What Does a Weightlifting Routine for a Transplant Patient Look Like?

The answer: like any non-transplant patient's weightlifting routine. Every situation is unique and transplant recipients should always check with their medical providers first, but I have yet to discover any weight-bearing exercises which are off-limits due to my having had organ transplant surgery.

Of course there is a plethora of information out there regarding exercises and exercise programs and what's appropriate/inappropriate, depending on the individual's goals and his/her age, weight, health, etc. I'll gladly leave that discussion to the experts (and to all the discussion forum posters). But I have found little in the way of resistance training guidance geared toward kidney transplant recipients, other than that it is something important we need to do, particularly those of us currently taking Prednisone.

For this reason I thought I'd share my current program here, which is an adaptation of Wendler's 5/3/1 program. For those unfamiliar with Wendler's 5/3/1, it is a routine built on progressive overload that follows a repeating four-week cycle, known as a mesocycle. Not your typical run-of-the mill bodybuilding split routine, Wendler's is built for strength gains, focusing on big compound movements. Volume and intensity varies week to week, with the idea being that your one-rep max increases every four weeks. The great thing is that the lifter's one-rep max goes up without ever actually performing a one-rep max, something which is largely inadvisable and unnecessarily risky for everybody but competitive power lifters.

Genetics and age, of course, play a factor so the weight gains don't come automatically every four weeks. And at some point, they won't come at all. But the important thing is to keep putting our muscles through the paces because the corticosteroids we're taking are working very much against them. The pills don't take a break and neither should we.

Specific information on the 5/3/1 program is easy to find on the Internet, and you can follow it verbatim or amend it to your individual taste. I'm on my 5th mesocycle and am still enjoying it (as much as it's possible to really enjoy physically demanding work!). The nice part about my adaptation of the program is that I can accomplish a lot in a relatively short amount of time. Compare my version of Wendler's to an ordinary bodybuilding routine, and you'll see just how much time you can free up during the week without sacrificing results.

So what does a weightlifting routine for a transplant patient look like? Well, for this transplant patient two weeks worth of work-outs look like this:

Saturday
Box Squats 3 sets x 5 reps
Squats (50% of 1RM) 5x10
Dumbbell chest press 3x5
Incline bench dumbbell fly 3x10
Pull-ups 4 sets of as many as I can perform

Tuesday
Reverse Lunge w/dumbbells or Bulgarian Lunge
EZ-bar rows
Push-ups 4 sets of 20 or so

Thursday
Deadlift 3x5
Deadlift (50% - 60% of 1RM) 5x8
Dumbbell shoulder press 3x5
Dumbbell shoulder press (50% - 60% of 1RM) 5x10

Sunday
Box Squats 3x3
Squats (50%) 5x10
Dumbbell chest press 3x3
Flat bench dumbbell fly 3x10
Pull ups 4 sets of as many as I can perform

Wednesday
Deadlift 3x3
Deadlift (50 - 60%) 5x8
Dumbbell shoulder press 3x3
Dumbbell shoulder press (50 - 60%) 5x10
Dumbbell pullovers 3x10

On Saturday the two-week cycle will repeat itself, only with a different intensity and repetition scheme, as these next two weeks will represent weeks three and four of the four-week mesocycle. And so there it is, a complete weight lifting regimen currently implemented by at least one kidney transplant recipient.