Roughly four months ago I severely injured my sacroiliac (SI) joint. It had been a long time coming after a year or two of lumbar discomfort and not addressing the issue. At the time of the injury I was deadlifting and pulling two-hundred and fifty five pounds for a work-set. This was pretty light for me since I was in the process of getting my deadlift back to where it was before I took a two month layoff. Everything felt great, pulls felt easy, the weight was light. And then I had finished the fourth rep in the set of five…

I began to pull the last rep and my whole back gave out, my entire lower body went completely numb, and it took everything I had to stay standing and not collapse.

Right after this occurred I instantly assumed a disc had been herniated, never in my life had I experienced such sudden numbness and weakness in my lower body. I finally laid down trying to get my bearings. Needless to say I was absolutely hysterical about the whole thing. For the entirety of the past couple years I had been pushing so hard to achieve the largest goals I had ever set for myself and now that I was finally closing in on some of them I was lying on the ground like a cripple.

In that moment I thought I was fucked and would never lift again. Which now seems absolutely ridiculous and overly dramatic, but it has become clear to me that serious injuries hurt your mind as much as your body. It didn’t help that the very next day there was a final in one of my classes. Because of this I had to rush through the test filling in bubbles on the scantron trying to get out of the class asap because the discomfort was unbearable. The following week I was a total mess, completely distraught and probably not all that far from being suicidal.

Now my intentions behind telling this embarrassing story are not to gain sympathy or anything in that regard. I was an idiot, the whole injury could have been avoided, and it was absolutely my fault. I tell this story only to illustrate that injuries and set backs are never as serious as they seem at the onset.

I would say the injury process is very similar to that of the grieving process. Generally people will go through shock and disbelief, to depression and despair, then anger, into some sort of acceptance. Everyone is different and may experience these various emotions at different times and in different orders.

Many people in this world are physically active and strong in spite of their injuries and conditions. People lift without menisci in their knee, others have come back to be strong after breaking their neck, spine, and basically every other bone in their body. And people who are even missing limbs have managed to perform many impressive feats.

The take home is, you will live to lift another day. Maybe you have to take a couple of months off to let your body heal, but you will be able to start again. It will hurt your ego, and you’ll wish it had never happened. But I’ll tell you that after two months of letting my SI joint heal, I had never been so thrilled to squat a forty five pound bar.

If you happen to get hurt again don’t freak out like I did, though some freaking out is natural. Instead focus your energy on talking to people that can help you with your injury and do what you can to rehab it yourself. My friend Dave’s recommendation to see his chiropractor was invaluable in speeding up and developing a plan for my recovery.

So stay healthy, but if you do get hurt make sure to keep your cool, find people you trust to help you recover, and do whatever it takes to keep yourself in the game mentally. And always remember that it is only on the precipice of destruction that we truly evolve.

Ok, so you have made the decision to better yourself and become the physical and mental embodiment of everything that is good in this world. Now what do you do?

I am going to give some very basic guidelines for what you should be looking to do in the gym. Programming is an art that needs to be specific to the individual’s goals, but I am going to give you some ideas that will work basically 99% of the time. If you are brand new and just getting started, they will work wonders.

For the most part when you are in the gym you want to focus on big movements, the ones that will give us the most “bang for our buck” so to say. Examples of these movements would be any form of squatting, pressing, or deadlifting.

I am not going to explicitly say you must back squat, bench/shoulder press, and deadlift because without a knowledgeable coach to teach you, you will more than likely just injure yourself. That being said, if you feel capable of teaching yourself, there are many resources available for the self teaching of the lifts. The book Starting Strength although a very dry read, offers an extremely detailed overview of how to perform the lifts and many things associated with training and would be a good place to start. Do yourself a favor and do not drink the milk as recommended in the book, just eat more protein.

Let’s say you don’t feel like reading a textbook on training though. Take whatever movements you know yourself to be proficient in, and try to get a squat, press, and pulling movement in each workout. This can be a front squat, dumbbell shoulder press, and barbell rows, or the traditional back squat, bench press, deadlift. I honestly don’t care what movements you choose if you are brand new to this whole thing particularly if you have no desire to do a lot of homework on the topic. Pick big movements, get a squat, press and pull every workout.

For gods sake warm up, this is a topic in and of itself, but I am a huge proponent of mobility work (a future article will be done on this). Google “Kelly Starrett” or “Mobility WOD” and use those to create a nice warm-up for yourself, all the while improving your mobility. When starting to do your lifts on a barbell or dumbbells, do a few warm up sets of the movement, for instance if you were looking to squat 225 for your 3×5, then you might warm-up with, 45# (the empty bar), 95#, 135#, 185# all for sets of five, maybe only 3 reps on the set of 185, you can also do more reps on the first set if you would like. Play this by ear and don’t be stupid.

In terms of sets and rep schemes three sets of five (3×5) is a generally good rep scheme for any movement you are looking to get stronger in and you should default to this if you aren’t sure how many sets and reps you should do. That being said, if you would like to include some hypertrophy focused exercises such as curls (all of the crossfitters just winced), three sets of ten can be used (3×10) to a better effect. Use the same weight for all 3×5 or 3×10 (also called sets across).

When determining how to add weight, you need to make consistent and small gains, and over the long term it all adds up. So if you are doing big barbell movements; five pounds a week or workout, depending on how difficult you found the previous training session (in terms of maintaining good mechanics), would be a good amount of weight to add.

Limit yourself to three to four training days maximum and two days as a minimum. Make sure to not do the same lifts day after day, perhaps instead of bench pressing every day, switch between bench pressing and shoulder pressing, the same goes for your squatting and pulling movements.

Along the path to physical enlightenment, you will eventually run into obstacles, namely injuries and plateaus. Injuries are such a large topic it will need to be saved for a future article. In terms of “plateaus” though. There is a very simple approach I would like you to use. If you find you cannot hit your required reps for the day, maybe only getting three or four reps on the last set. Take the current weight you are using and cut ten-percent off of it and start again. Do it only as you stall on a specific lift.

One last thing, with all of this strength training, we must make sure not to neglect our conditioning. Make sure to do some sort of metabolic conditioning work at least once a week, ideally two times a week. This can be as basic as going out to your local track and running 4-8 100-400m sprints. Avoid doing long slow distance forms of “cardio” and stick to high intensity, short (less than ten minutes), interval work. If you are looking to shed some extra poundage, doing a fasted walk for 30-45 minutes a few times a week in the morning will also help.

So there you have a basic approach if you are a total virgin to being in the gym. This is just the training portion; diet will be covered in a future post. This is not scripture and should not be taken as the “ideal”, it is just a good starting point. I encourage you to develop a passion for taking care of yourself, make it an obsession, and you will force yourself to learn the necessities of how to lift and how to treat your programming.

If you have any questions feel free to ask on twitter @thedanimal1991 or on the facebook page.

There are many different ideas as to how someone new to training should approach it. Some believe that you should first have a base of conditioning and then get stronger; others believe you should be strong first and then become conditioned if you are so inclined.

Getting strong first tends to be the better recommendation. I can tell you from personal experience when I was competing in gymnastics and crossfitting, although I could do pull-ups for days and had the lowest body fat I’ve ever had so far during my life, from an aesthetic perspective I looked like shit. Though I was lean and what some people might call ripped, I had not developed a solid base of musculature to resemble anything mildly impressive, to top it off I could hardly squat two hundred and twenty five pounds.

One of the main motivations for me wanting to make the people I coach strong first is the development curve. In order to become strong it takes months and years of consistent and hard training, the bonus is once you form a base of strength it takes a long time to go away, and if you ever do stop lifting, once you get back on it the strength you once had comes back at a rapid rate. On the flipside, it comparatively takes a very short amount of time to obtain a high level of conditioning, and it is lost very quickly. To get it back you will have similar challenges as to the first time you were attempting to reach that level of conditioning.

There are instances when working with an individual who is significantly overweight that they may already be somewhat strong, so an emphasis on conditioning may be needed, though strength training certainly would not be neglected. Of course the program the person is following should always be focused on the individual’s goals.

Getting strong and packing on muscle is almost always conducive towards someone’s aesthetic goals, most of us guys just want to look like monsters, whether you want to be a 265 pound monster or a 200 pound monster is really the decision that has to be made. For women I have yet to meet one that doesn’t want to look sexy, what girl doesn’t want nice curves with a conservative level of body fat? And strength training lends itself well to developing this type of appearance.

If you are someone that is involved with crossfit, you should get strong to. Think about how easy a 95 pound thruster will be if your front squatting at least 315 and pressing bodyweight? To excel at these types of metabolic conditioning workouts the weight needs to be so light for you that the only thing limiting your performance is your ability to breathe.

Plus, why not take advantage of the slew of positive health benefits strength training has? Stronger immune system, higher bone density, more musculature to support vulnerable joints like the knee thus reducing the likelihood of injury, and more sexual experience with the opposite (or same, who am I to judge) sex ?

In the end Strength is king. This is true for most everyone, particularly the older crowd. So, get to the gym, get under a barbell, and make a decision to become the person you have always wanted to be.