Curse of an ectomorph

As I mentioned in my previous blog, I had a 3 day training at work which involved me traveling to a remote location and having to depend completely on the meals and snacks provided at that location. While it is not necessarily a bad thing (because there were a good assortment of healthy snacks and meal options), the training was considerably intense and it distracted me from eating at the right time and right amount. I mostly ate fruits and nuts as snacks in between bigger meals. The meals I ate consisted of rice or tortilla, turkey or chicken or fish, and leafy vegetables. And while I tried to eat as much as possible, I think I did not eat the required amount and as a result I still lost a full 2.2 lbs in just 3 days!

I was extremely worried that some of the weight loss would be due to muscle loss. I was also aware that I was not drinking as much water as I should and so I knew some of the weight loss would be just water. I did not know what to expect until yesterday when I first stepped into the gym after a full 1 week break. I told my spotter to be extra careful because I was going to lift the same weight as I last lifted and if I really did lose muscle as I feared, then I might not be able to complete the expected number of reps, while my spotter is assuming I will be able to do the reps. Anyway all things aside, I did feel weak in my decline bench press. I could not complete the number of reps I set out to do. Rows and dips took a toll too. But interestingly my squats were just fine.

So continues the curse of an ectomorph. Just 3 days of not eating well and you will be punished with 2.2 lbs of weight loss. At this rate it will take 3 years for me to reach my goal of 140 lbs, keeping my fat at 10%. Not very encouraging. All this means is that I have to be super careful about eating a lot. Bulking goals in my next post.

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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

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

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