Skinny to Strong

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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, ...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Having done some dumbell curls and seeing no results at all, I decided to try some professional workouts. One sunday as I was flipping channels I came across a P90X infomercial. I know to be very wary of any infomercial but I decided to try that out anyway. The main reason for trying it out was because I did not know of any exercises that I should be doing. I did not know what a set or rep meant. So I thought this will be like a personal trainer for me. Although P90X was supposed to be done by people who are already kind of fit, I decided to give it a try.  I brought a bunch of dumbells and got down to business. The first few weeks were brutal. I was barely able to finish all the exercises. The workouts are usually 60 mins but I took long breaks and in the end it took more like 90 mins and I was barely able to do any exercises towards the end. I went on like this for a few days and they proved to be very tiring and I was always weak to do any other activity. I continued with the ...