Please criticize and improve my training plan

Do the leg presses before or after the squats and end with the lunges, land mine before the dips, T bar rows before dumbbell rows. Do all compounds before isolation exercises when your energy is at it's highest.

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Been in fitness for 35+ years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

Retroguy2000 wrote: »

Btw, your image embed works fine on desktop, but on my phone it was too small to read, and I couldn't expand it. That may limit your responses here.

I think you'd be better off with more frequency. IMO PPL is more of a 6-day routine. With 3-days, you end up training that part just once a week and it will have been long recovered before the next workout. I think you'd be better off doing something like:

M - Legs (deadlift as the main) and some Upper
W - Upper
F - Legs (squat as the main) and some Upper

So basically, the same exercises you list, the same total volume, but spread out differently. And maybe don't do the deadlift and squat same day.

As niner said, do compounds first, isolations last.

Don't forget to get your protein up to about 0.7g (if obese) to 1g (if lean) per pound, and consider adding creatine too.

It depends on age too. I only train each body once a week, but train everyday of the week.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 35+ years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

Okay, I have a lot of comments.

I guess my headline suggestion is that if this is indicative of your current strength level, you probably don't need a customized program and you probably shouldn't be making your own program. You just take an off-the-shelf that you like the look of and do it for 3-6 months, then take it from there. Arguably, at that point you should then switch to another off-the-shelf program.

Some specific critiques of this program:
* Refine your rep ranges. People generally say that for strength and power your rep ranges should be in the range of 1-5 reps, with the lower end of that being better for power (because you are training peak force production, which is one of the components of power). People will tell you that for hypertrophy you should be doing anything from 8-20+ reps. Your 10-12 range is fine.
* For hypertrophy you may want to do more sets. Huge bodybuilders can often get by with 2 or 3 sets because they known how to do it in a way that destroys them, they make every rep count. Us normal folk often need more sets to get in more quality work.
* You will have a time issue with this after a while. With the weights so low you will breeze through this, but once it gets harder and heavier it will take longer. If I do five hard sets of something it usually takes around 25 minutes not including warmup reps. So even with supersets there is what I can do. If I have an hour I can probably do 10 minutes of warmup/prehab/muscle activation, then two hard exercises with a superset worked in. Might have five minutes at the end.#
*If you did have enough time, Monday would start to give you serious fatigue and injury risk, at least if all of those were hard, heavy sets.
* Your exercise selection looks like a bit of a laundry list.
* YMMV, but you might have issues with frequency. Personally I can't improve my squat or bench if I only do it once a week. But some people do. But since you want to get stronger, you do need to improve.

I really like a full-body template like Starting Strength, Stronglifts or Greyskull, especially at the earlier stages. Obviously there are lots of versions, but I am a particular fan of:

Monday: Squat, your preferred press, your preferred pull, first assistance theme
Wednesday: Deadlift, your secondary press, your secondary pull, second assistance theme
Friday: Squat, your preferred press, your preferred pull, third assistance theme

So for your goals it might be something like

Monday: Squat 5x5, Bench Press 5x10, Barbell rows 5x10, assistance/supplemental- one additional heavy lower body exercise (5x5)
Wednesday; Deadlift 5x3, Overhead Press 5x10, Chinups 5x10, assistance theme- one additional pulling movement (5x10)
Friday: Squat 5x5, Bench Press 5x10, Barbell rows 5x10, assistance/supplemental- several bodybuilding isolation movements (5x10)

That being said, it would probably be even better to just pick an existing program.

gizzzo wrote: »

Thank you guys so much for the helpful tips.

Do you have any advice on how I can create my baseline weights and reps? Are there tests I could do myself to see whether the starting weights and reps is my baseline?

Sets and reps should be more or less according to your program/template. As mentioned, I would do 5x5 for most strength exercises, other than deadlifts, for which I would do 5x3. For hypertrophy, 5x10-12 as a starting point.

Don't overthink starting weight. First few sessions you can go really light. E.g squat with the empty bar. Next time add a bit of weight, and keep doing that until it is hard.

gizzzo wrote: »

Thank you guys so much for the helpful tips.

Do you have any advice on how I can create my baseline weights and reps? Are there tests I could do myself to see whether the starting weights and reps is my baseline?

start on the lighter side for your first set to get a feel of where your strength is now. End up at a weight that 10 reps feels challenging for the last couple of reps, lateral raises will be more like 12-15 at first and in reality that is a good rep range always for that exercise.

Dont go right into sub 8 rep compound exercises until your body has acclimated to those.

Don’t do 1 rep max sets. You should not be doing less than 5.