Got Built?

Time for an update.

Recall that I began cutting January 15th, having bulked to 150.4 lbs. 

Phase I was PSMF, which I did for 12 days, followed by a two-day refeed. This got me down to 139 lbs.

Phase II was my usual “Baby Got Back“, “How to do Cardio if you Must” and “carb cycling” combo, which I did for a month to bring up my work capacity and to prepare myself for Phase III, Lyle McDonald’s UD2.0.  (more…)

My formal education is in Statistics – and while there are lies, damned lies and statistics, the fact is that statistics is a game of good guesswork.

Face it – we work in a black box. We gather and analyze data, approximating truth with our models. We never actually know if we’re right (Hell, as Statisticians, if we did, we’d be out of jobs!), but repeated experiments produce converging evidence – and like multiple beams of light, eventually there’s enough brightness that we’re pretty sure of what we’re seeing.

I’ve noticed that many of life’s mysteries follow a similar pattern.

So how about we cast some beams of light on bicep growth? (more…)

Some of you have been training for a little while now – possibly using a full body workout like Basically, Training or some other routine and you’re ready to move into something with a little more variety – but without being overly involved.

Filled with optimism and keen to advance your training you google “exercise routines” – and your head promptly explodes.

There really is a lot of crap out there – usually with tag-lines extolling the virtues of “switching it up” or “muscle-confusion” – so let me save you some time and offer you a better alternative for your next workout plan.

My friend Patrick Ward of Optimum Sports Performance is a is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) through the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and holds a Masters degree in Exercise Science.  Patrick posted the following workout on his blog, and I liked it so much I asked him if I could post it here.

He very kindly obliged.

(more…)

Fat loss is a funny little beast.

When you’re VERY fat, your body will drop fat easily (honest!) as soon as you do ANTYHING that lowers calories and incorporates some sort of exercise.

Thing is, it doesn’t work the same way from start to finish.

This is the part where you’ll hear the rep-counters say things like “you have to trick your body” or “confuse your muscles” … when in fact your body will neither be tricked nor confused. It will simply respond to the stimulus provided. If YOU are tricked and confused by the nonsense these bozos try to sell you, you’ll spend a lot of money and work WAY too hard trying to get the results you seek. Don’t know about you, but I’m too cheap and lazy to spend money and effort for sub-par results that wear me out and starve me to death. (more…)

Every diet works for at least one person, right?

I mean, you’d at least HOPE this was the case. You’d hope that for every diet book published, the method produced results for the person who wrote it – and it sometimes seems that every person who has somehow won the battle of the bulge has a book with which to offer us salvation.

Thing is, sometimes a method works in spite of what we do, and not because of what we do.

We’re all different.
Aren’t we? Different I mean? Well, sort-of. What unites us all is the calorie. The sad fact of the matter is that irritating little truth, the conservation of mass. You can’t gain weight unless you consume more food than you require, and you can’t lose it unless you consume less food than you require. Even if you keep your intake the same, if you burn more than you consume, you’re going to lose weight, no matter how metabolically challenged you are.

So we’re all the same then.
Well, sort-of. One noteworthy difference between us all is comfort.

Surprised? Nobody ever mentioned that part? They should – because if you aren’t comfortable, you will NOT stick to a reducing diet. This is the part where people who find that magical combination of foodstuffs and timing that keeps hunger at bay think they have “The Way”.

One of the most contentious of these comfort-food based diets is the Atkins diet. Now I’m not hating on Atkins – that diet gave me my life back. After those first few days of the “Atkins flu”, for the first time in my life, I felt comfortable, fed – and the weight FELL off me, at least initially. It stayed off, too – effortlessly – getting me from “obese” to “healthy lean”. But it did not get me ripped, and I could not understand why.

It took me a very long time to come around to the idea that if there is, indeed, an metabolic advantage to ketosis, it is slight at best, I finally had to accept The Great Unified Theory of Weight Loss: I ate less food on Atkins, and that’s why I lost weight.

So how come it didn’t keep going? (more…)

Once upon a time, I had no delts.

Nothing. Nada. Zip.

In fact, in the eighties, I was the queen of shoulder pads.

DAMNED GENETICS!
When I started lifting, I could NOT connect to my delts. I tried millies, all the machines, lateral raises, laterals with static holds… nothin’. Invoking once again the wisdom of Dave Tate: “you can’t flex bone”. (I’ve noticed you can’t flex fat either. So much for “toning exercises”!) (more…)

Workout:

Done as antagonist pair:

• T-bars: 3×8 with two plates
• Low incline bench: 3×8 with 95 lbs

Done as antagonist pair:

• One-arm dumbbell rows, 3×8 each side, 50 lb dumbbell
• Low incline dumbbell press with stretchy bands: 3×8. I TRIED 30 a side, but I barely squeaked out 6 reps. Nope. Dropped to the 25s and hammered out 3×8

Bosu crunches: 3×8 with a 75-lb dumbbell on my chest.

Comment: I’m keeping the weight a little lower so I can build up the volume a bit for chest. My RC likes this better, and I’m gradually making progress. I really think the dumbbell presses with bands are helping me with this.
Weight: 142 and holding.

Workout:

• RDLs: warmups, then 3×8 with 185, smooth as silk.
• Split squats: plate a side, 3 sets at 8 reps each leg
• Bosu GHRs: 3×8, felt stronger than the last time, still assisting on most of the positives
• Sissy squats ss with the top third of leg extensions – 3×8 supersets

Ran out of time or I would have done close-grip bench. I’ll try to get a few in tomorrow.

Diet: still not tracking. I’m concentrating on foods I generally find satiating, and avoiding wheat like the plague. It’s amazing to me how much my appetite is affected by wheat.

Post workout meal: Homemade “instant” kheer with a side of cottage cheese.

Weight: holding steady at 142-ish. Kinda digging the whole “not tracking” thing.

I love Indian sweets – and living in Vancouver is both good and bad for me in this regard, because there are a LOT of really, REALLY good Indian restaurants and sweet shops in this city. Sadly, I cannot justify Gulab Jamun on the basis of any redeeming health benefits, but I have managed to come up with a perfectly acceptable use for India’s answer to rice pudding: kheer. Interestingly, I don’t like English rice pudding at all – and I don’t really know why. But creatine and kheer after leg day… there’s just nothing like it.

Instant Postworkout Kheer

- this may be blasphemy, but it’s really tasty and I make this “instant” version from pre-cooked rice.*
I take this with 5g creatine monohydrate post-workout.

Toss the following into a blender:

For each 50g cooked (salted) rice, partially blend with 10g dextrose and 50g milk. Add vanilla and cardamom powder to taste.

Blend until it looks like thin cream of wheat. It’ll thicken up as it stands. I like mine runny – if you don’t, well, add more rice. It ain’t rocket surgery!

If you want to be truly decadent, blend in a few tablespoons of coconut milk. I haven’t included this in the fitday calculation below. Coconut oil is a rich source of medium chain triglyceride, a fat your body easily oxidizes, so it tends to be burned rather than stored, and such fats tend to promote satiety. Not that you’ll find Kheer particularly satiating!

This is how fitday works it out for my usual 150g cooked rice (50g raw weight), 30g dextrose and 150g 1% milk:

*When I cook rice, I use 2 cups of water and a half a teaspoon of salt for each cup of rice. 100g raw rice translates into 300g cooked. For the above macronutrient breakdown, I used the raw weight.

Glute Ham Raises are among the most effective training modalities available for hamstring work. With no attached weights or moving parts, you would think more gyms would invest in this simple, basic piece of athletic equipment.

However, there are a few pretty major problems with GHRs:

1. They’re hard as hell (more…)