help please

C

cstocken

0
im 28 and just started the local gym,they have the usual gym stuff,
i wanna work on bulkin up and what the best method to use and what machine daily,im going 5 days a week monday to friday and sat and sunday off.
they have the weight machine with the cables on them,
if i could get any advice on what machine to use on what days would be brill and what sort of reps ect.
 
I am going to assume a couple of things here if they are wrong let me know.
You are a beginner to weights, meaning limited understanding of program structure and techniques.
The gym has a normal unbalanced set of machines with masses for upper body and a few for legs.
You are aware but probably don't like the fact that in the early stages learning technique has to come before adding bulk.
Your aims are predominantly aesthetic rather than performance related.

Below are some basics that need to be considered when training. There is a distinct lack of specific program because I don't know what is available for you to use and in the early stages it is more important to keep this concepts in mind than have a to the letter program.

Bulking requires energy (calorie) surplus. To do this most effectively you will have to accept there will be a bit of excess fat coming with the muscle but have to keep a close eye on your diet to ensure the gain is mostly lean mass not fat.
The calorie surplus needs to be in balance, so shovelling in an extra ton of protein while cutting carbs will not gain more muscle, in fact it will generally increase fat faster. The balance your body needs in training is not much different to without, training growth and repair all require energy, the bodies favourite is usually complex carbs (starch), but listen to what your body is calling for, if it wants more meats, it likely prefers slower burning fat, if it calls for sugars, give it starch because these will give the body glucose at the pace it actually needs.

Early training is about technique and endurance.
If you start with bad technique and keep it you will injure yourself, the longer it takes to do so the more weight you will hurt yourself with and more sever the injury, there are no exceptions to this rule unless you count people who quit training.
Endurance is one of the most key things for recovery, growth needs you to have recovered to be at it's optimum. There is good news here, bulking is best achieved in the strength end of muscular strength endurance reps 10 to 6, some say 12 to 6 and I have nothing to prove them wrong, 10 to 6 works better for me but 12 to 6 is better for others. 5 and below doesn't build you as fast, this is power and performance range.

Balance of training. I wrote a homage to uneven training in mythbusting the fitness files, pointing out how this is dangerous and terrible for aesthetics. Men have a tendency to want to bulk up the arms, chest and shoulder to impress, because these are be parts they see in the bathroom mirror. As a person who started off training for aesthetics I can recall a few occasions where I have been asked to turn around to give a better view, I have never been sure if this was a compliment on my butt or insult to my face, but like most training for aesthetics I obliged because the people requesting it were the gender I was wanting to please. A muscular back comes in useful when getting close too, dance partners will appreciate if everything they touch feels firm including the often ignored lower back.
The method I was taught for balance is BALS (Back Arms Legs Stomach) which really should be Pull Push Legs Core but PPLC is not as pronounceable. So if you were starting off doing some simple circuits or an all over workout to get you used to the movements you would do something like that below.
Lat Pull Downs - Pull or Back
Bench Press - Push or Arms
Leg Press - Legs
Plank - Core or Stomach
All of the above are compound movements, meaning they use a lot of the body at one time which is very useful for everyone from beginners to advanced. Reps when starting out would be 10 in most cases but at weights you could manage for 12 until you have the technique absolutely perfect, then weight for 11 and of course for 10.
The simple routine above would be a good starting point, but doing it 5 days a week would get very dull very fast, so you would want to mix it up, doing this 3 days and something else the other 2 or adding another 4 movements to this to give a more all over effect.
 
If you're keen to train 5 days a week, the standard approach to that for bodyvuilding would be something to the effect of:

Day 1: Legs
Day 2: Chest
Day 3: Back
Day 4: Shoulders
Day 5: Arms and abs

I prefer an upper/lower split over a 5-day body part split, but I'm not very big, so take from that what you will.

All of the machines have their purpose. Every exercise has its use. So I'm not going to tell you what's "best." But I will give you some quick recommendations, using the 5 day spit formula from above:

- Start each day with a free weight, compound exercise. Free weight means dumbbell, barbell, kettlebell, any other kind of -bell you can think of, or cable machine. These exercises do not have a fixed motion. Compound means that multiple joints are moving (and are meant to move) throughout the range of motion, so for a lower body exercise your hips and knees are both moving, and for an upper body exercise your shoulders and elbows are both moving. Examples: squats, lunges, deadlifts, bench press, dips, shoulder press, pull ups, most variations of rows.
- As the workout progresses, you may wish to move across to machines (other than cable machines) or isolation exercises (exercises that move around a single joint and really focus on a specific muscle group). As you progress in this direction, the need to stabilise yourself decreases, as does the demand for technical skill. Barbell squats are a very general, technical exercise; leg presses are more focused on the legs and less technical; leg extensions and leg curls have very little technical demand and really hammer the quadriceps and hamstrings respectively.

Even on the exercises that don't require much technical focus, you do still want to focus on the technique points that are there to maximise your muscle contractions while minimising the risk of injury. The temptation to load up more weight than you can handle with good technique will often be there, but your ability to handle the weight should always be a measure of how much weight you use. The cool thing is that good technique makes you stronger faster and more reliably than bad technique, so in a way that desire is fulfilled longterm by overcoming the short term temptation.

As a beginner, you tolerance for both intensity and volume will be low. The good news is the stimulus required to push progress will also be low, so it all works itself out if you're sensible. Let's say you do 4 exercises per workout. Starting out, you might only do 2 working sets of each, and since technique will be your measure rather than how much weight you can possibly lift, you'll finish each set feeling like you could have done more. That's a total of 8 low intensity work sets per day. Not a lot. At this stage, your most intense sets will probably be at the end, as you use really simple exercises at that stage, and so technique failure won't happen too far ahead of muscular failure. Still, doing that, drilling technique so that you can push yourself a little bit further each week, and eating sufficiently, will get you good results over time.

Eating sufficiently. There's a lot of bad advice out there on nutrition, because people get obsessed with the scale and want to either gain or lose weight as fast as possible, under the delusion/false hope that everything they gain/lose is what they wanted to gain/lose. In reality, you can gain maybe 10kg of muscle in your first year of training, which is about 20lb, which is less than 2lb/month, which means that a see food diet is probably not a great idea. The flip side to that is that if you aren't gaining 2lb/month, you're probably not gaining as much muscle as you could, and therefore you'll want to increase the amount you consume each day to make that happen. My recommendation is to immediately add 200kcal/day into your diet (preferably from healthy food sources -- health should always come before size/strength), and, so long as you're training for hypertrophy, check your weight under the same conditions each week (I suggest first thing in the morning after alleviating your system, stark naked without eating or drinking anything beforehand, same day of the week). If after 2 weeks you haven't gained 1lb, add another 1-200kcal into your diet. If you've gained more than 1-1.5lb, take 1-200kcal out of your diet. Keep modifying your diet as you progress -- what causes you to gain weight now might be maintenance for you in a month's time, as your body adapts to different training and nutritional conditions.
 
Hi thank u.yes im a beginner. My legs are very tonned already for some reason. But mainly wanna work on my upper body and def my arms.as fed up of bein the small guy lol. How long does it normally take to see the slightest different in body. As my wife also got that vibration plate as can use that to tone muscle up aswell maybe.
 
How long it takes to see differences is very personal. When I first started training, I could see a difference within about 2-3 weeks, but then I was so skinny that tiny amounts of muscle were a big deal. I've trained people who have all progressed at about the same rate, but because of their starting point have taken anywhere between 3 weeks and 3 months to start noticing any change at all in their aesthetics.
 
I know you are saying your legs are already toned, I seem to remember you posting about running, which will have helped here. If you don't train something because it's a strength it soon becomes a weakness, something I am noticing coming back to introducing some isolation work after years of purely compound exercises.
There is a very specific feeling that comes with heavy leg work, you either love it or hate it, never known a person who 'didn't mind' heavy leg work. I love it, but the name gives away why. One of the guys I used to know took a bucket around with him on both legs and deadlift days because he would ignore the feeling of sickness to the point that he would genuinely throw up around once every month or 2, I don't go that far but it's not unusual for me to re-rack the squat bar and hold onto it while full vision and balance return, both of us are of course outstandingly stupid for pushing ourselves this far. Truth is however if you want to build up heavy leg work will become a part of your life, love it or hate it. If you want to see why google image 'never miss leg day' you'll understand.
The split Goldfish has given you has legs once a week so that keeps them worked but not excessive. He is one of the best generic trainers you will encounter, you will gain a great deal by checking out his sticky in weight training for guidance. Obviously if yours is one of the many gyms that have done away with free weights altogether to make insurance cheaper it will be difficult to follow his programs.
'check your weight under the same conditions each week (I suggest first thing in the morning after alleviating your system, stark naked without eating or drinking anything beforehand, same day of the week).' Make sure you do this in private, supermarket weighing stations get really funny about this sort of thing.
 
Right food is all about balance. I use the food pyramid for basic guidance on proportion, not portion numbers, then adapted it a bit for my personal needs.
I burn massive quantities of energy, part due to training and part due to being a hyperactive ectomorph, so for me it's all about complex carbs (starch) and stacks of it to fuel my life, training and recovery. Others find this doesn't work for them so adjust the balance to suit. Don't copy others because you aren't them, use the generic sources like food pyramid as a base then find out what your body tells you it needs and act accordingly, the one time I tell people to do something the body is not telling them is when it's calling for sweet food, in these instances issue it starch and tell it to wait until this is processed.
 
Say to your fitness trainer to make good chart of exercise schedule on regular basis.
 
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