Exactly. That’s what I’m getting at. You’ve done everything you can to keep your weight at this point. Almost no other strength athlete can do that and consistently make gains, so the fact you managed to add in that timeframe is pretty remarkable.
I hopefully put on weight in a controlled manner
I would re-examine that word “controlled” and ensure we don’t understand that to mean “fixed, linear and predictable”. The controlled manner of weight gain often means that WE are in control of the fact we are gaining weight, but we don’t control HOW the weight gains. Quite often, trainees sabotage themselves because they only want to see the scale move so fast week to week, and they’ll slash calories if they see it jump more than they want, undereating during a period that’s supposed to be for growing. Meanwhile, they’re still TRAINING like they want to grow, and it sends a weird signal to the body of “We’re undergoing a LOT of physical stress AND we’re not eating enough to recover from it”, so it just starts shutting down, producing a bunch of cortisol, downregulating NEAT/metabolism, and putting folks in a worse place than they started.
A reverse diet, building the metabolism and growing, is awesome for sustained long term strength gains. But trying to beat the scale just makes us all worse.
I really like your comprehensive/holistic understanding of these inputs->outputs.
A lot of it very much reflects times when I’ve done and felt great, nominal, and worst. I just never quite put it all together, and certainly didn’t at those given times.
Just had to put that out there, especially in light of this current convo.
I love menus like this that tell a story. My first thought was to start out with strong flavors for the rabbit and taper them down, maybe culminating in a sweet course that is the rabbit taking a nap in a field of flowers, then having a slow build with the turtle to having it be more aggressive as the plates come.
I haven’t ever worked with turtle, so I’m not much help there, unfortunately.
oohh, that is interesting! The inspiration came from a half joking discussion about whether it’s okay to eat rabbit. Someone posted a gif of a tortise and hair race and I got thinking
it’s really nice, just not very versatile. The flavour is quite gamey and the meat is pretty lean and stringy. The benefit is the high collagen and the “skirt” of the soft shell. Basically, it’s good for soup and braising, maybe a terrine
My grandparents have a former student who owns a farm that raises them so I always get 1 or 2 if I ask.
first week and 1/2 of new block done. It’s BRUTAL and I had to cut a workout short because my lower back was too sore to safely do paused deadlifts.
Seems like RDLs and I don’t get along either. It’s a lot of tension on my traps and my neck had never been as stiff. Switching those out for cable pull throughs
Still trained. Took 1 day off for the tank museum day. Pure gym is absolutely amazing but I suspect some of the weights are a bit light.
There was a “functional training” area with a ski erg so I took full advantage of that.
Also walked min 40k steps a day lol
I’ve been training and it’s going well. Coming week is a deload so I’ll just do cardio and play around with the cool bars at the new gym.
In other news, I’m all moved in now and this place is even more convenient than I could ever imagine. I don’t even have to leave the building to get cheap groceries! There’s a nice farmers market a little over 1/2 mile away too.
New gym is also only 5 min walk away and has a lot of cool equipment. The only complication is that I can’t use any of the lower body machines
It’s pretty wild how lucky I got. Some of my friends had entire spreadsheets for house hunting. I found an in budget, ultra convenient living place with 20min of cursory searching.
Work is going well, just a big deadline coming up that we will probably miss. There isn’t really much I can do about that though. It was frustrating last week because the PI (my boss) went MIA and I didn’t know what I needed to do.
It turned out somewhat productive for me since I finally had time to read papers and think about my own interests, but the anxiety of not being able to contribute with the deadline looming wasn’t pleasant.
@Brant_Drake I’m finally going to take the time to drill down knife skills. Do you have suggestions for a “schedule” to follow?
I was thinking that I could spend 3-4 hours on Saturdays for various cooking activities but idk what order I should go for learning techniques and how much time to spend on each
In culinary school we did knife cut tests twice a week. You’d get a sheet tray with onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, garlic, herbs, whatever random stuff they felt like throwing your way, and then 45 minutes to break it all down. So it might be 1 qt julienne onions, 1 quart batonette potatoes, 1 qt oblique carrots, 1 cup fine dice shallots, and so on. Then they’d pick through your stuff measuring if it actually was 1/4 inches on all sides, or each piece weighed the same.
If they hated you, they would add tournee potatoes and fluted mushrooms to the list.
So I’d say pick a couple of days per week and do most of your knife prep for the next 3-4 days. It shouldn’t take more than an hour, and it’ll save your hands from getting tired from 3 hours of knifework. More frequency is probably better for muscle memory.
Here’s a free course that has some pretty good info in general. It’s only 2 hours, but he lays it out pretty well.
Training continues to go well, especially the squats.The SSB is a lot harder than regular barbell. I’m going to stop using the deadlift bar. It makes the lift easier, but it feels awkward because of how much it bends.
I also managed to flip a 350lb tire.
@Brant_Drake I’m having trouble making even cuts. I make a few even cuts by using the piece of food stuck on the side after cuts as a guide, but everytime I have to clear the knife, i can’t seem to get the same thickness
I love reading all of this. The deadlift bar does have a bit of a learning curve. Since you’re using a bar that’s harder to squat with, using a bar that’s easier to deadlift with is a nice balance. And tire flipping is awesome! Just gotta watch out for the biceps.
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