It made me laugh at the time but as I thought more about it, I realised that being honest, particularly being honest with yourself, is much, much more important.  Especially when it comes to progressing in the gym.

That humerous moment led to a post that I wrote, the importance of being: honest.  I enjoyed writing it so much that I turned it into a mini-series and wrote about the importance of being: educated and the importance of being: resilient.  I’m probably going to wrap it up with this one, though, the importance of being: consistent.

Why consistency?

I guess I believe that without consistency, you get nowhere in the gym.

Honesty is great for establishing where you’re starting from (as Mike T says, you’ve got to know where point A is before you can set off for point B!).  But if you’re not consistently honest then sooner or later you start telling yourself little white lies again and progress grinds to a halt.

Education is great for working out what needs to be done and avoiding giving over the responsibility for your injuries and limitations to other people.  But if you’re not consistent in keeping up that education then sooner or later there’ll be something that trips you up.

And resilience will get you through many a bad situation, from injuries to disappointment.  But if you let one thing get to you then it can set you back for longer than it should.

So consistency is what makes the other virtues work.

Virtues?  You’re starting to sound like St. Paul

I can do that.

Even if I’m honest about my progress most of the time, if I’m not consistently honest, I achieve nothing.  Even if I pride myself on being educated, if I don’t have consistency in the application of that education or my investment in that continuing education, then I achieve nothing.  And even if I am the most resilient person in the world (most of the time) but let my guard down for a day and fail to be consistently resilient, then I can be beaten down and achieve nothing.

OK, so that fun.  What shall we try next?

Stop showing off and tell us how being consistent has helped you

Of course.  Looking back, it’s actually easier to see how not being consistent has hindered me rather than the other way around.  But ignoring those lost opportunities, here are a few of my key ah-ha moments that made me realise just how important consistency is…

• Weighted chins - I started out my quest for a big weighted chin up with about 20kg (45lbs) under my belt.  So I wasn’t by any means a beginner when it came to doing them.  I hadn’t trained them for a few years because I’d been concentrating on getting as much time in the water as possible.  When I moved house, though, I lost access to my swimming club and started hitting the gym again.  I fixed on a simple 3 sets of 5 reps routine and did two or three sessions per week.  I tried to add a rep or 1.25kg each session.  Sometimes, I stalled for a couple of sessions but I just kept going and gradually the weights crept upwards.  After about 9 months, I started to get soft tissue problems in my rhomboids and rotator cuff and at that point I didn’t know how to deal with them.  It took me 3 months to understand how soft tissue work could be done with a hockey ball or a baseball.  Once I’d cracked that, I went back to the same routine and pushed on for another 9 months.  I got all the way to about 60kg (135lbs) without changing the routine.  To take myself to 72.5kg (160lbs) and a double-bodyweight chin, I used max-effort work, working up to a new 3RM each week.  But the bulk of the work was done with the simplest of routines and a bag full of consistency.
• Gaining weight - I set out last winter with the goal of putting on about 10kg (20lbs) and applied myself to the dinner table accordingly.  By setting out a meal plan and eating the same level of calories consistently every day for about four months it was like magic dust had been sprinkled on me.  I grew like a weed and put on no end of muscle with very little change in my workout programme.  At the end of it all, I realised that gaining weight is just a matter of how much you are prepared to eat… consistently.
• Dieting - when I had finished eating myself into a stupor, I set myself the task of stripping off some of the fat.  Five weeks of low calorie grumpiness later, I was about 5kg (10lbs) lighter and a whole lot better looking (hey, I need all the help I can get!).  Again, I didn’t really change my workout programme that much at all.  At the end of it all, I realised that dieting is just a matter of how little you are prepared to eat… consistently.
• Soft tissue work - not so long ago, I upset my left shoulder benching.  Afterwards, I gave myself a real talking to about not looking after myself properly.  Since then, I’ve not missed a single day of soft tissue work with the roller or the baseball and I feel completely different.  In fact, it only took a week of doing a brief routine every day to make the biggest change.  Consistency is king, again.

Consistency has been kind to me.  Now I just need to buckle down and make it work for me again. 

It came about as I was only half-listening to a conversation between friends and I thought I heard someone say “the importance of being honest”, when actually, of course, they said “the importance of being earnest”.

Oscar looking pensive

***

It made me laugh at the time but as I thought more about it, I realised that being honest, particularly being honest with yourself, is much, much more important.  Especially when it comes to progressing in the gym.

***

Being educated as the key to making your own decisions

Now, while I still hold that honesty is a key to making improvement in the gym, I have since been dwelling on the importance of other things that it’s important to be.   The thing that struck me this weekend was the importance of being educated.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not talking about Boris Johnson-style education, where you allegedly read nothing but Greek and Latin for twenty years and are then somehow deemed to be capable enough of running one of the world’s largest financial centres.

In fact, the kind of education I’m talking about is part of the long list of really useful stuff they NEVER teach you at school.  Stuff that makes your life better.  Like personal finance, networking and people skills, public speaking, golf and cooking proper meals that don’t come in a box… 

I’m talking about understanding basic issues in relation to health and fitness.  I suppose I could just as easily have phrased education as “open-minded” but that always makes me think of the quip: “you don’t want to be so open-minded that your brain falls out” so I went with “educated” instead.  Hey, if you don’t like it you can always pretend I said “open-minded”…

***

So what is the importance of being educated, anyway?

Well, if you aren’t educated then you can’t help yourself if you run into difficulty.  What kind of difficulty?  Well, there’s a lot of people out there who are overweight (or undertall) and have one or more nagging little injuries that make them unhappy.  Since they aren’t able to help themselves, they have to either:

• Put up with it; or
• Take advice about what to do.

And this is where it gets hard.  Because neither of these options is optimal.  Putting up with things makes you miserable and taking advice means that you are putting your health in someone else’s hands.  And while that person may have the best intentions, they may not have the skills to help you. 

Here are my top three points where I think that people would benefit from a little, well, educating… 

***

Point #1: The first law of thermodynamics: eat less, move more and lose weight

Millions of people in the Western world waste millions of person-hours of time debating on the internet around an issue that can very quickly be addressed by recourse to the first law of thermodynamics: that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Broadly, for health and fitness purposes, this law means that if you are carrying too much fat and want to get thinner then you either need to move around more than you are doing at the moment or you need to eat fewer calories that you are doing at the moment.  Either or both will achieve your goal.

When someone complains vocally on a forum that they eat virtually nothing and do loads of exercise but still can’t lose weight doesn’t mean that I will suddenly think they are a special case.

If I’m inclined to feel generous about their motives, I will think they are self-delusional or can’t (won’t) count calories properly.  If I’m inclined to feel ungenerous, I’m going to assume that they are lying to me to make themselves feel better.

***

Point #2: Lower and Upper Cross Syndrome: sitting is bad for you

Many people in the Western world (including me!) suffer from tight hip flexors and consquently weak glutes as a result of sitting for extended periods of time.  A series of further tight muscles and inhibited opposing muscles result in a range of muscular imbalances throughout the body that lead to the posture typically described as both Lower and Upper Cross Syndrome. 

Lower Cross Syndrome was first described by Czech physician Vladimir Janda.  He noticed that the hip flexor muscles of many of his patients were very tight and that their antagonist muscles (the glutes) were elongated and weak.  Many people suffer from the chronic effects of Lower Cross syndrome, which can be present in any age group, fitness level or occupation.

Common problems include shoulder pain (caused by the reduction in the space within the shoulder capsule), lower back pain, shortness of breath (caused by the collapse of the chest cavity) and depression.

I struggle with lower and upper cross syndrome enough to spend 30 minutes every single evening working on my soft tissue to prevent the tight muscles from getting any tighter and I include glute strengthening work in my gym sessions at least twice a week.

However, I notice that many of my work colleagues suffer from the same problems and do not have the same education that I have and consequently suffer continued pain and discomfort, eventually developing more serious conditions (including slipped discs in their lower back and chronic shoulder impingement). 

What’s more, most personal trainers don’t seem to know about these issues either…

***

Point #3: The Western medical profession: they might not know how best to help

Many of my colleagues and friends who have suffered complications as a result of their appalling posture have been to see a doctor and have ended up having some sort of operation.  To the best of my knowledge, no mention was made to any of them that they could sort out their own issues using physiotherapy, soft tissue work and strength training.

While I suppose it is possible that their complications had got so serious that an operation was the only course of action, I do remain sceptical.  This is partly because of the way that I understand they have been treated and partly because of what I learned at university reading psychology.  At university, I read about the alarmingly casual way the medical profession used surgery and pharmacy again and again to “treat” the mentally-ill. 

So, in short, I have developed the opinion that the medical profession tends to recommend direct surgical or pharmacological action as a matter of course and ignores possible other options even when these options are less intrusive and more effective.  Physiotherapy, soft tissue work and strength training, which we know can help in a number of different ways, just aren’t recommended by the Western medical profession because they aren’t in their toolbox.  When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail… 

***

To sum up…

So that’s my big three issues where I think most people could benefit from being a little more “open-minded”.  Did I miss one?  Do you violently disagree?

It made me laugh at the time but as I thought more about it, I realised that being honest, particularly being honest with yourself, is much, much more important.  Especially when it comes to progressing in the gym.

Being honest as the catalyst for improvement

As I thought about it, I realised that the moment I started being honest about something was the moment that it started to improve.  Here are just a few examples:

• Hip mobility: I only started to improve my hip mobility when I saw photos of myself on the beach with hyperlordosis, looking like I had been chained to a desk for at least 10 years and certainly not like I was fit and healthy.  The photographic evidence forced me to be honest about the situation and I took action as a result.  I am sure that without being honest with myself, I would have continued to ignore the problem and eventually would have got myself into difficulty.  I am now much better than I was and the improvement I’ve made so far gives me confidence to assess myself more honestly and keep pursuing  additional improvement.
• Left shoulder problems: recently, upon getting back from a cycling holiday, I tweaked my left shoulder when I tried some benching.  This was actually really good for me for two reasons.  Firstly, it made me get on and try some different pressing exercises, including one-arm press ups, which I haven’t done for ages.  And secondly, it made me be more honest about the rotator cuff, rhomboid, deltoid and pectoral knots that have been building up on my left side in the last few months.  Now that I’ve faced the truth, I’ve hammered them really hard with my soft tissue implements (very grand way of saying my foam roller and hockey balls) and suddenly my shoulder-blades are moving much more comfortably and I am pain-free in almost every exercise (except the damn bench press!) but I have confidence that with more dedicated work I can gain even more improvement. 
• Back squats: having sorted out my hip mobility, I was delighted to discover that after a year’s enforced lay-off, I could now back squat again.  It was fun to branch out into doing other leg exercises: my deadlift shot up with the increased attention and I worked up to a half-bodyweight pistol.  However, it was starting to grate that I couldn’t work on that most basic of lifts and it really made my day when I finally got my groove.  What delayed me from improving again, though, was the initial refusal to accept quite how much I had lost off my squat.  By consistently overloading the bar for several weeks, I kept missing lifts and made little or no progress until I finally called it a day and forced myself to be honest about where my squat was now.  Since then, I’ve been making steady progress and while it’s not a big squat, it makes me happy because it’s still going up.   
• Dieting: dieting is one of those areas that should come with a sign saying “honesty required for this to work”.  I have lost track of the number of people I have had conversations with at work recently who seem surprised with how fast I’ve managed to lose a few pounds.  They also seem surprised when I tell them how simple it is.  All you have to do is to plan what you’re going to eat and then stick to the plan.  It’s basically forced honesty.  You can’t deceive yourself into eating more than you intend if you have a plan and stick to it.  I have been staggered by the success that I’ve had this year with dieting, simply because I’ve created a diet plan and stuck to it 100%.  The added bonus is that you can get away with doing the diet for less time because you make more progress faster.
• Form: I have never found it straightforward to assess whether my form in an exercise is perfect, good enough, or needs improvement.  What I have found, however, is that there hasn’t been a signficant difference in my progress between exercises that have perfect form and good enough form but there has been quite a big difference in my progress between exercises that have good enough form and those whose form requires improvement.  Too often, I laboured away with an exercise (mainly row variations) using body english or leverage to keep driving the weight up when what it actually needed was a healthy dose of honesty, a lower weight, more control and ultimately better form.  Now, I enforce honesty by starting low on exercises that I am not confident about and grooving the form for a couple of weeks, by pausing at the top and bottom of the movements and by putting the weight up more gradually.

Have your strength or physique goals been similarly impacted by the simple application of honesty or am I unusual?

When I do collapse into a mountain hut or at the side of the road, it tends to be in a slouch.  Consequently, when I get back, I need to have a programme that will get me back up and functioning fairly quickly so I feel confident about hitting my squats and deadlifts in the gym.

***

My core stability progressions

I’ve used the following sequence a few times and it generally gets me up and running after a week or so.  Each phase of exercises includes a glute exercise, an abdominal exercise and a squat pattern.  I do each phase for a few days to a week until I feel comfortable doing it.

For the glute strength and abdominal exercises, I’ll generally do 15 – 20 reps and 2 sets.  For the squat patterns, I’ll generally do just 5 – 10 reps or until they feel natural.

PHASE ONE

Glute bridges

Lying on your back, you clench your glutes and push your hips towards the ceiling.  Hold the bridge for a couple of seconds to really activate the glutes.

Leg lowering

This looks so easy until you try and do it properly, i.e. without allowing your lower back to come away from the floor.  You lie on your back and extend both legs slightly so that you form a sitting position but horizontally, like in the first picture below.

Now try extending one leg slightly, while tensing your abdominal muscles.  When you feel your lower back start coming away from the floor, stop and pull your leg back slightly.  Pause for a moment and then try the other leg.

Plate squats

As it says on the tin, you squat while holding a plate.  Only go as deep as you can safely without rounding the lower back.  A friend who can shout when your lower back rounds comes in handy here.  The key is to counter-balance your rear end with a small weight so that you can easily sit back and therefore create hip drive.

PHASE TWO

One-leg glute bridge

Just like the two leg glute bridge, this exercise starts with both feet on the floor.  Then, you raise one leg up straight.  Finally, you use the leg in contact with the floor to raise yourself off the ground.

Two-leg lowering

Like the one-leg lowering, you start this exercise with both feet off the ground.  This time, though, you lower both legs together, while keeping the lower back in contact with the ground.

Goblet squat

Dan John has made these popular and I have only recently starting investigating them myself.  However, they are clearly a good way to teach people to squat with good form, keeping a flat back, shins perpendicular to the floor and chest out.  I can feel that my body is doing good things when I practice them…

PHASE THREE

Weighted glute bridge

These are just like the unweighted glute bridges I mentioned above.  But with weight.  Start on the floor with the weight over your hips.  I have never tried doing these with anything other than a barbell but I imagine you could use any weight so long as you could position it over your hips.

Hanging leg raises

You can do straight-legged hanging leg raises from a pull-up bar.  If you can’t do leg raises, you can substitute these with knee raises.

Pistol off box

Doing pistols off a box is much more comfortable for my lower back as the easier angle means that there is less lumbar rounding.  In the picture below, I am using some weight to make the exercise harder.  I am lazy, so I just grab plates but you could just as easily use dumbbells to increase the weight incrementally.

I like to do these phases so that I do one phase a week for three weeks, a couple of times a week.  After that, I figure I’m probably fine again.  It doesn’t stop me squatting and deadlifting in the meantime, but, hey, nobody’s perfect…

Since I have a desk job and have had a desk job for around 10 years, I had found that my hip mobility was poor and that my body had worked around it by increasing my lower back mobility.  I did plenty of stretching, soft tissue work, activation drills and strengthening exercises to improve. 

Ultimately, the programme worked well and I was able to go back to squatting again recently.  My squat depth is now good (around 12″) and I feel a lot better when doing most of my other exercises too.

Ongoing soft tissue work

However, I have found that if I don’t do soft tissue work regularly, I start to slip back into old patterns and find myself growing uncomfortable under the bar in the squat rack.

I never want to get to the point where I can’t squat again, so I have started doing a programme of soft tissue maintenance daily.

What you need

For this programme, I use a hard ball, (I have a baseball and a hockey ball, which I use for slightly different purposes) and a foam roller.  These are my tools of torture:

The key areas

My key areas to roll are (in order):

• Plantar fascia – hockey ball
• Tensor fascia lata (TFL) – foam roller
• Quadriceps (mainly rectus femoris) – foam roller
• Adductors, sartorius and pectineus – foam roller
• Calves – foam roller
• Glutes – hockey ball
• Psoas – hockey ball
• Rhomboids – baseball
• Rotator cuff – baseball
• Front deltoid and shoulder capsule – baseball

Choose the order carefully

I like to use the above order because it works well for moving from one exercise to the next.  I walk into the spare room and tread straight onto the hockey ball to hit my plantar fascia.  Then, I grab the foam roller and lie down on it to roll my right TFL.  Switching sides, I usually roll my quadriceps before doing the left TFL and my adductors.  Sitting up, I roll my calves and then chuck the foam roller away.

All that take me about 5 minutes.  It’s not a 5 minutes out of my day that I would willingly give up.

After that, I grab the hockey ball and roll my glutes (actually, I usually just do the right one) and my psoas.  At this point, I’ve finished the lower body part of my rolling programme.  Doing the lower body first is a guarantee that it gets done.  Then I move onto my upper body.

My upper body trigger points are very swimming specific but I suspect that sitting at a desk typing all day aggravates them something awful.  I find that I get knotted up in my rhomboids, my rotator cuff and my (left) front deltoid.  Using the baseball (because it doesn’t slip like the smoother hockey ball) I get around here in as long as I need to.  Some days, that takes 10 minutes, other days I take 20 minutes.  I usually let the ball settle onto a knot and then apply pressure until I feel the knot yield slightly.  Then I move the ball around a bit.

It hurts but I wouldn’t stop doing it if you paid me.

I think, overall, the key is finding the trigger points that are where the knots have developed and attacking them mercilessly.

Plantar fascia

This is a great place to roll and I am evangelical about getting all and sundry to do it.  It’s a pretty essential technique for when you’ve been doing a lot of walking.  I take a ball with me on walking holidays and when I remember to use it, it pays dividends.  I use a hockey ball nowadays, but when I started out I just used a tennis ball.

Tensor fascia lata (TFL)

Rolling this part of my leg used to be the most horrible experience in the world for me.  However, I found that if I rolled it every day for a couple of days, it slowly got less and less painful.  Now, rolling it every day, it’s usually pain-free.  If I leave it a couple of days, it starts to make me wince again and if I leave it a week, it really makes me grunt.  It’s great motivation for rolling regularly!

Quadriceps (mainly rectus femoris)

The trick to rolling your quadriceps is to roll each leg separately.  I have found that if I roll both legs together then I get off quite easily and it doesn’t really hurt that much.  Rolling each leg separately makes the experience a lot more “effective”. 

Sartorius, pectineus and adductors

This is an area that I have always rolled but have never really managed to improve significantly.  I can feel that there is some tightness here, which improves a little with rolling but not much.  If anyone has any tips on these, I’d be interested to hear them.

Calves

Like for the quadriceps, the trick to getting value for money out of rolling the calves is to roll each leg separately.  I have found that if I roll both legs together then I get off quite easily and it doesn’t really hurt that much.  Rolling each leg separately makes the experience a lot more “effective”.  When I first started a programme of rolling, I didn’t bother with my calves.  Recent walking holidays have revealed to me that the slight pain I get behind my right knee after a week’s hard mountain walking is entirely due to knots in my calf.  A hard rolling session later and I am pain-free.

Glutes

I never used to roll my glutes at all until I felt that my squat pattern wasn’t quite level.  I monitored how my hips felt as I descended into the hole and realised that my right glute felt tight.  I rolled it using a hockey ball and the change in the way my glutes, lower back and groin area felt was quite remarkable.  Needless to say, I always include some rolling time in for my glutes now.

Psoas major

This is a great little trigger point that really makes a difference to my squat pattern.  If I find a knot here, my squat immediately improves the moment I get rid of it.  It’s a bit hit-and-miss, though, whether it gets knotted up.

Rhomboids

I suspect that my history with these is swimming related but I would be intrigued if other people also have trouble with them.  My knots are pretty substantial when they develop.  They kind of feel crab apple-sized…

Rotator cuff

These feel like steel ropes most of the time until I apply some heavy doses of baseball to them (poetic, given that baseball pitchers often have rotator cuff trouble).  They take some punishment before they start to soften up but when they do my whole shoulder girdle settles down.

Front deltoid

This may be another area that is particularly bad for me, as it’s only my left shoulder that is troubled.  Again, however, it’s a pretty substantial knot that I tend to have to deal with if it flares up.

And that’s it at the moment.  If I find somewhere else starts getting tight and uncomfortable then I’ll start rolling that…

Fortunately, I managed to whittle it down to 11 short points, as follows:

1. Think long-term
2. Rest properly
3. Eat properly
4. Lift weights
5. Choose low reps and high sets
6. Put the weight up
7. Write a training plan
8. Keep a training log
9. Put the weight up
10. Learn how to squat properly
11. Find a mentor

A basic programme

I wasn’t going to specify a programme as I think it’s important to go through the process of finding out what works for you and what doesn’t.  After all, lots of intermediate lifters find success with a 5 x 5 programme but 5 x 5 never seems to work out for me.

Having given it a bit more thought, though, I figured that it might be handy to have a cookie-cutter programme on hand, just to start with, in case my 17-year old self asks for one.

Starting Strength

Ideally, I would recommend that my teenage self began the famous Starting Strengthprogramme immediately.

Why?

Well, it’s a programme that many thousands have tried and succeeded with.  Why would I try and create a customised programme when there is a field-tested and proven formula that works?

So what’s the problem?

I think Starting Strength would be too advanced for me without doing some sort of preparatory programme first.

Now before you go thinking that I was some kind of chess-playing, sick-note carrying sport hater, you have to bear in mind that I was swimming 100m in under a minute and had the upper body to prove it. 

No, I’m not talking about advanced in terms of strength development but in terms of mobility and technical ability.

Mobility and stability problems

My main problem was that I was sitting at a desk all day studying and then doing an hour or more a day of very repetitive exercise with no corrective strategies whatsoever.

So my hips were tight, my quads were dominant, my lower back was hypermobile, my pecs and lats were pulling my shoulders round and I could barely look to see behind me without twisting at the waist.

After all, the Starting Strength programme is based around several key movements: the back squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press and power clean.

These are all great movements, possibly The Great Movements.  However, they all require a certain amount of mobility and technique to perform.  So I came up with a few compromise lifts, alternatives to get me started and take me from being in the danger zone to being ready for Starting Strength.

Some alternative movements

Back squat

• Problem: squatting can be performed badly if you don’t know how to use correct hip drive and use your quads/lower back instead.  Swimmers tend to have hypermobile lower backs because of butterfly and after a couple of hundred lengths of freestyle, they often forget they have legs at all…
• My replacement: the lumberjack squat
• Reasoning: no spinal loading, you learn to keep your chest up and it makes you learn that you need to suffer if you are to improve

Deadlift

• Problem: getting all the way down to the floor can be challenging if your hips are tight from sitting at a desk all day
• My replacement: the Romanian deadlift
• Reasoning: avoids mobility issues off the floor, makes you push your hips back and use your hip drive, and helps increase mobility at the hip (rack pulls do the first but not the second or third)

Bench press

• Problem: benching badly is a recipe for sore shoulders, especially if your shoulders are as wrecked as mine were
• My replacement: weighted push ups
• Reasoning: weighted push-ups groove the correct movement for a good bench and are good for core and scapular stability

Overhead press

• Problem: er, can you say “overhead athlete”? plus my posture was poor from the overdevelopment of my pecs and lats from too much front crawl.  Not a good idea to introduce overhead pressing without some corrective work first
• My replacement: the Viking press
• Reasoning: overhead presses can aggravate shoulders where posture is poor, this gets some overhead without being directly overhead

Power clean

• Problem: as back squat.  Plus, have you seen swimmers on land?  They’re like penguins.  Problem is, though, that they’re really good at pulling motions.  So do you want a bunch of malcoordinated athletes throwing large amounts of iron around when they can’t control their own bodies?  No?  Me neither.
• My replacement: pull ups and inverted rows, followed by bent-over rows once completed
• Reasoning: I like pull ups, inverted rows get your core and scapulae working better and rowing is good for you

The programme

So I hope that this programme would have done a couple of important things:

• Start building some basic strength
• Start correcting some of my muscular imbalances
• Prepare me for Starting Strength

It’s not a true “corrective” programme.  I haven’t put rear delt flyes in, for example, which I probably would have done, along with a fair amount of rotator cuff work.  But it’s the basics that I would have based my programme around, had I known what I know now.

For simplicity, I’ve based it along the same lines as Starting Strength, with an A-B-A split, 3 sets of 5 reps, true linear progression and 3 workouts per week.  Here’s the summary:

Workout A (3 sets of 5 reps of each of)

• Romanian deadlift
• Viking press
• Weighted pull up

Workout B (3 sets of 5 reps of each of)

• Lumberjack squat 
• Weighted push up  
• Inverted row, transitioning to bent-over row when 3×5 completed

This would be just the beginning, obviously.  In time, I’d hope to run through a Starting Strength cycle and then move towards the kind of routines I do today: 10 sets of 3 reps and 5RM, 3RM and 1RM max effort work.

You have to ask yourself, what would you have done differently?

The time machine

***

For most of my teenage years, I had deep concerns about things that I know now were completely irrelevant.  Going to Cambridge would probably have been quite bad for me anyway.  That girl was completely unsuitable.  Playing the guitar for a living is overrated.  I thought I was a unique snowflake.  That sort of thing.

There was one thread in my teenage life, however, that started out as a robust line, grew tired and old from misuse and finally snapped altogether until my late twenties.  And that was the pursuit of strength.

If I had a time machine, I would go back and change that.  And this is how.

***

But first, a little background

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be strong.  I enjoyed the strength I had and I enjoyed showing it off.  Boys will be boys, I suppose.

At junior school, I can remember spending hours arm-wrestling in lunch breaks.

And it was important to all of us.  People paid attention.  Other kids would come up to me and say “you’re number three in class 4P aren’t you?” and “when are you going to arm-wrestle Duncan in class 4W?”

I honestly can’t remember now if I was number three or two or what happened when I finally arm-wrestled number one.

But I do remember how much fun it was and how much personal satisfaction I gained from competing in a strength sport.

The thread started out strong.

***

Competing at swimming

An affinity for water and some anatomical irregularities (no, I don’t have webbed feet) gave me a head start in competitive swimming and the pursuit of faster times quickly became very important to me.  Fortunately, I was encouraged both at school and in several clubs.  Sprint distances of 50m and 100m became my favourite and I was passably good until I stopped growing and suddenly all my competition were 6 inches taller than me. 

Undeterred, I persevered.  The thread held. 

***

But then came physical education

Our physical education (P.E.) class at school was so bad it should be possible to take the teachers to court for some sort of malpractice.  I don’t think I ever saw them teach anything.  They just watched as the ones who could already perform a skill performed it and the rest just looked around hopelessly.

I once saw one lad, who was desperate to do a handspring like some of the more athletically minded, miss the bench completely and land squarely on his head.

They took us to the “gym” once.  It was full of machines. We were told that we weren’t allowed to use it until we were in the fourth year (14-15 years) because if we used it earlier it would stunt our growth (I jest not).  Then they gave us a sample programme that used various machines with very little rhyme or reason.  We weren’t taught about progression and nobody talked about diet.

It put me off going to the gym for a very long time.  I can think of no worse testament to their inadequacy.

The thread frayed.  An opportunity was lost.

***

Lifting weights for swimming

Life happened and I kept swimming peripatetically.  At 25 years old, I was considered retired from proper swimming and became a master (like a veteran).  That gave me a new lease of life and I started competing again.

Moving out of London made it hard to find a proper club but fortunately a good friend had been teaching me about Mark Foster’s routines, which involved lots of weights work and very little swimming.  Since he is probably still the fastest human through water, with a 50m time of 21.13s (short-course), I listened.  Carefully.

Then I went home and did some pull ups.  I haven’t stopped doing them since.

***

What I would say to my teenage self

OK, so listen to me now.  You can carry on mooning around or you can get up and work at something worthwhile occasionally.  You want to be strong?  This is how to do it.

1. Think long-term – strength is a long-term game and you can’t just go into it thinking you’re going to be the strongest man in the world in a few weeks.  I know that’s hard to accept this kind of limitation with the huge amount of testosterone that’s pumping around your system at the moment but if you can believe that, you’ll be half-way there.
2. Rest properly – as a teenager, you’ll be able to recuperate faster than pretty much anyone older than you.  But don’t be fooled.  Spending every night partying and getting hammered all the time is going to catch up with you eventually.  Get to bed on time!
3. Eat properly – I’m not going to bore you with the details here.  Just make sure you eat lots of real food and plenty of protein.  Stop eating baked beans on toast and eat more meat, milk, eggs, cheese, fish, rice, potatoes, vegetables and fruit.  If you need to, down a protein shake twice a day.  I don’t care.  Just get plenty of good quality calories in.
4. Lift weights – don’t get seduced by bodybuilding or circuit training.  Lift weights.  Properly.  Pick 3 or 4 compound exercises you like and get really good at them.  There’s a saying: “strength is a skill” and skills need practice.  The more you do them the better you’ll be.  Choose squats, deadlifts, rows, chins, dips or cleans if you can.  Don’t worry if you don’t know what they are yet.  We’ll come onto that later.
5. Choose low reps and high sets – when you’re lifting in the gym, you’ll be surrounded by grunting guys with bulging biceps and giant pecs doing high rep sets with minimal rest between them.  Ignore them and do your 10 sets of 3 reps religiously with a minute between sets.  Try 10 sets of 4 or 2 reps occasionally but never go higher than 5 reps.  Ever.
6. Put the weight up – unless you didn’t get all of your reps out in the last workout, always put the weight up higher than it was last time.  By the time this stops working, you won’t need to listen to me anymore, because you’ll know what you’re doing.
7. Write a training plan – don’t ever do a session unless you’ve planned it and you know what you’re going to do in that session.  Plan your sessions in blocks of several weeks at a time.  Look for progression.  Increase the weight.
8. Keep a training log – don’t leave the gym without writing down what you did.  Every so often, check that you’re still progressing.
9. Start with simple exercises – not easy exercises.  Simple exercises.  Don’t expect to be able to walk into the gym and do the Olympic lifts perfectly the first time.  Start with the deadlift, chins, dips, bench press and rows and get comfortable with them first before you start anything more ambitious.  You’re not wasting time because you’ll still be doing those exercises when you’re sixty.
10. Learn how to squat properly – don’t miss this step out.  You will need to squat if you’re going to be strong.  You’ll need to be able to squat before you can Olympic lift too.  Forgetting this could lead to a world of pain.  You might disagree now but you’ll come around to my way of thinking eventually.  Take the time to do a few sets with an empty bar after your workout and start to find your groove.  It’ll come.  Just give it time.
11. Find a mentor – you don’t have a clue how to squat properly?  No problem.  Find someone who does and get them to teach you.  Self-taught weightlifters rarely accomplish anything significant.  There are exceptions but we’re trying to give ourselves the best possible start, right?

***

And that’s it.  In 15 years time, you could be an absolute monster.  Or you could be just starting out, like I am now.  The choice is yours.