Starting Strength - Day 1

Last night I finally got to start Starting Strength, the legitimate weight training program that I've been eying for a while. From what I've been able to tell, everyone from MMA fighters to parkour runners uses this program to get genuine strength gains, and after day one I can see why.

We did a quick ten minute warmup on par with a P90X warmup, and then got right into the lifts. There's a few different programs in Starting Strength and we're doing Practical Novice Programming. The lifts for yesterday were Squats (every day has squats in this program), Bench and chinups. We started squats at 55 lbs, did 5 reps, added 10 lbs and repeat. We did this until we struggled, and that struggling weight is where we start. Once you find that weight you rest and do more sets. I forgot how painful actual squats with weight on the shoulder is. My starting weight for squats is 85 lbs, and after 3 sets of 5, my legs feel like they are dying!

After I finished my squats, we went through the same process with Mark and then Anthony. Then it was on to bench. Bench followed the same 5 reps, add 10 lbs routine. I maxed out at 155 lbs, and pushed through two more really strong sets. I think I might be able to do more than 155 right off the bat, but doing all of the reps working my way up really got me tired.

So here's the reason this program works so well. The next time I do these lifts (Squats are Wednesday and bench will be Friday) I add 10 lbs to my starting weight. And I do that every workout. So by the end of next week, according to this schedule, I will be squating 135 lbs and benching 175. Crazy. Once I cap out my weight increases go to 5 lbs per workout, and when that caps I only increase by 2.5 lbs.

After all that I did a set of 5 chinups (which were REALLY strong) and 2 sets of 4 chinups and called it good. Chinups are 3 sets to failure, or add weight if going over 15. I obviously didn't need to add weight, but the fact that I can do any chinups still blows my mind!

So that's Starting Strength. We finished with 15 minutes of abs and called it good. Tonight I'm going to do some sort of cardio, and then tomorrow we're back to lifting. As for tonight I'm leaning towards the boxing workout from Bas Rutten. My legs are killing me, and just throwing punches seems like a good idea to recover tonight. But then again, my legs may feel great tonight, so nothing's decided yet. I'll keep you posted.

Bring it!