wolfgang ziegler

„make stuff and blog about it“

Working Out – The Big Three

January 13, 2014
Fitness

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For a change of subject, this blog post is again about fitness, working out and some of my personal experiences concerning following exercises.

When it comes to fitness and working out, here are your Big Three exercises:

  • Bench Press
  • Squat
  • Deadlift

Master these three, include them regularly in your workouts and you will get huge results in gaining strength and muscle mass. These three exercises combined, work out basically your whole body and muscle groups up from your shoulders down to your calves.

This comes with a caveat though: These exercises are hard to get down using correct form and your likeliness of injury is quite high, especially if you just started working out!

So make sure you have established some base strength before you start hitting the “big three”.

I am not a fitness instructor or personal trainer, so I won’t give you any advice on the correct form of these exercises, but I found instructional videos (like this series) very helpful.

Bench Press

bench

This is, a far as I am concerned, the easiest of the “big three” when it comes to performing it using correct form. Also, your likeliness of injury is rather low here (as long as you avoid dropping the bar on your chest) - you might want to have a spotter though.

The bench press is the ultimate upper body workout and you will soon notice good results on your pectoral (duh!) muscles, but also on your deltoids (shoulder) and triceps.

Personally, I consider the bench press among my favorite workout exercises and I almost have to force myself to no include it in every workout and give my upper body some recovery time. Nonetheless, I find it very hard to break through strength limit plateaus when doing the bench press. I noticed good progress when I initially started working out, but I hit my personal plateau at 80kg (~ 180 lbs.) and I am merely struggling to keep this level instead of going beyond it. Your results and experiences may of course vary.

Squat

squat

Squats are for many the most hated exercise when it comes to working out because they are really (really!) exhausting, hard to get down using correct form and rather uncomfortable do perform due to the heavy weight resting on your neck. Nonetheless, it’s an awesome workout for nearly your whole body (that’s why it is probably so exhausting). It mainly targets your quadriceps, glutes and calves, but also your upper body with your abs and lower back.

That said, good core strength is an absolute requirement for doing squats in order to prevent damage to your spine.

Deadlift

deadlift

Among the big three, the deadlift is king. This exercise works your entire body and is a great mass builder. Unfortunately, it is also quite hard to get done right when it comes to form and it can lead to serious injury if performed wrong. And by serious I mean  permanent spine damage serious - so do not take advice lightly here. Try to perform deadlifts as technically perfect as possible.

It took me quite a while to find a technique that worked for me. I am rather tall with long legs and upper body, which makes correct form difficult for me, but the real problem for me was that I have quite bad posture and tend to round my back, which is the absolute and definite no when doing deadlifts. I am still working on the form and deadlifts are my weakest exercise, but I have already learnt the hard (i.e. painful) way that rushing things and adding too much weight too soon is a very bad idea when it comes to this exercise.

On the upside though, deadlifts will give you great back strength which will help prevent issues with your back and spine, especially when you spend the whole day sitting in front of your keyboard coding.

The Monday Morning Workout

I recently started a one hour routine reserved for Monday mornings which includes “big three”:

  • 20 minutes warm-up (e.g. treadmill and lower-back machine).
  • Squats: 5-6 sets at up to 10 reps with increasing weight.
  • Deadlifts: 4-5 sets up to 10 reps with increasing weight.
  • Bench Press: 3 sets at as many reps as possible with maximum weight.

When starting my week with this exercise plan, there is not much that can unsettle me any more when it comes to work or personal issues :-)