Bad week to experiment

Seems like I have selected a bad week to experiment with clean food. I have a full 3 days of work related training and will be away from home. Now I may not get any healthy food and I am not even sure if I can eat every 3 hours. I will go prepared with some nuts and fruits, but it will be hard to keep track of the calories.

I want to err on the side of gaining fat rather than err on the side of losing muscle. I will also miss my gym, but I guess it is for the better. I have not taken a break since a long time and this will be a welcome rest week, not that I am tired of feel sore. So as expected I have to terminate my leaning phase prematurely. I will post my latest before and after pictures and lift stats in my next blog post after I return from my trip.

I will also have to prepare new goals for the upcoming bulking phase. This was a good run of leaning phase. Although I did not go all the way to 7% as I hoped to, I learned a lot of new things about my body. Now I know that I can continue to lose fat and keep or even gain muscle until I hit 10% body fat while continuing to eat moderately clean food (with some junk once in a while) and eating several times in a day.

I still don't have the silver bullet that will break my 10% lower bound for my body fat. Every time I want to experiment I get scared of losing the hard earned muscle and I take a step back. Anyway I think I will continue this careful muscle gain until I am 140 lbs and then I will worry about 7% body fat :).

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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...

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Skinny to Strong

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