M, 6ft1, 185lbs, 2 years progress

gtorre

New member
Mildly NSFW Pics (partial nudity). Terrible MSPaint skills.

Stats:
  • Age: 35
  • Height: 6ft1
  • Weight: 175lbs > 185lbs
  • Squat: 45lbs > 260lbs
  • Bench: 45lbs > 175lbs
  • Deadlift: 130lbs > 440lbs
I lift 4x a week, basically a PHUL type program (main compound lift followed by accessories).

I have no background in strength or athletics and completely neglected physical exercise from about 16 to 33 years old, except for the odd short term construction job in my early 20s.

Things I've learned:

As you can see my strength is pretty skewed. I am disproportionately stronger at pulling movements, and meanwhile I have a recurring shoulder/rotator cuff problem that basically prevents me from progressing chest exercises at all. Hence I'm developing a gorilla back and basically no pecs, lel.

Hard pills to swallow:
  • My shoulder problem won't get better by itself. I need to focus on actively rehabbing it, and failing that - surgery. But repeated attempts to simply rest and then go back into training have not been successful.
  • Having no background in sports is a big deal. I had to throw away the idea that I could just do a minimalist Starting Strength type program and blow up my squat to 300+lbs in 6 months. I was not physically prepared for heavy barbell training at first, and had a number of small injuries starting out that highlighted this fact. If you're really out of shape, you need a whole bunch of different kinds of exercise along with barbell training. If a set of 6 not very heavy squats gasses you out, that is you.
  • You basically never look as good as you do in your best progress pics. When you see progress pics on the internet (like mine), assume the actual person doesn't really look a whole lot different. At the very least they're not walking around with rippling muscles everywhere.
Things that surprised me:

I heard that your best gains are in your first 6-12 months, but I don't think that is true. At least not for me. Sure, on paper I made the largest % gains in that timeframe, but year 2 is when I really started to figure shit out, and once I did that's when I started to change the most physically. Stuff like: not phoning in my reps, really getting more out of each movement, staying tight and understanding where my sticking points and weakpoints are. And then diet things like how much sleep and protein affects my progress. Once I started to become aware of all of that, the hypertrophy really started to move.

My best advice for anyone starting from scratch in their 30s.

Forget about how you look or physical progress as much as possible. I realise that's counterintuitive to the probable reason you want to train in the first place ("to get in great shape in 3 months", for most people), but looking in the mirror is a poor motivator, and training to exhaustion and screwing with the balance in your entire life is a surefire way to burn out in 6 weeks.

Focus only on patiently adding in a small amount of consistent exercise and very slowly and very incrementally growing this amount over time. I mean literally 15 minutes 3x a week of light exercise is a good starting point. Fuck around on the machines with no particular goal if that's what it takes to get you in the gym regularly for the first month. Focus on absorbing information and trying to make fitness a passion, or at least a habit. Once it's a habit the gains will come whether you think about it or not.

There is no amount of hard effort or intensity that will beat consistency over time, so figure out a strategy you can stay patient with.

I hope this serves as a "decent, but normal" example of bulking progress. I remember when I was just trying to get started and searching for inspiration, most of the examples were from 16 year olds going through puberty, people bouncing back from a previous athletic history, dramatic weight losses where the overweight guy had a really strong guy underneath and people who changed their entire life around and sacrificed everything to train.

Well I'm none of those things. I still drink at the weekends (and many weeknights), my diet hasn't changed much (although I eat more stuff and more protein generally), my consistency is decent but not perfect and there's no strong guy under this skinny suit. Ultimately I'm just a regular guy who goes to the gym now.
 
@gtorre I’d disagree also on the first 6-12 months being peoples best gains also and will add to what you said agreeing with your take

Those aren’t even gains they are just learning the movements and their CNS is adapting to weight they’d be able to lift had they ever lifted with what they started with. When you hit your first real plateau that’s when the real work and consistency matters. That’s real growth.

A lot of people are afraid to bulk also, and end up just spinning their wheels . they don’t want to gain the fat but you need the calories for actual growth you can diet the fat off later.
 
@dawn16 Yeah. I'm not afraid to bulk but I am just not as consistent with eating as I should be. I have the opposite problem most people have: I eat well during the week but then on the weekend I somehow eat less, and lose weight again.
 
@gtorre I've had very similar experiences with injuries. Just resting and then coming back never really seems to do anything for me. Just flares right back up when I start to add weight. Mine always end up needing some kind of actual treatment/rehab and a gradual progression to reestablish strength in the affected area.

Nice work! Not easy to dig yourself out of that 'never really played sports or been physically active' hole. I think a lot of people don't realize how massively impactful growing up playing sports can be on physical development, and get disappointed when they don't progress as quickly as they would like to, when the reality is they're starting so far behind and need to do a lot of catch-up.
 
@gtorre I notice you talk very little about diet. I have found the key to being fit in your older ages is diet. Diet to me was a far bigger part of my weight loss than the exercises I did. I mean you have people in here say you have to do weights when I have only done hard cardio in the last 4 years with stretching and body weight exercises. I did all that before, and more, and the body never came and just got worse as I aged. It was diet that fixed that. And now it is the only way I have been able to maintain that body as I am 47. We lean far too much on exercise and our youth to maintain our weight. What I found out when I fixed that in my 40s is that I could have been so much stronger when I was younger if I actually ate properly.
 
@questioner1 Yeah, it's a thing I think about more and more. For the most part I eat well and I get a high amount of protein in (around 140g a day at least), but I do drink and get takeaways maybe too often.
 
@dawn16 I never discounted it. It is incredibly important. What I said was that when we are younger we often discount how important diet is because we are able to eat largely what you want in whatever amounts you want and still maintain a decent physique. The wall most experience at middle age is when those bad habits impact you more because you have aged. So as a guy that has fixed these things and is pushing 50 you see how much diet has impacted you for so long.
 
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