Tony's Exercise Page

I have discovered Weight Training/Body Building (yea, I know a little late, but I am doing it it none the less) as a fun and healthy way to get my butt off the couch and see if I can't avoid the family heart disease curse. 

I had originally converted the media room upstairs into a home gym but the purchase of the squat rack resulted in the home gym being moved downstairs.  This unit (bench & rack) is probably 400+ lbs, not including barbells and weight, then you add in my 200 lbs, that's just too much weight to have banging & bouncing around upstairs, even sitting on 3 walls (the system was sitting above the pantry & garage door).  I didn't want to do this originally but Heather's study is the best room for the workout equipment so we moved the equipment formal living room.  Well this didn't really look that great either so we moved Heather's display cases into the formal living room, and the exercise equipment into the study.  Heather's display cases look better next to the grandfather clock than the squat rack anyway. 

I moved the rack back upstairs after consulting with a structural engineer.  He said it would be fine but would be better if I put the rack on plywood to spread the load, which I did.

The gym is currently stocked with,
Weider C650 Squat Rack Catalog Image (2 80" olympic bars, olympic EZ curl, 2 olympic dumbbell handles, ~450lbs of weight)
The Dual Action Bike
And the old equipment which is still upstairs all of which is for sale, send me a mail if interested. tony at the gaston family dot com
Rack and Bench
The Bench SOLD SOLD
The Multi-Function Machine SOLD SOLD
The Gazelle SOLD SOLD
72" 1" bar (spin locks), 1" EZ-Curl Bar (spin locks) SOLD SOLD

My favorite hangout for weightlifting/bodybuilding info is www.t-nation.com.  The site has very active user forums, complete workout programs and more science behind muslce building than my brain can handle.

Ball State University, ABC BodyBuilding and ExRx have good indexes of exercises including movies and animations depicting how the exercise should and should not be done. 

I also found a site that supports/debunks all the various supplements out there, http://www.supplementwatch.com
I get all of my supplements from 1fast400

Well, gee Tony, this is all well and good but what is your goal here?  Well I'm glad you asked, my goal today (6/11/2004) is to see just how big I can get with my body type.  Do I want to get as big as Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ronnie Coleman, No, (but wouldn't it be cool to be that big :-) ), I am enjoying seeing my muscles grow so I'm going to see how far I can go.  If nothing else I have found an great side benefit, my back doesn't hurt as much as it used to (4 prior back injuries and 9-12 Motrins a day).  I am also standing up MUCH straighter with no noticable effort.

My current split is the 'Shut up Program' from T-Nation

Shocking Principles

Shocking principles are used to get your body out of a rut. Doing the same exercises day after day gets your body used to the activity and you don't grow.  So you use a shocking method to shock your body back into growing. Basically switch to one of these principles for 4-6 weeks.

Super Sets
Do a set of a compound exercise, then without resting immediately do a complimentary exercise.  Say bench presses followed by dumbbell flyes, or shoulder presses followed by front raises.  Then rest and return to the first exercise.

Rest Pause
The rest pause method allows you to continue past failure.  When your are unable to complete more reps you rest for 15 seconds or so then crank out a few more reps, this allows you to crank out a few more reps than you normally would.  The exact delay depends on the rep count and recovery time of the specific muscle.

Triples (21's, 24's, 30's)
Triples breaks the exercise into 3 parts, bottom, top, and total, then do reps of each part, back to back.
i.e. for Barbell Curls, do 7 reps from full extension to arm at 90 degree, then do 7 from 90 to full contract, then do 7 full extensions.

Yu Yevon
Perform the exercise set as normal, then pose that muscle doing a full contraction for about 30 seconds.

Reverse Pyramiding
Start with a heavy weight that you can only do 2-4 reps with, do the rep counts below dropping the weight slightly on each set
2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 10, 12

Drop Sets (Stripping) 
Do the exercise till failure, drop the weight, go till failure (double drop), drop the weight, go till failure (triple drop) all of this is done with no rest between sets

Slow Sets
Drop the weight from your normal sets, when doing the reps do them very slowly, 4-5 seconds per lift and lower

Powerlifting
The goal Powerlifting is strength, but it will also add mass.  In powerlifting you do 1-5 reps explosively using more weight than a body building routine.  5 sets of 5, or 3 sets of 3, or 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.  Compound movements are emphasized.

Speed Set
4 sets of 5 reps with 30-50% max weight done very quickly with a 3 second pause between reps and a long delay between sets.  I try work at least one set of these per muscle group several days away from when that group is normally worked (Monday-Arms, Tuesday-Shoulder etc...)