Skip to main content

Changes to diet and exercise: January - March 2010

Now that I am in the leaning phase I made some changes to my diet. Instead of force feeding myself with a lot of food every 2 or 3 hours, I relaxed it to "eat when hungry" mode. I don't force myself to eat every few hours whether I feel hungry or not. I eat when I start feeling a bit hungry. This means I still have to keep food stocked all the time so I can eat at the first indication of hunger. I try and keep each eating session to a modest 400 calories or less so I don't strain my body into digesting a lot at a time and it also helps me feel hungry in 3 or 4 hours. So far this new regimen is working well. I am slowly reaching my goal of losing 3 lbs of fat in 3 months. Still have to do something about gaining muscle though.

I also switched to a more relaxed 2 workout sessions per week. Each session involves a full body workout with more emphasis on chest and triceps. In general this is what I do
  • Day 1: Monday
    • Decline Bench Press (Chest and Triceps)
    • Squats (Legs)
    • Rows (Back and Biceps)
    • Dips (Chest and Triceps)
  • Day 2: Thursday
    • Bench Press (Chest and Triceps)
    • Deadlifts (Legs and Lower Back)
    • Pull-ups (Upper Back and Biceps)
    • Push-ups (Chest and Triceps)
These exercises help me keep the muscle while I am losing fat. Notice that I do not have any shoulder exercises. I sometimes do it on one of the days when I feel like, but I should really add it permanently. Or at least do just Shoulders and Traps on another day.

Comments

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

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