Anyone who read the post about my workouts yesterday will have read that I’ve finally admitted defeat and adjusted my workouts back to something that is better suited to me. Today I’m going to write a bit more about making my workouts fit for my own body and how I’ve learned about my own body through the things I’ve done.
Beginners get it easy!
When I was a beginner I followed standard beginner programs. I started with really light weights and high reps. This helped me learn the movements at the same time as building some basic strength, since I started lifting weights just after recovering from two fractured elbows and could barely pick up a 1kg plate when I began. It gave a whole new meaning to the “Starting Strength” program!
Most trainers say a beginner can do almost anything and gain strength. There needs to be some purpose to the exercises and this is a valuable time to learn the building blocks of correct form and mobility, but as long as the weight goes up each week, the beginner will build strength.
Be prepared for the next stage
I don’t want to put down the hard work of anyone reading this who is a beginner.
It’s fantastic that anyone should pick up weights and decide to start training, especially women who rarely have exposure to lifting in their teenage years and for whom big weights is a secret that the fitness industry seems to want to keep from us. It isn’t easy learning the right moves and grooving the movements. I recall many frustrated hours spent in the gym in those early years.
The problem with the beginner years is that you end up believing that the weight will go up forever. The first time you hit a wall it is completely destroying. For a few weeks I felt like a failure. I wasn’t ready for it.
Work with your body
I now find that the gains aren’t so easy to get. I can bump the weight up each week for a few weeks and then everything stalls. To get things moving again I often need to change the program or my approach.
A lesson I was reminded of this week is that it is much easier to work with your body to ensure that any program changes continue to use your natural advantages to best effect – in my case, my slow twitch muscle fibres.
Fast twitch or slow twitch?
I have found that accepting my extreme slow twitch muscles and building my program to suit them has been essential to the bigger successes I’ve seen so far.
Slow twitch muscles make me incredibly good at endurance work. I can sit on a bike for hours or walk for days and, with a few exceptions, I’m able to go again the next day. In the gym I’ve found that this seems to translate to rapid recovery, brief rest periods and an ability to still handle heavier weights for this.
Of course the range in the weights I can lift for different rep schemes is already narrow. With my bodyweight a 5 kg change to the weight I’m lifting is 10% of my bodyweight. It was because of this that we invested in 0.5kg plates. They’re really cute and make it possible to adjust the weight by single kilos.
Giving "girly weights" a whole new perspective
Chris, in contrast, is very fast twitch. He’s an excellent sprinter and wipes me out on hill sprints, but he doesn’t recover as well. He needs longer rest periods in the gym and fewer reps, but as a consequence of this (and his heavier bodyweight) he can shift much heavier weight on those few reps and still get an effective workout.
Is it a gender thing?
I don’t think so. I wrote the other week about my scepticism over the gender issue with workouts.
Reading training programs on male-dominated forums there are some men who also thrive on the sort of program that I benefit from. It may be that a greater proportion of women have slow twitch muscles than amongst men but that doesn’t mean it will be right for you.
Fitting the program to the body
I don’t know if fast twitch or slow twitch is a major consideration for most people. I’ve seen some trainers comment that muscle fibre type is not the decisive factor some people see it as and that trainees use it as an excuse.
To a point I agree with them – you should always train your body to cope outside of its comfort zone. I had a brief period last year when I did evil bike sprint intervals to learn to deal with lactate in my quads and now handle steep hills better. But for general progress you’ll get best results working with your body, rather than fighting it.
There’s no denying what we’ve seen in the gym. Chris gets most progress on programs with big rest periods (e.g. 2 minutes), fewer sets (at the moment the most he seems to do is 5 sets), fewer reps (usually 2 or 3) and really heavy weight.
I get most improvement on programs with short rests (doing the exercise on 60-90 seconds, so I usually get 30-60 seconds rest), more sets (10 seems to be optimum) and more reps (e.g. 3-5).
Make it work for you
Ultimately, the lesson I’ve learned over the last few years is that you need to try a few different things and fail at a few things along the way while you learn what works best for you.
Don’t fight your body. Work with it to get the best results.
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