Now that I’ve written about and explained why I started this blog I guess the first thing is to try to explain my current program, my goals, and my training history.
Let’s first go through my training history and “training age.” I started lifting back in high school because it was required if you wanted to play football. I never took it too seriously in high school, even though we ran a good program, but as any beginner I had decent results over the years (I could have done 30 seconds of the shake weight and gotten results as could any beginner, thats why that kind of stuff sells). I instead chose to screw around with friends like any high school kid and not really pay attention to the importance of what I was doing.
Once I got to college things didn’t get too much better even though I was in a sports medicine field I was extremely inconsistent in the weight room going maybe once a week (you’ll find out that CONSISTENCY and DISCIPLINE are the two biggest factors in the strength and fitness world). That is until my last year of college I really picked up on lifting 3-4 times per week and 5 times a week in the summer of that year. I saw my best results yet, and began to realize that this is what I really like doing, having a background in anatomy by this time, I knew I could eventually do something in this field as far as training others. Thing was during that time I hopped from program to program of essentially all the same stuff 3-4 sets of 8-12 reps and I hit a plateau HARD. For the next few years I did the same thing over and over expecting different results (pretty sure that’s the definition of insanity… and looking back now I don’t know what led me to think I would get something different doing the same things).
For the last yearish (that should be a word) I have finally found and stuck to a program that legitimately WORKS, and it’s all thanks to a guy named Jim Wendler. His 5/3/1 program and all of it’s variants were the answer for me and showed me that training for strength is what I’ve really been looking for. Since then I have not only gotten stronger and gotten to watch my numbers on the 4 major lifts skyrocket I’ve found an even greater passion for learning about strength and fitness. I’ve learned more from his books, articles, and programs than I ever did in any strength class or book (including the one they make you use for the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist test).
So as of now I am currently running one of his many variants of the 5/3/1 program. I’m more than capable of creating my own program and have before but as with all the other programs I could never stick to it. I’ve even created programs for my friends and family and have seen them get great results (granted they’re based on the 5/3/1 principles). I needed something made by someone else for whatever reason. You can type in Jim Wendler 5/3/1 into google and find thousands of results that will explain the vanilla 5/3/1 program that he came out with years ago (09 I think?..). Since then he has expanded exponentially on it and improved it in the same regard. Everything in the program is percentage based around your training max or which is 85-90% of your true one rep max (depending on what program you’re running). Again if anyone is really interested in it I suggest you search for it and learn, once you understand and apply it you will see progress without a doubt.
My current goals with this program are to compete in a powerlifting meet later this year (it’ll be my first one and I’ll finally have an official number for my squat, bench, and deadlift). I know this isn’t a true powerlifting program, but I’m not looking to become a powerlifter, I just want an official total number. I’m going to stick with his formatting of program for the time being because it’s based on the LONG term. If I decide to do another meet at some point then I will try a specialized program like sheiko.
For anyone that wants numbers my current 1RM’s at 173lb are
Parallel Squat-325 Deadlift- 375 Bench Press- 245
Strength and Golf 