Weekly Wrap Up 3.17.12

Personal Records

Another really good week of lifting. It's sort of funny when I think back to my actual workouts. I didnt start any of my workouts actually "feeling it" but yet I put up new personal bests every time.

Deadlift - 365.0x3 - At the end of January I was deadlifting 325.0x4 so I have increased by about 40lbs.
Bench - Benched 230.0x5 back in January. This week it was 240.0x4. Not a huge increase but I will take it.
Chin-up - 65.0x4 - With my current body weight of roughly 185 this puts my chin-up weight at 250lbs. At the end of January I was at 235lbs
Squat - 275.0x4 - I was doing 235lbs at 3 reps at the end of January.

As you can see my strength continues to go up week after week. I couldn't be happier.

Scale

I hopped onto the scale yesterday and weighed in at 183.8lbs. This is about a 9lb decrease from my highest weight of 193 which I recorded right after the holidays. It's always nice to lose weight and gain muscle at the same time.

Workout Changes

My tweak to the Reverse Pyramid routine is going good. As last reported, I increased my reps on shoulder presses to allow for more muscle growth. I have also gone to a 12-10-8-6, 12-15 set on curls to, again, allow for more growth.

Diet

My diet has been consistent this week. 100 grams of carbs on lifting days and less than 50 on rest days. Yesterday I played racquetball with a guy from work so I actually increased my carbs to 100 to account for the large deficit playing caused. Friday's are always hard for me because they are my cheat day. I always go into them thinking I will go high carb but still try to stay under my calorie maintenance level. Well that never happens. I tend to really binge on Fridays. On the plus side my weight continues to drop so I must be doing something right.

Injuries

Obviously my toe was feeling good enough to play racquetball this week so that was good. I am suffering from some sort of pain in my elbow though. It's almost like a tendonitis type feeling. Hurt's to the point where it's hard for me to lift any amount of significant weight with it. I am hoping its just the effect of playing racquetball yesterday and not being used to the movement of the racquet.

Wrap-Up

That wraps up this week. It's now been 4 week since my last deload week and I am seriously considering taking next week off from the usual routine. Who knows, I might do some crossfit type stuff. We shall see.

Peace out.

Weekly Wrap Up 3.02.12

Personal Records

Overall this week was pretty successful for me in the gym and on the scale. I am down another 2.5 lbs this week for a grand total of 5lbs lost since I went back to doing a low carb leangains cycle. I know last week I had mentioned that I thought my strength was going down since I switched to low carb but this week pretty much shot that theory to dust when I exceeded all of my PR's in almost all major lifts! I set new PR's in deadlift, squat, bench, and pullups/chinups!

Scale

Someone hit me up on twitter this week commenting on the fact that I am weighing myself again. He found it funny since I have been against not getting on a scale for awhile now. I am doing it for two reasons. Reason number one is for the contest that I got talked into doing at work. I really don't want to be the guy that gains weight so I am doing the best I can to not. The second reason is this bodybuilding show coming up in May. I really want to enter and the deadline is approaching fast. I felt that if I can get my weight down a little bit, I might actually have a chance at getting on stage. I am currently at 185 and I feel I need to be at 175 in order to make a run at it.

Workout Changes

I am tweaking my Reverse Pyramid routine a bit to allow for some muscle growth in areas I feel that I could use it. For now that means my shoulders and arms. I am still doing RPT but with high reps/lower weight and taking it to failure on those body parts. I should know in a few weeks if I was a good idea to make that change.

Diet

My diet has remained pretty constant the last 2 weeks. I did have a pretty big cheat day last Sunday caused by some friends pushing a 2 lb bag of M&M's on me. I cannot resist those stupid candies and ended up having quite a few handfuls. My body didn't seem to mind too much and I still was able to drop that aforementioned 2.5lbs this week.  I seem to do pretty well if I can go low carb all week followed by a 4 hour high carb feeding window.

Injuries

I have been fighting a sore neck and back for a week now. It hasn't really affected my workouts too much but does make it a pain to turn my head to the left. My toe is also recovering (slowly) from its run in with the wall during racquetball 4 weeks ago. I feel that I am finally at a point with it that I can start playing again.

Wrap-Up

That about wraps up my week. I am looking forward to another 2 weeks of hard lifting followed by a week of casual cardio and maybe some disc golf.

Weekly Wrap Up 2.25.12

I am late getting this out and therefore it will be an abbreviated post of my week. I had family in town for the week for my son's 1st birthday. My diet took a break for the occasion and I actually put on a few pounds because of it.  As of Friday morning, I was back down to my starting weight pre-party so that was nice.

I have lowered my carb intake significantly in order to speed up my fat loss. In doing so, I feel that my strength has also taken a bit of a hit. I will discuss this in a future post along with what I plan on doing to rectify the situation.

I had a moment last week were I thought about transitioning to a 5x5 program for a few weeks in order to overcome some personal plateaus that I have been stuck at. Instead though I am going to make some modifications to my pyramid routine with some additional emphasis put on the body parts that I want to increase size on vs just strength. I will discuss this in a future post as well.

I hope everyone else's week was productive. Peace out.

Weekly Wrap Up 2.17.12

I had a pretty awesome week so far and I thought I would share. Monday's gym time didn't happen because of the weather. I ended up working from home and as much as I would love it, I don't have the weight needed to really pull off a good workout. So I skipped it and instead worked out on Tuesday.

Since it's been roughly 6 weeks since I got back from the holidays, I decided I needed a break from the RPT setup that I have been doing. I, instead, made this week a deload week and went with the P90x lifting schedule (minus the moves that I feel no human being should ever do).  Needless to say, the high reps/low weight routines were a good change up from my usual low rep/high weight routine and I felt pretty spent after all three days of lifting.  Next cycle will have me doing a load workout for 4 weeks with the 5th week being a deload. If you don't currently do a deload and you feel like you have hit a plateue with your routine or if you just want a quick change of pace, I highly suggest doing one. It doesnt have to be time spent in the gym. It can be anything from a new routine to no workouts at all.  I enjoy the gym so I opted for a new routine for the week.

This last week also found me altering my eating habits a bit.  I am still doing my modified leangains approach but I have reduced my carb intake quite a bit.  I am now doing less than 50/grams on non-workout days and around 100/grams on lifting days.  This weekend will find me doing a "slight" carb load while I enjoy my son's first birthday along with my family being in from out of town.  I hope to restrict this load to health(ier) type foods and on Saturday only. Sunday I should be back to my 50/grams a day schedule.

I decided to go back to restricted low carb because I know it works for me. I think I happen to be one of those people that suffers from extreme insulin sensitivity and low carb seems to be the only way that I have been able to achieve leanness.  I have tried other things but LC seems to be tried and true for me. I am sticking to the Primal eating plan as close as I can but I find myself a bit more lenient with dairy. that is something I am working on reducing though.

This week I was invited by a co-worker to join his team on our work sponsored weight loss challenge. I hesitated because I haven't been on a scale in months and I really don't care to know what I weigh but I eventually caved and signed up.  Yesterday found me on an official proctored weigh in scale sitting at 190.5lbs.  That is 21lbs heavier than I was here while sponsoring my own P90x Primal challenge. All my clothes still fit the same (if not better) so I can only assume that most of it is muscle.  Since my p90x challenge ended, I have started back on training my legs which before were pretty skinny. My wife has also commented that my "guns" are huge.  Still, 21lbs isnt exactly where I want to be and I know in my mind, that it wasnt a 21lb muscle gain. That is part of the reason why I am back to LC Primal.  That and May 1st is the Kansas City WBFF deadline should I choose to compete this year. That gives me roughly 8 weeks to shed the excess fat.  It's going to be tough.

Not a lot of new gym antics to report this week. I did see a guy doing tricep extensions and shoulder presses while riding the recumbent bike.  Saw another guy trying as hard as he could to do the same Crossfit workouts that he must see on the website.  Try as he might, doing Crossfit in a 24 Hour Fitness just doesn't seem to be the same!

So there you have it. This has been my week in review. I am looking forward to getting back to some heavy RPT next week and to see if I cannot drop a few pounds by then. My weight at the home scale is 187 and that is the scale that I will be using to report my weekly weigh in for my blog.

Peace out and have a great weekend.

Tyson

Inconsiderate Trainer

While working out at the gym yesterday, I came so close to going off on one of the "personal trainers". For anyone that knows me well, I don't often get upset by the little things that happen in the gym but this had me mad.  Here is what happened.

There I was... on my second set of bench presses ... right in the middle of lowering the weight...when suddently at the top of my vision I see a red shirt snagging weights from right above my head! It startled me so much that I lifted the weight back to the starting point and had to reset my focus. To make matters even worse, he grabbed two 2.5lb plates and then walked half way across the gym (past 4 empty benches with weights) to an incline bench and proceeded to have his trainee do some sort of swimming motion with the weights while laying down on her stomach.  I am not really sure what that exercise was going to do for that woman or why he felt he needed MY weights from MY rack instead of from the weight tree that was 5 feet from where he was now stationed.  On a good note,  I was able to bottle that anger and use it for the remaining workouts that I had.

On a side note, I thought I would share another "awesome" exercise I saw being done by my new favorite trainers. It sets up in the walk in squat rack. The weight is grabbed off of the bar and it looks like its going to be a clean and press. That would have been impressive as heck if that was what they were actually going to do! But instead the weight stays in the pressed position and the shoulders begin to do some sort of reverse shoulder shrug???? That's right. They were shrugging the weight higher!  You know the look someone gets when they are about to throw up?  Their head goes down a bit and their shoulders sort of heave higher? Now put an Olympic bar with 25lb plates on each side.  That is what these guys looked like

As painful as it looked, I think throwing up might be more enjoyable.  Second, what happens when they have fatigued themselves and drop the entire setup on their head? Or lower the weight with such poor form that they pull a muscle in that heaving shoulder?  I am also curious as to why they just didn't grab some dumbbells and do some standard shrugs? I guess it's just not as impressive as doing a clean and press with shrugs. *shrugs shoulders* Don't know.

Today’s Amusing Gym Antics - Take 2

Is it the goal of a personal trainer to make their trainee do the most ridiculous excerises imaginable as justification for charging high prices? Maybe it's a way to convince the trainee that they are getting their moneys worth? After all, who would pay for a trainer to show them how to do the major compound exercises (squat, bench, deadlift, etc) when they can do fun and exciting things with a Bosu ball!

As an example, today I saw a trainer that was having his client do bicep curls....laying on her back....on the cable row machine....while he assisted by pulling the cable down. I am not sure how this was more effective than grabbing some dumbbells and going to town with those. What made it worse was that she didn't even struggle with the weight, even before his assistance.

The only thing I could think of was that this was for a "Wow" factor for the client. She must have thinking to herself "Wow! I would have never thought of doing this on my own! I am definitely going to be signing up for another 6 week training course at the affordable rate of $199!"

I have to admit that I, too, have done a lot of dumb exercises in my lifetime (P90x Crouching Cohen Curl anyone?). It's my goal to try and educate people that going to the gym doesn't have to be about using the fanciest of equipment or coming up with the most interesting exercise to use with a ball.  Working out also doesn't have to be hours in the gym.  Most of my workouts consist of 4-5 exercises and I always incorporate a compound movement into the mix and I am usually in and out in 45 minutes.

What crazy exercises have you seen in the gym lately?

Manly Lifting Stats - Update 1

I hit some new personal records at the gym today. That got me thinking about where I stood on reaching my ultimate goals outlined here. After all, its been 3 months since I originally posted it. So here goes.

I am guessing my current weight is hopefully still around 190. I dont think I have hopped on a scale at all in the last 3 months. I hate scales. I really do. They depress me and make me think dark thoughts about myself. Ok, maybe that is a bit too far but I really do dislike them. They never make me feel good about what I am trying to accomplish.

Bench Press
Back in October I was benching 205lbs eight times. Today I benched 230lbs five times with my ultimate goal being 285 at a 1RM. My calculated 1RM currently sits at 280lbs but that is unproven at this time. Bench pressing has always been my weakness and I used to forgo it all together. It feels good to be doing it now and I am hoping that my strength will only increase as time goes on.

Pull-Ups
In October I was able to do six pull-ups with a combined weight (including body) of 235lbs. Last Friday I did four pull-ups at 245. Not a huge increase but I do know for a fact that last month I was pulling more. I switched gyms and for some reason, my pull-up weight went down a bit. It's starting to go back up but I am still a bit disappointed in both pull-ups and chin-ups.

Chin-Ups
My chin-up weight/rep is the same as my pull-up. Calculated 1RM for both is 254 and the goal that I am hoping to reach by year end is 285.

Squat
In high school the squat was my exercise. I could push 400lbs like it was nothing. Now I really cant say the same thing. Last Friday I squatted 235 at three reps. That is actually a 50lb decrease over last October but since then I have altered my form and started doing them correctly. I am now breaking plane and doing them correctly. I will take the 50lb loss knowing that I can look in the mirror at night and know that I am not cheating myself. My goal is 360lbs and my calculated 1RM is 374lbs.

Deadlift
On Monday I deadlifted 325lbs four times with a calculated 1RM of 368lbs (again, untested). Back in October I was only able to deadlift 225lbs six times. So in the last 3 months I was able to increase my deadlift by 100lbs! Now that is some exciting news! I am still 150lbs away from my 475 goal though. I will get there by year end unless my gym kicks me out for making too much noise!

I am a little disappointed in my progress but at least I am making some. The goals set forth were for advanced lifters so any progress towards them is a positive in my book.

What goals have you set and achieved recently?