I'm starting to hate the gym, especially having to eat so much

Just do brosplits and eat whatever cunt. Stop being a colossal proctologist and buy a homegym as well or I'll get Gary Busey to molest your mum

You misuse the word optimal.

Having shit basic cardio means that you are the exact fucking opposite of fit.

Fitness doesn't start and end with an olympic bar user.

Fitness is subjective. Goals are objective. Conditioning is not a limiting factor when it comes to getting strong for a very long time. A focus on conditioning, however, will absolutely hurt gains in the long run.

>Fitness is subjective. Goals are objective. Conditioning is not a limiting factor when it comes to getting strong for a very long time. A focus on conditioning, however, will absolutely hurt gains in the long run.

Nothing in your post actually states that I'm wrong.

Stop misusing the word optimal.

Optimal fitness for the average person is not having fucked joints, shit cardio gains, but having a really heavy squat.

That's not fitness.

Stop stating that strength training is the be all end all of fitness. It's fucking stupid and is not and has never at any point in fucking history been true.

Being fit doesnt mean looking like a model. There are guys who are scrawny compared to me but better cardio and there are guys fatter then me but lift way heavier weight.

Your fitness goals is subjective to you and you alone. Someone might not care to strength train and only want to swim and there might be a guy who loves rock climbing but nothing else.

Quit making fitness into only being about picking shit up and setting it back down. Thats narrow minded as fuck.

It's optimal for the goals I mentioned, hence why I said fitness is subjective, which was to imply that your idea of fitness is not what OP wants to achieve. Besides, nobody who can train 4 times a week and squat 500 has "shit cardio gains", merely worse cardio than someone who actively trains for endurance sports. If you're not breaking a sweat and elevating your heart rate while lifting, you're not limiting you rests enough. If you can't do that while maintaining intensity you need to work on your work capacity, programming or just try harder. Doing sets of 1-5 doesn't magically make your conditioning worse. It just makes it better slower. If you're not training competitively for endurance, chances are someone who's a serious strength competitor who has been training with progressively increasing volume for years has better cardiovascular ability than you do. This of course assumes we're not talking about the circus fat man weight class.

Of course, but since OP is strength training and doing so for the last 6 months, I decided to assume his goal is to be strong, big and lean. Going out and smashing up his shitty knees with distance running is only going to hurt his ability to reach his goals. He's likely never going to give a shit about his mile time.

I feel the same here. For some reason i have an all-or-nothing lookout on fitness. Been on the juice, got off and recovered pretty good (just got my bloodtest yesterday), but still lifting pretty hard and heavy (doing dc).
It feels like a grind. After every workout i just feel relieved that i finished it, especially leg days with 20 rep squats, but i dread waking up every morning because that means gym time. I also love cardio which i do pretty often so that cuts into my regeneration, too.

Feels bad man.
Probably gonna start doing some easy pump brosplit to get the joy of lifting back

He clearly doesnt like the gym since he's already complaining. If its not for him then its not for him. I was just giving him other options to stay fit.

>especially having to eat so much

What do skellies mean by this?

But not because he hates lifting weights. Veeky Forums is a shithole full of contradicting information where both sides are wrong and everyone likes to pedal their own arbitrary bullshit to appear superior. I was in the same boat as OP for a while, took 3 months off, came back, really started to enjoy lifting again, now I'm learning and re-learning things I thought I knew from legitimate sources instead of just listening to whoever sounds the most sure of themselves on an indonesian rat breeding webforum. The only place really worth lurking here is /plg/, everywhere else is garbage. Worst of all is the routine general, where people post the same exact linear weekly routine 1000 times with irrelevant exercise substitutions or arbitrary rep range modifications and argue over whether a 20 degree incline will get them more gains than a 15 degree incline. I used to hate training full body because it meant I had to spend over an hour in the gym per session, now I enjoy progressing towards concrete goals and I'm happy to spend 6-10 hours in the gym per week.

Yeah.
You totes know exactly what OP wants.
He should learn to enjoy lifing and the gym life because that's the only way to get fit and do body recomp.

They pretend that eating is the hard part because underrating is "admirable".

In reality they don't hit the gym as hard as they should and as a result their appetite isn't ravenous like it would be otherwise

If you aren't hungry as fuck and able to eat above maintenance after a workout you've got health issues. Hunger is the natural response to exertion

You're making the same assumptions I am, except mine are based at least loosely off what he's saying, and yours are just what you personally want to do. I'm willing to risk a false assumption that OP is a big boy and he's decided to do what he wants to do already. Besides, everyone gives a fuck about how big, strong and lean they are, nobody cares about how fast they can run a mile. The ones who do care, and really put the effort in, get creaky knees just as much as those who push themselves to squat as much as they can.

Ah, I've been talking to a fat fuck powerlifter who thinks anyone gives a fuck about his squat number.

I'm 75kg. Your opinion is shit anyway even if I was fat. Competitive powerlifters are leaner and faster than you'll ever be, just like competitive sprinters are probably stronger than I'll ever be.

uh huh...
you can go away now porkens

by the way, with the amount of shit those power lifters and sprinters are on they damned well better be leaner and stronger then me

Even natty amateurs like Candito are fitter than you'll ever be by your own standards.

>I'm doing things pretty damn close to what I'm supposed to

Don't be so sure. For deadlifts and squats, my knees were clicking and whatnot before I started focusing on posture intensely throughout the day and stretching my traps/chest/legs to make sure I was loose enough to workout.

I'm on /fits/ variant of Phraks Greyskull. I'm doing the program as its laid out.

I already do HEMA which I love and I'm practicing that a minimum of 30 minutes a day 3 days a week, with a 2+ hour class weekly. I hate the idea of being weaker than the average male and not looking at least a bit bigger than ottermode more than I hate eating lots and going to the gym, so i decided to make a sacrifice. The things is I used to enjoy the gym, never the eating, but I stuck with my diet plans and had a decent time lifting with my friend. Now that joy is gone.

My goal is stronger than the average male at 6'ft height, with low% body fat, looking similar to Geralt from the Witcher 3 (At least close. I have minor pectus excavatum so I'll have to deal with the difference)

It's hard to describe the sensations. It's like a half way point between numbness and pain when I bend my legs, like it's progressing to an injury but not there yet. I find it very hard to tell what I should push through and when I should stop. It worries me because I've heard lots of horror stories with strength training. People claim it's safe but I always hear about someone fucking themselves up for life, or being injured for 6+ months and losing all their gains anyways.

I was told by a lot of sources that I need a good strength based first for effective hypertrophy. I'm only at one plate bench, 2 plate deadlift, and 1.5 plate squat, and 1/2 plate OHP.

I just don't feel hungry that often and I stay full for a long time, though I'm by no means frail. I felt my best when I did cardio 4 times a week and ate as I normally did, but that would do nothing for gaining muscle if I stuck with that and never went to the gym.

My form is definitely not perfect, but it's not horrible. I was curious if it was so I took a session with a strength based personal trainer that I knew. He helped fix my form. Stretching sounds like a good idea though.

I should mention for my bench, deadlift, squat, and OHP I am talking about 5 reps, not a one rep max.

your issue depends, do you write down the movements, reps and weights down?

What's your weight and estimated bf%?

6 ft, approximately 17%-18% body fat. My adonis belt is pretty clear.

Weight, nigga.

Yes.

Woops. 170 pounds.

Start by cutting at a 500kcal deficit, maintain your lifts, lose 1-1.4lbs of bodyweight per week (rounding from kg here, 1.5lb is a bit over what you want to be losing, it's better to be under). Run a low-ish volume program that doesn't have super aggressive progression and has some autoregulation. Lyle Mcdonald's generic bulking routine is perfect for your goals. jcdfitness.com/wp-content/download/Lyle_McDonald_Generic_Bulking_Routine_FAQ.pdf

Read the whole pdf which tells you how to incorporate deadlifts, how to implement training cycles by manipulating volume, but most importantly scroll down to the section about diet and how to adapt to cutting. Add reverse flies on upper body day. After you're somewhat happy with how lean you are (a bit less lean than you'd like to end up), eat at a 200-250 kcal surplus, gaining 0.5lbs a week and try to progress weekly with the base routine. By the time you stall on weekly progression while on a surplus, you should know enough about training to continue from there.

Also, it's no surprise you're getting overuse issues in your shoulders and elbows when you're doing zero antagonistic work to your pressing (curls to balance out elbow extension, reverse flies to balance out your front delt). You're also working to failure every single day you step in the gym on big lifts, so no matter how good your form is, you're grinding your joints up pretty bad and your form is breaking down on the last reps. The greyskull programs that are on Veeky Forums are all complete shit, you should have read the book instead.

why the hell should he cut? he not overweight in the slightest. if he doesnt want to gorge himself he should just run the program at maintainence so it doesnt kill his energy levels and risk injury

why is katherine mcnamara so cute

Personal preference. Cutting is a lot easier when mistakes or laziness set you back a couple weeks worth of strength gains instead of a month or 2. He can spend 10 weeks cutting now or he can spend those 10 weeks cutting when he reaches a certain arbitrary level of proficiency in his lifts but it really doesn't make much of a difference. Recomposition without changing bodyweight is less efficient than cutting fat and slow, clean bulking while minimising fat gains and it's just a slower way to reach the same goal.

I'll definitely gove that a read. I'm just curious as to why I should cut?

I'm doing curls as they were added in the Veeky Forums version of greyskull.

Is my current strength level fine for hypertrophy ranges? I feel like doing it for a while would be easier in my joints and be a lot less likely to lift to failure, but I'm not entirely sure.

As far as you should be concerned, there's no such thing as a hypertrophy range in the way Veeky Forums describes it. In practice, there's some level of difference and therefore certain rep ranges are used for certain training effect, but that's something you should research on your own. Just do the program.

From what I researched it's almost universally agreed that different rept ranges produce different results, with a small fraction saying that it doesn't matter and that you'll grow evenly in size and strength no matter what range you use.

I'd like to hear what you believe

theres a big difference between lifting 1 time super heavy and lifting for reps at a lighter weight, but everything in between is a lot more similar than people let on

I told you. There's some level of difference that can be used to elicit a specific training response. Yes I would program hypertrophy work in a 6-10 rep range on the main lifts, yes there is a reason for this, but variables such as relative intensity, rest periods and total number of sets are just as important for this purpose and I don't feel like explaining it to you when you have more holes in your knowledge of programming than you have knowledge of programming. It suffices to say that, should you take the strength program you are doing, and change nothing except the rep ranges, you'll realistically see a significant change in difficulty of progression (it's easier to add 5lbs to a 3x5 than it is to add 5lbs to a 3x12), which will result in less sustainable progression, which will most likely outweigh whatever minute benefit you might experience in terms of hypertrophy, because when your progress stops, your hypertrophy stops. If you could theoretically load infinitely small weight increments, then it wouldn't really make a difference.

change your routine up heaps
do a brosplit and do eating cycles
on-bulk, off-bulk. same as cutting but takes longer