Beginner Template modifications

Hi Team BBM,

I recently asked for some nutrition advice on the nutrition forum and thanks Jordan for answering my questions. Here I have some training questions in particular.

To give you a background, It’s been 3 weeks since I convinced my wife to start strength training i.e beginner template. She has never trained with barbells before in this fashion and I also have a 45 lbs barbell at my disposal. This limited her to do the high rep exercises with barbells initially. Therefore, I did modify the template a little bit. For example, on the 4 rep squat day she would do barbell squats but on the other days, esp the 10 rep squat days, she would do dumbbell goblet squat.

  1. Is that okay and should I ask her to continue this or do you some other recommendations.

Psychology related questions and how to deal with them:

she really likes the low rep range training as she has been seeing strength improvement every day and that is motivating her but she is averse to the idea of working out 5 days a week therefore she is skipping conditioning altogether except whatever steps her daily general activity accounts for.

  1. How should I motivate her to include some type of cardio in her weekly training. Or should I, at this point? Any suggestions would be helpful.

  2. This might again be related to 1 but how should I modify her template to reduce the time especially with the last exercise for the day. She gets really frustrated at the end since it takes more than an hour to complete it. It’s as if she has a switch in her head and her enthusiasm goes down significantly.

I know it is a long post and I also think I might be rambling a bit here

Thanks for the post, x2.

It is okay if your wife does goblet squats and BB squats, provided she’s getting close to the target RPE for the prescribed rep range.

We would recommend doing the prescribed conditioning in the template. Perhaps you could do it together in solidarity, picking the mode you prefer one day and having her pick another day?

I would reduce rest periods to 2-3 minutes across all exercises if you need to reduce training time.

-Jordan

Hi Jordan, thanks for the advice. I am very glad that she has started training at all in the first place and I want to make sure she doesn’t give it up because she thinks it is not sustainable for her. I guess this is the toughest part, convincing that exercise and training is non-negotiable.

Anyways, thanks once again and have a wonderful and prosperous new year ahead.