My gym workout over past few years to transform from no muscle to noticeable abs (and shoulders)
Working out in the gym is important. It is. But it took me a while to convince myself to act on it. Good posture, strong muscles, and a good physique does more for you than “nice, bro”-s at the gym or “oooh”-s in a girl’s mind. My favorite side-effect to loving the gym is how it sharpens your mental focus and improves your ability to act and accomplish difficult tasks, including deep thinking tasks. (See the first main chapter of “5 steps to rapid improvement”.)
So how do you do it? If you’re a total noob to the concept of lifting weights beyond it being done by stereotypical muscleheads, how do you get yourself in there? How did a guy like me, skinny fat with bad frame (and sh*t style to boot) 2.5 years ago, turn my life around from being scared of the gym?
If you subscribe to Atomic Habits, it starts with changing internal identity and external habits, becoming someone who goes to the gym. A Gym-Goer. A Gym Enjoyer. Once that’s established, it’s easier to keep up the process. Here’s an imperfect chronological overview of how I developed into a gym-enjoyer:
START: I went to the gym with no plan, after receiving an invite from a college friend who went regularly. I’d wanted to go for a while, reading about the gym’s importance from guys like RedPillDad, TheRedQuest, and GoodLookingLoser. He was a smart guy, jarring my mental preconception of what a gym dude looked like, and I pretty much messed around with no plan. Sometimes I’d do what he did, asking for tips, sometimes I’d try some of the machines and stuff. I didn’t track anything.
Within a month or two of going to the gym (and continuing to read too many articles the wrong way), I tried StrongLifts 5×5, which I started with low weights and worked up quickly. It was a good way to start, and one of my real-life mentors started using it a few months ago (found it independently) and recommends it himself. However, back when I started going to the gym I didn’t gain much at all because I was limiting my potential via sleep deprivation1 and poor nutrition habits (no, 5-6 hours on a good night is probably not normal or healthy for you if you’re a Homo sapiens)
StrongLifts was too ambitious to me and felt too boring after about 6 months, so I switched to some combination of an A/B workout split from AWorkoutRoutine plus adapting some ideas from RPD‘s own routine, with less reps and sets than each might recommend.
From there, I played around with some exercise options, like adding pull-ups (eventually, slowly, weighted pull-ups), chin ups, barbell rows, sit-ups, and others I can’t recall. I stalled and dropped weights multiple times, how many sets I do, how many reps I do, and more. I dropped barbell squats due to discomfort, bad form, and it feeling like a grind each time, eventually adding dumbell squats.
Now to keep myself going in the gym I have a routine of slowly increasing reps over multiple sets for each exercise, up to a cap, at which I “graduate” myself to much lower reps again at the next highest weight. I currently have a 3x-per-week A/B split workout, per the following:
(Completed in 35-60 minutes’ time, bolding the main strength-building exercises)
A:
- Bench Press, 3 sets of 3-6 reps plus 2 warm-up sets
- Monkey Bars2, 1 set of 13 reps (each bar being “1 rep”)
- Knee Raise (Captain’s Chair) 1 set of 10 2-legged reps, 1 set of 10 reps on each leg separately
- Lat Pulldowns (Wide Grip, Machine) 3 sets of 3-7 reps plus 1 warm-up set
- Squat (Dumbell) 2 sets of 3-8 reps
- Lateral Raise (Dumbell)3 3 sets of 3-9 reps
B:
- Deadlift (Barbell) 2 sets of 3-5 reps plus 3 sets of warm-ups
- Eccentric Dragon Flags (body weight) 4 sets of 5 seconds each. Just added this to target more lower abs
- Monkey Bars, 1 set of 13 reps (each bar being “1 rep”)
- Weighted Chin Ups, 3 sets of 3-8 reps
- Overhead Press (Dumbell)4 3 sets of 4-9 reps
- Bicep Curls (Dumbell) 1-2 sets of 2-7 reps
- Pull Ups (no added weight), 2 sets of 2-9 reps
This isn’t perfect now, I just found what works for me—specifically what adds muscle, isn’t too easy, and what I can do consistently without burning out or hating it. And by seeing visible abs, I’m still not in athletic shape5. But I’ve dialed myself into the positive reinforcing upward spiral of progress-oriented cuts and bulks, and this isn’t the most fit I’ve been (which was about mid-January). I’m on a good track. Will you dare to join me?
Keep Rollin’.
- I can’t emphasize enough how 5-6 hours average sleep per night, 6.5 on a good night, is not at all healthy for your brain or body (you are probably not an exception. Stop taking your phone to bed) and has a detrimental effect on you for the rest of your life, plus ruining your memory/learning and relevantly your muscle gains, even if you’re doing everything else almost perfectly. Sleep cannot be made up for with other factors. If you are reading this and you are not made of AI, you need sleep, at least 7, if not 8 hours a night. ↩︎
- Hanging and monkey bars apparently have significant health properties as they go, and most adults lose the ability. It sounds fun, so I added it. ↩︎
- For sides of shoulders, I don’t know the muscle group name ↩︎
- To target shoulders ↩︎
- Just finished a bulking January with some love handles, so the abs barely poke out of a protruding belly. My current monogamous girlfriend says she doesn’t care, but the fact that I care has an effect on her—when I feel more sexy, she feels more of my “gravity” (a Nash concept). ↩︎
NightRoller Game 