I need some help on what type of weight training to do.

I am looking to build strength and lose fat. I am 5'10-1/2" tall and weigh 247lbs. I am looking to lose fat and get stronger. I dont really want to make my muscles larger. I have alot of muscle on my body. I just want to maximize the strength from the muscle I have. (if that even makes sense)

About three years ago I weighed 245lbs. I went on the atkins diet and got a membership at the local health club and started weight training and cardio. To make a long story short I got down to 190lbs and looked great. I have not been working out at all over the past two years and the weights has come right back. Last time I went into it blindly with no advise from anybody with experiance. I dont want to do that again. I have also since discovered that the atkins diet is not really a good thing to do.

To increase strength and lose fat, should I be lifting heavy weights at low rep or light with high reps. Is it even possible to make you muscles stronger without making them grow?

To give you an idea of what kind of body I have. When I weighed 190lbs I just had small amount of fat around my waist line.

Got that right.

Please look around the forums before asking questions like this. They are very difficult to answer as we dont have much information.

1, if your a member of a gym ask the instructors.
2, do you have any health probs we should know about.

Try writing up a program for yourself and the post it back on this topic. Most ppl will be more than happy to correct your ideas and help rather than spend ages doing the work for you.

make sure your not working each muscle more than twice a week.

Good luck

I went into gym last night and started out by warming up on the stair machine. I did that for 5 minutes. I then moved on to weight training. I did the following.

Pulldowns 3 sets of 10 @ 100lbs.
incline dumbbell press 3 sets of 10 with 40lb weights.
flat bench dumbbell fly 2 sets of 10 with 25lb weights.
tricep push down on the cable machine 3 sets of 10 with the pin set @30lbs
dumbbell curl 3 sets of 10 with 25lb weights.
Hammer curls 2 sets of 10 with 25lb weights.

I plan to change it up each time. I also will do bent over dumbbell rows, overhead press, cable rows, and what ever else I should do for a complete upper body workout.


I plan to do upper body on monday
Legs on tuesday
1hour cardio on wednesday
Upper body on thrusday
Start back on monday

Is it ok to go four days a week as long as I only work each muscle no more than twice? I work second shift and there is nothing to do after I get off work on the weeknights after 11pm and im wide awake. I will do the stair machine, cycle, and jog on the tread mill on my cardio days.

The only things wrong with my body are
1- I have a dorsal ganglion cysts on my left wrist
2- I have TMD. (Temporomandibular disorder)

I have been told by my doctor that niether of these will keep me from working out. Although the cyst can be quite painful when doing press type workouts.

First off you can train each major body part more then 2x per week. Adding a little muscle won't hurt but you can easily gain strength weightout alot of muscle mass, just keep the volume lower.

IE 3x3, 5x3, 3x5, 4x5, 3x6 etc using %85-90 of your 1 Rep Max, basically powerlifting.

As just a general comment, going heavy, with lower reps (5-6), will always work. Occasionally you should bump it up to more reps (8-10) for a couple weeks, then go back to the heavier, lower rep routine.

Whatever you do, don't waste time with low weight, high rep schemes. These do not 'tone' and do not 'trim up the arms/legs/etc'. They build relatively no muscle mass...but they do train you to be able to do lots of reps with hardly any weight. I guess if someone wanted to do competitive beer can aerobics, then that rep scheme might help.

/sarcasm

I do believe that beginers should start off lifting 3-4x10 as this gives them a chance to develop technique and gain knowlege of there limits before going right in for the heavy stuff.

Tom - 5-6 rep scheme is much more affective for building muscle than 10-12. However, you should stick with what your doing for at least 2months to get a feel for the weights. You need to be able to know how heavy a weight is going to feel before you lift it. i.e. bench press - you need to know that you can push the weight up after lifting it down, or you'll be in trouble.
The stage will also help you devolop technique. If you get any aches and pains in the first 2 months of training from bad form, can you think how much worse it would have been if you were lifting a much heavyer weight.

What alot of people fail to realize is you can't seperate the sets from the reps. IE 10x3 is more volume then 3x8.

For strength gains without mass you should aim for anything less then 24 total reps for any given muscle group 2x to 3x per week.

A cutdown version of Bill starr's routine would work great for your goals. Instead of doing 5x5 you simply do 3x5 or 4x5 with squats, deads, presses and rows.

But dont you agree that 3-4 sets of 10-15reps would be better for a beginer.

Bare in mind that this prob wont over work the muscle because most beginners wont lift there full potential for a set because they dont have the mental focus or mindset to push heavy weights.

Why is that?

yep i agree ... they need time to get focus while seeing results

I think newbies should workup there conditioning levels yes and not jump into a full blown powerlifting routine.

I agree with Newf, sets of five are perfectly fine for the beginner. Its not like you have them start out using their 5 Rep Max to begin with! Take for example in Mark Ripptoe's text Starting Strength, he hooked EMG up and checked out various muscle control in the rep ranges. 5s had the tightest most controlled EMG, while sets of 10-14 form and control began to deteriorate, and lastly sets of 15-20 there was further breakdown in control and form. Sets of 8-12 are fine, if you want to fill out muscle without any hustle. This muscle break down is sarcopasmic hypertrophy, breakdown of the filler goo surrounding your sarcomere. Sure it adds size, but it doesn't improve strength. Rep ranges in 1-6 usually have a higher percentage of load (75-95%+) and causes adaptation to the sarcomere itself. While the sarcomere is hypertophied, the surrounding muscularculture expands with it.
In other words, stick to using 5s using about 50% of your 10RM and build your way up that way. Fives will teach the body to stay tight and respect the weight and after a few cycles of adding some pounds to your 5s, you'll see some serious gains in both size and strength!

Just a few thoughts,

-Andrew

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