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 with relative ease. Finally I can do a plate and 25 lbs for my next deadlift. All good. But I still have a long way to go to reach my goal of benchpressing a plate on either side. I know the target. I know the path. It is now just a matter of time.

Comments

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

End of an Era

Image via Wikipedia It has been a long time since I gave any updates on my progress. Actually it is almost 3 months! There have been a lot of developments on my personal front which was the main cause of this much delayed update. My progress has slowed down considerably too. I was hoping to be at 140 lbs by the end of this year with 7% body fat. That seems like a dream that will not be fulfilled this year. I will not even be able to meet the 140 lb goal let alone the body fat %. So what happened to me over the last 3 months? I have been in the US for more than 8 years now! I loved every moment that I was here, starting from the early struggling days of my MS to my current stable job state of today. However even before coming to US, I promised to myself that I will be back in India after gaining 5 years of work experience in US. Now that the goal has been realized, it is time to move back to India. So in the last 3 months I have been working towards the goal of moving back to India. M

Skinny to Strong

Search This Blog