wolf116 said:
They just do higher reps and lighter weights for a while.
This is what I was implying, that someone who is coming from a sedentary background should stick to GPP, volume work, and whatever else he/she can manage in the gym for 6-8 weeks prior to lifting heavy. ie. stick to the 8-10+ rep range.
Take two guys. Guy A coming off a sedentary lifestyle, Guy B a former recreational athlete(football).
Which one is gonna gain strength faster? Guy B of course...
I've had the privilege of starting a strength program from both positions, and I can tell you it's much much easier when you're already in good shape. And I'll say this too, that no one is going to get in great shape just doing a strength-based routine. And by strengh-based routine I mean a program where you limit cardio to muscle-sparing activities, and try to limit training the CNS only to when you're lifting heavy.
Not saying that this is what others do, but I witnessed a trainer talking to an out of shape dude a while ago, here's how the convo went pretty much:
Client: the past week has really worn me down and i've been sore for days. All this lifting heavy is taking it's toll.
Trainer: perhaps the workload is too great, lets cut out a cardio session here and here and reduce volume here.
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The intensity of the heavy lifting and cardio schedule was clearly too much for the out of shape client, so the trainer decided to cut down the workload to fit the guys current capacity. The real solution would be to raise the guys work capacity, so the workload that'll achieve results faster doesn't result in overtraining.
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What I could have said was to spend 6-8 weeks "overtraining" yourself to raise work capacity. Clearly not overtraining in a sense of injuring yourself, but in a sense that the type of training you'd be doing is not going to build much muscle at all.
The implication was there of using lighter weights for volume since you aren't going to overtrain yourself to injury doing that sensibly. It's easy to overtrain and royally fvck yourself when using heavy weights, so that would be avoided for the 2 months.
