PR Friday is a time to reflect on your training with people who actually understand you. Post your updates or PR’s to the comments.

Last Week’s Challenge was to do rows after every training session; post results to the comments.

Next Week’s Challenge: 1) Sign up for the Movember team, 2) post about it on your personal social media, and 3) donate one doll hair to the Movember team. This isn’t the first or last fundraising initiative 70’s Big will be a part of, so I’m not asking you to drop 10, 20, 50, or 100 doll hairs into the kitty. Just donate one doll hair. If everyone that looks at this site in the next month donated one doll hair, we’d raise a shit load of doll hairs and easily beat last year’s total. Remember: every doll hair counts. Also, instead of asking you or other people to donate a lot, I think that we can raise more by getting more people on the team overall. So join up, donate up, and let’s do this.

Week In Review: Monday’s female post asked hard training females to not only continue setting a good example, but to share how they got into lifting. Tuesday was a very important day — the 2012 Declaration of Movember. Join the team and help us raise money. Wednesday was a statement of unity through our uniqueness.

Image made by Alex B.

Q&A

Leeuwer on October 31, 2012 at 7:14 am said:

Dear Justin,

My girlfriend is highly interested in growing muscle, powerlifting and losing fat. This is fantastic.

I moved her from a typical diet to a paleo diet. Currently, she is used to sprinting 2-3 times a week.

I wrote down the following training routine for her:

 

Workout A:

Squat
Press
Chins (5 x 2, one leg on a bench behind her, cannot perform multiple reps unassisted yet)

Conditioning: 10 minutes Jump Rope

 

Workout B:

Squat
Bench Press
Deadlift

Conditioning: 10 minutes Jump Rope

 

These are alternated for three weight training days a week.

I suggested she limits the sprinting to twice a week and performs a calmer jog or walk on the third day (since she trains dogs and does her training with them). These are performed on the days in between weight training.

 

The questions:

1) Is the chin-up progression all right for her the progress to doing singles or doubles on chinups? Once I know that she can perform at least two chinups, I’ll move her up to doing 10 sets of singles, etc. Is this a good idea?

2) Is the sprinting/weight training too much? Having them both on one day would allow for more recovery, but that is unfortunately not possible.

3) Based on your article on females and higher reps, I wondered how I should best program her sets and reps. Better to have her perform 3 sets of 10 or 3 x 5? Or would you advise alternating? She wants to gain muscle and firm up, first and foremost.

Thanks for any advice.

 

Dear Leeuwer,

Good to hear that your girlfriend is interested in strength training and muscle building. Before I get to your question, I just have a few general notes to consider. This doesn’t mean you have to blindly follow them, but I think they are relevant.

– I’ve written about developing a chin or pull-up for females exhaustively. “Programming Pull-ups” and “Developing A Pull-up” will give you all you need to know. I also suggest “Experiment for da Ladies” in this case. This addressed your first question.

– I’m not a huge fan of just simply alternating A/B workouts in a linear progression unless the person is brand new to lifting. The A/B alternate will have a trainee deadlifting three times in two weeks, and this will become a problem very soon. If she’s brand new, then run with it, but after 6 to 8 weeks, just have her deadlift on Friday and do RDLs on Monday (or whatever corresponding days).

– What kind of sprints has she been doing? If they are legitimate 200 or 400 meter repeats, then jump roping won’t be terribly stressful to her. In fact, I would consider jump roping as less stressful than yogging for the same amount of time. If she’s been doing legitimate sprints, the jump rope won’t have the desired effect you’re after.

– I’m not a huge fan of training on off days, but if she’s relatively new to lifting (and hasn’t been consistent before), then it probably won’t be a big deal if she does a bit of conditioning on the off days. Just keep in mind that if her progress stalls in a few months (and her protein intake is close to 1g per pound of body weight), then the conditioning on off days should be the first to go. Your second question indicates that it’s not possible to do the sprints on the same days that she lifts, so your current plan is fine until you guys run into stalled progression — which should not happen for several months. And assuming she’s new to lifting, I don’t think it’d be a problem if she sprinted on a third non lifting day of the week (like on a Saturday). You know what to remove if she has recovery problems.

– Since she is still new to lifting, just use a 3×5 set/rep scheme. It provides a happy medium between strength training and hypertrophy, and she cannot build muscle without strength. She will develop muscle doing this stuff, and you can even turn her “conditioning” days into high intensity circuits to give her more reps of muscle contraction. I think you did a good job creating her plan and suggest that you stick with your plan until February and then worry about changes then. I realize she wants to “gain muscle” and “firm up” first, but muscle building is not a fast process, even for guys. Improving body composition will help the “firm/tone” goal.

There haven’t really been a lot of questions lately. Feel free to drop them in the comments or on social media.