OJ's guide on how to work out and get jacked as hell

Been working out for a few months now and writing about my insane gains on my journal led to a request for my full routine. I'm providing a little more than just that, and I thought I might post this here because this is information that I searched for for a long time, and now that I've finally collected it for myself, I'd like to help out anyone who's been kept back from working out by not knowing how to do it right. Or, if anybody is already working out, hopefully I can help you do it better and get shredded and bigger quicker.

Apologies in advance if some things are not clearly explained. I did my best but only proof-read once, and if I do it again I know I'll be here for another 3 hours tinkering with each individual sentence to make it read easier, but I don't have time for that right now.

So, @One Mic my man, at your request.

Here is how to work out. I'll try to explain the principles behind it so you know why you are doing what you're doing, which, as always, is more important than the thing itself. Obviously I can't explain the entire human body in this post, and nor could I because I don't know it all myself. This isn't to get you to the Mr. Olympia contest in 2021, but rather just to get you started. If you take it seriously then you'll see some great results, but you should look up more and more about working out so that you know how to avoid injuries and train safe. This is the most important thing: preventing injuries. There are many you can make and it's hard to find information on how to work out best. Read through this post and when you are learning how to do an exercise, look it up and find AthleanX's video on it. He most likely has one, no matter what the exercise is.

First, you're working to improve your muscles: to shape them and develop them. You do this by forcing your body to adapt to more demanding requirements. If you go to the gym and work your biceps hard for 2 hours, forcing them to lift heavy weights over and over again, your wonderful body starts to send resources to that area to be able to handle it. For example, during the workout, if you're doing a good job you get blood pumping to the muscle which makes it grow in size and work better. Another example, after the workout, your body uses primarily proteins from food in order to repair and grow the muscles for future use (N.B. this is why protein is important in your diet. If you don't get enough I'm not sure what happens but I feel like you become really stringy and sinewy, I don't want that personally). In this way you develop your body.

The body responds in specific ways to specific challenges. For example, heavy powerlifters have trained their body to provide a huge amount of power for a single use. As a consequence their muscles are thick and dense. On the other hand you have athletes who require endurance and so train differently. Their muscles tend not to be so dense, but are much more structurally developed i.e. 'toned.' Then you have bodybuilders - and I don't look at all at bodybuilders of recent years who honestly look ugly as shit. I only look at the 70s when aesthetic was still the goal and they all had beautiful bodies.

Bodybuilders use a variety of exercises to not only build huge muscles, but also shape them closer and closer to perfection. Basically, trying to look like ancient Greek Gods, but better. Most of what I write here is designed for that, since that's what I know best. Some great examples, and ones I use for inspiration to work out harder, are Frank Zane, Serge Nubret, and of course Arnold. The question of aesthetic is somewhat subjective. I find that most people are quite turned off by modern day bodybuilders and so have quite a bias to the whole idea of bodybuilding itself, but the more I look at pictures from the Golden Age of bodybuilding (when Arnold was around), the more I appreciate the aesthetic of their bodies and the more I respect the way they did things. There are a lot of other misconceptions and myths which are all dispelled in Arnold's book The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuliding - it's a great book with all the information you could ever need. Some very few things are outdated but it is still impressively relevant for something so old.

Anyways, I'd like for you to understand at least a little bit about the way the body works before I go on to the actual working out part.

First, what is a muscle? It's just a set of fibers that run along some length of your anatomy and connect to bones so that you can move. These fibers can do one thing and one thing only: contract. For example if you curl your elbow upward to your face, your biceps are contracting, generating the torque necessary to move the skeletal structure. When you extend your elbow outward, it's not your biceps doing the work anymore but your triceps. They contract to move the bone in the opposite direction.
Any body part you use requires some way to go in the 'forward' direction as well as the 'backward' direction - but a muscle can only provide contraction in one direction. That means that muscles come in pairs: one muscle group for forward contraction, and another muscle group on the other side for contraction in the other direction. Check it out: biceps on the top of your arm, triceps at the bottom. Chest for pushing forward, back for pulling backward. Quads for kicking forward, hamstrings for kicking backward.
Any joint that moves two ways will have two muscle groups controlling it. When one group is contracting, the other one is being stretched out. This understanding, by the way, helps you work out how to stretch muscles you don't know any stretches for.

Now that we know what muscles are and their function, we can understand how best to train them. Their only job is to contract: to provide a force that rotates the joint in question. To train the muscles, you have the two ends of the spectrum: heavy weight, low reps; light weight, high reps. Let's talk briefly about each of these so that you know why you are training the way you are training.

First, consider low weight, high reps. Your muscles need to be doing a small amount of work over a longer period of time. Physiologically it is easier for the body to accomplish this if a muscle has many fibers composing it. The more there are, then the less work each individual one has to do, and therefore the easier it is for the heart to provide enough blood to keep going. The more muscle fibers you have, the more defined the shape of the muscle is. This is what is generally known as toning.
Now look at the other side of things. High weight, low reps. All you need is to do a huge amount of work in a single burst. The best way for the body to do this is: thicken each individual muscle fiber so that it can contract with more force. Since endurance isn't a problem, if you train your muscles this way the body will respond by thickening the fibers and giving your muscles new size. This explains why the powerlifters are chunky rather than toned.

The best way to exercise is a clever combination of the above. In my workouts I do 5 sets of each exercise:
First set: use a weight such that I get to about 15 reps until muscle failure
Second set: increase the weight so that I get to about 10 reps
Third set: increase weight to fail at 8
Fourth set: increase weight to fail at 6
Fifth set: try once more to reach 6
This way of working out gives you the benefits of both worlds. You are making your muscles bigger and stronger through the low-rep workouts while at the same time recruiting more muscle fibers in the high-rep workouts so that they have shape and aesthetic as well. Size on its own for me is not motivating at all, rather just ugly. Nor is having small but sculpted muscles. What makes me love working out harder is seeing my muscles both grow and shape themselves.

And that covers the basics of lifting weights. Now, what exercises do you actually do?

Well, let's understand the body a bit more. There are only a couple of main parts to it, right? You have:
- Shoulders and arms, meaning the biceps and their partners the triceps, the forearms on both palm-side and knuckle-side [idk the official names] and the deltoids. You could also include the lats in the group, which are down the side of your upper body.
- Chest, and its partner the back. Understand also that there are upper, middle, and lower parts of these, and each should be targeted for complete development.
- Abdominals, upper and lower.
- Legs, meaning: quad(ricep)s and their partner the hamstrings or leg biceps, then the calves which, when developed, have two heads which together give an inverted love heart shape which look stunning.

Asides from the abs, you have 3 different groups here. The best way is to work each group out on a different day, so that each one gets 2 days' rest before getting another workout on the 3rd day after. This way you allow them time to recover and get ready for the next workout. My split is:
Monday & Thursday - Chest and back
Tuesday & Friday - Shoulders and arms
Wednesday & Saturday - Legs
and abs every day.
Note that it's really important to do abs every day. They require a lot of work to develop, and they are super important. Why? Well you know how abs are referred to as your core a lot of the time? It's because they are the 'core' of all your strength when you do other exercises. Any workout you do, you should usually be feeling your abs tight and working. They are sort of like a hub for strength and so: work them every day. Upper abs are usually not a problem for most people but it's the lower abs that are a harder nut to crack. For this reason the best way is:
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday: lower abs (by leg raises).
Tuesday, Friday: upper abs (by incline sit ups),
and 5 sets of 25 for each exercise. I can't justify that number too well, it's given in Arnold's book as the way to go. It has given me a lot of success so I stand by it.

Now the last ingredient is the actual exercises. How do you work out each muscle group? This is the hardest part when you want to get into the gym, because it takes a while to learn how to do an exercise. You should put all your focus in, at the beginning, towards perfecting your technique because, believe me, injuries suck fucking ass - you want to minimize your chances for one by working out smartly, patiently, and wisely. So take your time. It took me 3 or 4 weeks of working out until I finally had most of my exercises learnt properly. I still had great gains in those weeks, but I could've been targeting my muscles much more effectively.

Ok, I'm going to list out the exercises to do here. I'm copying the "Beginner's workout" from Arnold's bodybuilding encyclopedia - once again this book has a wealth of amazing information and if you don't feel bad about it, you can find PDFs of it online pretty easily (last time I checked, at least). It has detailed descriptions and pictures of how to do each exercise and for the more dangerous ones, explains the necessary form and posture to avoiding injury.

It's been great for me and I've made so much progress in my physique - all of me is larger. Family and friends complement my size all the time, and I'm only getting bigger and better. My goal isn't to be huge - it's simply to be well developed. That means, a respectable amount of size and great shape and definition.
The only problem is, I read online that some people couldn't handle this workout and found themselves overtraining and getting immune system issues. I'm not sure what might've caused that, but I want to say nutrition. When you're working out, make sure you have enough protein so that your body can actually build and repair muscles. I've eaten quite well and never faced any problem. Having said that I was very athletic before I started weightlifting so I might've been more conditioned.. but I doubt that that's it. I hadn't worked out for 2 months prior to starting this regime so it's gotta be nutrition I bet. Nutrition is really important but I can't get into it in this post - just make sure you're eating healthy and enough. When I get home from the gym I'm hungry as a wolf. Make sure to appease your appetite and don't starve yourself for the sake of losing fat or something.

When I started some workouts took me 3 hours. Now I work with more intensity and usually take 2-2.5 hours depending on the workout. This is a good amount of time. Shoulders and arms takes the longest because there are so many different muscle groups to work out.

Ok, the exercises. If you don't want to use Arnold's book, look up youtube videos to learn how to do these. Don't find ones with like 100 views and no comments. Find ones with many views so that you can read in the comments and find out if anyone has anything to say about it being wrong. The most reliable channel is AthleanX. If you want to work out, you should be watching as many videos of his as you can.

The workouts include some powerlifting exercises which aim to develop hardness and density in your musculature, and have numerous other benefits. Solely powerlifting will make you look chunky and fat but a reasonable amount within your workout will get you looking hella strong.

WARMING UP IS CRUCIAL. If you don't prepare your body for a workout, you're going to suffer some kind of muscular injury. These kill your motivation and happiness. The best way I've found of preparing for a workout is:
- Stretch out all the muscles in your body the first thing when you wake up. It usually takes me 20 mins and is an incredible way to wake up.
- When you get to the gym, don't worry so much about stretching before the workout [though I'm still not sure about this fact, there are pros for and against] but focus rather on getting your muscles warmed up. By warmed up, I mean literally, warmed up: you need to get your heart to start pumping more blood into the area so they can work more efficiently. The best way is, whenever you get to a new type of exercise, do 3 sets of really light weight before starting the actual workout. So, I would do 3 warmup sets of bench press with no weight on the bar, and then get into it. But if I moved on to an incline press I wouldn't have to worry so much about warming up - I might still do one set just to remind my body of how it has to move. But when I'd get to pull-ups, then, I'd start with some warming up by using, i.e. a pull-up assist machine or something.
- At the end of your workout, take care to stretch out all your muscles again. Remember, you have a responsibility to work out wisely. That means developing your flexibility as well as your strength. When you contract any one muscle, its partner is necessarily being stretched out - so unless you have the necessary flexibility developed you could really hurt yourself. I'm more flexible now than I've ever been. Straight out of bed I can get out and not only just touch my toes, but lay my hand flat across them. There are some bodybuilders who make the mistake of not stretching enough and get to the point where they can't touch their hands behind their back, for example. Don't make that mistake.

Another note: after your workout, give your body another half hour at least, before you jump into a shower or a meal. Let it return to a sort of natural physiological state before you start eating so that everything can be processed properly, and as for the shower - that's just something from personal experience. I once showered with warm water right after a shower and pulled a muscle near my neck that hurt like hell.

Monday & Thursday - Chest and back.
Chest
-Bench press, for overall chest development. I prefer the rack with a barbell.
-Incline press, for upper chest development. I prefer the machine.
-Straight-Arm dumbell pullover, an amazing exercise and one of my favourites. Took me a few weeks to figure it out but it's amazing. Expands the ribcage and develops the chest. Helps you look huge.
Back
-Pull-ups as a fundamental strength building exercise and to develop the upper back. As a general rule don't do anything behind the neck - this puts unnatural stress on the joint in your shoulder joint (rotator cuff) and leads to long term wear and tear. Look up AthleanX's videos on pullups. The aim is to do 50. If you can't do 50, do as many as you can until the total adds up to 50. When I started I was on 4 or 5, now I'm on 12. Bit by bit.
-Bent-over rows for more for the upper back
Power training
Deadlifts - 3 sets of 10; 6; 4 reps to failure. Deadlifts are an amazing exercise but have a reputation for being dangerous. This is true: if you don't keep your back straight during the lift you risk harming some spinal vertebrae. There are disks between the vertebrae of your spine and if you are bent over forward, then you risk a compression on one side of the disk but an extension on the other side. This unequal pressure can cause some serious injury.
However, if you start simple and learn how to keep your back straight, it is one of the best exercises you can do. A good deadlift works almost your entire body - more muscles in one single motion than in any other exercise - but particularly hits the lower back muscles. You shouldn't be afraid of them, they're really important to your workout - but you should respect them. If you have access to a trainer or someone who knows how to deadlift so that they can check your form, you definitely should.
Abs
Leg raises, 5x25

Tuesday & Friday - Shoulders and arms
Shoulders:
- Barbell clean and press: does wonders for your whole upper body, gives you a really powerful look that is best described as Herculean. This is one of my favourite exercises, but I didn't know how to do it properly until I asked a personal trainer at the gym to show me.
- Dumbbell lateral raises: for your deltoids and lats, though usually this just burns my delts, I don't feel much on my lats. When I started it was hard to go through the full range of motion because of so much pain through my deltoids. I had to build up really slowly, using very light weights and making sure to have complete control throughout the full motion - so not going explosively upwards and letting my hands fall back down. That's just a bad way to do it. I've heard that it's best to focus on light weights with these and making sure you feel a burn. Also, make sure you are doing a version of them where you turn your hand forward as if pouring tea out of a pitcher - this way you target the rear head of your deltoid which is often neglected.
- I added this one from my researching online as a substitute for the power training exercise "heavy upright row" suggested in Arnold's book. The heavy upright row is one of the worst exercises you can do, look it up on AthleanX's channel to find out why. I've replaced it with "dumbbell high pulls" which, make sure you watch AthleanX's tutorial on how to do them. He doesn't have an explicit video for them but it's in the clips where he explains why the upright row is a bad exercise and offers this alternative.
Power training
- Push press: 3 sets of 6; 4; 2 reps to failure. This is basically a clean and press but you are using a lot more explosive power and help from your legs to lift the bar up over your head, which you have now loaded up more weight onto than you can usually press overhead. For example after you have cleaned the bar up to your clavicle, you squat down and jump up explosively to give the bar that bit of momentum to get up. In the strict clean and press, you must lift the bar up over your head from your clavicle without cheating from any other muscles - purely your shoulders.
Upper arms
- Standing barbell curls for overall bicep development. Before I started doing this exercise I had some dumbbells at home which I did curls on for a few weeks. I had great bicep head development but when I extended my arm out flat, the bicep was really thin like a stick. Embarrassing, even. After starting to do this exercise, I finally have that width I always wanted. Asides from that, this is simply the most fundamental exercise to build up your biceps.
- Seated dumbbell curls. Make sure you know how to do it right, namely that you twist the barbell as it reaches your chin, to target the biceps fully.
-Narrow-Grip Bench press for triceps. This is probably my favourite tricep exercise, although I only know a few at this stage. I feel a lot of work being done by my triceps, as well as being the only exercise where I directly feel my inner and lower chest being worked.
- Standing triceps extensions with barbell. Pretty good although at the time of writing, I don't know whether it is anatomically a good exercise or leads to the road of injury in the future.
Forearms
I bet you're thinking, what the hell? Why exercise your forearms? Well I thought the same thing until I considered the question to myself: imagine my biceps insanely built and developed, utterly beautiful - and no forearm development at all. It would look pathetic. No sir, if you want to look good, you need to develop your entire body, especially the forearms. I can tell you that my forearms actually look surprisingly good, now that I've worked them out a lot. In order to make progress with them, it'll be necessary to let them burn quite a bit. As I hear from Arnold, they tend to respond quite poorly to work, so you have to really work them if you want to develop them.
- Wrist curls for your palm-side forearms
- Reverse wrist curls for your knuckle-side forearms (in my experience, these are much, much weaker)
Abs
Incline sit ups, 5x25

Wednesday & Saturday - Legs
You always hear of people skipping leg day, right? I hated leg day until I decided to stop trying to use huge weights, but instead use the correct weight necessary for my own muscle growth. That meant looking a lot weaker than others, but it was more than worth it - not for the gains, but for the feeling itself. You work out harder when you enjoy the feeling. You enjoy the feeling when you know your muscles are doing a great job. They do a great job when you hit them just the right way. So, when you work out properly, you will love leg day and never want to skip it.
- Squats. I mean, with a bar over your back and weight on it. A great and fundamental exercise for your quads. Once again I stress that you should be looking up tutorials from AthleanX.
- Lunges. An absolutely amazing exercise, they do so much for your legs. In any leg day, focusing on a single leg exercise is crucial for optimal development. So lunges are a great first step. I've taken to doing reverse lunges, kudos to a point made by AthleanX, that the regular lunge puts a lot of stress on the weaker part of the knee. My own knees suffered a bit of stress through my hard running so I aim to avoid any injury of them ever again. By being smart I went from not being able to walk for weeks due to the pain, to running a marathon the year later. Best to be smart by preventing those terrible chronic injuries before they happen.
- Leg curls. To develop the hamstrings, or the leg biceps. If you look at an anatomy chart, the muscles running along your hamstrings look quite small and weak, and I think that they have potential to give your legs an amazing look from the back (picture is Tom Platz whose legs are a little too developed for my tastes, but still). This motion is the same in principle as the bicep curl, and so you should bring the same mindset to it.
Calves
Never underestimate calves. To me, they are the centerpoint of your legs and there are few things as beautiful as well developed calves. There's an inverted love heart shape that simply looks incredible, and insanely rewarding when you can see them for yourself.
- Standing calf-raises, 5 sets of 15 reps each.
Lower back (and legs as a secondary muscle group)
- Straight-Leg Deadlifts, 3 sets of 10; 6; 4 reps to failure
- Good mornings, 3 sets of 10; 8; 6 reps to failure
Abs
Leg raises, 5 sets of 25.

Finally, AthleanX recommends, and I've started implementing this - doing an exercise called face pulls at the end of every workout. I try to do 3 sets of 10. They are aimed at developing a few muscles in your back that are important to a healthy and natural posture, and that get neglected in the majority of your workouts. They're quite fun to do, so I definitely recommend them too.

Now you have all the information, you just have to learn how to do the exercises. Watch as the gains come.

Now some last remarks on how to actually work out.

-You are not at the gym to lift weights, understand this. Your aim is to work the muscles. That you are lifting weights is a means to achieve that end - not the end itself. Your aim should always be to have your muscles contracting and working. If you don't focus on this, you can not only make mistakes in your form that could cause injury, but you are also losing so much focus and accuracy you could get, and so much reward. By focusing on the feeling of the muscle fibers working, you are reaffirming to yourself the goal you're working towards, strengthening your motivation with each rep, and always willing yourself to go for 'one more.' When you feel the muscle directly working, especially if it's a heavy weight, it's an amazing feeling that makes you feel like a god. If you want to get gains, you need consistency. To get consistency you need self discipline. To get the amount of intensity each day for maximal gains - you need the motivation that comes from listening to your body and seeing with your own eyes exactly what it's capable of. When you put your mind 'inside' the muscle, you can see if it's doing the right thing as well - if you're doing a motion wrong, then you will be able to feel it easier, and stop before you hurt yourself.
Remember, it's not about lifting a huge amount of weight either. A good bodybuilder knows how to get a maximal benefit out of any given exercise, on any single rep. If you're going in to do 15 reps, don't take the first few reps easy so you can get to 15. No, you should do every single rep as if it's the only rep you're doing that day: perfectly.

-Focus is important. If you let your mind drift, keep checking your phone or texting people - your mind is at a different place. You're unable to focus on the muscle as well, and you are sacrificing the quality of your workout.

-Similar point is not to rest too much. You need to keep your intensity up, and you can't do that if you sit around for 5 minutes after doing bicep curls for 20 seconds.

-Motivation is as much physical as it is psychological - if your heart isn't pumping that blood through your body with intensity, then you will not have it in you to muster up the focus necessary to keep your workout going at the same rate. The measure is something like 72% of your energy is restored after 1 minute of resting, and after 3 minutes you're not going to get any more recovery unless you take an extended rest. So I try to keep my rests between 1 and 2 minutes. And if I am resting - I don't sit around. I keep standing, keep walking around, just to keep my body warm. Once I sit to relax I'm losing intensity. Can't have that.

-Gyms usually have some music playing. Inexplicably, that music seems to always be utter fucking trash. I don't mean based on my own taste in music but based on the rhythms and beats of the songs, not at all conducive to a badass, testosterone fuelled weightlifting session. In my workout playlists I put on some of my most badass music, usually with strong bass, drum rhythms and hard riffs. Whenever I'm doing my ab workouts and one of the songs from the John Wick soundtrack comes on, I turn that shit up and keep pushing harder and harder until the sweat is pouring into my eyes.

That covers just about all I can cover in a reasonably-sized post. One more time I emphasize that a great source of information to fill all the gaps in the above is The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding by Arnold Schwarzenegger. All this is just a distillation of the main points necessary to the beginner. But the book has so much amazing information from the world's greatest bodybuilder ever, from mentality, to workout, to physiology, to nutrition, to injury recovery and prevention. It's simply an amazing resource and if I could afford it I'd buy a hard copy but I'm stuck with a pdf for now. There are only a few things which are outdated, like for example the upright rows, which are objectively a bad exercise (you are actively working against your natural anatomy) - but for a book that's 35 years old it's pretty spot on.

Enjoy your gains!

 

Damn I totally forgot that this post ever existed, but I'm glad it helped someone. Hm, it's rough when you're at home, I know that myself. It's no fun and hard to hit the muscles the same amount. But you can still make an effort. I was doing a couple of simple exercises even though I didn't have access to many weights. For shoulders I could do lateral raises and Arnold press, which you can google, and two or three different weight ranges served me well. In the end I found that you don't necessarily need to always follow the 15 10 8 6 6 rule I noted in the post (though I try to stick to that while in the gym), because the aim is to contract the muscle and make it strain itself. You can still accomplish that with less weight, but by the sound of it you have enough weights available to smash the muscles adequately. And if you don't have that, you can load more weights up onto one dumbbell and isolate each side of the body. That of course requires some way to keep your body balanced but I'm sure you can figure that out somehow. Just make sure to warm up cos it'll be giving you rough cramps.
For chest I did dumbbell flys and the weights I had were too light. I only had at most 20kg on a single dumbbell but I managed to still push my chest by doing one side at a time, and pushing my chest. I found a bar on which I could load up some weights and some 15L water jugs to make up to 50kg for deadlifts which went a long way too. I was able to get some good clean and press (a.k.a clean and jerk in the olympics) action with that. And you can do your bent over rows with it, and for pullups you can either find a good tree or go to the local playground.
Abs you don't need weights to work out, just do your leg raises to hit the lower abs which are the ones that always need more work.
Legs you can do lunges and squats and even a little weight goes a long way. Calves though I wasn't able to find a satisfactory way to work out. But you can try to figure out a way to stand balanced on one foot, hold weights down your sides, and really focus on each individual side. Using just the one leg ofc means you need roughly half the weight to reach the same effect (though lately I'm suspecting that it's really more like 40% of the weight for equal performance ability).
As for the rest there are a bunch of different exercises to hit each muscle, and it's definitely worth looking up new ones that your body isn't used to, and the muscles will grow in response.

Hopefully I said something useful here

 

Haha, glad to hear it. The other day I started working on this list Arnold put out at the start of covid, it's gone quite well so far; I've gotten sore muscles in most places
https://www.reddit.com/user/GovSchwarzenegger/comments/flz3es/stay_at_home_stay_fit/

 

It's tough, I'm struggling with it myself. Working out at home is much more difficult than the gym and less engaging too. I think it helps to have other incentives. I love to have a protein shake after my workout, and I don't let myself have one unless I've actually had a workout. Tracking your progress helps too. First week seeing that you can only do 8 pullups in one go, and next week finding that you can do 10 now, and wanting to keep going and getting better. It's the same system as you'll find in gaming, progressive effort brings improvements, bring more enjoyment.
Have a goal and actually put some time into thinking about it. Lately I'm finding that spending the first half hour or so of my morning just running my mind through important things helps me to get a grip on the day, and to keep enough mental attention to lead me to working out properly.
And when working out, I've found the best motivation comes from doing the exercises well. When you push your muscles up to and beyond the pain barrier (which requires serious focus on your will, and complete negligence on the body's discomfort), it is an extremely rewarding feeling which becomes addictive. For example when I do bicep curls, I focus intently on my biceps and make sure to feel them working throughout the full motion, when I get to the top I squeeze even harder, and I let the bar back down slowly. On my last reps, just as I'm no longer able to bring the bar all the way up, when I let the bar back down I do it extra, extra slowly. Painfully slowly. All these little things add up, they tear the muscle apart, but that's where the good feelings come from. The same goes with all exercises, don't focus on the number of reps but the quality of the muscle contraction.
I'm not perfect either, some days I fail to motivate myself, and especially while at home, it's extremely hard to spend more than an hour working out, so I definitely understand you on that account. But you can get around that too, and do two smaller sessions, one earlier in the day, and one later when you're back rested again. I often find it tedious now to work out for longer than two hours when I'm at the gym, and longer than one hour when I'm at home.
I suppose with motivation, it's really something you have to rebuild every day, it's a rickety building that will get blown away without regular attention.
I don't have all the answers yet either, but it's up to us to do whatever we can. I'm trying very much lately to focus not on the outcome of the action itself, but only my intention to act. Focusing on the outcome leaves you more susceptible and sensitive to failure, but focusing only on your intention to act makes things significantly more effective in my experience. For example, I don't try to go out and exercise, I only try to carry out the inner intention to move myself outside and engage myself with as much focus as I can muster, on my exercise. Some days that focus will be very hard to come by, but what I'll always have is my power of choice, and choosing to exercise as well as I can. I've found this very helpful to me both in motivation and in exercise quality, but it's an idea I learned from stoic philosophy too, and maybe needs more explanation and context to be useful. Though I write about it from time to time on my journal as well.

The more comfortable it is, the easier. Make sure you have comfortable clothes, this is something I sort of neglected because I always figured - it's just working out, what do clothes matter? But it makes a huge difference, especially at home, if you're too cold or too hot, if you're in some baggy comfort clothes or in tighter workout clothes. I like something tighter because it helps me feel my muscles more, which helps me focus on them better and makes me enjoy what I'm doing more. Having my stations already set up for my different exercises, so I don't have to waste any time doing menial work like moving chairs around so I can do dips rather than rows etc., it all makes a big difference too.

 

I didn't, I agree that they need work but I only recently started working on them myself and it's definitely necessary. It's dope that you actually have some more experience in this, did you compete?

I didn't mention neck either, at the time I wasn't even thinking about it but recently I had some second thoughts. I think there was a bit about this in Arnold's book and from memory he said that the neck gets enough of its share in other exercises, but it's something to check too.

That's definitely a good point too and was thinking about this today when I went to play football with my brother. It's a whole different type of exertion that your body has to respond to, and I'd prefer being more of a well rounded athlete rather than only isolated skills in bodybuilding. Although my main interest is nonetheless in bodybuilding.

In lockdown I'm moving a lot more toward bodyweight exercises where I can, since I don't have enough weights lying around at home. Emphasizing pullups the past two months in lockdown a lot more than I did over the past year (and it's been nearly 2 years since I wrote the post) I saw some major growth and actually think I have a respectable back now. I had done pulldowns and the like in the gym but honestly since cutting that out for 30 pullups I saw a lot more growth. In the original post I wrote to do 50 but I found that setting the number a little lower motivated me to keep going and working, and after a month of this I'm aiming to lift it up to 40 per session now, as well as switching the way I do the pullups to get the variety on the muscle. Varied grip, varied arm width and so on. Too high-reaching a goal, especially after you're no longer an eager beginner, can be a bit discouraging, not to mention the difficulty in working out from being in lockdown, so adjusting my workout routine with that in mind definitely helped me make more gains.
Added a lot more dips, pushups and the like in my workout too, I can't believe I neglected dips before - they are amazing. Squats and lunges, either bodyweight or +20kg with very high reps got my quads soon feeling very firm, and motivated me to keep going on with leg workouts, which I found hard to achieve in the gym. Glutes are also getting a lot more attention possibly due to an improved form but possibly also because they're not used to the high rep workout. Having spent so much time now working on my form I feel a lot more confident that when I get to the gym I can build up to and get under a heavy bar and do squats and lunges with more determination now. I think the most I did with squats was 80kg but I was quite afraid, so I'm eager to get back when everything opens up again.
With my net 20kgs of weights at home I can only do a little bit for specific muscles but have to work in a different way to get failure. I like to exhaust myself with dips and pushups for example and then do bench with the 20kg bar so that I don't have to do 50 reps until I start feeling something. Plus loading on the 20kg onto a dumbbell (I don't have enough to do 20kg on both hands lol) and doing DB bench with one side is going okay but definitely needs a lot of warming up and care lol. But as with squats it's definitely the case that doing the low weight high reps to improve my form is giving me confidence to go back to the gym and try pushing on with personal bests.
Working out once early in the day and once later at night has been phenomenal, hitting the same muscle groups twice in one day. I've seen the most growth out of this. I think it's to do with letting the muscle rest during the day and then hitting it again when it's ready for session 2 and pushing it far beyond what you could do in a single workout.
A while ago I stopped thinking about whether it's chest/back or arms/shoulders or legs day, and rather just tried to listen to which parts of my body wanted to be worked out that day. Feeling that deeper connection with my body helped me be so much more motivated and feel more reward from working out. As that motivation snowballed I sort of phased back into an organised approach to keep an even split between all muscle groups, but my best results I think have always come when before the workout, I meditate and listen to my body first to check in how each of the parts are feeling. And if they don't want to be exercised I try to convince them to it by imagining the feeling of tight contractions and growth from the pump

Damn, shit man. That's thankfully not something I've had to deal with and I'll work to keep it that way. What sorts of injuries did you deal with? Needed surgery for any?

 

What are compact exercises? Or you mean compound? Things like clean and press? I love that exercise so much hahaha

Yeah I saw Mike Tyson doing several thousand neck crunches on youtube and I thought that was pretty awesome. It does get hit a little during pullups and other exercises but yeah rare to get dedicated exercise, I still haven't had a chance to look up what Arnold had to say about it

Same, my left knee really messed up in 2018 from running every single night for 3-4 weeks, surely with bad form. I was in pain every day and could hardly walk for a month, and thought I'd never be able to run again, but looked up some stuff from AthleanX on proper form and practiced, and trained my leg muscles up again, and late in 2019 I managed to run a full marathon in under 4 hours - so I would like to think there is always hope with proper care.
Elbow pain must be horrendous though, my goodness!
Interesting point how your left side is more injured. My left is a lot weaker than my right and I'm putting extra emphasis right now in my training to even them out so hopefully I will be able to become a safer lifter in the process. But definitely as I noted in my previous post, having been forced to lift light weight with high reps, really taught me how to improve my form and I feel a lot safer now. And as I said, my quads are rock hard, something I never got from heavy squats.

Yeah 3 hours 6 days per week had been my routine for a few months at the time I made the original post and since then, due to lockdowns of all sorts it has been quite hard to keep the same thing going. But you don't really need that much time to see progress, and if you must train a lot, then I think it's far better to do two smaller sessions. I've a vague suspicion that after 2 hours of training, the gains you can make start to drop off quite a bit, but I could be wrong. Most of my workouts are at most 1.5 hours now. Ideally 6 days per week but that is at times quite a difficult goal to sustain, and I usually feel much better listening to my body and finding out what needs to be exercised today.

If I could do 30 a set I would be over the moon hahaha, but now I am right around 12-13 myself, although I did one day do 15 and I don't remember what the difference was in my grip or whatever. I tried to build up with assisted pullups at the gym but I think that's a waste of time. Better to rep it to failure until you accumulate 30 or 50.
100 pullups a set, that is pro level, hot damn. Arnold in his book makes it sound like doing 50 at once is a simple matter, but it's taking me a long time to build up strength and endurance. That's why I want to keep varying it with different grips and rep numbers and all that, hopefully get more holistic muscle development. But I have to say, seeing my lats grow has been one of the better pleasures of the past few months hahaha

 

It actually varies a bit and I don't necessarily always do my full set routine. Sometimes I wake up and just stretch out my legs, lower back and abs. For legs and lower back I like to stand feet shoulder width apart, and bend over with a straight back as if to touch my toes. I vary it a bit by putting my arms out to the side like making a big 'T' shape, or sometimes I pull them down to touch my toes. Each stretches out different muscles and I like to have a bit of everything.
Probably will be hard to explain some of them in text but I'll give it a shot.
There's the standard quadriceps stretch where you stand on one leg and bend your other leg back at the knee until your heel is touching your bum. I do this but I also lean forward (while balancing with my hand on my bed) to stretch the hamstring of the opposing leg.
One of my favourite stretches, sit down on the floor and with both legs going forward, cross one leg over the other at the knee, and twist your body in the direction of the raised leg. So if you cross your left leg over your right, your upper body twists left. I do this one a lot as it relaxes particularly stiff muscles I have. Called a "seated spinal twist" google for pics.
For abs I just lie face down on the floor, and with my arms push myself up aiming to stretch my stomach, I'm sure it's a standard yoga pose.
For back I put one arm out and grab a pole or something, and pull and twist my body until I can feel my back stretching. For instance if I want to stretch out the right side of my upper back, I grab something with my right hand, my thumb pointing down and palm facing outward to the right, usually bend forward (you have to explore your body to find what works) and pull myself toward it. For chest it's the same thing except instead of your hand grabbing something in front of you, you grab something behind you and pull.

After I exercise, whatever exercises I did, I do the corresponding stretches for those muscle groups. What I mean is the following.

Rememeber the main thing: the muscle has one functions - to contract, and to stretch.
When you exercise you are contracting them.
To stretch, look at whatever motion you are producing in the exercise, and then sort of go the opposite way.
For example with a biceps curl you are lifting your arm up because the biceps is contracting as you bring your hand up and to your shoulder. Therefore to stretch it you want to move your hand down and away from your shoulder. And remember the biceps doesn't know whether you are pointing it down, up, left or right, it only knows where it is in relation to the shoulder. Therefore you can stretch the biceps putting your arm out forward and straight or out to the side. You have to listen to your muscles and learn how your body works, and try around with different positions until you get a good stretch.
I often invent new stretches for myself to try to target stiff spots. The best place to start is to just google stretches and that way you can also see how they do it. Take a week or two to learn them. There are a lot of good ones.