This thread is about my take on the training of novice lifters. It will be rather different to most articles or posts about novice training you may find while searching the Internet. If you expect to find a routine you can follow, you'll be disappointed. Most of my posts here will be about HOW not WHAT, and the reason will be obvious below.
I'm not a PT nor professional strength coach. I lift weights as a hobby, and compete in powerlifting. I'm also a certified coach, and mostly help out with coaching intermediate to advanced powerlifters. Until recently, we had no real novice lifter in powerlifting, as people who seek out a powerlifting club tend to already have some half decent lifting experience. My exposure to novice lifters started with family and friends, then as Crossfit gained popularity, more and more people are attracted to lifting and our club started to take on novice lifters and I began to train some. Since I do this as a hobby and I have limited time outside of my own training to coach, I tend to let other coaches (usually young guys who want to be PTs / strength coaches) write their programs while I simply observe and give them feedback on techniques and general training. This thread will therefore follow in a similar direction.
The opening post will state a few themes that apply to pretty much everything I'll be writing here. Then I will post up some daily observations and tips as I encounter while coaching other novices at my club.
== TL;DR - why should I learn all this shit? ==
Many years ago, on a similar forum to RVF (a Game one, with a fitness section), I was told to hit the gym, and I started asking people what I should do, and got overwhelmed by the shear amount of things I had to learn. I asked them to just give me a program, I don't want to learn all this junk. One old school bodybuilder bloke told me that it's inevitable if I want to achieve my goals. I didn't listen to him, and got nowhere for a couple of years.
Eventually, I took his advice, learned how to do it properly, achieved all the goals I set then and progressed beyond what I thought was possible.
I'll reiterate that advice again, one which you will most likely ignore for now, but will believe later: Lifting - be it for aesthetics, athleticism or strength - is a set of skills, that you will need to learn properly if you want to achieve your goals. It is not a routine that you can blindly follow.
== What is a novice lifter? ==
When I started lifting seriously, I used to buy programs from this old school coach, who often stated in his newsletters that a novice is someone who has yet to bench/squat/deadlift 2/3/4 plates (or about 100kg/140kg/180kg). If you're a smaller guy, he'd tell you to get bigger. This hurt a lot of butts whenever it's brought up, as people tend to think they're more experienced than they really are.
Personally I follow this chart, which is even harsher:
http://forum.reactivetrainingsystems.com...tion-Chart
A novice is someone below a Class 3. I'm a Class 1, going for CMS by the end of the year.
If you haven't yet competed, add up your best gym 1RM in the 3 powerlifts, then take 10% off. That should roughly get you your first (imaginary) competition total for comparison purpose.
While I wouldn't necessarily call someone below those standards a novice (as not everyone wants to be a powerlifter), if you haven't yet achieved those lifts, it's useful to train like a novice powerlifter. Training like a higher level lifter while possessing lower level strength is bad for your future progression.
== What should a novice train for? ==
While each of you should have your own specific goals, here are the 3 major things you all train for anyway, whether you can articulate them or not:
- Aesthetics: more muscle mass with good symmetry, less fat
- Athleticism: jump higher, run faster, more agile etc.
- Strength (consisting of many types, which I'll get into later)
It's only at the elite / professional end where you'll have people focusing on one while sacrificing others (e.g brutally strong, but fat and unathletic powerlifters). For everyone else, those three are related, and improving one often will involve improving the other two.
I will elaborate on this in a subsequent post.
I'm also going to assume that you are natural and do not want to take drugs. I have nothing personal against them, but I know nothing about their practicalities, have never used any, not even recreational ones, and you may find magic shortcuts through them that I cannot offer here.
== Consistency, sustainable habits and hobby ==
If there is one quality that will help you progress, it is consistency. No surprise there. I have my training logs dating back to August 2010 when I first started powerlifting, and I did not miss a single planned session, ever. Consistency will turn even a suboptimal program into excellent progress, and elevate a genetically average man to levels of strength he never dreamed of.
How do you achieve consistency? Despite what's popular on social media, it is not motivational video montages or memes, nor some inner talk you give yourself everyday to get to the gym. They make for good movie scenes and stories, but are ultimately unsustainable.
What you need to do is to develop a set of lifestyle habits (each taking roughly 3-4 weeks to form) that allow you to train and recover well day in day out, week in week out. Do things right outside of the gym, so that your gym efforts do not go to waste. If you make it easy for yourself to be consistent, you will maintain that consistency forever.
And ultimately, don't forget that this is supposed to be like a hobby i.e something you love and enjoy doing. If you don't enjoy it, don't do it just because someone on the Internet tells you that's how you can achieve your goals. Learn to love the lifts or exercises that you do. Leave something in the tank after each session, so that you leave the gym feeling like you're ready to conquer the world, not collapse in exhaustion. Make yourself crave the barbell so that you can't wait to get to the gym next time to lift more.
I'm not a PT nor professional strength coach. I lift weights as a hobby, and compete in powerlifting. I'm also a certified coach, and mostly help out with coaching intermediate to advanced powerlifters. Until recently, we had no real novice lifter in powerlifting, as people who seek out a powerlifting club tend to already have some half decent lifting experience. My exposure to novice lifters started with family and friends, then as Crossfit gained popularity, more and more people are attracted to lifting and our club started to take on novice lifters and I began to train some. Since I do this as a hobby and I have limited time outside of my own training to coach, I tend to let other coaches (usually young guys who want to be PTs / strength coaches) write their programs while I simply observe and give them feedback on techniques and general training. This thread will therefore follow in a similar direction.
The opening post will state a few themes that apply to pretty much everything I'll be writing here. Then I will post up some daily observations and tips as I encounter while coaching other novices at my club.
== TL;DR - why should I learn all this shit? ==
Many years ago, on a similar forum to RVF (a Game one, with a fitness section), I was told to hit the gym, and I started asking people what I should do, and got overwhelmed by the shear amount of things I had to learn. I asked them to just give me a program, I don't want to learn all this junk. One old school bodybuilder bloke told me that it's inevitable if I want to achieve my goals. I didn't listen to him, and got nowhere for a couple of years.
Eventually, I took his advice, learned how to do it properly, achieved all the goals I set then and progressed beyond what I thought was possible.
I'll reiterate that advice again, one which you will most likely ignore for now, but will believe later: Lifting - be it for aesthetics, athleticism or strength - is a set of skills, that you will need to learn properly if you want to achieve your goals. It is not a routine that you can blindly follow.
== What is a novice lifter? ==
When I started lifting seriously, I used to buy programs from this old school coach, who often stated in his newsletters that a novice is someone who has yet to bench/squat/deadlift 2/3/4 plates (or about 100kg/140kg/180kg). If you're a smaller guy, he'd tell you to get bigger. This hurt a lot of butts whenever it's brought up, as people tend to think they're more experienced than they really are.
Personally I follow this chart, which is even harsher:
http://forum.reactivetrainingsystems.com...tion-Chart
A novice is someone below a Class 3. I'm a Class 1, going for CMS by the end of the year.
If you haven't yet competed, add up your best gym 1RM in the 3 powerlifts, then take 10% off. That should roughly get you your first (imaginary) competition total for comparison purpose.
While I wouldn't necessarily call someone below those standards a novice (as not everyone wants to be a powerlifter), if you haven't yet achieved those lifts, it's useful to train like a novice powerlifter. Training like a higher level lifter while possessing lower level strength is bad for your future progression.
== What should a novice train for? ==
While each of you should have your own specific goals, here are the 3 major things you all train for anyway, whether you can articulate them or not:
- Aesthetics: more muscle mass with good symmetry, less fat
- Athleticism: jump higher, run faster, more agile etc.
- Strength (consisting of many types, which I'll get into later)
It's only at the elite / professional end where you'll have people focusing on one while sacrificing others (e.g brutally strong, but fat and unathletic powerlifters). For everyone else, those three are related, and improving one often will involve improving the other two.
I will elaborate on this in a subsequent post.
I'm also going to assume that you are natural and do not want to take drugs. I have nothing personal against them, but I know nothing about their practicalities, have never used any, not even recreational ones, and you may find magic shortcuts through them that I cannot offer here.
== Consistency, sustainable habits and hobby ==
If there is one quality that will help you progress, it is consistency. No surprise there. I have my training logs dating back to August 2010 when I first started powerlifting, and I did not miss a single planned session, ever. Consistency will turn even a suboptimal program into excellent progress, and elevate a genetically average man to levels of strength he never dreamed of.
How do you achieve consistency? Despite what's popular on social media, it is not motivational video montages or memes, nor some inner talk you give yourself everyday to get to the gym. They make for good movie scenes and stories, but are ultimately unsustainable.
What you need to do is to develop a set of lifestyle habits (each taking roughly 3-4 weeks to form) that allow you to train and recover well day in day out, week in week out. Do things right outside of the gym, so that your gym efforts do not go to waste. If you make it easy for yourself to be consistent, you will maintain that consistency forever.
And ultimately, don't forget that this is supposed to be like a hobby i.e something you love and enjoy doing. If you don't enjoy it, don't do it just because someone on the Internet tells you that's how you can achieve your goals. Learn to love the lifts or exercises that you do. Leave something in the tank after each session, so that you leave the gym feeling like you're ready to conquer the world, not collapse in exhaustion. Make yourself crave the barbell so that you can't wait to get to the gym next time to lift more.