Since ExodusStrength.com is down so often, I’ve decided to also mirror my training over here. Or, depending on how long the current outage lasts, perhaps Exodus is now the mirror!
Please excuse the HTML tag in the title. I tried it with the thought that I’d just do an edit if it didn’t work, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. I guess going forward I’ll just pretend it was meant to be ironic!
Since this is my first log entry over here, I’ll share my training history. So please also excuse the word count!
I’m 66, and have been doing weight training since 2015. Before that I trained almost exclusively for endurance for many years. During that time, I made a point of keeping my body weight under 155 pounds, for the sake of riding bicycles up hills as fast as possible, so at 5’11" I was pretty skinny and had little muscle mass outside of quads.
Around the time I turned 60 I started hearing and reading a lot about sarcopenia and frailty, and had already been diagnosed with osteopenia, so I decided I’d better work on strength and muscle mass while I still had some semblance of vigor. I studied up online for a while and decided that, despite appearances, a certain curmudgeonly fat guy in Wichita Falls seemed to have the most credible program.
And so I became an adherent of Starting Strength. I got a couple of coaching session from Paul Horn in June 2015 and started my SSNLP at S65/B65/D135/P35 (yes, those are in pounds!) for the proverbial 3 sets of 5. I mucked around in the StSt universe for a little over two years, during which time I (a) did a stall-ridden NLP, luckily helped along by coaching from Leah and TomC, (b) did an Andy Baker HLM program one and half times, (c) got sick for 3 months and had to revert to about week 6 of my initial NLP, and (d) did another LP, which brought me to 1RMs of something like 225/145/245/95 by the middle of 2017. During that time my body weight also ballooned from the low 150s to more like 175 to 185.
By that point I had gotten pretty well fed up with StSt and their dogmatism and general offensiveness. Since then I’ve found this site and ExodusStrength.com far more useful for training information and discussion. Starting late in 2017 I got coached for over a year by Colin Lambert, whom I met on Exodus, and while working with him I made quite some progress on the lifts while getting my weight down to a tolerably svelte 165.
My wife also started doing the lifts, and she even went to Untamed Strength and got coached for a couple hours by Alan. (As a welcome side effect, she was also OK with repurposing a room in our house for training, with a Rogue R-3 rack and related stuff.) Another real highlight for both of us was attending the BBM seminar in San Diego early last year. It was great to meet Jordan and Austin in person, reconnect with Leah and Tom, and share and compare experiences with all the other attendees. Especially memorable for me was hitting a 10-pound PR during the deadlift session.
Since the pandemic hit last year, I’ve tried to be real diligent about both weight training and cardio. I’ve gotten into maintaining a 9-day “week” with 4 days of the main compound lifts alternating with 4 days of cardio (two bike days and two running days), plus one rest day. I also do some sort of GPP/bro stuff most days. While keeping the schedule consistent, I’ve done quite a few different templates, including BBM Hypertrophy. Most recently I’ve been following former SSC John Hanley’s 12-session “Montana Method” program, which in very rough terms involves doing quite a lot of volume while keeping most of the work sets to @7 or lower.
My current PRs, all from the last few months, are 245 on the squat, 175 on the bench, and 325 on the deadlift. Nowadays I consider the OHP more of an accessory, but for what it’s worth my heaviest press was 102 a couple years ago. So I’m still not remotely strong in any absolute sense, but maybe doing tolerably for a skinny old fart.
Right now I’m on my third consecutive iteration of that Montana Method program. Today was the cardio day between Session 3 and Session 4. So, finally, my actual training log entry follows.
Cardio: Cycled 54 minutes. Mostly flat route, with a one-mile climb and matching descent in the middle. Warmed up comfortably for about 15 minutes, then hammered the rest of the way, so it was probably in the neighborhood of 7-8 MET-hours. No GPP today because my elbows are going through a cranky phase.
tl;dr: Old weak guy messes up log title, drops names of coaches, yells at cloud, describes bike ride.