My New Workout Plan, and Some Criticism of Starting Strength

Well, let me start this entry off by saying that I thought I was supposed to go into work tonight. Turns out that wasn't the case, so after I drove my ass home, I decided I'd get to work on a post about my new workout plan.

You'll probably notice that I haven't written much about fitness lately, and there's a reason for that. A few months ago, I broke one of my big toes in a stress fracture. I could barely walk without intense pain because of it, so I wasn't hitting the gym. I wasn't doing much of anything. Just laying around, waiting for my broken toe to heal up so I could be active again.

Some of you might laugh and say, "Oh, you broke your big toe? How tragic!" Yeah, you can fuck off. I'm not 17 anymore, and I don't heal from a broken toe after a few days. Hell, it still hasn't healed fully and I'm hitting the gym anyway.

Anyway, after sitting on my ass for two months I finally decided to hit the gym again. I also started doing karate again before the injury, so I started going back to the dojo, too. I went back on my old reliable Starting Strength routine to create a baseline for strength before I ended up on my current workout, which I had planned on starting long before my injury.

After about six weeks of being on Starting Strength, I felt like I was starting to max out on the plan well below my previous best lifts. I'm not entirely sure why that happened. I'm guessing that it's because I'm getting older. After being about thirty pounds below each of my best lifts, I started to plateau. Instead of being stubborn and trying to push through until I reached maybe another ten pounds on each lift, I cut my losses and began the new workout routine.

Enter Functional Fitness!

I had heard about functional fitness about two years ago, when Alan Thrall, a YouTube strongman, thoroughly had his ass kicked while trying to do one of those types of workouts with a gym called Real World Tactical. Here's the video on that:

The title says it all. The workout nearly killed him.

So I had wanted to do a functional fitness workout for a while after seeing that, and after doing some searches on The Google, I found this one to be the most gym friendly. It has four days of full body workouts, but the goal is different on each one. The first day is strength, the second is hypertrophy, the third is power, and the fourth is speed.

On week one, I finished day one without much difficulty. The strength workout sort of mirrors what you'd do in Starting Strength. Mostly sets of five reps, although more sets than the average Starting Strength routine. I was sore as fuck afterward, but not more than usual after a good workout.

It was after that that I saw the Hypertrophy plan and said to myself, "Dear God, what have I done?"

I know that screenshot is posting a little light, so if you're having trouble seeing it, hit the link above (it's hyperlinked as "this one") and look at Day Two.

I posted that screenshot to Facebook and my friends were pretty much a big collective of "lol, nope!" on that routine. I don't blame them. I was dreading it myself.

Still, I managed to finish it against all odds, and finished the rest of the workouts during the rest of the week.

I'm now on the fourth week of the program. The program is supposed to last ten weeks. So here's the results so far:

As far as strength goes, I'm not certain as to whether or not that's improved. Because I knew I'd be lifting more reps than the Starting Strength plan, I started off lifting fairly light. I started doing 185 pound squats and 185 pound Romanian deadlifts. I'm now up to 205 on each, even though I've squatted 235 and deadlifted 265 before I began the program.

The biggest results I've seen so far are in my muscular endurance. I've written very briefly on muscular endurance in my post Achieving Greatness (on a Budget). Basically, muscular endurance is your body's ability to take a beating and drive on. On that note, I've improved greatly.

So yeah, my muscular endurance has improved, so where's my criticism of Starting Strength?

Starting Strength has its name for a reason. It's not called "Starting Endurance" or "Starting Speed" for a reason. It's not meant to improve any of those. It's meant to improve your strength.

And for that reason, I'm thankful for the program. Without it, my lifts would all still be in the high 100s and not the 200s or even the 300s (like my best squat and deadlift). I found new strength because of this program.

But as I did that program, I noticed that the other parts of my fitness began to wane. I wasn't able to run as fast I used to. I certainly didn't have the endurance that I once had. I was able to lift more weight in five rep sets, but that was about the only physical improvement I felt.

Starting Strength is called "Starting Strength" for a reason. It's a beginner program, meant to get you to a certain level of strength that you didn't know you were capable of, before you move onto better things. It will make you damn strong. Like, really strong. Stronger than you'd be able to do with your average bodybuilding or weightlifting plan. But it's not good for building any other type of athleticism.

So if you're new or relatively new to the weightlifting game, Starting Strength is fantastic. Once you plateau on that, you'll want to decide where you want your fitness journey to go.