please help a novice strength athlete

[muscle99]

Hey all,

Suppose I better give a little info on my background. I have been cutting for about 3 and a half months now, almost finished, been dragging on & on as I have been learning what to do along the way. Have lost about 13kg in fat and a solid 10kg drop on military, bench, squat & dead lift being 40kg. Previously I have been doing a 4 day bodybuilding routine focusing on building mass.

As for my body, I have always gained fat very easy, and muscle growth has never been a problem yet it is never "easy". Losing fat has always been the hardest thing for me, even with a large calorie deficit along side hours of cardio & weight training each week. The type of muscle I have built is large & hard & developed only when pumped. Later in the day it returns to nothing at all. I have always been real weak for my size. Pullups, bench, military have always been embarrassing low. My strengths would be deadlifts & leg press. For example: before my cut my stats were, 8 bw pullups, 75kg x5 bench, 45kgx5 military, with a 160kgx5 deadlift & 300kgx7 leg press. Squat was 110x8.

Now I am focusing on remaining in a 400 - 600 calorie deficit with along side strength focused training, making small gains while removing another 2-4 kg fat to make myself 5% bf I think.

Currently doing a full body workout MON,WED,FRI.

each day is 6repsx5sets of some form of bench,squat,row,ohp.deads friday only. with two isolation exercises after each day 8-10 reps.

Hoping this will be fine for 6weeks as mon,wed,fri has slightly different versians of each exercise. I'm not expecting large gains as I will remain in a small deficit.

Is a full body workout just as good as a spilt strength program?

Not really sure on any alternative routines. Have heard of the 5/3/1 & 6/4/2 rep schemes yet not too sure on any finer details. I'm guessing the rep ranges must be changed from time to time to avoid plateauing? I kinda no exactly what too do in regards to building muscle/bodybuilding style training but not too sure what too do in regards to strength focused training. Any advice would be great. I'm sure someone will gladly help convert another

Also, with the full body workouts I find my delts are rooted after bench & row leaving my military a light half arse effort. How do I get around this?

[steak]

Check out Stronglifts.com... a 5x5 routine would be a reasonable place to start. Wendlers 531 also.

[drizzt]

Hey man. Sorry, if I get the gist of what you're asking, you want to lean up and get stronger? Not impossible, but post your diet up in the diet section as if you aren't losing weight in a calorie deficit (AND you're doing cardio) there is something wrong somewhere along the chain. Speaking from experience here, as I used to think mine was all good and also had trouble losing weight - until people checked over it for me and made a few tweaks here and there. Boom, things started dropping.

Anyway onto the strength side of things, what Steak suggested is a perfect start, personally I'd head onto a 5 x 5. I got some really good initial gains from it using the novice program (gains of 30/10/40 I think?), and recently (a couple of years after the novice program) used the advanced program for some more great gains.

Also, with the full body workouts I find my delts are rooted after bench & row leaving my military a light half arse effort. How do I get around this?

5 x 5 way of doing things has you benching on days 1 & 3, and pressing on day 2 alongside your deadlifts. Worked really well for me. We changed the strict military (or push press) into a pin press (set at about chin height) and we believe this contributed to our bench strength going up.