This is written with the purpose of you understanding it, and thinking about it. It’s not your next “how to get pussy quick” guide. It’s fairly detailed and requires your attention if you’re a lurker or beginner in the gym. I’ll edit and link to the other parts as I finish them in the next couple of days/weeks.

Beginners Guide to Getting in Shape Part 1: Why Strength over Aesthetics (At first)
Beginners Guide to Getting in Shape Part 2: Programming for Linear Strength
Beginners Guide to Getting in Shape Part 3: Transitioning to the intermediate phase

Who is this for?

I have not seen any posts here on TRP about “fitness” that actually gives you the HOW. “Just lift bro”, “go lift” are terms that give you a hard on but it doesn’t help the lurker here on TRP who has no fucking clue what to do. This is my attempt to give you the HOW if you’re a lurker or beginner.

Out of roughly 12k subscribers who are viewing this sub in the quarantine state, there has to be thousands of you that don’t have this aspect of your life figured out. If you do, close this page. If you don’t, spend some time to read them, digest them, think about them, then come ask questions. Getting in shape is simple and easy. This series will talk about the good old barbell movements and the training that goes along with it. Exercise makes you sweat and feel good, training accomplishes long term goals. Some guys made money selling “programs” for your “21 guns” or your “achilles body”, or the “thor body”. All bulshit with a catchy name duping guys into thinking they can skip the basics and find the next best thing for a pretty fucking penny.

This shit is not difficult. You don’t need to pay for a program that sounds catchy. Don’t fall for the bullshit. Or maybe it’s a western thing where you pay for shit that’s free.

Why should I listen to you

You don’t have to listen to me nor follow my advise. I’m a regular dude who is a strength coach amongst other things. I draw my info in this series from the Starting Strength books, an instructional academy I attended through a related company with lots of math, mechanical analysis of the big lifts that make the SS book look like a children’s book. Multiple seminars from the prominent guys in the industry. Information from diet and nutrition from Layne Norton, Mike Israetel, Barbell Medicine and a host of other guys in the industry who put out good content. I bought the material and now you don’t have to. Most importantly, from helping older folks get strong, younger guys lose weight, and guys who are skinny to get strong with big with muscles. Old ladies getting their life back after being sedentary.

Why getting strong first is the path of least resistance

If you’re sedentary, or don’t do much training (maybe you exercise a bit), it’s likely that you’re not very strong. To define strength, we’ll use SS’s definition as I agree with it. Strength is the ability to produce force against “something”. That something can be your couch you’re lifting, picking up your plate, standing up for your arm chair in your moms basement, or any activity that requires your muscles to produce force to overcome another objects resistance.

When your body is strong, as a whole, it moves better, feels better, looks better and can lift more weight during hypertrophy blocks because you do higher weights for more reps. Squatting 85kg (185lbs) for 4 x 8 (sets x reps), doesn’t induce enough of a stimulus for your big leg muscles than if you would with 140kg (315lbs’ish). Overhead pressing 65kg (145lbs) is better for your shoulder girdle and hypertrophy than pressing 20kg (45lbs). Building a big back with big traps is accomplished with heavy deadlifts and its variants instead of standing in front of a mirror holding 50lbs dumbells and “chicken-necking” your dumb ass looking like a retard. Big muscles require big stimulus, not little glove-wearing-pussy-necking shit.

Getting the biggest bang for your buck in the gym - Satisfying the criteria

Regardless of what you read, you can become really strong and big by only using the big four barbell movements and their supplemental variants. Supplemental movements are those that use similar amounts of muscle with almost similar range of motion (ROM) but at a reduced weight due to the change in ROM and mechanics. You are a beginner, don’t worry about these for now.

In order to not waste your time in the gym, you want to get in the gym, do your work and get out. Spending the least amount of time in there getting the most out of your training for the day. Go home, sleep, fuck, eat and recover.

To satisfy this, we’ll use the criteria the Starting Strength uses. They are:

1. Use the most muscle mass
   
2. Use those muscles over the longest ROM safely and
   
3. Use the most weight in that session.

Movements to satisfy these criteria

So which movements and why? Simple. Multijoint movements use the most muscle and have an effective ROM. Lifting the bar and moving your body through space and the ROM will have the biggest bang for your buck. Using the barbell also mimicks movements you do everyday (sit down, put stuff overhead in shelves, picking things up). Analysing the squat, deadlift, press and bench satisfy this criteria and you can add weight for the rest of your life to the bar as opposed to other multijoint (but still useful) movements but have limited ability to add weight to for more stress.

It’s all in the SS book if you care about mechanics. If you don’t, then just trust me on this one. The movements that satisfy the criteria come down to the low bar squat, bench, overhead press and the deadlift. Supplemental movements that gets used later on are the chin up, rows and dips with upper body work for the arms, we call those fluffy stuff.

Adaptation

A quick word about adaptation. You can find via a quick google search the adaptation rate explained in SS. In short, using the criteria above with the movements we chose, you will stimulate the body as a whole each session, three days a week. These big movements have a profound effect on the body’s hormonal and physiological processes when training has concluded and you’re asleep. By carefully programming the lifts, we can take advantage of this adaptation and become strong really quickly. It's called the SRA cycle, Stress-Recovery-Adaptation.

Hate on SS all you want. I care about effectiveness. And every time, every single fucking time regardless of age, sex, limitations, this program works. I will show you how to make sure you don’t look like a t-rex at the end of this program by adding in some simple but effective upper body movements to keep you looking balanced while you get really fucking strong (for the spergs really strong is relative to your potential/anthropometry/age/sex/phenotype).

Why I advocate Starting Strength for establishing “the base”

Before the spergs come out and list all their emotional reasons for not liking SS, like I said in the beginning, this series is for beginners. If you’re in the gym 5 days a week doing 5 movements for each “muscle group”, then close this page. It’s not written for you.

You can quickly go search on their forums for old people getting really strong, people with health problems, women, trannies? (dunno), anyone who gets strong experiences the changes resulting from strength in their personal lives. SS is a good program STARTING OUT. It makes you strong quick and sets you up for some exciting programs during your intermediate phases. I will cover the basics of intermediate templating for continued strength or if you choose, some hypertrophy work too.

Think of strength as the foundation of your existence. If the foundation of a skyscraper is strong and solid, then whatever you put on top doesn’t matter. Whether you want to be a bodybuilder or powerlifter, physique athlete or steroid monkey, soccer player or cyclist, having a really good base of strength makes those goals easier. Being strong requires less effort to do “things”.

Your training in the gym will always have two parts. 1) the base strength and 2) the fluffy stuff

Fluffy stuff..? What is this? Fluffy stuff is everything NOT to do with the base. The base of the program during your beginner/intermediate phases will be the big compounds and their slight variants. You always need to have the base first in training, if you don’t you will lose it. Foregoing your compounds for leg splits, bulgarian split squats, lunges, wall sits, will “burn” your muscles but you will lose the strength. If you’re okay with this fine, but those big quad muscles require a fair amount of volume of a proper ROM to grow. Silly fluffy shit like wall sits won’t make them grow, just build up lactic acid making you feel good. Same goes for the other base movements.

Fluffy stuff will be the movements you do for arms, delts, tri’s, maybe abs (god forbid). Instead of worrying about “sarcoplasm” or whatever the fuck they call it, you just need to focus on slow control of the weight, the squeeze, the pump, and proper stimulation. 95% of your gains for your genetic potential will be gained with simple but effective programming and the least amount of fuckaroundtitis. (yes it’s a disease). It’s not a fucking meme on faceborg or instabutts, it’s true when they say consistency is the key to your success.

Changing your body to look better takes time, make peace with this

We all want abs. We all want to be at a low bodyfat to get more girls or feel better, whatever reason you have. There is no quick way about this. You can do 5 or 6 day splits with thousands of minute bodypart movements getting jacked from a skinny fat self or a fat ass. It might work, it’s my opinion and experience with clients that the hard process of getting strong first, then chiseling away the chubbiness works best.

Your biggest friend during this process will be your nutrition. I’ll briefly cover that later on with suggestions on where to start to make sure you don’t get too fat, or if you’re fat, how to lose the fat mass while you gain strength. (noobs here). For untrained folks, you will gain lean mass and lose fat for a while. Be thankful you’re a beginner.

The next part will attempt to give you some tools to use to enable you to get going and get free form checks online, a modified program to include some upper body stuff and how to alternate the program when shit gets heavy. It’s about done, I’ll post it in a couple days.