Status Update

I’ve pretty much reached my body composition goals. I’m somewhere around 135 lbs and probably around 9-10% body fat.  Losing any more fat at this point would pretty much be all cosmetic. I already have a six pack, so I think if I lost any more I’d start to look freakish.

It’s honestly hard not to be on a diet. I can get quite obsessive about things, and it’s hard to let things go.  I’ve steadily (very steadily) lost weight for the past couple of months or so. I think I started out at about 142, so I’ve lost an average of about a pound a week. Pretty standard stuff. I guess I should see what will happen if I just go on maintenance calories. Right now I’m at a 250 calorie deficit per day at around 1850 calories.

The question is, do you still have cheat days when in maintenance mode?  My guess is probably not, since your leptin levels probably don’t drop off on maintenance calories. Then again, with 2100 calories, I can pretty much have a cheat meal every week and not worry about it.

I’ve made great strides on my 5k.  This week I got it in sub 26 minutes at 25:39.  It was pretty tough though. First 2 miles were pretty effortless, but in the third I started panic breathing. Ran most of it at 7.1 mph, cranked it up to 7.3 at some point, then 7.5. I took the last .11 miles at 8.  I’m actually enjoying running now.

Only did crossfit once this week, and it wasn’t stellar. Improving at running is very easy to track, while it’s nearly impossible to do so with crossfit. you can try to improve your time or number of rounds for a particular WOD (workout of the day), but there are literally hundreds of them.

Overtraining

I’ve had 2 sub-par workouts in a row – yesterday and today. Quite frankly, I feel beat up. My back hurts, my shins hurt and I have no energy. I think my body needs to rest. I’ll take this long weekend as a mini-vacation from working out. I may actually be fighting something as well. Lisa (my wife) has been sick for the past few days. Maybe it caught up with me too.

Yesterday I only completed seven rounds of a very short circuit in 30 minutes. Honestly, should have completed at least 10. Today I ran basically 1 mile. It’s the fastest mile I’ve run since high school, but that pretty much ended me for the day. My shins felt like they were going to crackle and disintegrate afterwards.

Current Status

I guess I should document where I am right now:

• Weight: 136 lbs (lightest I’ve been in a long time)
• Body fat: 8.99% (calipers) to 12% (omron bf monitor)
• Goals: 25 minute 5k, 7 minute mile, 10% BF (on omron)
• Diet: 1610 calories/day – 40% carb, 30% protein, 30% fat
• Workout routine: crossfit, running
• 5k: 28m 12s
• Mile: 8m 30s

I generally work out M-F and try to do active things on the weekend (hiking, climbing, running). I do crossfit (or some kind of HIT circuit) on MWF, 5k on Tuesday and speed running on Thursdays. Well, “speed” is probably a misnomer. I’m trying to improve my mile times, so I’m not exactly sprinting, but it’s definitely a higher intensity than my 5k days.

I’d like to start training for power actually. I’m pretty weak compared to my workout buddies and it’s not like they’re huge guys. I’m not sure I’m going to get much stronger just doing WOD’s.

Oh, there are 2 events in the fairly distant future that I’m training for. The first is Tough Mudder, coming up at the end of May. It’s basically an intense 10 mile obstacle course up and down a mountain, including running through fire and electrical wires. It looks really fun, but I’m just hoping I can finish . Crossfit seems to be a good way to train for this one. The second event is the Mission Inn Run 5k in November. I’ll just keep trying to better my 5k time for that.

In terms of my diet, I’m essentially on 1600 calories Monday through Saturday and I “refeed” on Sunday to jumpstart the metabolism back up.

Reboot once again

Looking back just a few months ago, I used to frustrate my wife on a weekly (or so) basis. “I think I want to lean out” followed a week later by “I’m looking pretty skinny, I should start bulking again”. Endlessly changing my mind, focus or energy. She would say, “Whatever, you’ll change your mind in a few days.”

I’m not saying that has completely stopped. I still look for ways to tweak my diet, but I think I’ve settled down a bit. About 5 months ago I saw a guy at the gym doing what looked like a combination of burpees, push ups and pull-ups. It looked intense, tiring and very fun. I’m a lunchtime gym rat, so I see all the other lunchtime gym rats every day. Rich was one of them. I’d seen him doing power cleans, farmer walks up flights of stairs and tons of pull-ups, so I knew he was not your typical musclehead iron pumper. Something about those burpee pull-ups intrigued me enough to break through my typical shyness and silence at the gym.

“Are those like super-intense burpees?” I asked.

“Burpee pull-ups. Works out your entire body,” he answered.

Rich went on to explain that he doesn’t like the typical 3 set, 10 rep weight workouts or steady state cardio. He and a couple of other guys do a combination of crossfit, p90x and homemade circuits. Essentially, they do HIT (high intensity training). Short, intense workout sessions with very little rest. I took the plunge and began working out with Rich and Kris (one of the other guys), and I’ve never looked back.

The first workout was tough:

5 rounds of:
500m row
90 lb (45lbs each hand) dumbbell thrusters, 15 reps
135 lb power cleans, 10 reps

When they explained what the workout was, I just looked at them in disbelief. I was like, “yeah, um, I’ll never be able to do that.” And the funny thing is, it’s the weight that scared me. I scaled down the thrusters to 30 lbs and the cleans to 95. But one round in, I understood that the weight wasn’t the scary part. I felt like my heart was going to beat out of my chest! I’d never felt so fatigued in my life, and there were still 4 rounds to go! But I pushed through and finished. Well, to be honest, I didn’t. Towards the end I was just doing thrusters and cleans to failure, which at my lowest point was like 5 thrusters and 2 HANG cleans (starting with the bar at my knees, instead of on the ground). The point is, I got through the workout, and I never thought I could do that much work in my life. It was exhilarating, well inwardly so anyway. On the outside I was a broken shell of a man. I thanked them for the workout and apologized if I slowed them down. They assured me that I did not.

In the months that followed, I’ve gotten in the best shape of my life, and I’m far from done. I still need to scale the workouts a lot of the time, but I finish them, and I do so confidently. Kris still comes up with workout that make my eyes pop out on first explanation, but that’s part of what makes it fun. If it starts to get predictable, it will get boring. I want new challenges. I want to push myself as hard as I can. I’ve stopped thinking, “I can’t do that!”. Now it more like “Wow, that looks hard. Let’s go for it!”

Creatine

I’m gonna stop taking creatine for a while. Creatine always seems to mess me up in terms of figuring out my true body weight/body fat/etc. Because it fills your muscles with water to hold ATP, it does 2 things: 1) It artificially inflates my body weight (I lose 2-3 lbs. off of creatine) 2) It artificially decreases my measured body fat percentage. My monitor measures based on “lean” body weight, which includes muscle AND water. With increase water in my muscles, it makes my body fat appear lower. Just for the sake of keeping things consistent (I rarely take creatine on weekends and/or cardio days), I’m going to cut it out for now.

Back to Stronglifts

I spent weeks and weeks trying to create a perfect workout routine. I only have around an hour a day to work out, so full body workouts weren’t really an option.

Body Part Splits

I started with body part splits. I had always felt that I neglected my arms/chest and I wanted to give them some special attention. This turned out to be impractical because of time. I had 4 split days: chest, back, lower body and arms.  This required a minimum of 4 weight lifting days a week, and each body part would only be worked out once in that ideal situation. Problems arose when I realized:

1. Sometimes I want to do another form of exercise: rock climbing, cardio etc.
2. I often can’t dedicate 4 days a week to weights
3. I wasn’t doing core lifts (compounds – squats, deadlifts, bench) often enough
4. Uneven workouts. Arms days were ridiculously non-strenuous, while the lower body workout was killer.

Upper Lower Splits

In an effort to address the lack of time necessary for body part splits, I moved to an upper body/lower body split. This seemed better because I only needed a minimum of 2 days to get everything in. Because I had to get all upper body lifts in one workout and all lower body in another, I had to limit the number of exercises per body part. So I would end up doing one chest exercise and one back exercise and one leg exercise, etc. After listening to a podcast on lifting weights, I realized I was completely neglecting different plains of movement. For example, for upper body there is a pushing horizontal (bench press) and pulling horizontal (rows), a pushing vertical (military) and pulling vertical (pull-ups). For lower body there is a pushing movement (squats) and a pulling movement (deadlifts, romanian deadlifts). So while I was working out body parts more often, I wasn’t working them out from all angles. I also didn’t like that on a given day I was only working out half of my body. That brought me to my next solution…

Full Body Split

So I decided I would do a full body workout over two days, each with a focus on a different plain of movement – horizontal one day, vertical the next. My workouts looked like this:

Horizontal
Bench Press
Bent Over Row
Squat
Reverse Crunch

Vertical
Pull-Ups
Military Press
Deadlifts
Bicycle Kicks

Look familiar? This is Stronglifts 5×5:

A
Squat
Bench Press
Inverted Rows
Push-ups
Reverse Crunch

B
Squat
Military Press
Deadlift
Pull-ups
Plank

I mean, it was uncannily close. So I’ve decided to just move to Stronglifts, with the caveat that I will be doing the original version of Stronglifts that uses bent over rows instead of inverted rows and dips instead of pushups. Also, since I’ve been lifting this whole time, I’m not going to start with the bar. However, I am going to start quite a bit lighter than my max’s. I did A yesterday and I’m feeling it now, more than I’ve felt a workout in a long time.

Note

Well, so much for my cutting week. I spent half of the week with a severe case of athlete’s foot. I really need to wear flip flops in the showers evidently. I did have a severe cheat day today: bacon/eggs for breakfast, 2 donuts for a morning snack, a whole bunch of meat for lunch and beans and rice for dinner.  I really need to try and have some cardio days next week. I did one this week. It was basically HIIT using the Bear and pullups, then about 10 of steady state.  I don’t like unstructured weeks though and that was pretty much what this one was.