertrophy of your musculature. This means using good morning, belt squats, weighted step ups, and hip thrusts for building your lower body in place of squats because they don't stress and compromise your spine in the same way. For upper body this would mean using the floor press, overhead press, rows, weighted pull-ups, and other lifts to build all of your muscles. Reaching this stage, it's a good idea to ditch the 5 rep range and use 10 reps sets for hypertrophy while practicing straining against heavy weights with singles. Conjugate style training is more than a change of rep range and focusing on smaller movement for your hypertrophy. You can begin incorporating a variety of tools such as new bars, bands, and chains into your workouts to add a whole new dynamic to your training.
It is important in the intermediate stage that you focus your work on your weak points, which you will identify when you perform your heavy singles. Put an extra emphasis on whichever muscles you feel are giving out during your heavy lifts so that they are no longer your weak links. This will ensure the greatest increase in your strength.
For safety sake, it's important for me to tell you that if you feel pain doing a movement, that you should stop doing it. Lifting heavy is uncomfortable and at times stressful, but at no time should you be ignoring pain. If you feel your tendons become inflamed doing a movement, change to a different movement. You only have one body to work with - you can't afford to inflame and destroy your tendons. Search the internet for proper form instructions so that you don't hurt yourself.
Without somebody to sit you down and explain conjugate style training it can be a bit daunting to approach. The easiest way to put it is the following:
Monday: Bench Max
Tuesday:Squat/ Deadlift Max
Thursday: Bench Speed Work
Friday: Squat/Deadlift Speed work
For the bench max day, perform an exercise that is conducive to doing a one rep max i.e floor presses, bench presses with or without bands or chains, OHP, or any other movement that you can safely perform as a one rep max. For the max effort squat and bench days, rotate between a squat based max and a pull/deadlift based max. You can get creative with the kind of movement that you select for your maxes. The purpose of max effort day isn't to stick to the classical lifts, it's to practice straining against a maximal weight so that your body gets accustomed to producing maximum force.
For the speed work days, put 50% weight on the bar and ramp up contrast weight over a 3 week wave. Ideally you would do a three week wave of bands that increase in weight each week then switch to chains and increase the chain weight over 3 weeks. You can bring a set of bands with you to the gym and attach them to some 45 pound plates if necessary but lugging around a bunch of chains isn't quite as realistic. Therefore an alternative would be to do ramping weight for the speed work of 60, 65, and 70% bar weights over the three weeks, then switch back to the bands. For all of your speed work, you want to explode the weight as fast as you can under control for 10 sets of 2 or 3.
Every training day you need to be doing rep work to build up all of your lagging muscles, because the basic skeleton of hitting maxes and doing speed work is not enough to make progress. You have to be doing a significant amount of rep work to build the necessary to be making progress doing this program. This takes the form of sets of 10+ after you have done your maxes and speed work. Use your max effort work to inform your weaknesses based on where in your body you feel the most strain. This is an example max effort bench day from my own training:
Max Effort bench against 50 pounds of bands
3-5x10 Football bar floor press
3-5 x 10 Pendlay Rows
3 -5 x 10 2 board press
3 sets to failure band tricep push-downs
My major weaknesses in my presses are my triceps. Therefore I make sure to work my triceps to failure on my upper body days. I slowly try to add weight over time to every lift. If my weak point changes, I would change the lifts that I selected to address the new weakness. Replace the Max effort lift with the speed work and you have the structure of the speed day. And of course if you want to have different accessories on max days and speed days, you could do that as well. You should rotate your accessory lifts whenever you start having connective pain or have stalled on a lift for more than 2 sessions in a row.
If you are having connective tissue pain or see extensive fatigue, it is best to take time away from doing the aggravating movement until the pain has gone away. This is called deloading, which is whole topic in and of itself.
The great thing about the conjugate style of training is that it is great for avoiding injury. You use smaller movements for your hypertrophy and you don't have to risk high volumes with movements that apply compression on your spine.
This page is a work in progress - as I learn more and get stronger, I'm going to add more content to this page.
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