Mesmerizing Gigachad
Iron
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Hello my friendly friends, I’ve looked for the gym guide in the archive to see if I could improve upon it and what do you know, there is no gym guide at all, or maybe I could just not find it. So here we go. I am a personal trainer by trade and gymmaxxer myself. This guide won't contain diet information even though that's extremely important as well so maybe I'll write a dietmax guide but for now I welcome questions in the comments.
Disclaimer: I started from being underweight which is really helpful because your body is more keen to pack on muscle mass instead of bodyfat so it allows you to bulk nicely for an extended period of time. But here we go, my results after only 1 year coming from 0.00, 6 months of complete no-life gymmax with 100% adherence followed by 6 months of laid-back casual ~60% adherence:
There’s a billion things I can tell you about everything related to lifting but I’m going to focus on beginners (little to no experience with serious lifting), the goal being increased aesthetics and the assumption that you have access to a gym where you’re willing to go to twice a week. I will assume you have no serious (physical) injuries. I’m going to keep it fairly light on the references and science because we’ll be here all day, but you can always ask me questions in this topic.
We need to know the following things:
Which gym to select
The one that is the closest, but not Planet Fitness.
What exercises are optimal
Our good friend Menno Henselmans has a decent article on exercise selection, if you have some spare time you can find it here: http://www.simplyshredded.com/7-principles-of-exercise-selection.html
However, Menno is also severely autistic, i.e. him mentioning he is a digital nomad every 10 seconds due to extreme neurosis or trying to coin/invent new fitness terminology more often than Lord Byron in a desperate attempt to create a legacy in the fitness industry, while he is but a miserable ant. His beard is also stupid and I know deep down inside he has the beard in an attempt to be more unique, not because he genuinely believes it makes him look better. He has to be a unique snowflake with everything he writes down (if you want a good laugh check out his circadian rhythm article). Can’t blame him, the fitness industry is oversaturated and in order to stand out – while not being completely full of shit – is to latch on to fringe science and interpret it in the edgiest manner possible while still remaining vaguely correct. On top of that he alienates people by using unnecessarily fancy words. I still understand what he means (although I wish I didn’t), but you may not, so I will tl;dr his above article here while omitting some things and adding some stuff of my own.
If you’re wondering why we’re using something of him as a source despite all the critique I just gave him, it’s because the article is genuinely useful. I wouldn’t recommend any other content related to him, unless it is an uncensored video of his gory execution. I have stopped reading his articles for a while now because if I want to read jester manifestos I’ll read some Shakespeare. Not that Shakespeare is particularly good btw, I think the only reason English teachers are obsessed with him is because he writes funny. It probably doesn’t help that you need hundreds of footnotes per sentence to understand the supposed genius of Shakespeare, which tbh is mostly just neuro-atypical callback/meta humor your average incel would try and use to woo Stacey who is of course oblivious and just thinks he is weird. Not that it would have mattered because it was over anyway due to your genetic make-up giving you that face. Anyway I digress, forgive me for bamboozling you with my narcy ranting and making this guide about me and my opinions up until this point, I’m dark triad maxxing. Also fuck Menno.
What exercises are optimal, but this time for real
To find out, we need to define what makes an exercise optimal. In no particular order:
1) Your willingness to do the exercise in the implemented manner
If you do the ‘optimal’ exercise but you completely hate your life while doing it (as in, you hate it more than usual), sustainability is going to become an issue. You’ll stop doing the exercise or make excuses to not go to the gym.
2) Well defined range of motion
I believe push-ups are better than the bench press in most situations, but the issue is that there’s a million ways to sabotage yourself during a push-up and not so many during a bench press. It’s really easy to slightly alter your range of motion, your angle, involvement of muscles (i.e. the ones responsible for moving your scapula), pelvic tilt and so forth, so you can easily be fraudin’ yourself without realizing it and that is a problem. You just don’t have any of these issues with the bench press.
3) Ability to overload
Lets take the bench press and push-up again: with the bench press, you can incrementally add small amounts of weight to a movement pattern that is strictly defined. How are you going to add weight to the push-up? The weight will be displaced over your body and the resistance curve changes as you move yourself through the range of motion, if you even manage to find a reliable way to add weight. You can also fraud yourself during a push-up, which you can’t really do with a bench press.
4) Limiting factor
If you want to train your back but you can’t hold on to the weight long enough to effectively train your back, your grip is the limiting factor and is actually what’s being trained, making the supposed back exercise a grip exercise. Similarly, if you’re standing on an unstable surface (such as a bosu ball) your balance is almost always going to be the limiting factor no matter what exercise you do. If you’re going to do a lot of air squats (air squats = no additional weight), your cardio may become an issue instead of your leg muscle endurance.
5) Most weight possible
You want to be able to lift the most amount of weight while still maintaining the correct technique. Obviously you need to make sure #4 is being met.
6) Low risk of injury
You don’t want to get injured I assume. This point kills things such as upright rows, behind-the-neck-anythings, …,
7) Full range of motion
If there’s multiple variations of an exercise, the one with the most range of motion is usually superior, as long as #6 is being met.
The program
I have done the problem solving for you and have selected the lifts you should do, with the reps/sets/exercise order included, but I can’t do point #1 for you, so I have given you the other factors so you can look for another exercise in case you dread doing it. Look up technique vids for these if you are unsure or ask me in the comments, else this guide will become too long.
This should take you between 60 and 120 minutes to complete, based on how much of a beginner you are (if you just started you’ll breeze through but it gets fairly difficult later on). You’ll be going twice a week – there’s really no need to go more often. Make sure there’s at least 2 days In between workouts, it doesn’t really matter on which days you go but keep in mind that on Mondays there’s usually the most amount of people in the gym.
(90s to 180s rest between sets)
Barbell Back Squat (high bar) 5x5
Stiff-legged Deadlift (SLDL) 3x5
Barbell Hip Thrust (regular) 3x8
Superset these (60s to 90s rest between each set)
(Barbell overhead) press 3x5
Lat pulldown (pronated, 1.5x biacromial width) 3x10
Superset these too (60s to 90s rest between each set)
Bench press 3x8
Seal row* 3x8
Aaaand superset these as well (60s to 90s rest between each set)
Lateral raises 3x15
Barbell curl 3x8
*ideally this is done on a specific seal rowing bench station with a cambered bar, but I’ve never seen these in the wild even though they supposedly exist (I think Rogue Fitness has one?), use a chest-supported machine row instead
On your rest days, do hollow bodies (google: hollow body progression), planks (until you can comfortably hold 2 minute normal lever plank and 1 minute side plank), crunches (add more reps instead of weight each successful workout). These are on your ‘rest’ days because the only thing you need in order to do these effectively is a time keeping mechanism (i.e. stopwatch on phone) and the ground, so no need to add this to your normal workout volume. If you’ve bought bands do some mobility work too.
Start with the barbell on everything except the SLDL, here you will start with 5kg plates (preferably the maximum diameter) on both sides. Every successful completion of an exercise add 1.25kg plates on each side of the barbell, except for the barbell curl and overhead press, where you will add 0.5kg micro plates. If you fail to complete an exercise, go back 2 levels. Examples:
Squat 50kg --> success --> do 52.5kg next time
Squat 50kg --> fail --> do 45kg next time, then continue as normal
Barbell 25kg --> fail --> do 23kg next time, then continue as normal
Although everyone is different you should be settled for 3ish months with this program. Eventually, this will become too hard to do due to too much volume in 1 single workout (for example if you have an advanced person do 5x5 squats and 3x5 deadlifts they are completely done for that session, no way they are doing any other work). You’ll just end up becoming gassed halfway through as well as tired, demotivated and unable to move any useful amount of weight on some of the exercises later in the workout. This is normal – you have now become an intermediate and you’ll need to adjust your workout volume and disperse it across more than 2 days, you’ll probably want to start implementing some different exercises and rep/set schemes as well. But that’s something for another guide.
Stuff to buy yourself, in case your gym doesn’t have it
1) Micro plates
Your gym won’t have these, because no gyms have these, because the people responsible for deciding who gets to decide on the design of their gym have no knowledge about fitness and are purely profit driven, similar to the degenerate capitalistic society we live in. They usually sign a deal with a brand and that brand throws in a bunch of machines from which the majority is useless. One machine can easily be worth more than a barbell + an entire set of plates combined. Hell, some of the newest self-powered treadmills cost upwards of 8k (although I must admit these are really useful, but it still puts things into perspective as a set of high quality weights is not even 1k).
2) Bands
Your gym probably has these, but it’s useful to do mobility work at home (shoulder dislocators). They are good for warming up your rotator cuff, glute medius, stretching etc. – especially good for shoulder dislocators (google this exercise if you haven’t heard about them). You can also do some posture work at home (YWTL raises)
3) Magnet weights
Your gym certainly won’t have these. These are weights that have a strong magnet in them, you can add them to the stack of weights on a (cable) machine or the side of a dumbbell, although this program doesn’t have any dumbbell exercises in it. Be careful with the magnet and any devices that are sensitive to magnets.
Warming up
Watch this video:
but add shoulder dislocators to the list. Don’t bother watching anything else from Jeff Nippard (except technique videos) as it’s too hard to separate unique snowflakiness from advice representative of reality for a beginner. His technique videos are good though.
Good luck, taking questions.
Disclaimer: I started from being underweight which is really helpful because your body is more keen to pack on muscle mass instead of bodyfat so it allows you to bulk nicely for an extended period of time. But here we go, my results after only 1 year coming from 0.00, 6 months of complete no-life gymmax with 100% adherence followed by 6 months of laid-back casual ~60% adherence:
There’s a billion things I can tell you about everything related to lifting but I’m going to focus on beginners (little to no experience with serious lifting), the goal being increased aesthetics and the assumption that you have access to a gym where you’re willing to go to twice a week. I will assume you have no serious (physical) injuries. I’m going to keep it fairly light on the references and science because we’ll be here all day, but you can always ask me questions in this topic.
We need to know the following things:
- What exercises are optimal for our goals
- How to implement them (reps/sets/exercise order/how much rest/weight/progression/etc.)
Which gym to select
The one that is the closest, but not Planet Fitness.
What exercises are optimal
Our good friend Menno Henselmans has a decent article on exercise selection, if you have some spare time you can find it here: http://www.simplyshredded.com/7-principles-of-exercise-selection.html
However, Menno is also severely autistic, i.e. him mentioning he is a digital nomad every 10 seconds due to extreme neurosis or trying to coin/invent new fitness terminology more often than Lord Byron in a desperate attempt to create a legacy in the fitness industry, while he is but a miserable ant. His beard is also stupid and I know deep down inside he has the beard in an attempt to be more unique, not because he genuinely believes it makes him look better. He has to be a unique snowflake with everything he writes down (if you want a good laugh check out his circadian rhythm article). Can’t blame him, the fitness industry is oversaturated and in order to stand out – while not being completely full of shit – is to latch on to fringe science and interpret it in the edgiest manner possible while still remaining vaguely correct. On top of that he alienates people by using unnecessarily fancy words. I still understand what he means (although I wish I didn’t), but you may not, so I will tl;dr his above article here while omitting some things and adding some stuff of my own.
If you’re wondering why we’re using something of him as a source despite all the critique I just gave him, it’s because the article is genuinely useful. I wouldn’t recommend any other content related to him, unless it is an uncensored video of his gory execution. I have stopped reading his articles for a while now because if I want to read jester manifestos I’ll read some Shakespeare. Not that Shakespeare is particularly good btw, I think the only reason English teachers are obsessed with him is because he writes funny. It probably doesn’t help that you need hundreds of footnotes per sentence to understand the supposed genius of Shakespeare, which tbh is mostly just neuro-atypical callback/meta humor your average incel would try and use to woo Stacey who is of course oblivious and just thinks he is weird. Not that it would have mattered because it was over anyway due to your genetic make-up giving you that face. Anyway I digress, forgive me for bamboozling you with my narcy ranting and making this guide about me and my opinions up until this point, I’m dark triad maxxing. Also fuck Menno.
What exercises are optimal, but this time for real
To find out, we need to define what makes an exercise optimal. In no particular order:
1) Your willingness to do the exercise in the implemented manner
If you do the ‘optimal’ exercise but you completely hate your life while doing it (as in, you hate it more than usual), sustainability is going to become an issue. You’ll stop doing the exercise or make excuses to not go to the gym.
2) Well defined range of motion
I believe push-ups are better than the bench press in most situations, but the issue is that there’s a million ways to sabotage yourself during a push-up and not so many during a bench press. It’s really easy to slightly alter your range of motion, your angle, involvement of muscles (i.e. the ones responsible for moving your scapula), pelvic tilt and so forth, so you can easily be fraudin’ yourself without realizing it and that is a problem. You just don’t have any of these issues with the bench press.
3) Ability to overload
Lets take the bench press and push-up again: with the bench press, you can incrementally add small amounts of weight to a movement pattern that is strictly defined. How are you going to add weight to the push-up? The weight will be displaced over your body and the resistance curve changes as you move yourself through the range of motion, if you even manage to find a reliable way to add weight. You can also fraud yourself during a push-up, which you can’t really do with a bench press.
4) Limiting factor
If you want to train your back but you can’t hold on to the weight long enough to effectively train your back, your grip is the limiting factor and is actually what’s being trained, making the supposed back exercise a grip exercise. Similarly, if you’re standing on an unstable surface (such as a bosu ball) your balance is almost always going to be the limiting factor no matter what exercise you do. If you’re going to do a lot of air squats (air squats = no additional weight), your cardio may become an issue instead of your leg muscle endurance.
5) Most weight possible
You want to be able to lift the most amount of weight while still maintaining the correct technique. Obviously you need to make sure #4 is being met.
6) Low risk of injury
You don’t want to get injured I assume. This point kills things such as upright rows, behind-the-neck-anythings, …,
7) Full range of motion
If there’s multiple variations of an exercise, the one with the most range of motion is usually superior, as long as #6 is being met.
The program
I have done the problem solving for you and have selected the lifts you should do, with the reps/sets/exercise order included, but I can’t do point #1 for you, so I have given you the other factors so you can look for another exercise in case you dread doing it. Look up technique vids for these if you are unsure or ask me in the comments, else this guide will become too long.
This should take you between 60 and 120 minutes to complete, based on how much of a beginner you are (if you just started you’ll breeze through but it gets fairly difficult later on). You’ll be going twice a week – there’s really no need to go more often. Make sure there’s at least 2 days In between workouts, it doesn’t really matter on which days you go but keep in mind that on Mondays there’s usually the most amount of people in the gym.
(90s to 180s rest between sets)
Barbell Back Squat (high bar) 5x5
Stiff-legged Deadlift (SLDL) 3x5
Barbell Hip Thrust (regular) 3x8
Superset these (60s to 90s rest between each set)
(Barbell overhead) press 3x5
Lat pulldown (pronated, 1.5x biacromial width) 3x10
Superset these too (60s to 90s rest between each set)
Bench press 3x8
Seal row* 3x8
Aaaand superset these as well (60s to 90s rest between each set)
Lateral raises 3x15
Barbell curl 3x8
*ideally this is done on a specific seal rowing bench station with a cambered bar, but I’ve never seen these in the wild even though they supposedly exist (I think Rogue Fitness has one?), use a chest-supported machine row instead
On your rest days, do hollow bodies (google: hollow body progression), planks (until you can comfortably hold 2 minute normal lever plank and 1 minute side plank), crunches (add more reps instead of weight each successful workout). These are on your ‘rest’ days because the only thing you need in order to do these effectively is a time keeping mechanism (i.e. stopwatch on phone) and the ground, so no need to add this to your normal workout volume. If you’ve bought bands do some mobility work too.
Start with the barbell on everything except the SLDL, here you will start with 5kg plates (preferably the maximum diameter) on both sides. Every successful completion of an exercise add 1.25kg plates on each side of the barbell, except for the barbell curl and overhead press, where you will add 0.5kg micro plates. If you fail to complete an exercise, go back 2 levels. Examples:
Squat 50kg --> success --> do 52.5kg next time
Squat 50kg --> fail --> do 45kg next time, then continue as normal
Barbell 25kg --> fail --> do 23kg next time, then continue as normal
Although everyone is different you should be settled for 3ish months with this program. Eventually, this will become too hard to do due to too much volume in 1 single workout (for example if you have an advanced person do 5x5 squats and 3x5 deadlifts they are completely done for that session, no way they are doing any other work). You’ll just end up becoming gassed halfway through as well as tired, demotivated and unable to move any useful amount of weight on some of the exercises later in the workout. This is normal – you have now become an intermediate and you’ll need to adjust your workout volume and disperse it across more than 2 days, you’ll probably want to start implementing some different exercises and rep/set schemes as well. But that’s something for another guide.
Stuff to buy yourself, in case your gym doesn’t have it
1) Micro plates
Your gym won’t have these, because no gyms have these, because the people responsible for deciding who gets to decide on the design of their gym have no knowledge about fitness and are purely profit driven, similar to the degenerate capitalistic society we live in. They usually sign a deal with a brand and that brand throws in a bunch of machines from which the majority is useless. One machine can easily be worth more than a barbell + an entire set of plates combined. Hell, some of the newest self-powered treadmills cost upwards of 8k (although I must admit these are really useful, but it still puts things into perspective as a set of high quality weights is not even 1k).
2) Bands
Your gym probably has these, but it’s useful to do mobility work at home (shoulder dislocators). They are good for warming up your rotator cuff, glute medius, stretching etc. – especially good for shoulder dislocators (google this exercise if you haven’t heard about them). You can also do some posture work at home (YWTL raises)
3) Magnet weights
Your gym certainly won’t have these. These are weights that have a strong magnet in them, you can add them to the stack of weights on a (cable) machine or the side of a dumbbell, although this program doesn’t have any dumbbell exercises in it. Be careful with the magnet and any devices that are sensitive to magnets.
Warming up
Watch this video:
but add shoulder dislocators to the list. Don’t bother watching anything else from Jeff Nippard (except technique videos) as it’s too hard to separate unique snowflakiness from advice representative of reality for a beginner. His technique videos are good though.
Good luck, taking questions.
Last edited:
