This might not be the best place to post this, but after having two children, a busy job, some hobbies, strength training took a backseat for the first time in my life in roughly 18 years.
A very wise S&C coach once told me that one could get by and be very very well built just doing squats, chins and dips.
Well, because my time was limited, and sleep was a commodity (2 small girls) I did just that starting about 6 months ago. That is how I got started back, just doing those in my basement, even though I have plenty more equipment to use both at my house and my parents home.
I cleaned up my diet, and guess what? Best shape I have been in for a long time.
I am adding things here and there (deadlifts, curls, tricep pushdowns, calf raises, inclines, lateral raises, etc.), but these are the cornerstone of my training. I wish I had made these the foundation years ago.
AJ said that years ago
"Just because some group of idiots calling themselves “experts” appoints some other idiot to a position from
which he can force his stupid opinions down the throats of the public it does not follow that anything will be improved; the only thing you can count on as a result of such a move is the fact that the government will hire a few thousand other idiots and give them the authority to fuck up your life even more than it already is, and, of course, the fact that a few more billion dollars will be pissed away to no good purpose.
Apart from a rather limited number of hardcore bodybuilders who are misguided enough to believe that they have a
chance to compete against the outright genetic freaks that now dominate bodybuilding competition, just about anybody else in this country can produce nearly all of the potential benefits of proper exercise without spending much if anything in excess of about twenty dollars. You can build both a chinning bar and a pair of parallel dip bars for a total cost of only a few dollars, and those two exercises, chins and dips, if properly performed, will stimulate muscular growth in your upper body and arms that will eventually lead to muscular size and strength that is very close to your potential.
Adding full squats, eventually leading up to one-legged full squats, and one-legged calf raises, will do much the same thing for your legs and hips. Using this very simple routine, when you get strong enough to perform about ten repetitions of one-armed chins with each arm, your arms will leave very little to be desired.
Or, instead, you can do what many thousands of others are now doing and piss away thousands of dollars and years of largely wasted effort while producing far less results. The choice is yours
One of the best pair of arms that I ever saw on a man belonged to a guy that I knew about fifty years ago in New York, and he never performed any sort of exercise apart from chins and dips, and damned few of them."
