My Very Own Skinny to Fit Series

Hey all you guys and gals out there! I am planning on starting a series that was inspired by Chris Archie. I plan to turn my thin physique into something better.

A little bit about myself...

Well, as a freshmen in high school, I weighed about 155 pounds and I was about 6 foot 1. I've played football since fifth grade and I planned on playing throughout my high school career. Over the summer we began to lift weights and we started conditioning. I gained about 5 pounds during that season without protein/creatine. After the season, I swam on the swimming team and lost all of that weight plus some. So during sophomore year, I was about 150 pounds and then I did the same thing, worked at football, then lost the weight. Also, I just want to let you know, we lifted during the swim season but not nearly as much and not as hard as we did during football. So fresh out of football my senior year I weighed about 195 pounds and I felt bigger than I ever have in my life. Then once again, swimming... I lost weight and now I am 183.8 pounds as of 7/12/2014. Over this summer I have not lifted at all, well just a little but not enough. So I have stopped lifting until I start college which is August 21st. I think I will lose a few pounds here and there but not too much. During college, I plan on lifting 4-5 times a week and I want to continue that routine for as long as I can.

Note: I have started this thread for encouragement and tips on how I should lift. I will be posting pictures of my body every 2 weeks after I start college. I started this thread now because I wanted to kind of lock myself into this commitment.

Thanks for everything and this should be fun!

This is how we lifted for football and I plan on starting my basis off of this:
Monday - Arms and Shoulders
Tuesday- Legs and abs
Thursday - Dead lift and conditioning
Every other Friday we would have competitions like a farmers run (Run 200 yards carrying one 45 pound plate in each hand). A towel pull(basic tug of war 1v1). Tire Pull(Tire tug of war). Tire Flip ( Relay of flipping a giant tractor tire up and down the field).
--I probably can't do the competitions but I will try my best of working off of those lifts!

Also, once I begin the thread will become more organized!

Current:
Weight: 183.8
Height: 6'3"

 

uhhhhhh so there's no chest day? And you're also only doing dead lift on thursdays? Your chest and back won't grow very much if you're doing no workouts for chest and only one workout for back. The one workout for back is barely enough to get your blood flowing and your body to gain any muscle in that area.

 

Two tips right off the bat.

I would completely revamp that base workout regiment because its just not where it should be even if it is just a base. Like pur3 pointed out you're completely overlooking a HUGE body part.

2nd tip would be to just start now! Why wait?? Just do it, when the time comes when you say you're going to start lifting it could just be another excuse...like "college was more involved than I thought". Next thing you know you're saying you'll just start lifting over break. Start now that way when you do get to college you'll be hopefully too obsessed with your gains to let college get in the way of them no matter how involved it may seem.

As for workout plans you can find some sweet ones on the web and lifting forums. I know when I was deployed my buddies and myself were always ripping pages out of magazines for their workout plans.

 

I have a YMCA Membership but the weights aren't as good as the ones at the college facility. It is also very crowded where I go and it takes just too long to get the work done. But I think that I will continue with the small stuff that I am currently doing

 

You have my motivation! I have it worse than you.. Im 6'4 and 145 lbs.. But instead of football I play basketball

 

I gotcha! If YMCA is holding you back I know golds gym is literally 9.99 a month and you can pay on a month to month basis. Those things are everywhere, I'd be really surprised if one wasn't close to you! Literally $10 bucks could get you a decent jump start until the start of your first semester the 21st. If you couldn't tell I REALLY want you to start lifting like yesterday haha!

A couple basic workout structures that I've messed with to give you an idea!

Monday - Chest
Tuesday - Biceps/Triceps
Wednesday - Back
Thursday - Shoulders/Legs
Friday - Weight training rest...cardio/abs
Saturday - Repeat

This one wasn't bad, I used it when I first started lifting. I liked it at the time because my muscle endurance wasn't up to speed and didn't recover all that quickly between sets. Resulting in mediocre secondary lifts...Example if I did chest/tri...me doing a tricep workout would completely kill my ability to smash my next chest workout.

Monday - Chest/back
Tuesday - Bicep/tricep
Wednesday - Shoulders/Legs
Thursday - Rest (cardio, abs)
Friday - Repeat

People refer to this as "Push/Pull", personally I didn't like it all that much! Chest and back are two very big days for one. Bi/tri day I felt like I was robbing my bicep pump wile doing triceps and vise versa haha. (probably all in my head but hey that's 98% of the game)


Monday - Chest/tri/traps/abs
Tuesday - Back/bi/abs
Wednesday - Shoulders/legs/traps/abs
Thursday - Rest (read the paragraph for explanation of this day)
Friday - Repeat

This SO far is my favorite scheme to work with! Now that I've been lifting for a while my muscles can definitely handle it. If you haven't noticed I always space out a chest day and a shoulder day. I never ever stack those two days in front of each other! I've just notice my shoulders would start to hurt when I did try and lift like that which would totally destroy my lift for the day!

For the past 2 weeks or so I've really been buckling down on abs, you can pretty much do them everyday because they do recover very quickly!

Thursday - is a rest day from weights for me. Kinda far from a rest day though. I call it my body weight and abs day. I pretty much do set upon set of dips/pull ups/abs...feel free to get creative with abs, there are so many things you can do that can make it pretty fun!

Also the first iteration of lifting (Mon - Weds) I lift slightly lighter weight and go for higher reps (10-12 reps). While the second iteration of lifts (Fri - Sun) I'll lift heavier with fewer reps (weight that will ensure I never lift less than 6 and more than 8)

You probably noticed I have ABSOLUTELY no real cardio in the mix...well when I was in the army being apart of the 101st I was forced to run entirely too much...now that I'm out I'll run 2 MAYBE 3 times a week for NO LONGER than 1.5 miles haha. But the 1.5 miles I do run I do intervals. Example I like to use telephone poles on the street. Sprint and I mean sprint from one telephone to the next...then jog to the next pole and repeat!

Also I feel like every time I post in this section I tell people to keep their rest periods short! There really is no need to spend an hour and a half to two hours at the gym. Try and keep your rest period's short...like around 20-30 seconds for now since you're just getting back into it!


If you have an specific questions feel free, I kinda just touched base on a lot of things to get it out there and give you some ideas!

 

Dude you weren't even small! You were pretty good size to start with.

 

What are your current lifting stats?
Bench, Squat, DL, OHP for 1/5/10 reps?

 

Gl man work towards ur goals and I'm sure u can achieve em

 

I think I'll start hitting the gym a bit more consistently.

 

Îf you work hard you can achieve everything but you need to be interested in it.

 

Damn I'm glad you've discovered complementary muscle groups. Doing chest & back on the same day must have been a killer, that's a shit load of compound movements.

I'm with you in that I give shoulders it's own day now and leave a day between chest/tris/abs & shoulders/abs. I just can't give it an effective workout when combining it with chest like I used to. The natty woes lol.

 

Haha yeaaa it definitely was, two major core muscle groups on the same day just didn't cut it for me. My buddy who was a lot bigger than me at the time suggested and I did read about it in a muscle&fitness mag once so I gave it a shot!

Yea man you're totally right, I explained it to a buddy the other day like this. When you're working out chest you are hitting your front delt's at least a little bit, and when you're doing shoulders you're hitting your tri's as well. To do those back to back your slamming your secondary muscles that were your primary just the day before...it can be rough lol.

An update on abs! For abs I really just stuck to my body weight for them..example: Crunches/leg raises/situps/flutter kicks/oblique crunches...not totally the right answer I found out!! I've been doing a lot of cable crunches with the rope. For those that don't know you take the rope (normally used for tricep push downs) and position the cable towards the top of the machine and you get down on your knees with the rope in your hands and you crunch down keeping your back straight and holding for a brief pause. Make sure you're not using your lats to help pull it down, I ensure its totally ab work by keeping my thumbs lightly touching my temples (that way I know I'm not pull with my arms and such).

I then put a little spin on it by twisting...pretty much twisting in such a way that my left elbow touches my right knee and vise versa...I really feel it burning in the obliques when I do this! You can turn it into a nice little set...for example
- 10 oblique crunches each side (alternating left right left right etc. . .)
- 10 Crunches straight down (no rest in between any of this)

 

Start babylovers' SS


http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=135564721


(if posting this link is against rules, sorry delete it)

 

Yeah it's always good to try new things. I was going to phrase this by saying it never hurts to try new things... but it can in this instance haha.

Ah I know the Hodgetwins have done this in the past and loved it. Currently I do not go to a gym (home gym) so I don't have access to cables but will definitely try it when I actually am comfortable in forking out for a gym membership which will likely be at the end of the year.

I'm a firm believer in mixing things up though every now and then. For example on chest day I usually alternate between flat & incline (leaning more towards incline) and also alternate between a barbell and dumbbells.

 

This thread really hit home for me, I have been trying to get into shape for about the past year now. I started once I started my first year of college with a mixture of situps and dumbbells that I bought off of eBay. My roommate and good friend who is much smaller than I am but more physically fit suggested a few techniques to do with the dumbbell involving more areas than I had been currently targeting.

I guess now I should mention my past weight and height. At my max I weighed 265 or so halfway through my senior year of high school having the only sport that I had done during my high school career being golf I was not much of an athlete other than luckily being the strong kind of fat. I measured about 6 4 and because of this my fat evened out better than the less fortunate short fat people.

Through my first year of college I never ran and used weed as my workout tool often doing 100 reps smoking a bowl of the bong and repeating until I did sometimes up to 1000 reps. I also ate healthy buying yogurt, water, and salads. By the time I finished college and came back to my home town for the summer I weighed an even 200 with many people commenting on my drastic change. I just withing the last week decided to start running and have done so every day gaining as I can feel more and more muscle and a longer resistance to being out of breath while running and the amount of time that I do run since I honestly haven't ran since my junior high sports days (5+ years ago).

Also as mentioned above the sprinting from light pole to light pole is the trick I used back in junior high track and while running in town daily except I recently have been adding more light poles to my sprint (like going 2-5 poles at a time and walking one and repeating until I run myself out (Also have sleeping problems so I pop a couple sleeping pills and use this exercise to wear myself out before a shower / bed and gives my the cover of darkness to confidently walk / run in peace) starting with a fast paced jog and by the time my legs become sore more of an average / fat kid struggling jog. Just today ran up and down a shitload of stairs at a local park 5 times till I could hardly walk then walk/ran home to post this and pass out. Currently still 200 pounds but that fluctuates nicely because I have been making more muscle and losing small amounts of fat at the same time and am 6ft 6 as just measured at a recent doctor visit within the past 2 weeks.

Sorry about the Novel but maybe Ill get it published some day

 

but who was pics??

 

Grats man. It's really hard to gain weight and keep lean muscle. Props to you.

 

Yeaa its always good to change it up! If you keep it the same you're always hitting just the same muscles at the same angles...Just the slightest variation can make a world of difference!

For example like you're doing with incline and such...people say they do incline, but the bench has different angles of incline...each angle will hit chest justttt a little bit differently. Its a wonderful thing really haha. Same goes for every other workout there is.

itching to show of your hard work haha?