Skinny to Strong

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 somethi...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...