Self-programming sanity check

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Hi!

I wanted to start learning to self-programming for a couple of reasons:

  1. I find the time invested makes me happy, I like to educate myself on things I do in my life, just for the sake of it.
  2. I find that it could be profitable from an athlete point of view to be also knowledgeable about coaching
  3. I want to be independent and save some money in the long-term since I decided to keep training for the rest of my life eventually. Given these points, returning from a 6 months break of lifting weights in gym due to life, I want to sign up again in a gym and start self-programming altogether.

For now I have listened to the three parts of BM programming videos, which contains lots of information and probably I will need to listen to them multiple times. I also bought the Practical programming book of Rippetoe, still to be read.

My idea was to exploit the programming model of Austin and Jordan as follows:

  1. (Still to be done) Learn how to asses my current health and body conditions. Track my BMI and measure the muscles size?
  2. Start a LP block where the focus is to: get back to the gym focusing on my current strength, e.g. estimating my 1RM main lifts and assessing my “sensibility/robustness” to the training schedule with regards to the so-called spectrum defined by BM. In this block I will focus only on the Intensity variable and keep things simple.
  3. When LP finishes, I will start a hypertrophy block with the focus on building muscle for the long-term goal of strength training. In this block I will change multiple variable, with the main ideas of managing and training the “work capacity” and increase over time the “volume” variable. I like the idea of solving the practical problems of the individual inter-intra variability, its adaptation over time, and external noises due to life by means of adding also “performance” singles in the hypertrophy block, also not to lose or learn to active all the muscle fibers and the skills when testing performance in the main lifts. My goal list is a follows in priority order: have fun, being healthy, learn how to be an athlete/coach, trying to modify my body for personal preferences (e.g. I am skinny and I would prefer being bigger), train strength.

I would like your opinions with a sanity check. I still have to dig deeper, e.g. learn how to design a program with block scheduling, choice of exercises and theoretical management of variables (e.g. when and how to increase volume, for instance).