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 :).

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...

Updates for 2011

It has been more than a year since I updated this blog. But the good news is, I am not as irregular with my gym though. Having moved to India early last year, I had a lot of catching up to do, not to mention all the re-learning that I had to do since it has been almost 9 years in the US. Anyway back to the topic of weight training, I have switched to a new program and this time it is called the Scrawny to Brawny program. Another program for the skinny folks and another attempt to become huge in no time. Meh, it does not work that way. Boring stuff aside, I did really like the organization of the book and the exercise program as well. Basically you start off with a form and body posture correction in Phase I, then move on to some heavy lifting to build up some of those primary muscles in Phase II, and concentrate on lifting very heavy with high intensity low reps in Phase III and finally in Phase IV an attempt to get rid of the huge amount of fat you might have gained in the previ...

Squats Goal Achieved!

For the longest time I have been looking forward to the day when I will be able to squat 1.5 times my body weight for 8 reps. And that dream has been realized last week :). I am not really sure where I read this, but to be called an advanced body builder one should be able to Squat 1.5 times body weight x 8 reps Deadlift 2.0 times body weight x 8 reps Bench press 1.2 times body weight x 8 reps Shoulder press 0.9 times body weight x 8 reps So I set those as my goals. Finally I am able to squat 1.5 times my body weight. However I still have a long way to go for the rest of the exercises. I am unable to find out where I read about those proportions, but a quick Google search provides me with this alternate proportions that I will use in the future. My weight is 118 lbs (about 53.5 kgs) and I did a 80 kgs squat (20 kg + 10 kg plates on either side + 20 kg bar). so that comes out to be 1.5 times my weight. Here is a video of me doing the squats taken with my phone. ...

Skinny to Strong

Search This Blog