Skinny to Strong

Another interesting article http://www.biologiclabs.com/advice/details.asp?article_id=42 I have a weight set point dominant genetics and it does not help me at all in gaining weight. No matter what I eat it just becomes nothing. My body just does not care about what I eat. It just wants to be at the same weight no matter what I do. The curse of a skinny guy. Is there no solution? Food: The author says that skinny guys should just eat and eat like there is no tomorrow until they break the caloric buffer threshold. Beyond which point muscle and weight gain come "thick and fast". Unfortunately he does not exactly say what the caloric buffer threshold is. He says gaining 10 kgs at a time should help the body keep its new weight while loosing fat. Basically I just have to eat a lot of carbs and proteins and any fat that comes with it. It seems I can eat bad food too after I fill my stomach first with good ones. Intriguing. Eating frequency: The author says that I should be...

I found this very interesting article: http://www.biologiclabs.com/advice/details.asp?article_id=23 If you read it and take everything to heart then you will never do cardio again! I like how he debunks the claim that cardio reduces fat %. I agree with almost everything he has to say. I like his simple equation which relates food, muscle, weight and fat. Food determines your weight Strength determines your lean mass The difference is fat If you eat more, you will gain weight. Now if you increase strength proportionally then you will keep the same body fat. At the end of the day you have less body fat % yet you weight more and have more strength. Although putting this principle into practice is not easy. Because you cannot exactly measure how much to eat so that you just gain muscle and not fat (with excess calories). Similarly you cannot be eating less than what is required otherwise you will not see the best strength gains and your recovery and metabolism slows down too. Many...

With my last post I have completed recollecting my past bulking and leaning phases. Now to the present. After my first round of bulking and leaning I understood my body more. I still am not sure what is the best formula for leaning. However I think I have a better understanding of how to bulk up. Since it has been over 4 months of leaning I decided to switch to bulking phase now. Starting this week I am increasing my calorie intake and see if I can lift more weights. Here is what I found out about me when bulking: I should not be overeating suddenly but instead increase my calorie intake slowly and let me body see the change in calories. I should be eating more carbs than either fats or proteins. In fact I decided on 60% carbs, 20% protein and 20% fat ratios. Without all the carbs my body hates me. I have headaches and feel very tired. I should reduce the number of exercises, sets and reps. Instead I should concentrate on lifting heavy with low number of reps. Since my body recovers...

Having lost a lot of enthusiasm because I took 10 weeks to lose 5% instead of the planned 5 weeks, I decided to finish phase II quickly with a lot of cardio. First I started walking about 2 to 4 miles every other day. Since monday, wednesday and friday were my workout days I decided to go walking on tuesday, thursday and saturday. Sunday being the rest day. But walking did nothing to me. I continued for 3 weeks and my fat % was still in 11% range. First week (august 22, 2009) it was 11.9% no difference at all. Next week (august 29, 2009) it was 11.6%, next week (september 5, 2009) it was 11.7%. I thought I might have reached my plateau. I tried again in one last desperate attempt to reduce fat by taking up running. I never jogged, much less run. I gave it a try on september 1, 2009. I ran as fast as I could. I ran for about 20 to 30 seconds before I was completely out of breath and thought I would die. My shins were killing me. Then it hit me, I was super unhealthy. My body is not ma...

I though the fat reduction process would be very easy for me, being the skinny guy by nature. So according to my plan I wanted to go from 17% to 6% in about 3 months. That gave me 12 weeks to get rid of 11% fat. Remember that I have never gone below 12% in my life. This will be the first time. My body generally settles around 12% BF. I guess every body has a baseline BF % to which the body tries to reach with normal food intake. I split the leaning time into 2 phases. Phase I for 5 weeks and the goal is to reduce from 17% to 12%. A 5% reduction in 5 weeks. About 1% per week. It felt like it was totally doable in the given time without adding any cardio. Just tweaking my calorie intake should take care of it. As per the plan I started eating slightly less every week. I don't know what I did wrong, but it took me 10 weeks to go down to 12% BF! Perhaps I should have cut more calories, but I was worried I will lose strength and muscle. Initially my strength was still going up as I wa...

After going through the bulking phase which left me with 127 lb weight and 17% body fat, I decided to shed all the fat while maintaining the muscle. I wanted to go down all the way to 6% body fat. For this I decided to lean in 2 phases. The first phase of leaning would be cutting down the calorie intake. Still keep eating clean most of the time. Decided to go with 50:30:20 ratio for carb:protien:fat. And keep increasing the weights I lifted while leaning. No cardio at all. The workouts would be Chest, Shoulder and Triceps on Monday, Back and Biceps on Wednesday and Legs on Friday. Simple isn't? I planed to keep doing this phase until I reach 12% body fat and then switch to phase 2. The second phase would be reducing the calories further and still eating clean. This time the diet will be more protien, less carbs and fat. So the ratio I panned is 50:30:20 for protien:carb:fat. For the workout I will just try to do the same weight that I was doing at the end of phase 1. Not more, ...

While I was doing strong lifts, I ate a lot of food. I basically stuffed myself every 3 hours. And I think that was a bad thing. I think the body cannot take a sudden huge inflow of calories. And it has a nice way of showing that I am eating over the limit. If you look at my photo right after the strong lifts season you will notice the effect of over eating. Here it is again I have a belly now. And it is not the soft flabby fat at the lower part of the midsection. Before I explain I should first start with the types of body fat that effect the midsection. So there are 2 types of fat - subcutaneous fat and visceral fat. Subcutaneous fat is the fat that settles at the lower part of midsection. This is soft and you can measure the fat by pinching your skin and measuring the thickness. Visceral fat is the fat that surrounds the internal organs. This is hard and settles in the upper part of midsection. You cannot pinch it. Although I had some flab I noticed that the upper portion was p...