Skip to main content

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. And not as intense as P90X. I did not need to do my workouts for 1 hr straight with very little rest time in between sets or exercises. This is more like 1 hr of workout with adequate rest. Just 5 reps per set is very encouraging. I started out strong lifts 5x5 on February 23, 2009.

Initially the workouts felt very easy. I was feeling very motivated. I could see my graphs going up every time I workout because strong lifts 5x5 starts with a very low weight initially and every workout day you increase the weights by 5 lb. I felt very confident. I continued this for about 3 months. But then had to stop and move on to another workout plan.

In my next few blogs I will write about
  • My workout logs for stronglifts
  • Body Fat % and weight changes due to my increased eating habits
  • Why I had to quit stronglifts 5x5 and what I did next
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
12 comments
Read more

The Skinny Guy Diet

A few friends and neighbours have been asking me for advice on diet. Unfortunately I am not in a position to propose a diet that works for everyone. I have experimented with myself with a variety of diets during bulking and cutting phases. Some worked some failed. But in the end I am more knowledgeable than when I started, but I don't think I have the silver bullet. But more importantly I have information about diets that works for me. And may be more generally it may work for other skinny folks. So in today's post I just want to layout my eating habits in the hope that it might help other skinny guys out there. To start off, I have most recently switched away from my 6 meals a day hogging to a more reasonable 3 meals a day with an optional snack. Gone are the days when I tried to stuff myself with food whether I was hungry or not. Those medium size meals every 3-4 hours were just not doing it for me. I always felt full and bloated. Was becoming more lethargic and was gainin...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Big Switch: Strength Training to Muscle Mass Training

I have so far been training for strength without giving any though to the muscle mass. My aim was to do 3x5 benchpress, rows with 1x my body weight, squat with 1.5x and deadlift with 2x. I have reached all my goals except for deadlift goal. So now that I have enough strength I want to switch my training to build muscle mass. Another reason is because I am getting bored with the strength training and my central nervous system seems to be getting taxed heavily for too long. Switching to muscle mass training means nothing more than reducing the weights to 80% instead of 90 to 95% and then doing 8 to 10 reps instead of 3 to 6 reps. I am not going to completely switch to muscle mass training. I plan to do strength training one week and muscle mass training the next week. Here is my plan Week 1: 3 x 8 with 80% 1RM Week 2: 6 x 4 with 90% 1RM Week 3: 3 x 9 with 80% 1RM Week 4: 7 x 4 with 90% 1RM Week 5: 3 x 10 with 80% 1RM Week 6: 8 x 4 with 90% 1RM At the end of the 6 weeks and ass...
2 comments
Read more