Focus on getting stronger?

[Robster]

42/m. Been lifting for years but after i decided i needed to “cut” i went on a long diet and lost pretty much all strength and size i had obtained and my lifts were back down to early intermediate numbers (ie Squat around 250, deadlift 350, bench 250, OHP 145). Im 5’11 183 at the moment. At my biggest and strongest i was 215 in my early 30’s. Anyway i ran a couple of pure hypertrophy programs the past 4-5 months and weight went from 177 to 183 but i dont feel i look any bigger and the focus was mainly on lots of accessories rather than progressing big lifts. Trying to decide my next course of action. Should I focus on simply getting stronger and getting my SBD numbers up more and along with that hope some muscle gain? Or would something like an U/L split work as well? I looked over Andy Bakers U/L program and it looks interesting. Im just tired of hovering around this 175-185 lbs and being quite a bit weaker than i used to be. Just looking for some suggestions on programs or what i should focus on. In the SS forum it was suggested to run novice linear progression for awhile but theres no way i can add 5 pounds to the bar session to session

[Hardartery]

42/m. Been lifting for years but after i decided i needed to “cut” i went on a long diet and lost pretty much all strength and size i had obtained and my lifts were back down to early intermediate numbers (ie Squat around 250, deadlift 350, bench 250, OHP 145). Im 5’11 183 at the moment. At my biggest and strongest i was 215 in my early 30’s. Anyway i ran a couple of pure hypertrophy programs the past 4-5 months and weight went from 177 to 183 but i dont feel i look any bigger and the focus was mainly on lots of accessories rather than progressing big lifts. Trying to decide my next course of action. Should I focus on simply getting stronger and getting my SBD numbers up more and along with that hope some muscle gain? Or would something like an U/L split work as well? I looked over Andy Bakers U/L program and it looks interesting. Im just tired of hovering around this 175-185 lbs and being quite a bit weaker than i used to be. Just looking for some suggestions on programs or what i should focus on. In the SS forum it was suggested to run novice linear progression for awhile but theres no way i can add 5 pounds to the bar session to session

Mitchell Hooper has some free programs, might be worth a go. No sense banging your head against the wall with any SS stuff if you've been lifting more than a month. You really ought to have some idea of what does not work for you at this point, even if you don't know what does. Picking some main movements and accessories that address the weak points and staying with it for a while is usually a safe program that goes somewhere. What is your actual goal? Be strong? Look strong? Grow a better mustache than your mother-in-law? It depends what you want...

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

@Robster I think that the first thing that you should do is actually make up your mind on what you want. Do you want your main lifts to increase ? Then bias your program towards strength. Do you want to get bigger ? Then bias your program towards hypertrophy etc. As you have found out, doing a heavily hypertrophy biased program will (sometimes) not yield good strength progress.

Fitness influencers love to make up rules about what you should focus on like
- "if you are above (random bodyfat threshold) then you should definitely cut"
- "you should focus on strength instead of hypertrophy if your S/B/D are below (random strength standard)"
- you must focus on gaining weight if you are below (arbitrary bodyweight based on your gender height and wrist and ankle circumference)"

or whatever stupid "rule" they came up with. The reality is that all of this stuff boils down to what you want and that's all. There are no "bad goals" in lifting, it's a "choose your own adventure" type of activity.

Now once you have made up your mind (say you decide to pursue strength for the sake of argument), just look back at your training history, find your best training block that yielded the most increase in strength, and design a program that looks like this best training block. From then on just improve on it by trial and error. I think templates are OK, but if you've been lifting a long time you'll get much superior results by refining your own programs through trial and error.

PS: please don't do an LP, it's kind of silly.

[JohnHelton]

https://exodus-strength.com/forum/viewt ... 08#p222308

Because Hanley knows what he is doing. If I was you ,I would probably put myself in a small surplus and run this program.

[Zak]

I am similar in size to you, and also 42, was once over 200 with fairly big lifts, was been able to cut to 170-ish and hold most of my strength, and now building back up with pretty good results. This is after several less successful efforts at accomplishing the same. Here's some of what I've learned:

1. In my opinion most people focus too much on the main lifts (powerlifts) and smaller accessory, and do not put enough focus into the second-tier type movements (supplemental lifts that resemble the powerlifts, e.g., high bar pause squats, larsen press, spoto press, stiff-leg deads/RDLs, etc...) I have found the best results just touching the main lifts for 1-2, maybe 3 heavy but fairly low RPE sets, then put most of the effort and volume into the secondary lifts. These lifts tend to emphasize the weak range/lengthened position and as such are usually more effective at building the prime movers involved in the lifts than are the lifts themselves.

2. In contrast, too much of the big lifts (low bar squats and deadlifts specifically) take more from me than they give past a certain point, particularly when you're talking about higher-effort multi-rep sets. When these are hard, they should be hard because they're heavy, not because you're pushing deep into a hard set.

3. I also just have not gotten much out of single-joint assistance type work basically ever. At around 2 decades of lifting I can't say with any assurance that I wouldn't be about where I am had I simply never done a single set of that kind of work, which is astonishing when I think about it. (I would except rear delt work, GHRs/back extensions, and maybe curl variations...those have uses, the curls if for nothing other than elbow health).

4. It's a pain in the ass but tracking calories and macros has been essential for me in getting to the kind of precision in my diet that enables very slow but consistent rates of weight gain/weight loss. I've tracked consistently for a few years now and there is no way I could get the same results without doing it. Big deficits and surpluses have led to total shit results for me, go small and embrace the slow burn of consistent progress.

5. I would not attempt any kind of SS-style linear progression, even as a relatively new lifter. It's just not a smart way to train. You waste the first couple weeks on loads that don't really cause much adaptation, if you're luck you maybe hit a sweet spot in the middle for a couple weeks where the loads are about right, then blow past that and burn yourself out. Big waste of time and perversion of what effective training should be.

6. In terms of "hypertrophy," I'm 5'10, 175, so maybe not the most qualified, but I really do not think your programming makes much difference here as a natural lifter. If you're getting stronger in the big lifts past the very early stages of training and you're gaining scale weight, I think that's about as good as it's gonna get. People more gifted for hypertrophy than myself may notice particular muscle groups really responding to certain specific strategies, but I mean, after a couple years of lifting, how many pounds of muscle do you think you can gain in a year of training? Maybe 5 if everything goes perfectly, more likely 2-3. That's just hard to really notice on your physique, even on a year-to-year basis. I'd just stay consistent and do what you can to get stronger.

[Hardartery]

I was guessing that you actually want to get stronger, based on the thread title, but in relation to what @Zak mentions the isolation stuff is a special skill honestly if you want anything from it. Also, It did not occur to me that others would not lump all the variations in as main movements. Like, high bar/low bar/bow bar/safety squat bar/axle are all the same thing to me as far as base programming. The details are in which particular one I am doing right now and when that might change for a block and what that needs to change to. It's still a focus on the main lifts in my mind, it is counterproductive to try and throw any of those in on top of your favourite flavour of squat because it overburdens your recovery. Same as DL, there is nothing wrong with using a block pull or a RDL as the main lift in place of a normal DL. In fact, I think it makes more sense to do that and treat sumo as an assistance movement than to try and do serious conventional DL and then RDL on top of that. It comes down to knowing which version you need right now, which is fluid over time.
Also, this guy is both entertaining on his own channel and providing useful info for the most part. He's BB focused, but that plays into making iso stuff work.

https://www.youtube.com/live/6bLGzMvZA7 ... m7K34WREkg

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

6. In terms of "hypertrophy," I'm 5'10, 175, so maybe not the most qualified, but I really do not think your programming makes much difference here as a natural lifter. If you're getting stronger in the big lifts past the very early stages of training and you're gaining scale weight, I think that's about as good as it's gonna get. People more gifted for hypertrophy than myself may notice particular muscle groups really responding to certain specific strategies, but I mean, after a couple years of lifting, how many pounds of muscle do you think you can gain in a year of training? Maybe 5 if everything goes perfectly, more likely 2-3. That's just hard to really notice on your physique, even on a year-to-year basis. I'd just stay consistent and do what you can to get stronger.

I agree with almost everything with a caveat: your programming does not matter too much for hypertrophy, providing that it is not retarded. I would define not retarded as:

- training all muscle groups at least once a week
- with enough volume to ensure progression
- with a weight chosen to get somewhere in the 6 to 30 rep range somehow close to failure

There are plenty of people who are gaining scale weight and progressing in their big lifts that have underwhelming arms
and/or shoulders because they simply do not train their arms and/or their shoulders (this qualifies as retarded programming in my opinion). I mean some people would recommend squats to grow your biceps lol. And interestingly enough when people start to train those muscle groups properly, even after years of lifting, all of a sudden they grow.

Now finer things like what type of curls you should do, how much you should control the negative, whether you should train a muscle with 4 reps in reserve or 2 reps in reserve, and so on have probably a rather small impact, I agree with that. A lot of this stuff seems like mental masturbation. I mean if hypertrophy training required so much accuracy and complexity to work, nobody would be jacked, and honestly anyone with a room temperature IQ and 10 years of consistent visits to the gym applying good effort and eating like an adult will be somehow jacked.