Since June, when I stepped up my training at the gym to go five to six days a week, I’ve started seeing some massive improvements. Over the months, I’ve been doing a lot of investigating literature and speaking to other people on how they train. From this, I have come up with a hard-core training plan which is certainly pushing me to my limits.

I’ve seen some excellent techniques, and some really bad ones. The bad ones have been every bit as instructional as the great ones! 

This system works for me, and probably will help you if you choose to adopt it (or something similar). These cards help you focus on individual muscle groups, one at a time. If these five exercises are carried out over the course of seven days, resting on any two days you choose, you are only hitting each muscle group hard once per week. In other words, you are getting six quality days rest and growth each time. You will probably see results within a month.

Just going to the gym and doing what you think needs doing is a recipie for disappointment. Develop a system, have confidence in it, and stick to it.

I hope you enjoy.

Pete’s Top Tips 

• Consider using “broken pyramids” (i.e. medium weight for warm up set, then heaviest, then drop down.)
• Choose sufficiently heavy weights so that you can complete 8-10 reps per set only. A little pain is good!
• Stick to this card order – it gives the muscle groups minimum overlap and allows them to rest fully.
• Do one card and then put it to the back of your pile. Then do the next one. Repeat. This way you achieve a balanced workout – not just what you ‘feel like’ on the day.
• At least two ‘rest days’ are recommended per week. You can do cardio and light stretching, but you should give your muscles a chance to recuperate.
• This is an intense workout if done properly – you must eat and sleep well to reap the full benefits.

I find it a good idea to write each of these on a white plastic card using permanent pen.  These all fit nicely into a ‘bus-pass’-style wallet and you can bring them into the gym without looking too much like a dick.  

My “twist balance crunch” is as follows:  

• Starting with your back back flat on the floor with your legs straight out and raised off the floor by a few inches.
• Feet never touching the floor, execute a crunch but twist your head and arms so that the left elbow approaches your right knee.
• At the same time, keeping your feet roughly the same height off the floor, bring your legs in towards your bum to maintain your balance.
• Return slowly and under control to the start position, however, do not let your shoulders relax and touch the mat again until the set is over.
• All the time, you should focus on your stomach muscles and make sure they are under tension and doing all the work – NOT your thighs.
• Keep the movements fairly slow and under control – to not jerk or throw your weight about as this defeats the point of the exercise.
• Aim to do sixty at the start, middle and end of your workout. I suggest breaking it down into 30/20/10, but you might prefer 25/20/15.  

Some of these exercises may not be ones that you know. There are some excellent resources on the internet which show you just how to execute them if you are unsure.  

You might try these sites:  

  http://www.shapefit.com/training.html
  http://www.bodybuilding.com
  http://www.acefitness.org/exerciselibrary/

Over the past few years, I’ve started and stopped training at the gym several times.

I start because I’ve look at my body and think: “God, Pete, you could do a little better, couldn’t you?” And I stop… out of frustration usually. I get annoyed that, despite all the effort I put in, I don’t seem to change much. It looks like exactly the same person staring back in the mirror. I reckon that the lack of a ‘visual yardstick’ to reassure the gym-goer that he’s making progress has got to be one of the major reasons for quitting. It was certainly behind the many false-starts I’ve had at the gym. If only I’d known this then, I might have hung in a bit longer.

I don’t know about you but I need feedback. Even if it’s just to tell me just how well I’m doing, and to make me feel good. If I’m training on my own, I have to provide this all by myself.

The best feedback is to be able to look in the mirror and go: “Bloody hell – where did those muscles come from?” But the harsh reality is that this almost certainly will not happen for the first few months of any training program. For some, even longer.

So anyone who starts training must tough it out for quite a while, almost blindly, trusting that they’ll start to see results three months down the line.

Why is this so? I’ll try to explain in a moment.

Many people don’t have the patience to wait all this time to get visible results. They will stop and say simply that the gym just doesn’t work for them. Usually around the start of February! Well, if they knew just why it was taking so long to show, maybe they’d be a little more persistent. It all happens soon enough, I realised.

I’ve seen the reasons explained in books before but it didn’t really register. It was probably presented in geek-speak and didn’t stick in my mind. I only understood it after a little study and so I will try to render what I learned more simply and more digestibly….

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Everyone’s body is different, so all times and measures will vary according to your own body. But not as massively as you might think.

FACT: The number and types of fibres inside your muscles are predetermined and fixed.
Before you were even born, your genes had already decided just how many fibres you were going to get in  your muscles, and what types they would be. No amount of training or good diet will ever change this, whatever people may tell you.

But bloody good training and diet will improve the size and strength of these muscle fibres.

I’m not going to go into the whole training thing – you can find this out for yourself using a whole host of information available in books and on the net if you really want to – but I will explain why you don’t get immediate results.

When you train hard, you are putting your body under stress. And your body’s response to having to being made to lift heavy weights is to try to adapt itself quickly so that it can do this more effectively.

“Great! So why am I not getting bigger? Cos I’ve been lifting heavier and heavier weights for two months now and I can’t see any difference.”

This statement hits the nail square on the head. You are lifting heavier weights, and so your body is getting stronger. It is just that your body gets stronger by two separate mechanisms. You are observing just the first one at work. The first mechanism is not visible, as it is only the second that results in muscle growth.

Your body is only really interested in the bottom line: performance. It needs to be strong above everything else. Survival of the fittest and all that. Muscle bulk is just a fortunate side-effect of this increase in performance. You want it, but your body sees it as hard bloody work – especially when there’s an easier and less energy-costly way to make you stronger. This is the invisible first mechanism which I was talking about.

When you’ve never trained seriously before,  your body is pretty poorly prepared for serious muscular exercise. It simply isn’t fully wired. The infrastructure is all there but, a bit like the phone lines in new-build apartment, the sockets are all there but you’ve got to get it all connected up properly before it works at full throttle.

For example, to flex your biceps your nervous system triggers the nerves attached to millions of individual fibres inside the muscle strands causing the whole muscle to contract powerfully. What you may not realise is that, in an untrained state, your body uses only a small fraction of its available muscle fibres because only a limited amount of “wires” (nerves cells) are actually connected. When your brain says “flex” – this limited number of nerve cells go ping and those muscle fibres that are plugged in contract.

In the first couple of months of training, your body seeks first to improve it’s internal wiring. This doesn’t cost much from a biological point of view, so improving your nerve-muscle connections means that your muscles can work harder without getting bigger.

Only when your muscles are fully wired in, and there is no further scope for improvement here, does your body start to properly put muscle mass on.

So – the bottom line? Stick at it and don’t give up after just two months. You’re probably nearly there by that stage!

[Sun 20 Apr 08] I went for a cracking three-hour ride in Marple with a nice bunch of people. Lots of punishing uphills and skittery, slidey downhills that got the adrenaline pumping.

I was one of the youngest people there and, although I consider myself fairly fit, I can see that I still have a way to go!

25 miles covered.