Have you ever tried to google a workout program and came up with something like: “3 day a week program for beginners”, “Mass building plan for intermediate lifters” or “Double daily routine for advanced lifters”?
I am a living proof how easy one can misunderstand the difference behind beginner, intermediate and advanced.
Choosing advanced program because you want to “challenge” yourself although you are everything but advanced lifter.
Ego at it’s finest, thinking of yourself as a beginner, although you are active all your life and have some experience in a weight training is a humble thing to do if you think about it.
Being young, delusional and motivated is a bad combination.
That’s the reason why I don’t like this kind of naming, although it makes perfect sense once you understand it.
Maybe we can come up with better idea at the end of this post, who knows!
What is the difference?
Difference between all those lifting stages is the amount of effort required to gain muscle and become stronger at performed movements.
You are beginner if all it takes is training 2-3 times a week with not much attention to recovery and diet. As time goes on and your progress slows down, the effort needs to raise in order for you to progress.
Different people react differently to training and the time required for them to go from one stage to the next one varies.
The luckiest are the ones who are beginner for a long long time and vice versa.
Now that we understand the difference, let’s talk about training approach for each stage.
How should you train as beginner?
Beginner stage is the golden period of bodybuilding journey. If you ever wondered what it’s like to use steroids, look no more. You will never experience the amount of growth you get at this period. Training 3 days a week, eating whatever and every week you are stronger than week before.
As a matter of fact, you gain muscle even with fat loss diet.
This should be milked as much as possible with progressive overload approach. Meaning, with every training session you should induce more stress on a muscle. It can be done either with rep or weight addition to the movement.
Before we start, we need to make one thing clear. Being beginner, lot’s of gains and yada yada does not mean no conditions should be met on your part!
Consistency is of utmost importance and training hard is a big plus, but other than that, you don’t need to overthink anything.
Since you are probably weak, small and almost without muscle the main goal is to incorporate best muscle building movements into your training.
Those are not very comfortable, but excellent movements for building the “base” of your long term progress.
Main movements which align with this description are:
- Squats
- Hip hinges:
- Good mornings
- Deadlift variations
- Presses/Pushes:
- Bench press variations
- Overhead press variations
- Pulls:
- Row variations
- Pull-up variations
These are compound movements and work multiple muscles at once, overload is very straightforward making them perfect for progression.
As a beginner the best training approach is to do a full body workout at least 2 days a week.
There is a lot of beginner workout plans available online
- Starting Strength: Basic movements, strong base but small arms and lacking muscle growth
- Nothing Barred Fitness: More detailed than starting strength and great option
- The Alpha Destiny Novice Program: A bit too complicated but great attention to detail
Intermediate training approach
Why do all good things come to an end?
You were getting stronger every week, packing that muscle on regular basis and for the past few weeks you can’t add that rep to your press.
Adding few pounds to your squat seems impossible. Welcome to the world of plateaus!
I have a good, bad and comforting news.
The good one is that you are not beginner anymore, intermediate sounds much more serious and your technique is great.
Bad news is that it will never be as simple as it was and you will have to start thinking more about training if you want continuous progress.
Comforting news is that you won’t have to kill yourself from all the thinking… at least for now.
Recovery, diet and exercise selection are things you have to focus on.
Diet
This is the hardest part of this training stage transition.
Until now, you just tried to get those protein in and not be hungry, never thinking about calories.
Calories are standard unit for measuring energy, and in this context, think of them as your body fuel.
Less activity you do, less fuel your body needs and vice versa.
Let’s introduce some terminology:
- Calorie surplus – More calories than maintenance
- Calorie deficit – Less calories than maintenance
- Calorie maintenance – Amount of calories needed to maintain weight for given activity level of an individual
Bulk
If you give your body more calories than maintenance level, it stores them as fat (for future needs) or uses some of them for rebuilding and generating new fibres (muscle gain).
This doesn’t mean that you should eat as much calories in surplus as possible to get jacked, but it’s perfect strategy to get fat and strong.
Losing that fat takes a lot of time, and your skin stretches which sucks.
Much better way is to eat in a small surplus (250-500 cal over maintenance). This way your body gets enough fuel to recover and rebuild, while small fraction of it goes into fat.
As you get stronger and bigger, your maintenance rises and your calorie intake needs to rise proportionally for continuous progress.
The hardest part of every bulk is eating enough, but as they say.. no pain no gain.
Cut
With less calories then maintenance, body fat is used for energy, hence weight loss occurs.
Weight loss needs to be done strategically as well. Rapid weight loss is very rarely a good idea, it’s a shock for organism, training performance suffers tremendously, there is a great risk of dehydration and there will be muscle loss happening.
Approach weight loss same way you approach bulking phase.. eat in small calorie deficit (250-500 cal) over period of few weeks. This way, your body gets accustomed and your performance and life enjoyment do not suffer. You can go a bit more into deficit but try to stick into this range.
Calorie tracking sounds intimidating and lot of people shame it like.. “Only girls track calories bro!”, “Relax bro, you take this to seriously!” etc.
One you get grasp of it, it becomes second nature, as it is the case with every skill. When you know where you are at, you are not wasting all those efforts and hard training sessions for nothing.
At the end of a day, joke is on them Swole Bro!
Recovery
Recovery is another piece of a puzzle in intermediate phase. We already covered diet part, which is of utmost importance for great recovery. Without enough food, there is no recovery.
But what else is important?
Glad you ask!
The most important recovery and muscle building hack everyone has in their control is sleep.
All of muscle growth happens when we sleep, and better the sleep, better the muscle growth.
Sleep is so important that it is better to skip workout than be sleep deprived.
If your sleep game is not good and you fix just that, your progress will skyrocket.
Select one day of a week where you will just chill and relax to deal with accumulated stress over the week.
Try to not drink too much, drinking interferes with recovery a lot so try to minimize it for better gains.
Exercise selection
Beginner workout plan should be all about the simplicity and “bang for the buck” approach.
Simplicity is important because you are just starting and it should not be overwhelming, but with time, not all muscles are worked equally.
Those muscles can become a limiting factor in strength progression.
For example, during your beginner phase, selected press movement was Flat Barbell Bench Press where the lower chest area gets bigger stimulus than the upper one.
That was not the issue for a long time, but as we already said.. all good things come to an end. At the moment, upper chest development might be a limiting factor in your bench press.
Replacing flat press with incline might be a solution for a problem.
Try to analyse your strengths and weaknesses and find a replacement which will work more on.
Higher range of repetitions is also worth experimenting with. Instead of 5-10 range, try 10-20, you might be pleasantly surprised.
You see, not much thinking at all. You’re welcome Swlo Bro!
Advanced suffering
Welcome to the world of attention to detail where everything matters. In order for you to progress, everything needs to be top notch; Diet, recovery, exercise selection, training approach, identifying your weaknesses, you name it!
For us to cover entire topic, it would probably take a a few weeks, so we will not go in too much detail. And besides, if you were advanced, you probably know everything about it anyways.. duhh.
Mind-muscle connection
Until now, most of your movement attention went to technique and tempo. As advanced lifter you have it all ingrained in your neural network.
You can get even more out of a movement if you focus all the tension of the movement to the muscle you want to target.
Contract that muscle during entire movement and try to feel every inch of the movement.
This is much harder than it sounds and it’s the reason why it is an advanced technique. It is not important as technique and tempo of the movement, but when everything counts it counts.
Fatigue management
With hard training, your body accumulates internal fatigue . Whether it is nervous system or intracellular signalling disruption, anabolic and catabolic hormonal disruption or different micro tears and fractures.
A beginner does not lift remotely hard enough for huge fatigue to kick in, that’s why you can do hard squats every training session.
As you get stronger and more advanced the fatigue management becomes more and more important.
You are so strong that one hard squat session requires almost if not entire week for your squads to recover.
You want to select exercises which are not taxing on your body but provide great stimulus to muscles you want to work on.
Every 4-6 weeks you should introduce deload week to deal with that internal accumulated fatigue.
Week before, go behind failure (drop sets, small pauses when missing the rep, etc.) so you completely destroy your body before recovery week.
Introduce variations
Think about different variations to your training.
For example.. change volume and intensity every few weeks. Work with heavy weights and low repetitions first few weeks, than spice it up with 10-20 repetitions for the next few weeks and finish it off with 20-30 repetitions for the last few weeks.
Conclusion
As you can see, journey to being jacked is not a straight line but long and bumpy road which requires you to become stronger, smarter and more dedicated as time goes by. That’s the way it should be.. nothing in life is easy and harder it is, more rewarding and special it becomes.
Eat, sleep and train Swole Bro!
Until next time!
