Skinny to Strong

For the last few months my goals have always been around weight, fat and muscle. But this time I want to try something different. I am finding it really hard to make sense of the varying weight and fat numbers. So this time I want to have strength goals (which always should go up). Again these can vary a bit too, but I want to give it a try and see how I do with strength goals. At the end of March 2010, the numbers for some compound exercises are as follows (able to do 3 x 5): Squats: 175 lbs Bench Press: 125 lbs Rows: 95 lbs Shoulder Press: 65 lbs Deadlift: 200 lbs Looking at the past trend for most of my compound exercises, I see a 5 lbs increase per month in the weight that I can lift. Extrapolating that for 3 months I should be able to lift about 15 lbs more than I lifted at the end of March. Just to make it a bit more challenging I throw in an extra 5 lbs to the goals. So the final goal for each of the compound exercises should be a 20 lbs increase in the lifts. But...

Today was really the first day when I attempted to slow down my tempo to allow for more time under tension. When I decided to do it last week, I was just guessing that my body needs more time under stress. But now I have something that reinforces my logic for using slow tempo for 6 weeks (again just random number I picked which happened to be what Hugh Jackman used for his workout!). Here is the link to the whole Hugh Jackman workout: http://www.squidoo.com/hugh-jackman-workout. Apparently Hugh used a two phase approach. Basically the website explains (I cannot say if it is authentic, but hey that is the case with most body building websites and stories) that he used a slow tempo phase for mass building and then a faster tempo to gain strength. Each phase lasted for 6 weeks. First he would start with a mass gain phase. This is the phase where he uses slow 3 second eccentric contraction and 1 second of concentric contraction. This tempo is useful for muscles to adapt and grow. It li...

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...

I first started recording P90X stats from september 2008 onwards. But all the data that I wrote in a notebook went missing. So I stared to record them online in google spreadsheet. This started sometime on december 6, 2008. This was also the time at which point I have finished phase I of P90X and just decided to split the total time into 2. When I first started P90X I was barely able to do 4 pull-ups. It is surprising enough that I can do any pull-ups at all ;). I was able to do about 10 push-ups at that time. By early december of 2008, I was able to do 7 pull-ups and get around 20 push-ups! That is a great progress isn't it? Instead of going through each workout and how much I did I will just copy paste the progress stats from my spreadsheet here. The first one is for Chest Shoulders and Triceps. Notice how I have 1 date above and another below? That is how I used to split the workout into 2 parts for 2 weeks. The time is whe...

Having done some dumbell curls and seeing no results at all, I decided to try some professional workouts. One sunday as I was flipping channels I came across a P90X infomercial. I know to be very wary of any infomercial but I decided to try that out anyway. The main reason for trying it out was because I did not know of any exercises that I should be doing. I did not know what a set or rep meant. So I thought this will be like a personal trainer for me. Although P90X was supposed to be done by people who are already kind of fit, I decided to give it a try.  I brought a bunch of dumbells and got down to business. The first few weeks were brutal. I was barely able to finish all the exercises. The workouts are usually 60 mins but I took long breaks and in the end it took more like 90 mins and I was barely able to do any exercises towards the end. I went on like this for a few days and they proved to be very tiring and I was always weak to do any other activity. I continued with the ...