DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... Anybody got any good workout routines?

I've yo-yoed my whole life. The quickest transformation I ever had was with P90X. It's an hour a day, 6 days a week of ball busting work, but you get results quick....really quick. There were a few others on here doing it a few years ago.

You're not wrong. Your grasp on the aerobic cycle far exceeds my own. The exercise style that I'm talking about tries to avoid the aerboic cycle though. Sprinting for 10 seconds doesn't allow oxygen to be used in converting energy. It uses the anaerobic cycle, which is less efficient in burning calories as it doesn't rely on calories. It's only used for about 10 seconds or so. That's why sprinting is key. Anything longer and an appropriate amount of oxygen fills your lungs and you start to be an efficient animal.

Just keep it simple. I've been on every sort of diet philosophy (Vegan, Paelo, Atkins, and Primitive fwiw) and they all seem pretty effective.

I used to be vegan and work out. I kept the gains going while not eating meat. You just have to know that your body needs protein, carbs, and fat. You can find any of these through numerous sources. I drank protein shakes and ate nuts when I was a vegan to get up that protein. Fats and oils, you don't need that much of and can suffice it with just cooking with them. Coconut oil keeps me going. Make sure to avoid omega 6 fats when you can and replace them with omega 3.

The real trick is carbs. Most diet plans actually approach carbs the same way. Keep the complex carbs and get rid of the sugary, processed, simple carbs. Your carbs should be things coming from nature. If you think they ate it 200 years ago then it's probably a complex carb and you should eat it. White grains are considered simple and you should stay away from them.
Fruits and veggies are another simple carb, but they act as complex carbs in the system. Feel free to pile on them. Especially celery. It has no calories and provides glucose to the body. It's the perfect snack food for mental naps.

Just make sure to grab your macro and micro nutrients somehow and you should be good. Although vitamins aren't nearly as effective in being retained by the body as they do when found in foods.

Just remember that the longer you do a diet the better it feels. Don't give up on a diet because you're not feeling it at first.

So, run two miles and have 7 tacos.

Without the shells.

What are your goals?

One fundamental thing to realize is that past the beginner stage (and based on your posted workouts, you are obviously not a beginner), you can't improve everything at once. It would be far too much work. You would end up throwing together heavy strength work, high volume hypertrophy work, lots of cardio, some HIIT etc, etc. and soon enough you will end up being some combination of backsliding, overtrained, miserable, and injured.

Sounds kind of silly but it happens all. the. time. Know your limits, pick a primary goal and perhaps a secondary goal and work on it for a block of training (perhaps 1-3 months), deload for a short time, then hit it hard again or pick something else to focus on while maintaining the rest. You can maintain adaptations for extended periods of time with reduced volume and frequency and training as so long as you maintain the intensity (weight on the bar + reps, aerobic pace, whatever) I will come back to this in a bit.

For weight training, if you don't how how to set up a program I'd recommend just picking something proven and sticking to it. Most of the people who post on bodybuilding forums are idiots. Just stop reading that nonsense before your brain explodes (and yes, a lot of those guys use juice and that is so effective that it tends to make the quality of training not mean so much. Pump enough drugs in you and you will get huge and ripped no matter how crappy your training, diet, and life is.)


What kind of training do you like? There are the routines in the Bill Starr, Mark Rippetoe, Glenn Pendlay mold that usually go something like a squat, a press, and a pull from the floor for fairly low reps and low volume. The routines would be Starting Strength, Texas Method, Madcow's routines, and some others. Bill Starr (strength coach of the Super Bowl winning 1970 Colts) has a somewhat famous book called 'The Strongest Shall Survive' which has some classic routines.

With that said, I don't like this style of training. I've done it before and kind of grew out of it. However if you like squatting and/or only have a minimum of equipment (e.g. barbell and power rack) these can be good routines.

There are a lot of popular 2 way splits out there. Most are 3-4 days a week upper/lower+core, where it would go something like...

LU LU, LU LU
or
UL UL, UL UL
or
L U L, U L U
etc.

...on a two week basis. Each one does manipulates exercise choice, volume, intensity, frequency a little differently.

Lyle Mcdonald's generic bulking routine - good all around program, has more freedom to manipulate (and thus screw up if you make bad decisions) than most others

5/3/1 - Jim Wendler's program

DoggCrapp - favors intensity with techniques such as rest-pause training

Layne Norton has a 5 day split called PHAT that also hits everything 2x/week. That is far more than I like to be in the gym but it could be an option here as a hypertrophy routine.

Borge Fagerli has some good routines. His bigger contribution IMO is actually myo-reps, which isn't so much a routine as much as a time-efficient way to use rest-pause training in other routines. It is a milder form of rest-pause training than you would see in something like DoggCrapp although that is a positive for myo-reps in most situations.


All of the above can be useful to get stronger and/or more muscular if that is a primary goal. If something else is a primary goal (e.g. aerobic capacity and/or fat loss), reduce the length and/or number of weight workouts while keeping intensity the same. It's kind of a generic but stick to that general guideline and you'll be fine.

Eventually you realize that even just something like hypertrophy is too overriding of a goal. Try to bring everything up at once and it just wrecks you. There are ways around that e.g. specialization routines (bring up one or two exercises or bodyparts while maintaining the rest) but probably only 1% of people will ever need to go there.

For cardio, I would stick with a minimum of cardio in any mass/strength building phase. 3x/week steady state cardio for 20-30 min apiece is fine. Just maintain the cardio and save your energy for for the lifting.

Alternatively, in a cardio building block, you would focus more on cardio while reducing the amount of lifting. There are even a lot of options there. You could simply do more. Or if you wanted to work in HIIT, you might do something like HIIT 2x/week and steady state cardio 1x/week. HIIT leads to great short-term improvement but improvement tends to level off after only a few weeks or a little more. This leads to some very flawed interpretations of studies that may only last a month or so. You can look at the training of any high level endurance athlete-- most of their training is high volume, lower intensity work and then they 'top off' with HIIT in the month or so before a big race. Doing HIIT year-round is a major mistake that takes a great deal of recovery ability out of you without major benefit in the long run.


That's kind of a primer on a lot of different things anyway. Each of these ideas go much further and some are hotly contested (the thoughts on HIIT being a prime example).

For diet, here's a comically simplified idea: Eat things that your grandmother would approve of. That should apply to most of us younger posters. The older posters could use a diet their parents would approve of. For the most part, this would be a diet of solid choices, free of many of the modern gimmicks that require a whole lot of effort and that are useless at best.

Hahaha, Swish! I literally whispered the exact wording of your first response before I read it.

I'm no expert like some on here, but I always thought you had to lift lighter with higher weights to get the wiry look. Also, I'd look at the pacing of your workouts. I know that if I'm working within a program for a little bit and start to get bored, the pace of my workouts slow down.

Also, like some have already said, I'm never looking for extreme results, as I don't have the time nor motivation to chase that. Setting challenging but realistic fitness goals is key.

When I plateau, I also like to change things up a bit. Swimming might be what you're looking for. I know when I want to work out so I feel like I've been hit by a truck after, I usually swim.

If you want to get in a great cardio workout and lose weight it's easy.

OK you must start this exercise in your early 20's IMO it's good to start when you turn 21. Start by drinking one beer per day. Drink it right before your dinner so you feel fuller and eat less. Stick with this till you hit your 30's then increase your beer intake to 2 beers everyday right before dinner. This is very easy to do for the first 19 years but trust me it gets tougher. When you hit your 40's Go to up your beer intake to 6 beers per day and have them before breakfast. Also add in three bottles of water later in the afternoon. When you hit your 50's add another 6 beers before lunch, and add two more bottles of water before bed. By now your trips to the bathroom which were 3 or 4 times a day in your 20's should have increased to around 50 times a day and you will be sprinting to the bathroom every time. When you hit your 60's add another 6 pack of beer. Now your up to 18 beers per day and make sure you up your water intake to 18 bottles per day also (we don't want you getting dehydrated) You will now be too full to eat anything so make sure you double up on your daily vitamins. You should now be peeing 150 to 160 times per day and sprinting close to 25 miles per day. Your BMI should now be somewhere between Karen Carpenters and a skeleton's. You should also be buff as you would have lifted over 189,791 pounds by now.

You and I are the same there. I got over the hump by just forcing (it was hell) myself to get 2-3 days of healthy eating. I just told myself to get through the next hour, next couple hours, next day. After I made it through a few days, I actually started losing that food addiction feeling.

That was the hard part though. I really did feel "addicted," probably like you do. With processed foods and all the sugar that goes into things, I think we actually do feel addiction-like symptoms to have those high-fat/high-carb foods.

Wendler 5x3x1 with Big but Boring is what I would recommend. Can be done on a cut to preserve strength and even make some gains.

Of course if you're trying to lose weight calories in vs. calories out. Good luck OP

Try this one.. it's cheap and easy.. I call it the "Commercial workout"

Here's what ya do.. watch a movie, baseball game or a football game. Each time a commercial comes on.. hop on the floor and do pushups, situps, barbell curls etc.. until the commercial is over.. then watch some more tv.

There is definitely an addiction-like component to many processed foods. That is how a lot of foods are manufactured these days-- stronger initial 'reward' and once you are hooked, traditionally healthy and tasty foods are just kind of bland in comparison. It does not have to be that way! For example, fresh fruit tastes great on a healthy and balanced diet. It's just not going to give the same impact as your favorite pop or a cheesecake or whatever.

Regarding using diet to burn calories and then eating a ton of food: Realize that for most of us (meaning those of us who do not exercise obsessively and who are not in world-class shape) will not burn nearly as many Calories from exercise as we think. As a rough guide for how many Calories you are burning:

sitting around: ~1 Calorie/minute
standing: ~2 Calories/minute
walking: ~5 Calories/minute
steady state cardio: ~10 Calories/minute

Obviously those are ballpark estimates and much has to do with other factors like how much you weigh, etc. But take an hour walk, or do a brisk half hour on the elliptical and you are burning a few hundred calories. That's about a piece of pizza. Nothing necessarily wrong with pizza but that's not much.

Don't get me wrong, there are many reasons to exercise. I think just about everybody should regularly do at least some basic weightlifting and cardio. It improves body composition, is great for many parameters of health and longevity, great for the mind, etc.

If you want to lose weight though, the major contribution comes from diet. There are many styles of diets that can work. Personally I'm a middle-of-the-road kind of guy and food is no exception. In dieting terms that would equate roughly to zone-esque proportions (e.g. moderate carbs-- more than the paleo/low carbers allow for, but less than the quite high mainstream recommendations)

As a general idea, base a meal around a protein source (meat or fish or eggs), add in some veggies and/or fruit, and add other types of foods for calories e.g. nuts, dairy, starches/grains. Everybody seems to be a little different in terms of how much they can eat without gaining weight, what types of foods they tolerate well, and all that. I'm a tall/lean type, I try to get some exercise in just about every day (even if it's just a walk) and have no food allergies that I know of so I can eat just about anything. I still avoid some of the worst manufactured/processed junk foods, especially foods with trans fats or ridiculous amounts of sugar.

dude, awesome break down.

Thanks Swish. Fitness in general has been a hobby/passion of mine for a long time. I spent more time and effort on it when I was younger. I still put some energy into it of course, there is really no way around that to maintain good results but I kind of coast more and focus on doing the things that matter as opposed to being neurotic about things. That last bit is somewhat unfortunate-- there is so much misinformation out there and many people do such weird things in the context of dieting and working out that it can be a major turnoff to people who are new to it all.

quote by hasu above:

"...But take an hour walk, or do a brisk half hour on the elliptical and you are burning a few hundred calories. That's about a piece of pizza. Nothing necessarily wrong with pizza but that's not much."

But here's the deal: Burn that "extra" ~ 360 calories 5 times a week for a year and we're talking 90,000+ calories.

That's some serious poundage and the key to significant and healthy weight loss.

If only it were that easy. There are a few pitfalls in that logic:

- That is quite a lot of time: 5 hours/week spent just walking. Getting people to just do half of that can be tough.

- The body compensates in a variety of ways. You can't just make a dietary change or throw in some exercise, tally up the theoretical change in energy balance, and then say you will burn 90,000 extra calories [and thus lose 25 lb. of fat]. It does not work that way in the real world!

The first reason this does not work is one of the issues being discussed in this thread -- exercise tends to stimulate the appetite so some of those calories are being directly offset by simply eating more. Of course, a strict dieter with a lot of willpower can largely negate this but it does take some effort.

The other reason is that human metabolism adapts to an extent. That is, if you eat less and/or exercise more, metabolism will adjust to compensate. A key phrase there is 'to an extent'-- the adaptation will virtually always be less than the initial caloric deficit but it's still there. So if you are creating a 300 Calorie deficit up front, eventually various systems are downregulated to burn less energy. In more extreme diets you see people burn out with little energy, weakened immune system, reduced sex drive, etc. although none of those things have to happen or should happen at a healthy weight with a reasonably set up diet.

That's not to discourage walking or any other form of exercise. Walking can be great. It takes very little to recover from. It can be rejuvenating. It's great for physical and mental health. It can improve cardiovascular adaptations in beginners, and may contribute to it even in non-beginners. It can burn some calories which can be a nice side bonus so long as your diet is in check to take advantage of it-- it just won't lead to the results suggested in the above post. Not by itself anyway.

If one wants to lose weight, it's really a very simple process: calories IN need to be less than calories expended (out)

DOING that can be tough, but that's really it, at the core.

There are myriad ways of doing it, of course.

so just a quick update:

today i weighed myself, even after a night of drinking and pizza, but since the post, i changed up my diet like y'all said.

i'm at 219. when i made the post i was 227.

top of my abs are showing. gonna be beach bod ready by summer time.

If you need some motivation bro just remember your still 10 pounds heavier than me right now.