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Can't be hungry. Can't be full.

Before I go into the gym I have to make sure that I am neither hungry nor too full. I am not sure if that is how everyone feels but this requirement of delicate balance between too full and too hungry is causing trouble to me. There have been times when I went to gym when I am too full and it scares me that I might throw up especially when I do squats or deadlifts. Another problem is cramps for more movement involved exercises. Yet another problem with being too full is that I will not be able to eat much after the workout (the ectomorph problem of getting too full too quickly). And then there are times when I go to gym feeling hungry like today. Something urgent came up at work and I was 45 minutes late to gym than usual. I started feeling hungry as I stepped into the gym. It is a weird time that I can neither have a snack nor a full lunch. But in retrospect I should have had a snack even if it means I will have to reduce the big lunch after workout. As I started working out I fel

Calories, Food, Weight

I have been wanting to record what I eat and how much I eat for a while now and I was finally able to do it for 1 day. So this is what I ate on Friday, December 18, 2009. Early morning snack I had a glass of 2% milk early in the morning at around 7 am. Calories: 122 Fat: 4.81 gms Carb: 11.42 gms Prot: 8.05 gms Breakfast For breakfast I had a bowl of cereals. The cereals is a mix of raisin bran and cheerios. I ate this around 9 am. Calories: 175 Fat: 2.19 gms Carb: 34.58 gms Prot: 4.95 gms Morning Snack For my morning snack I had a cup of pineapple and a cup of cottage cheese. This was around 11 am. Calories: 272 Fat: 4 gms Carb: 26 gms Prot: 31 gms Lunch Lunch consisted of chicken burger and fries at 1 pm. Calories: 498 Fat: 20 gms Carb: 51 gms Prot: 27 gms Afternoon Snack Chicken tandoori with a glass of 2% milk at 4 pm. Calories: 253 Fat: 11 gms Carb: 13 gms Prot: 23 gms Dinner Chicken dum biriyani at 7 pm. Calories: 410 Fat: 11 gms

The Hugh Jackman Workout

Today was really the first day when I attempted to slow down my tempo to allow for more time under tension. When I decided to do it last week, I was just guessing that my body needs more time under stress. But now I have something that reinforces my logic for using slow tempo for 6 weeks (again just random number I picked which happened to be what Hugh Jackman used for his workout!). Here is the link to the whole Hugh Jackman workout: http://www.squidoo.com/hugh-jackman-workout. Apparently Hugh used a two phase approach. Basically the website explains (I cannot say if it is authentic, but hey that is the case with most body building websites and stories) that he used a slow tempo phase for mass building and then a faster tempo to gain strength. Each phase lasted for 6 weeks. First he would start with a mass gain phase. This is the phase where he uses slow 3 second eccentric contraction and 1 second of concentric contraction. This tempo is useful for muscles to adapt and grow. It li

Time Under Tension Changes

I have made some good progress so far as my strength and weight goals are concerned. Although I did not reach any of my strength goals I am very close to achieving them. Almost a week into December and I already reached my weight goal of 125 lbs. That means I gained a whopping 6 lbs in 3 months (for an ectomorph that is a big deal believe me). However along the road I gained a huge amount of fat too. A full 3.5% to be precise. In the past 2 months and 1 week I have only concentrated on increasing the strength. Always performed the exercises with quick bursts of energy when lifting and quickly bringing the weight down in the negatives. So the time under tension was very low. Perhaps around 2 to 3 seconds per rep. Total time under tension for a set was around 10 to 30 seconds depending on the reps. As a result I could keep adding weights more often and kept going. Now that I have reached a certain point in my strength I want to concentrate more on form and letting my central nervous sy

The Graphs: November 2009

Here are the weight and fat graphs for November 2009. Body Weight Chart For the first few days the weight gain was slow, but after a couple of weeks the weight went down. Clear indication that I was not getting enough calories. That was when I increased my calories from 1800 to 2000. See my previous post for more details about it. As soon as I increased the calories I saw a sudden and quick weight increase for a couple of weeks and then it started dipping. I am not sure of the reason, but it could be because I was over training. I rested for the first week of december so that should give enough time for my body to recover. Body Fat % Chart The flip side of gaining weight is the fat. I have been constantly gaining fat. Even during the time when I could not gain any weight I was still getting fat. Perhaps over training, muscle loss and calorie deficiencies could be the reason. I have to take better care of my body. We will see how december goes.

The numbers: November 2009

It is past end of November and time for some more numbers. Over all this month went well. I did gain a lot of weight, however I far exceeded my fat % limit. I know for sure that I will reach my weight goal but at the same time I will fail miserably in my fat % goal. Anyway here are the numbers for my weight and fat % at the end of November Body weight and fat gain in 1 month Weight: 124.54 lbs Fat %: 14.03 % Lean mass: 107.07 lbs Weight gain: 3.74 lbs Fat % gain: 1.83% Lean mass gain: 1.01 lb I was able to put on 4 lbs of weight, but at what cost? I added 2.73 lbs of fat just to gain a mediocre 1 lb of muscle. At least my body does prove that a gain of 1 lb of muscle a month is about the right rate at which I can gain muscle. Not everything is gloomy though, I am very close to reaching my weight goal of 125 lbs by the end of December! I will have to do something about the fat % though. My weights have also steadily increased, albeit very slowly. Here are the numbers for my l

Missing gym due to work related travel

I will miss my gym all this week as I am on a work related travel. As a matter of fact I am typing this post in the flight (go to love free wifi on virgin america airlines during this holiday season :). I feel bad that I have to take another recovery week because I took one just a couple of weeks ago. Actually there is a gym in the hotel I will be staying in, but I don't think I will have enough energy after coming back from work to go to the gym. These business trips usually mean that I have to put a lot of time at work and get things moving as quickly as possible. I might do some push-ups and squats with my luggage though :). Just to remind my body to keep the muscle during this week. Although this is an unexpected break, it may still be good. Since my left arm has been creating problems for my shoulder press, I hope this time will be put to good use by my body to repair the damage. My calories intake might also suffer now that I cannot have my protein shake first thing in th

Changes in diet and exercise

For the past couple of weeks I noticed a few things and have decided to change my diet and exercise as a response. First I am not gaining any more weight with my 1800 calorie diet. So I increased that to 2000 calories and now the weight is going up again slowly. I lost a week or more by just eating 1800 calories and not gaining weight. I have to keep this in mind for my next gaining phase. Every day counts for an ectomorph. The second thing I noticed is that while my weight remained constant I started to see an increase in body fat percentage. Again not good. In addition I was also feeling tired more often too. That is when I decided to give myself a recovery week. After coming back I did perform well in the lifts but still my weight would not increase and the body fat percentage was increasing. Moreover my left arm started to hurt whenever I did any dumb bell shoulder press. I had to skip the dumb bell press for 2 weeks now. This probably is an indication that my body is not recover

Protein powder or a meal: Which is better?

I always like to eat a well rounded meal right after I workout instead of drinking protein shakes or eating protein bars. That is the reason I workout right before lunch. It works well. Protein bars and drinks should only be supplements to your diet but should not be the raw material for building muscle. The natural way to build body is to eat the natural food that is available. I found this interesting video on the same topic. Makes sense doesn't he? Eat solid natural food and lots of it right after your workout. At the end of the meal drink a glass of orange juice or grape juice. This will give you the insulin spike that you need and also some vitamin C to prevent muscle loss after the heavy bout of weight lifting. Give it a try and see the difference. I support eating a protein bar or drinking protein shake during workout session if it lasts a longer than 45 mins. But don't eat or drink so much that you will not be able to eat the huge amount of food that you will h

Is it possible to gain 55 lbs of muscle in 12 months?

Genetics play an important role in how you look and how much muscle you gain. All things remaining same a person with better genetics can gain more muscle than one without the gifted genetics. But what kind of genetics does a guy possess if he can gain 55 lbs of muscle in 12 months? I have no idea! But this guy over at bodybuilding.com claims to have done just that. Unbelievable. He kind of dwarfs my measly goal of gaining 20 lb of muscle in a year. And even that is a stretch goal for me. I kept it intentionally high in the hopes that I will at least be able to do the minimum of 12 lbs of muscle in a year. He says that he did not use any steroids, and I believe him. I think it is possible to gain so much muscle with proper training, rest and nutrition and most importantly good genetics. I wish he had a blog where he wrote his daily routine and nutrition. One thing is clear genetics play a huge role. I don't wish I had that kind of genetics. It is more fun and challenging with

Amazing what a recovery week can do to you!

It really is amazing what some rest can do for your mind and body. I am felling more energetic and in good spirit today. When I left my house to go to work, I was not sure if I will go to gym or take more rest. But as the day progressed I felt good about myself. I stretched a bit to see if any of the muscles are sore. No. Not at all. I decided to go ahead and hit the gym :). It was a good thing too. I did not feel tired, just fatigued after the work out. And guess what? I got 9, 7 and 5 reps for my benchpress with 110 lbs. You know what that means? It means its time to up the weight for the next benchpress. I can finally do a benchpress with 35 lbs on either side of the bar for the next time! It is time for the elusive weight to become true for the first time. It is so much fun to set goals and try to reach them. It is like building a house, brick by brick while you have the final completed house firmly imprinted in your mind. Even the deadlifts felt easy. I was able to do 190 lbs

The recovery week is here

I have been doing my strength and mass gaining exercises for about 6 weeks now. Time to take a break. Let the muscles recover completely before my next bout of extremities. I just completed shoulder and trapezoids exercises today and I did not feel good about it. All this week my performance has not been so good at the gym. First I did fewer reps than before week on my bench press this past Monday. I also did not do as well as I expected on my deadlifts too. Then I had a very weak bicep curl on Tuesday. Today (wednesday) I stepped into the gym with very low confidence. My body does not feel all energized. I felt tired even before I started. Not good. I picked up 42.5 lbs to start my shoulder press but again could not do any better than previous week. I could not finished my 3rd set at all. Not even a single rep. Which is bad news. My body is demanding rest. And rightly so too. It has been a little over 6 weeks since I started my mass gain phase. I need some rest. Respecting what my

Relation between muscle and lifts

I found this interesting article , that tries to form a relation between muscle gain and the gain in the lifts. In the article the author gives a very simple relation between the amount of muscle you gain and the increase in 1 rep max weights for deadlift, squat and bench press. While it may not be accurate and perhaps not applicable to everyone it gives us a chance to formulate and set good goals. According to the author if you gain x lbs of muscle then you should be able to lift 4.5 times x lbs more weight in your deadlift. So for every lb of muscle you gain you should life 4.5 lbs more than you did before the gain. All the calculations are based on 1 rep max. Similarly for every lb of muscle you gain you should be able to sqaut about 4 lb more and bench press about 3 lb more. So for my next muscle gaining phase I will use this information and come up with better goals for my deadlifts, squats and bench press.

Before and After Pictures - Sep 2009

Here is the transformation from February 2009 to September 2009. This is after I bulked up from March to end of May and then leaned from June to end of September. February 2009 September 2009 There are some changes that you can notice. During that period I could only gain 0.4 lb of muscle, but lost 3 lbs of fat. Since I took the second photo at my lowest body fat percentage of 10%, you can see very light ab definition in there. Very exciting! But now that I am bulking again the ab definition is slowly disappearing.

Graphs for Oct 2009

For the sake of posterity, here are the weight and fat graphs from last month Body Weight Chart Body Fat Chart The graphs start from my lowest weight and fat points which was on September 23, 2009. I was about 117.3 lbs at 10.2% body fat at the time. I started eating more calories from there on and now after 5 weeks I am 120.8 lbs at 12.2% body fat. After about 2 weeks of eating a lot I started seeing that my body fat % was moving faster than my weight gradient. So I decided to cut back a little bit, but then I lost weight (and fat) quickly. And then again I increased my calories. Here are the gains I have made last month: Body weight gain: 3.5 lbs Body fat% gain: 2% Body fat gain: 2.8 lbs Muscle mass gain: 0.7 lb I fell very short at my muscle gain, adding just 0.7 lb of muscle while putting on a lot of weight.

Stats for Oct 2009

So it has been a month since I started bulking up. How am I doing so far? Here are the raw numbers Exercises Squats: 170 lbs, 8 reps Deadlifts: 185 lbs, 10 reps Bench Press: 110 lbs, 4 reps Pull ups: Body weight + 25 lbs, 7 reps Overhead Press: 75 lbs, 6 reps I am doing well in all exercises except bench press. The exercise that is already closest to my goal for end of december is my pull-ups. I can already do 7 reps with 25 lbs hanging off my waist! You can check out my previous post for the goals I have set. Body weight and fat Weight: 120.8 lbs Fat %: 12.2% I am able to add weight as expected. But my body fat % shot up too much. My goal for end of december was to weight 125 lbs at 12% body fat. But I am already over the limit for my body fat %. So I have to lower it and at the same time increase my weight. Very unlikely. I might have to revise my goals, but I will see how it goes and hope to make better predictions for my next bulking phase. It is not at all easy to ke

Importance of sleep

From time to time I meet people who routinely sleep 4 to 6 hours a day and they report they feel great with just so much sleep. I sleep 8 to 9 hours. They say that I am wasting a lot of time sleeping while I could be more productive. But I cannot sleep less than 8 hours. I feel very grumpy if I sleep less than 7 hours. And I feel great after a good night's sleep and perform well in my daily duties and also my workouts. I feel strong and motivated when I am rested. Big weights don't scare me as much in this motivated state. But when I don't sleep my 8 hours I feel a kind of fear that I may not be able to lift heavy. And without the motivation the weights feel heavier. It is not just a psychological factor it is really a physical problem. When you are in deep sleep your body and mind have little to worry about the worldly things. Your eyes are not picking up huge amount of data for the brain to process, you body is not moving, so no reason to stabilize various muscles or se

I live by the numbers: Compound Exercises

In my previous post I wrote about my body weight, muscle weight and fat % goals. Today I will write about my weight training goals, in particular about my compound exercise goals. If I have to choose the 5 best exercises I would choose the following exercises and in that order Squats Deadlifts Bench Press Pull ups Overhead Press It is very easy to understand why I like them. These are the exercises where I can lift heavy. Heavy like lifting close to or more than your body weight. Lifting so much weight simply means one thing, those exercise require more number of muscles and also mostly bigger muscles. One cannot bicep curl one's body weight. The muscle is way too small and no other big muscles are involved. Also the distance these weights are moved is big. Work done is weight times the displacement. So you do more work moving the weights to a longer distance. Engaging more muscles means more hormone response, more repair and more muscles! Now back to my goals. On October

Why does my bench press suck?

I have been benching for the last 5 months. Yet I am still not able to bench press a plate. What is wrong? I always believed and still believe that one should be able to bench press (1 rep max) 1.25 times his lean body weight. I mean it will not happen over night, but from what I heard the progress is pretty quick and one should be able to add 5 lbs to his bench press every week until the 1.25 times body weight limit. Then it becomes challenging to go upward from there. But it has not been the case for me. My current body weight is about 121 lbs at 12% body fat. Which means I have about 106 lbs of lean body weight. Multiply it with 1.25 and you get 132 lbs. But I am currently able to bench press only 110 lbs and I get about 4 reps which correlates to about 120 lbs 1 rep max. Why is it so hard for me already. I am unable to increase my bench press by 5 lb every week. It is kind of a slow process. More like 5 lb every 2 or 3 weeks is where I am at currently. Am I doing something wrong?

The diet

I believe that diet and rest constitute to 70% of the mass gain, rest of the 30% is exercise. So what you put in your mouth is more important than what you lift at gym. I am also a strong believer in eating natural food and try not to depend too much on supplements. Supplements should be the last 10% of the diet. The only supplement I use regularly is Optimum Nutrition Whey. The other supplements I use from time to time are SportPharma Multi V vitamin tablets, CLIF builders bar and Optimum Nutrition Casein Protein. My daily diet consists of: Morning snack (because I don't have time in the morning as I rush to work) 1/2 glass 2% reduced fat milk 1 table spoon honey 1 scoop (about 24 grams) ON whey protein powder 1/2 glass water I mix all the above and drink it first thing in the morning right after I brush my teeth. About 30 minutes later I drink 500 ml of water. Breakfast 1 cup cereals with 2% reduced fat milk and muffin or bagel with cream and 1 muffin or waffles with

I live by the numbers: Weight and Muscle Goals

Like most people who are dead serious about body building, I too believe in setting goals and trying to reach them. The goals should not be too easy neither should they be too ambitious. And the goals will always be measurable and be limited by time. So we come to the topic of numbers. I live by the numbers. In this post I will tell you what my goals are how I arrived at those numbers. Baseline and Time Taking my current weight and fat % as my starting point, I set myself a difficult yet reachable goal for a time period of 3 months. My weight on October 1, 2009 was 118 lbs at 10% body fat. Here is the data I have now: Time = 3 months Current Weight = 118 lbs Current Fat % = 10% Current Fat Mass = Current Fat % x Current Weight = 10% x 118 = 11.8 lb Current Muscle Mass = Current Weight - Current Fat Mass = 118 - 11.8 = 106.2 lb Muscle Gain Goal Now since I know the deadline which is in 3 months and taking the somewhat commonly agreed muscle growth number of 1 to 1.5 lbs/mont

Going to the gym

Having a home gym is a very convenient. But there are some advantages to going to gyms outside your home. Like the experience I had today. I usually go to gym at my work place along with a few of my colleagues. You can recognize me from the tiny speck walking along with a bunch of huge guys. I say tiny not only because I am this short dude walking with 6' guys but also because they are huge, weighing in at 1.5 times my weight. So when I go with them I always have a spotter. Usually my bench press weight is like their ez-bar bicep curl :). However today every one was busy so I had no choice but to go alone. And the main reason for me to quit home gym and go to gym at work is that I can have a spotter so I can lift much heavier weights without the fear of hurting myself. Today that was not the case. I went anyway hoping to do some light weights. The gym was pretty empty. Today is my shoulders and traps workout day. I wanted to start with shoulder press. There was one guy who was us

Body fat measurement: Part 3

In this final post about body fat measurement I will provide you with some of my measurements and make some comparisons between the various measuring devices. First off the omron body fat scale always seems to give higher body fat percentages than the calipers. However there are some formulas in multi-site measurement using calipers that give fat percentages that are way out of the ordinary. Bioelectric impedance method With the omron bioelectric impedance method I am averaging about 11% body fat. I take measurements every day once in the morning and once in the night. I keep averaging the body fat % for the last one week and consider that my body fat % for any given day. Here is the data for the morning readings for the past 2 weeks. The right most 2 columns are my weight and body fat % as measured by the device. The second column is the average for 1 week. Notice how the absolute measurements vary wildly from day to day. But the average is more smoother. Calipers Using the

Body fat measurement: Part 2

In part 1 I briefly described a couple of convenient methods to measuring body fat. In this post I will tell you what devices I use and how often I take measurements with each of them. I also give my recommendations on which device works best based on my personal experience. I have an accu-measure calipers which I used to use a long time ago to measure body fat. The calipers gave very consistent measurements if done right. I got used to taking the measurements consistently at the same location and accurately too. I just used the one location mentioned in the booklet and for some reason I felt that it gave be a lower fat % reading than I expected. I mean I used to see 9% body fat measurements when I could not see any ab definition. I later used the multi-site measurement methods . I generally take readings with calipers once a week, so it did not bother me much that I had to take so many measurements. Still I was not satisfied because each formula gave a different value for my bod

Body fat measurement: Part 1

I use 3 devices to monitor my body fat. One more than the others, but it is mainly a convenience thing rather than accuracy of measurement. There are very many ways to measure your body fat, but most of them are not accurate perhaps with exception of MRI scan. Even more important to note is the cost of these methods. Some of them are really expensive. This leaves us with 2 ways to measure body fat cheaply and conveniently (at home without having to dip yourself in a pool of water). The first one being the calipers method where you pinch a location on your body and measure the thickness of the pinched part. Then you refer to a chart that gives you a table of fat percentages for each range of thickness measurement. This is considered to be fairly accurate and considered to be almost as good as the gold standard (hydrodensity weighing) when done correctly. Now for the pro and cons Pros It is more or less consistent through out the day and your fat percentages will not change during th

Squats make me dizzy

I hate squats but I love them. Every time I go to gym to do squats, a feeling of resentment and fear takes over me. I resist those feelings and put on a weight with which I can do warm ups (usually about 60% to 70% of my work weight). Once I rip through them I gain some confidence. But as soon as I do my first work set I know why I hated squats in the first place. It is not because every part of my body hurts. But because of the dizzy feeling of the aftermath. By the 6th or 7th rep I am breathing heavily, panting almost and the very strong urge to stop doing any more reps creeps in. I force my self to do a couple more if I can. Move slowly to rack the barbell and once the weight is off my back I feel my head reel as if I am going to faint. I just have to hold on to the squat rack and stay there without moving lest I blackout. But after the 3 work sets that I normally do, I feel great. Almost proud to have achieved my goal for the day. Squats are considered to be the best exercise i

I might have hurt my back

Yesterday I did some chest and tricep exercises. I also did heavy squats. And today I was feeling very tired. My legs were hurting a bit when I step up or down. But that pain is nothing compared to my back pain. My lower back has been in rough weather since monday when I did deadlifts. Then on tuesday I did shoulder press which also put some stress on my lower back. On wednesday I did some hanging leg raise for my abs, but the negatives also applied stress on my back. Come thursday it was squats time. And everyone knows how many muscles it uses. It goes with out saying my back was getting a good pounding. And finally today I did rows and back extensions. Back move man. The rows hurt a little but I did not do heavy weights nor did I push myself. But then came back extensions which I did with a 60 lb dumbbell in my hands. That is the last straw. Although I completed all the sets, my back is taking revenge on me now. I am feeling a lot of pain from mid to lower back and I might have spr

I have been called many names

In the past and still I have been called many names. Every time I step into the gym I just have to get used to the fact that I will be called names because of my stick figure and the amount of weight I lift. Chicken legs and pencil neck were rarely used on me. No. When I lift weights I am what they call as lifting like a girl. Or lifting the ladies weight. And that trend still continues. Well if I weigh 120 lb it is not very easy to benchpress with a plate (45 lb) on either side now is it. Due to my small frame the 7 foot olympic bar causes stability issues. Only so much of my muscle is there touching the bench to stabilize the bar. And a weak rotator cuff does not help me at all. The best advice these strong gym guys can give is "you are not trying hard enough" or "you are not lifting heavy weights, using light weights will take you no where". These so called advices don't help me. Guys remember I am skinny. I am not bulky like you with your broad shoulders

Chin ups and Pull ups

When I first started P90X I could barely do a couple of chin-ups. But in P90X video I see people doing 15 and 20 reps and that is not just in the first set. They consistently do as many chin-ups in every set. I used to question whether I can ever be so strong. I always hated my chin-up days. Not anymore. How did I do it? I just kept doing them even though I could only get 2 or 3. When I could not do any more I used to do negatives. For this I would jump to the chin-up bar so that I am in the top most position. Then I slowly came down. I kept doing it for all the sets where I could not get even 1 rep. Coming down slow is the key. I kept doing as many negative reps as I could get without hurting myself. The next time I did chin-ups I could get 1 or 2 extra reps! That worked very well. I later found another trick that helped me get more energy. The trick is to tighten the abs as I am doing chin-ups. This helped me do a few more reps. I am not doing negatives any more because now I can

Weight Set Point

Another interesting article http://www.biologiclabs.com/advice/details.asp?article_id=42 I have a weight set point dominant genetics and it does not help me at all in gaining weight. No matter what I eat it just becomes nothing. My body just does not care about what I eat. It just wants to be at the same weight no matter what I do. The curse of a skinny guy. Is there no solution? Food: The author says that skinny guys should just eat and eat like there is no tomorrow until they break the caloric buffer threshold. Beyond which point muscle and weight gain come "thick and fast". Unfortunately he does not exactly say what the caloric buffer threshold is. He says gaining 10 kgs at a time should help the body keep its new weight while loosing fat. Basically I just have to eat a lot of carbs and proteins and any fat that comes with it. It seems I can eat bad food too after I fill my stomach first with good ones. Intriguing. Eating frequency: The author says that I should be

Cardio does not help in body fat reduction?

I found this very interesting article: http://www.biologiclabs.com/advice/details.asp?article_id=23 If you read it and take everything to heart then you will never do cardio again! I like how he debunks the claim that cardio reduces fat %. I agree with almost everything he has to say. I like his simple equation which relates food, muscle, weight and fat. Food determines your weight Strength determines your lean mass The difference is fat If you eat more, you will gain weight. Now if you increase strength proportionally then you will keep the same body fat. At the end of the day you have less body fat % yet you weight more and have more strength. Although putting this principle into practice is not easy. Because you cannot exactly measure how much to eat so that you just gain muscle and not fat (with excess calories). Similarly you cannot be eating less than what is required otherwise you will not see the best strength gains and your recovery and metabolism slows down too. Many

Back to the Future

With my last post I have completed recollecting my past bulking and leaning phases. Now to the present. After my first round of bulking and leaning I understood my body more. I still am not sure what is the best formula for leaning. However I think I have a better understanding of how to bulk up. Since it has been over 4 months of leaning I decided to switch to bulking phase now. Starting this week I am increasing my calorie intake and see if I can lift more weights. Here is what I found out about me when bulking: I should not be overeating suddenly but instead increase my calorie intake slowly and let me body see the change in calories. I should be eating more carbs than either fats or proteins. In fact I decided on 60% carbs, 20% protein and 20% fat ratios. Without all the carbs my body hates me. I have headaches and feel very tired. I should reduce the number of exercises, sets and reps. Instead I should concentrate on lifting heavy with low number of reps. Since my body recovers

Phase II of fat reduction

Having lost a lot of enthusiasm because I took 10 weeks to lose 5% instead of the planned 5 weeks, I decided to finish phase II quickly with a lot of cardio. First I started walking about 2 to 4 miles every other day. Since monday, wednesday and friday were my workout days I decided to go walking on tuesday, thursday and saturday. Sunday being the rest day. But walking did nothing to me. I continued for 3 weeks and my fat % was still in 11% range. First week (august 22, 2009) it was 11.9% no difference at all. Next week (august 29, 2009) it was 11.6%, next week (september 5, 2009) it was 11.7%. I thought I might have reached my plateau. I tried again in one last desperate attempt to reduce fat by taking up running. I never jogged, much less run. I gave it a try on september 1, 2009. I ran as fast as I could. I ran for about 20 to 30 seconds before I was completely out of breath and thought I would die. My shins were killing me. Then it hit me, I was super unhealthy. My body is not ma

Phase I of fat reduction

I though the fat reduction process would be very easy for me, being the skinny guy by nature. So according to my plan I wanted to go from 17% to 6% in about 3 months. That gave me 12 weeks to get rid of 11% fat. Remember that I have never gone below 12% in my life. This will be the first time. My body generally settles around 12% BF. I guess every body has a baseline BF % to which the body tries to reach with normal food intake. I split the leaning time into 2 phases. Phase I for 5 weeks and the goal is to reduce from 17% to 12%. A 5% reduction in 5 weeks. About 1% per week. It felt like it was totally doable in the given time without adding any cardio. Just tweaking my calorie intake should take care of it. As per the plan I started eating slightly less every week. I don't know what I did wrong, but it took me 10 weeks to go down to 12% BF! Perhaps I should have cut more calories, but I was worried I will lose strength and muscle. Initially my strength was still going up as I wa

Time to reduce fat %

After going through the bulking phase which left me with 127 lb weight and 17% body fat, I decided to shed all the fat while maintaining the muscle. I wanted to go down all the way to 6% body fat. For this I decided to lean in 2 phases. The first phase of leaning would be cutting down the calorie intake. Still keep eating clean most of the time. Decided to go with 50:30:20 ratio for carb:protien:fat. And keep increasing the weights I lifted while leaning. No cardio at all. The workouts would be Chest, Shoulder and Triceps on Monday, Back and Biceps on Wednesday and Legs on Friday. Simple isn't? I planed to keep doing this phase until I reach 12% body fat and then switch to phase 2. The second phase would be reducing the calories further and still eating clean. This time the diet will be more protien, less carbs and fat. So the ratio I panned is 50:30:20 for protien:carb:fat. For the workout I will just try to do the same weight that I was doing at the end of phase 1. Not more,

Visceral fat matters!

While I was doing strong lifts, I ate a lot of food. I basically stuffed myself every 3 hours. And I think that was a bad thing. I think the body cannot take a sudden huge inflow of calories. And it has a nice way of showing that I am eating over the limit. If you look at my photo right after the strong lifts season you will notice the effect of over eating. Here it is again I have a belly now. And it is not the soft flabby fat at the lower part of the midsection. Before I explain I should first start with the types of body fat that effect the midsection. So there are 2 types of fat - subcutaneous fat and visceral fat. Subcutaneous fat is the fat that settles at the lower part of midsection. This is soft and you can measure the fat by pinching your skin and measuring the thickness. Visceral fat is the fat that surrounds the internal organs. This is hard and settles in the upper part of midsection. You cannot pinch it. Although I had some flab I noticed that the upper portion was p

Strong Lifts: Before, After

I guess I should be giving the customary before and after photos. So here we go. The left photo is before I started strong lifts and the right one is after. As I mentioned in my previous blogs, I do not maintain photos as I should be. Perhaps I never will. We will see. However I do have several photos from my various visits to friends / parties / outings / hiking trips. So I should be able to find something for almost anything :). Don't know if anyone can notice, but I have gained a few pounds in the right image. The right photo is not from my peak weight of 127 lb (think I was 125 lb at the time), but I have slightly bigger arms, shoulders, chest and belly. Here is one more. This is the photo that is taken when I was at my peak body weight. But since my hands are not visible I did not use it for the before after comparison. I look bigger than the previous 2 photos. But at 17% fat I am not sure if the size increase is a result of muscle or fat. Whatever the case may be,

Strong lifts was a good experience

After doing strong lifts for 3 months, I was very satified with the results. I did not become huge but I did become strong and I was more confident about myself. During the strong lifts phase I made a small home gym with all the barbells and weights. I always worked out at home after coming back from work. I was very shy to go to gym because I was so skinny. I was worried that everyone will make fun of me if I could not even benchpress the empty bar that weights 45 lbs. Strong lifts helped me come out of my shell. So I decided to go to gym at my workplace along with my colleagues who have been asking me to join them ever since I told them I wanted to become strong back in december 2008. Since I have gym partners now I wanted to do what they were doing so we can spot each other at one place instead of me running all over the gym with the strong lifts routine. That was the main reason I stopped doing strong lifts. It was fun while it lasted though. I would definitely recommend any sk

How much you eat matters

During my strong lifts phase I decided to up my calories by at least 500 calories. But how much am I eating now? To get that number I opened an account in dailyburn and started entering what I usually eat. It came out to be something like 1350 to 1500. Then I made a conscious effort to eat 1750 to 2000 calories. Also decided to eat every 3 hours for a total of 6 meals. So I have to eat about 300 calories per meal. Simple enough. I then increased the amount of food that I ate and logged everything in dailyburn. I was not easily able to eat that much food every 3 hours. I felt very full all the time. Then after reading about another skinny guy in strong lifts I decided to go with a lot of milk instead of solid food. I felt slightly better but still felt like I was over eating. During this time I tried to eat clean, but cheated several times. I weighted about 120 lb with about 12.5% body fat when I started. My goal was to gain 10 lbs while not going beyond 17% body fat. I tracked my bo

Strong Lifts 5x5 log

I started strongs lifts on Februry 23, 2009 and ended it about 3 months later on May 13, 2009. Here are the logs of my workouts by day and weight lifted. All the weights are in lbs. The cells marked with a blue background indicate that I could not do 5x5 and so I had to repeat those weights. As you can see I had some good progress overall. I never did squats and now I know what those are and how much I can squat. Bench press has always been my weakest workout. I could not go over the 100 lb weight (even today). For push-ups I used a weighing scale below my hands and checked how much weight gets exerted on it when I try to do a push-up. The scales showed 70 lb (I weight 120 lb). So I am not lifting my full body weight when I am doing push-ups. I was able to do 3 sets of 5 reps each. Then for my next push-up day I kept a 5 lb plate on my back and did my push-ups. If I was able to do 3x5 then for the next time I added another 5 lb plate and so on. That is how I got those numbers for m

Goodbye P90X, Hello StrongLifts

My love affair with P90X lasted for about 3 months before I gave up. Why? Because I was simply not seeing any more results. I am not saying P90X is flawed. Neither am I endorsing it. It just did not work for me. I think P90X works for people who are very fit at some point in their life, but have since become overweight. Even in the infomercial for P90X, they mostly show people who were rowers or athletes or runners or well trained people who slacked and then took up P90X and saw good results. I am not one of them. I was never fit. Never lifted weights, never ran more than 100 yards never lifted more than 30 lbs using any known muscle nor was in rowing, boxing, tennis or any other physical activity ever. I just have a weak body. And it has always been that way. So I could not use P90X to get back to my fit state. After discovering that it is not working well for me I started searching for some workouts for skinny folks like me. I came across stronglifts . This workout was different. A

Body Weight and Body Fat stats from Jan 2009

It was sometime in early January of 2009. It suddenly hit me. While I was getting stronger doing P90X, I was also feeling that I was gaining weight. All the exercises are making me more hungry and since I was still eating junk, I basically ate more junk. I could see my gut project out ever so slightly for the first time. I did not like what I saw. That is when I decided to invest in some body fat measuring device. After a thorough search on the internet and reading about pros and cons of various devices I decided to buy 2 of them. I initially bought a body fat calipers that was recommended by many experts from body building forums. It was easy to use, but I am not sure if I am taking the readings properly or not but when I measured at the location mentioned in the booklet I always got less body fat. Something like 12%. I was sure I was not at that body fat percentage. So I went ahead and brought myself a body weight and body fat measuring scale . This was very easy to use. In addi

Some before and after stats from age old workouts

I first started recording P90X stats from september 2008 onwards. But all the data that I wrote in a notebook went missing. So I stared to record them online in google spreadsheet. This started sometime on december 6, 2008. This was also the time at which point I have finished phase I of P90X and just decided to split the total time into 2. When I first started P90X I was barely able to do 4 pull-ups. It is surprising enough that I can do any pull-ups at all ;). I was able to do about 10 push-ups at that time. By early december of 2008, I was able to do 7 pull-ups and get around 20 push-ups! That is a great progress isn't it? Instead of going through each workout and how much I did I will just copy paste the progress stats from my spreadsheet here. The first one is for Chest Shoulders and Triceps. Notice how I have 1 date above and another below? That is how I used to split the workout into 2 parts for 2 weeks. The time is whe