The cruel fact is: when you stop (or slow down) your workouts, you will lose strength. Even the best pro athletes reach a “peak” when they’re at their best. But they can’t peak continuously; they have to back off at some point.

If you want to back off a bit, try working out at 50% to 80% for a while. Doing that, you’ll probably avoid losing strength and mass.

I advise you to avoid getting obsessed with maximums and constant progress. True success past a certain point requires long-term thinking and injury prevention.

Good luck; I wish I could offer a more satisfying answer but I don’t want to pretend I know things that I don’t.

I’d suggest this:

• Figure out your body composition
• Create an eating plan that causes you to gain a pound of body weight per week (unless you’re carrying too much fat already)
• Add a bit of weight to the bar each time you lift

I am not qualified to give you any advice about training with a surgically-reconstructed back. What I do know is that if a person has had back or knee surgery, they’re never going to be as capable as someone who has avoided injury, and they’re going to have to face up to the fact that certain activities will forever be off-limits.

There comes a point in lots of peoples’ lives when their youthful dreams of immortality suddenly disappear with a “pop“. After that, training is best geared towards injury prevention, joint mobility, and quality of life.

Although there are plenty of anecdotes on the ‘web demonstrating how someone was able to deadlift heavy weights after disc surgery, I’m not prepared to ever recommend deadlifting to someone with back problems. I have absolutely no experience in the matter, one way or the other.

Weight lifting — even for young, healthy, athletic people — is implicated in tens of thousands of back injuries every year. According to the US Government’s Consumer Products Safety Commission, in the year 2009 there were 14,734 emergency-room visits just in the United States because of lower-back injury during weight lifting. That figure doesn’t include emergency-room visits by people who hurt their back lifting things other than weights.

Heavy deadlifting should be done only after a thorough warmup, and then only if your flexibility is sufficient to allow you to keep your back/spine oriented properly, and then only once per week. Anyone who is unsure whether they are flexible enough to deadlift heavy weights should read Mark Ripptoe’s Starting Strength. A lot of the weight-training advice on some well-regarded internet sites is simply re-written directly from Ripptoe’s book. In lieu of that, perhaps get some advice from an experienced trainer who has a degree in something like kinesiology or exercise physiology and is a member of a professional organization like the NSCA. For those who want more reading, Krista gives some useful info on how to choose a personal trainer.

Good luck!

My theory is: if you’re going 5 reps to failure in the squat, you’d better have good technique and proper flexibility. If you have bad squatting technique or flexibility problems on that last rep, you’re going to cause trouble for yourself. But at 10 reps to failure, things are a lot more forgiving: you can squat your way into shape and work on technique at the higher rep ranges.

Just wondering about the rep range. Can mass still be put on by using a maximal strength workout (i.e. approx 5 reps/set) rather than a traditional hypertrophy program (8-12 reps)??
thanks

Virtually all compound exercises involve the core (or abdominals). If you add separate ab work, you will probably limit your ability to make progress in the main compound lifts.

You can bulk up with a full body compound exercise routine, or you can isolate the abdominals and build a six-pack, but unless you are genetically gifted and a bit lucky, you can’t do both at the same time.

Just as the arms get a lot of (indirect) work from bench presses, pull-ups, and other compound exercises, so do the abdominals. If your abs (or any other part of your core) are the weak link, compound exercises will strengthen them up just fine.

During a mass-building workout, you are gaining weight and muscle by eating an excess of calories and lifting with a high level of intensity. Your body can’t withstand this intensity year-round. A typical mass phase might be three months at the most. After that, you probably need a period of rest and recovery.

Other than mass-building workouts, you can do sports-specific strength workouts, general fitness and strength-maintenance workouts, rehab workouts, etc. Basically, if you are gaining weight you are in a mass phase, but if not, you are doing something else.

I am hesitant to recommend a one size fits all workout here on this website, but you can see some of the thinking that goes into program design in this article: designing a bodybuilding workout.

The length of a typical routine depends on your level of proficiency with weight training. As long as the gains keep coming, don’t change what’s working. When your results begin to plateau, then you are no longer a beginner and you will need an intermediate or adanced routine.

Many people on the web use and recommend the routines found in these places:

Strength Mill Forum
StrongLifts 5×5 program
Sherdog strength and power FAQ

If you like books, here is a good one at amazon.com: Starting Strength (2nd edition)