And so it begins!

It’s 17 weeks until my cousin gets hitched in Rome. 18 weeks until one of my best friends gets hitched in Chester. And it’s 20 weeks until I have a university reunion. I’d better get training! 

My name is Gino and I’m 28. I have what can be described as a long limbed body with narrow-ish shoulders, wide hips and solid legs. I regularly play football, run 10km and even throw myself into silly triathlon and duathlon challenges. I also attend my local gym and weight train twice a week - or at least try to. 

On a recent holiday in the French Alps one of my roommates argued that he “had a great physique and that it came purely down to working hard over the last ten years”. I can’t deny that he has had worked hard, however we also have to establish the fundamentals of training to back this up. 

Firstly you have genetic factors. No matter how hard you train, watch your diet and rest, genetics are going to be single handidly the biggest factor in how you look after taking up weight lifting. Let me put it this way. If I worked at the same intensity as this particular friend, ate the same diet and did the same volume of work and rested the same amount of time, the only factor that would vary from how I look to how he looks is genetics.

Secondly, you go to the gym for a whole myriad of reasons, however if you are weight lifting the physiological changes are going to be muscular hypertrophy (muscles getting bigger) and or muscular endurance, muscular power and strength increases. You can’t go to the gym to “shape your muscles”. Once again, the way you look is a by-product of the intensity of your workout, your actual workout in the gym, diet and rest you have out of the gym, oh and genetics. 

Obviously I have tried all kinds of weight training regimes as well. Multiple sets to supersets and even HIT, and I am not here to debate which is the best form of training, I am using HIT because all the science indicates is that you can achieve similar strength gains with single set to failure (HIT) as multiple sets in less time. Like everything else in this world, if you can get it done quicker why wouldn’t you? 

Throughout the 20 weeks I will be talking to a whole variety of people, from physiological academics and strength trainers to the gym “rats”. I want to not only better my strength and performance in the gym, but my knowledge of the subject and understand other people’s attitudes best I can to weight training. 

Two of the most commonly used names that you will hear are Tim and James. Tim is my housemate and a fervent advocate of HIT training. He is also a graduate of Exercise Sciences and will be the first to change his opinion on HIT training if overwhelming evidence comes out that multiple sets is significantly better for your training. This would obviously all depend on the quality of the research done, period of time for the study etc. James is an associate lecturer and lab technician at Solent University in Southampton, what he doesn’t know on HIT training isn’t worth knowing. He introduced me to HIT training some years ago and he will be giving me more than my money’s worth on training advice and knowledge. 

I will be posting regular updates (I’ll try once a day, at least once every other day) to keep you all interested, even if it will be me and possibly several friends that will only read it. I hope you enjoy it, and if you want to comment please feel free to do so.