Help, I'm going to be a dad!

[Ryanusaurus]

Hi folks,

My wife and I are expecting our first child in a few short months. I'm currently 18ish weeks into my 2nd run of Novice LP. I'm expecting that I'll finish LP and will need to switch to Intermediate Programming shortly before my son is born.

I'm 30, 5'11", 210lbs, 330x5 squat, 405x5 deadlift, 245x5 bench, 172.5x5 Press, 190x3 Power Clean.

My Question is: Have any of you been successful with your Intermediate Programming while handling the lack of sleep, nutrition, and other stressors that are involved with caring for a newborn? I don't want to lose gains if I can help it, but I also need to be realistic. I would love to hear your experiences!



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[omaniphil]

Congratulations on the upcoming parenthood. My daughter is 6 months old, and so I had to go through exactly what you are going to be doing just a few months ago. I was actually able to scrape time together to lift, although nutrition and sleep did suffer. It probably goes without saying not to transition to TM. With the probable lack of recovery you'll be facing, a HLM format would probably (definitely) do you more good. If you need to slow it down even more, you can make 2.5lb jumps per week which would be easier to recover from. It's slow, but its still progress, right?

If your routine gets ruffled enough, you might want to consider reading Andy's article on Training Without a Plan which is aimed at situations like this.

[SpinyNorman]

Hi folks,

My wife and I are expecting our first child in a few short months. I'm currently 18ish weeks into my 2nd run of Novice LP. I'm expecting that I'll finish LP and will need to switch to Intermediate Programming shortly before my son is born.

I'm 30, 5'11", 210lbs, 330x5 squat, 405x5 deadlift, 245x5 bench, 172.5x5 Press, 190x3 Power Clean.

My Question is: Have any of you been successful with your Intermediate Programming while handling the lack of sleep, nutrition, and other stressors that are involved with caring for a newborn? I don't want to lose gains if I can help it, but I also need to be realistic. I would love to hear your experiences!



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I was 30, same height and a bit lighter lifting less weight than you when my first kid was born. I didn't know about SS or much of anything about programming. I was still able to gain weight and increase my lifts. I got to the gym and lifted three times a week with very few missed sessions.

By the time we had our second kid I was bigger, stronger, older and was just starting to learn about programming. Still, the most important thing was just getting out to the gym and not missing sessions. I actually had a pretty good run on intermediate programming for a while during this time. I think that's when I started a log on this site. Feel free to browse it and ask questions. Maybe you can use something from it or (more likely) figure out some stuff that might not work.

[Karl Schudt]

First child?

It took a while, but my wife finally conceded that I was not able, in fact, to breast feed the child. So what was the point of me getting up in the middle of the night?

Good luck, and congratulations!

[George Christiansen]

Unless you have a very particular problem with your child, they are really easy during that phase.

There are really so many variables that really depend on how you decide to deal with things.

Our daughter ate every 3 hours at first, so we just rigged things so that my wife would pump and then go to bed, I'd stay up another 3 hours, wake the baby to feed and change her, and then sleep 6 hours while my wife took the next shift. This isn't a great amount of sleep, but I compensated with being otherwise pretty lazy.

The baby should have zero impact on the actual training and eating. Really you can do both while the kid sleeps, which is all they do when not shitting and eating anyway.

My kids are older now, but 2016 sucked horribly for me regarding stress and sleep and while the improvements were minimal, I at least never lost ground. You may find that you have to basically stretch out the cycle of weight jumps and maybe cut volume and frequency a bit, but going backwards isn't really necessary.

Good luck and congratulations.

[Christopher Anderson]

My son is four months old now so I am still in the phase you're about to be in for the most part. The sleep and nutrition will be fine except the first week or so, but that's just because you will be busy getting use to having the baby home etc. My biggest problem with lifting has been the scheduling stuff, with my wife being a nurse and working a 12 hour shift that changes from week to week really puts a wrench in planning. I think that the best thing to do is to just keep eating and sleeping when you can and make it a point to get in to lift when you can. Enjoy being a dad, its the most amazing thing in the world to be, other than stronger of course. Congrats on everything! Oh yeah, go with Target brand diapers, they are made by the same company that makes Pampers.

[Brodie Butland]

So, I've sort of run into this problem twice. First, I had some really bad months at work last year--two big cases basically exploded at the same time...meant lots of nights of little sleep, and the weekdays just weren't conducive to training. So I cut down my training days to weekends only--either one or two days--and did basically a combination of Madcow and back-off sets so that I would do my intensity and volume on the same day. Definitely not ideal and has a lower gainzZz ceiling, but I set all-time PRs in the squat, deadlift, and bench press during that time...so it worked somewhat. (I started really having recovery trouble after the 410x4 squat and 465x4 deadlift--there were some personal reasons that kept me out of the gym for a month or so in June/July, so I don't know whether I would have ultimately gotten past those plateaus or not, but it was definitely getting rough at that time.) I haven't updated my log in a while, but feel free to take a look--pay especial attention to the January through May 2016 period.

Now that I'm a month in to fatherhood, I'm going back to the same weekend well to see how long I can go. Too early to tell how it's going to go, but I'm optimistic that I'll at least stay in a respectable ballpark until the little one starts sleeping through the night...my last squat was 370x4, so although fatherhood has taken some toll, I'm still starting significantly higher than I did on my last good run.

[Christopher Anderson]

So, I've sort of run into this problem twice. First, I had some really bad months at work last year--two big cases basically exploded at the same time...meant lots of nights of little sleep, and the weekdays just weren't conducive to training. So I cut down my training days to weekends only--either one or two days--and did basically a combination of Madcow and back-off sets so that I would do my intensity and volume on the same day. Definitely not ideal and has a lower gainzZz ceiling, but I set all-time PRs in the squat, deadlift, and bench press during that time...so it worked somewhat. (I started really having recovery trouble after the 410x4 squat and 465x4 deadlift--there were some personal reasons that kept me out of the gym for a month or so in June/July, so I don't know whether I would have ultimately gotten past those plateaus or not, but it was definitely getting rough at that time.) I haven't updated my log in a while, but feel free to take a look--pay especial attention to the January through May 2016 period.

Now that I'm a month in to fatherhood, I'm going back to the same weekend well to see how long I can go. Too early to tell how it's going to go, but I'm optimistic that I'll at least stay in a respectable ballpark until the little one starts sleeping through the night...my last squat was 370x4, so although fatherhood has taken some toll, I'm still starting significantly higher than I did on my last good run.

Hey Brodie would you mind sharing a template of the training you're doing? I think that might benefit me with only being able to get in 2 days a week right now.

[Ryanusaurus]

Congratulations on the upcoming parenthood. My daughter is 6 months old, and so I had to go through exactly what you are going to be doing just a few months ago. I was actually able to scrape time together to lift, although nutrition and sleep did suffer. It probably goes without saying not to transition to TM. With the probable lack of recovery you'll be facing, a HLM format would probably (definitely) do you more good. If you need to slow it down even more, you can make 2.5lb jumps per week which would be easier to recover from. It's slow, but its still progress, right?

If your routine gets ruffled enough, you might want to consider reading Andy's article on Training Without a Plan which is aimed at situations like this.

Thanks for linking the article! That was very helpful. I was going to give TM a shot up until the due date, depending on how much more I can squeeze out of LP, and switch to...something, afterwards. Andy outlines training that seems manageable. I haven't really ever tested out my 1rpm on my lifts so his short and sweet approach sounds appealing!

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[Brodie Butland]

Hey Brodie would you mind sharing a template of the training you're doing? I think that might benefit me with only being able to get in 2 days a week right now.

So, here's my one-day template:

Squat
Ramping sets of 4 up, up to three ramping work sets
Workset 1: 4 reps, at a weight where I have about three reps left in the tank if I went for it
Workset 2: Same, except two reps left in the tank
Workset 3: Same, except one rep left in the tank
Backoffs: 2 or 3 sets at about 10% under workset 3

Deadlift/bench press (alternate weekly)
Ramping sets of 4 up, up to three ramping work sets
Workset 1: 4 reps, at a weight where I have about three reps left in the tank if I went for it
Workset 2: Same, except two reps left in the tank
Workset 3: Same, except one rep left in the tank
Backoffs: 2 or 3 sets at about 10% under workset 3


So here's an example day (actual training day stats so I'm not just making numbers up) of what I started after my son's birth (and very similar to what I did last year):

Week 1:
Squat:
Ramping warm-ups of 4
330x4
350x4
370x4
345x4x2

Deadlift:
Ramping warm-ups of 4
355x4
380x4
410x4
375x4x2

(Trump hands...my deadlift is typically not that far away from my squat)

Week 2:
Squat:
Ramping warm-ups of 4
330x4
355x4
375x4
350x4x2

Pause bench press:
Ramping warm-ups of 4
205x4
225x4
245x4
225x4x2



If I am able to make it two days, then I do either the bench press or deadlift (whatever I didn't do on the first training day), and then do ramping sets of 8 on squats up to three top sets, same "reps in the tank" scheme as the heavy day. No backoffs.

The goal is to increase the heavy lifts each time...so squat hopefully will improve 5 lbs per week, deadlift and bench press hopefully at least 5 lbs every two weeks