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Showing posts from April, 2010

Eating clean: Why I fear I may not gain weight

A while ago I decided to switch to eating clean because I was unable to lose any more fat while maintaining muscle with my junk food diet. However a few days later I discovered that I lost a considerable amount of muscle as a result of my work related travel and my tendency to eat less as I was trying to lean. As a result I decided to go back to mass building phase and increased my food intake. But the sad news is that after all my efforts to eat clean and eat a lot, I am still losing weight (and fat too, which is good). For an ectomorph eating clean means it is even harder to put on weight. In the last 3 weeks (about the time when I first started to bulk up), my fat % went down from 9.92% to 9.46% and my weight from 122 lbs to 120.8 lbs. This eating clean thing is killing me. It is very hard to stuff oneself with clean food. Which is why I fear I may not be able to put on any weight if I continue doing this. I have to find some way to increase the number of calories. Although I am

Strength Goals: April - June 2010

For the last few months my goals have always been around weight, fat and muscle. But this time I want to try something different. I am finding it really hard to make sense of the varying weight and fat numbers. So this time I want to have strength goals (which always should go up). Again these can vary a bit too, but I want to give it a try and see how I do with strength goals. At the end of March 2010, the numbers for some compound exercises are as follows (able to do 3 x 5): Squats: 175 lbs Bench Press: 125 lbs Rows: 95 lbs Shoulder Press: 65 lbs Deadlift: 200 lbs Looking at the past trend for most of my compound exercises, I see a 5 lbs increase per month in the weight that I can lift. Extrapolating that for 3 months I should be able to lift about 15 lbs more than I lifted at the end of March. Just to make it a bit more challenging I throw in an extra 5 lbs to the goals. So the final goal for each of the compound exercises should be a 20 lbs increase in the lifts. But