The recovery week is here

I have been doing my strength and mass gaining exercises for about 6 weeks now. Time to take a break. Let the muscles recover completely before my next bout of extremities. I just completed shoulder and trapezoids exercises today and I did not feel good about it.

All this week my performance has not been so good at the gym. First I did fewer reps than before week on my bench press this past Monday. I also did not do as well as I expected on my deadlifts too. Then I had a very weak bicep curl on Tuesday. Today (wednesday) I stepped into the gym with very low confidence. My body does not feel all energized. I felt tired even before I started. Not good. I picked up 42.5 lbs to start my shoulder press but again could not do any better than previous week. I could not finished my 3rd set at all. Not even a single rep. Which is bad news. My body is demanding rest. And rightly so too. It has been a little over 6 weeks since I started my mass gain phase. I need some rest.

Respecting what my body is telling me I decided to give myself this week off. I have been lifting very heavy for the past few days and that compounded with a very busy week at work aggravated the situation. It feels great to even think about the week off. It is unlike the feeling I get when I have to miss gym because of other reasons such as I am busy at work or because I have to travel etc. Looking forward to a restful week...

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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

Finally broke 130 lbs

I have not been updating my blog for some time now, mostly because I had nothing to update. I am still doing the same exercises and still trying to gain weight irrespective of my fat %. The good news is that I have finally reached a weight of 130 lbs. This has been my dream ever since I started working out some 2 years ago. The journey has not been easy at all. For some time I was stuck at 125 lbs (which was my previous high before I decided that I had to lose fat before I start gaining again). My body seems to have some kind of resistance at my previous weight set point of 125. I could not break it no matter what I did. But before going into more details, take a look at my graphs first. Weight Chart Fat % Chart Lean Mass Chart As you can see, I was trying to break 125 since early June. But no matter how much I tried, I could not break it. I was about 125 for a full 2 months. I got really frustrated. I was eating the same kind of food and about the same amount every day. I did n

Skinny to Strong

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