Critique My Workout Please

You're doing a lot of weight lifting, are you doing anything else? What about distance running or sprinting? Are you doing any speed, agility, balance or quickness drills? What about power lifting for overall strength, and stability ball for core strengthening? I'm not trying to rip you kid I'm being serious. If you want to be the best athlete you can be, then you need to train like an athlete not a bodybuilder.

Right now it's just lifting some speed training and agilities and football. After football season I'm going to hit the boxing gym a lot though.
 
More isn't necessarily better. You can add some size to your arms by working them directly. However, you'll probably find that your arm size tracks closely to your overall body weight, and much less so to your arm workouts. If your arm size is tracking body weight, then it makes sense to just focus on the big lifts that stimulate overall body growth. What you are doing isn't inherently wrong, but I think you are chasing something that will have very limited returns for you.




I usually give people the opposite advice: form follows function. If you want to get big, get strong and your body will adapt. Having strong triceps can definitely help your bench, the question is whether doing an extra 85 reps of triceps work after your bench is helpful at all. I'm not going to suggest that the extra work is necessarily harmful, but I will say from anecdotal experience that when I backed way off of the assistance exercises my core lifts got stronger faster.

You mention that this is your off season lifting routine. What does your on season routine look like?

I've come to a similar conclusion. I just started on my second cycle of 5/3/1; today was Bench. During the first cycle, I used Close Grip and Dumbbell as my Assistance exercises, 5X10 on both. This time I cut the reps to 5X5 and felt much stronger.
 
You're focusing too much on a bodybuilding type workout (3 different types of curls, twice a week... really???). I agree with following a basic westside template. You can't go wrong with it. It's what I do. It's what most of the football players at my school do.

Great size and strength gains. Eat lots for maximal results.

Joe Defranco has some modified templates for in-season lifting too.
 
That's one thing about westside, there's so many options in terms of which exercises to do. It could easily be overwhelming.



I've never done Westside, so I can't speak from experience (although at some point in the future I might like to try it, if for no other reason than I think I'd learn something from the experiene).

But the combination of heavy work with the main lifts, and solid effot on the assistance work should work quite well. That said, any powerlifting program that isn't low volume, combined with sufficient eating should produce gradual muscle gain, even if some do work better than others.


Cool. I was doing Hepburn, then took a few weeks of due to a variety of crap. Now, I think I'm going do 5/3/1 (trying to decide which variety) while upping my calories a lot. Gotta get HYOOOGE
 
I was worried about reading most of the responses on the first page.
 
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