Yea diet is so underappreciated (by me especially!) Glad you’ve got on top of it!
No rush to catch up on my log, not a huge amount happened - I took a big hiatus and only back at it this week myself!
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@dagill2 hi I am considering running Ben Bruno’s 100 rep trap bar workout/progression and seem to remember you mentioning it in the past. I am unsure how to pick my starting weight, do you have any advice?
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Erm, yeah, don’t.
I’m joking, but fair warning, this is a tough, tough program the way I ran it. The first session took me about an hour. The last session took me about 2.5 hours, of which about 2 hours was just the 10 sets of deadlifts. I adapted pretty well and pretty quickly to the volume increases, it was the weight increases that floored me. I went into it with a traditional deadlift max of around 150kg, started at 100kg (6 x 8?) for the trap bar deads and finished with 10 x 10 @ 140kg. Bare in mind that at this point, I was regaining lost strength, rather than building new strength as well.
Thanks for the extra detail, that gives me lots to consider. I’m eating lots and want a challenge so that sounds good 45 minutes is a long session for me right now so it might not be right.
I was doing it at midnight, so my only time limitation was that I wanted sleep. I was also combining it with a 531 session beforehand, which took some of the time. I was cracking the early sessions out in 30mins without much rush if we’re talking about just deadlifting. The later ones only took so long because of all of the lying on the floor hating my life time. Remember I went from 150kg being a 1RM to doing 140kg 10 x 10 over the course of 12 weeks, while on a severe calorie deficit and doing 20 rep squats another day.
If you choose your weights more sensibly, and do other things more sensibly, 45 mins is absolutely achievable.
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Ah okay, sounds good, thanks again. I’ll have to give it a test run this week before I decide on anything I think.
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Let us know how it goes.
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Well it’s time for another update.
Still lifting 3x a week, still cycling 1x a week (just about) and still playing football 1x a week… not a whole lot has changed since last time. What has changed is I’m now pretty confident I’ve gotten more muscular and I’m the strongest I’ve ever been for a lot of lifts, but I’m a little fatter than I’d like too, thanks to an indulgent holiday period. My cardio is pretty rubbish too but that’s expected and it’ll come back.
Anyway, I’ve been doing some thinking and decided to do a fairly aggressive four week diet to trim off a bit of the fat I have. After that the plan is 10 weeks of all out muscle gaining followed by around 15 weeks of dieting to get leaner than I ever have before ready for my first holiday abroad since COVID struck. Once I start the gaining phase I think I’d like to start logging on here again.
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Another update…
I’m extending the diet an extra two weeks to six weeks total. In truth the first two weeks were kind of rubbish so I have to make up for them but I also looked at pics from when I was my lightest in May 2020 and I look a lot better than now. I got weighed for the first time since October too and I’m about 83kg at the moment whereas in October I was about 78kg. Some of that weight gain is definitely fat but hoping there’s a bit of muscle too. I took pictures and compared now to the same weight last year and I think there’s more muscle. I’m stronger anyway.
Plan is to get down to about 80kg in these four weeks, gain a little for eight weeks after, hopefully to around 82kg then lose weight to around 75kg where I think I’ll be very happy with my body fat. Numbers will probably change but that’s the rough idea. I will probably post at least weekly with updates since it’ll keep me accountable.
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Diet has gone pretty well since my last update but I got COVID so activity was way down on account of being stuck at home. Some days I feel like I’ve already lost a load of weight and others I feel like I’m no different but I know my mind plays tricks on me so I’ll just keep eating well and trust the process. What I need to do is get weighed and/or measured but I always forget until I’ve already eaten in the morning and I usually weigh myself empty. Hopefully I’ll remember soon and can post some numbers.
Training wise, the last few workouts before COVID were really good and I was setting a fair few PRs, especially pressing. Hopefully that strength is still there. I think I’m still feeling the effect of COVID with my cardio and was getting out of breath pretty easily at my first game back at football last night. I really want to sort this out, both for health and so I can play football better, so I’m going to add eight rounds of 10s on, 20s off on the assault bike twice a week. I have done it before and it had a noticeable effect on weight loss and fitness which is great for how long it takes.
Hope everyone else is doing good. I’m so behind on so many logs these days but I’ve been catching up slowly over the last few weeks.
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