Skip to main content

The very first attempt

As I said in my previous blog, I started to think about getting fit and strong about an year ago. Over the coming few weeks I will post what I have been doing the past year and soon I will catch up to what I am doing now.

First I will start with a photo as usual. I looked like this around august of 2008.

 

I was looking skinny. So, I wanted to get fit. Alright. But I did not know where to start. I decided to do my own stuff (without even thinking to consult any websites), and brought myself a couple of dumbells of 15lb. Seriously that is how much I could lift in those days. I used to do dumbells everyday morning. I did not know about sets or reps at that time. I just did as much as I could. That is all I did. I did not do any other exercises. Can you believe it? Can I ever build muscle doing just bicep curls?

Anyway that continued for a while. But nothing improved much. I was not any stronger but my biceps were slightly better. I have always eatten junk food all the time and it still continued during that time. I ate what I found. Drank a lot of coffee and mountain dew. But overall I think I did not eat enough to gain any weight. So I was still around 115lb.

In my next post I will write about my next attempt at building muscle.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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...

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...