Best Articles to Convert a Novice to BBM

[Rob adams]

I have a friend who is 37 and who has created a good habit of going to a gym and lifting over the past seven months, but I’ve been unable to convince him that he should be doing compound lifts multiple times per week. He has a chest day, leg day, and so on.

Can anyone provide me some some links to articles or a similar thread that I could use to help him make a bit more use of his time in the gym. I’ve explained stress-recovery-adaptation to him twice but to no avail.

Appreciate your help.

[Bak2ThaBasix]

I mean anything with the BBM brand on it is a good bet. However, I wouldn’t waste energy on someone who isn’t taking credence to what you say. You gave him the information and it’s up to him to make the choice.

[Serack]

Going from a bro-bodybuilder split to a BBM (Powerlifting/RPE) style paradigm is really shaking up the status quo for the guy. His current methods were interesting enough to get him to stay in the gym for 7 months, and since he was a novice for those months, they almost certainly resulted in excellent returns so he will probably be reluctant to deviate from the status quo that has worked so well for him.

I would approach the possibility of him shifting paradigms from the question of: What goals is he putting in all this time and effort in the weight room towards. If it's aesthetics followed by strength (typical), then honestly, there isn't much reason for him to change course unless he feels like he has hit a deep rut and wants to shake things up to get out of it.

However, if he wants to be able to pick up the entire gym, and is willing to consider appropriating his workout slots in recognition of the fact that the majority of his body's muscle mass is below the waist, then discussing BBM style programming is a good idea.

A fellow gym goer mentioned the results he got from a 5x5 compound movement linear progression when he was coming back from an injury, which is what got me into the Barbell/powerlifting style programming, and then @jordanfeigenbaum's professionalism and scientific based approach are why I'm in this particular corner of the community.

[cwd]

Yeah, those fast initial gains make *whatever* program one starts with, look really good. If he switches programs at 7 months, he's likely to blame the new program on his (inevitable) slower progress.

I'd just leave the guy to his bro-split until he stalls. Make sure he's logging his progress so he notices the slowdown, and can tell when (or if) his next program is an improvement.

[Rob adams]

Great points. Thanks for the replies. Part of the problem is he doesn’t log his workouts so he doesn’t really know how much he is improving (if at all). He mostly gages the efficacy of his program by how much he sweats and how tired he feels. He has a training partner who guides what exercises they do and his partner is switching programs now to Jim stoppani’s 12 week shortcut to size. The program looks far from ideal to me so I figured this would be a good time to try to enlighten him to some other options.

I did link link him up with a Greg Nuckols article on high frequency training. I will just keep chipping away at him and perhaps eventually will make some progress.