8: First Day of Training

I have been reading about the virtues of linear progression of weight - just adding more weight every workout until you can’t anymore, only getting fancy when it’s really needed.

I have a tendency to get over-excited about programming and periodisation but feel that actually this is the best approach for safely rinsing the easy early gains of resuming strength training.

So I’m going to begin by doing this with a hypertrophy (muscle growth) focus, thinking of the body in terms of muscle groups and spacing those groups across the week. A good, time-efficient rule of thumb for hypertrophy is 2-3x / week but I can’t resist making things more complicated than that and am instead taking the average of the training frequencies recommended by Mike Israetel (Renaissance Periodisation) and Chris Beardsley (Strength and Conditioning Research), and then spreading the exercises relatively evenly across five days.

I’m starting with extremely light weights, as recommended in this article by Mike Zourdos, and am going to try to increase them each workout - 2.5kg for overhead press, 5kg for bench and row, and 7.5kg for most lower-body things. When I can’t stay in the specified range, I’ll keep the weight the same and work on increasing reps. When I can’t do that, I’ll probably switch to more of a strength focus, thinking about the body in terms of movements rather than the muscle groups.

Today’s Workout

• 1x20 bench scapular retractions with 15kg barbell (probably too heavy actually - felt I didn’t get full retraction in some of the later reps)

• 1x20 face pull-like movement face-down on the bench with 0.5kgs

• 3x10 pull-ups assisted by a green band

• 5x10 bottom-up single-arm overhead press with 6kg

• 4x15 closing an easy grip trainer

• 3x8 paused pike compressions

• 3x12 double kettlebell squats with 8kgs

• 1x20 lateral raise with 0.5kgs

• 2x15 barbell bicep curls with 15kg

I scattered sets of everything between doing laptop work.

All felt lovely.