Not sure if this is the right forum but here is my question. I was doing the SS novice progression for a while and then life happened and I’ve fallen off for almost a year since the last time I did anything involving lifting. Where should I start again? Just based on one session the other day my weights would be almost from where I started off and thats fine but should I just do the novice progression again? Or would another template be better? Thank you,
As for goals they are (in order of importance to me)
body fat loss
strength
getting off my dam blood pressure meds that I forget a lot anyway
These days, people mostly recommend starting with the bridge right away. There is no Barbell Medicine novice template (yet), but the bridge will do fine. The hyper specificity of the starting strength NLP brings no unique training advantages and in your situation (having to lose some fluff around the waist and getting off blood pressure medicine) the starting strength paradigm of not doing cardio under any circumstances surely isn’t a good idea. The bridge will expose you to the main lifts and a few variations as well as GPP work and will be a useful learning experience for your future training career.
Hey, good job at getting back after it! Yea so I’d say go with either the bridge or maybe even one of the GPP templates to assist in your weight loss goals. Your focus should be building your general work capacity, not “adding fahve” at the expense of all else. Also, you asked about programming, but are you reasonably confident in your nutrition? That’s going to be key in your weight loss goals.
I’m reasonably confident my nutrition needs to get better. I’ve been working on it. My main question in that vein is when to dose / use whey? I am thinking that during the days I am training I can take 40g before I workout and maybe some after or when I go to bed? but on no training days? When? Other then that I am thinking I probably need 2000 maybe 2100 in Kcal’s and as close to 200gram in protein I can get?
So that’s a pretty easy question: use whey when it’s convenient for you and allows you to hit your protein numbers in a whey (see what I did there?) that increases compliance. You do not need whey protein ever in your life to be successful in your weight loss or weightlifting journey. That said, it MAY make your journey easier just in terms of hitting your Macros.
As as far as how many calories to eat per day, if you have some sort of food journal, you could make decisions based off of that as far as where to go from there. On the other hand, without that, a simple starting point is just do ~13kcals per pound of bodyweight, allocate 1g/pound of bodyweight for protein and the same for carbs, and the rest for fats. Do that for about 1 week and see how that works for you both in terms of objective and subjective measurements. Ie, are you losing weight? How much? Do you like that fat/carb split? Manipulate things from there based on your objective/subjective measurements.
Also, it’s probably beneficial for you to read the relevant BBM nutrition articles: