Hello all,
I’ve gotten to that point in my life when most of the major sport stars are younger than me and I don’t like it. Mainly because when I was younger, I always thought there was more time to get in the physical shape I wanted - having that baby fat(/uni-beer belly/first job 2 st) and lack of muscle never seemed that important because I could fix it. Well, life is passing me by and I don’t see myself morphing into Arnie.
Why am I doing this?
First and foremost - health. I’ve been training for approximately 5 months regularly now and I might have forgotten what it’s like to be able to run up stairs. It’s nice. Add to this, a long standing injury/movement malfunction with my knee following reconstructive surgery 8 years ago - I’d like to avoid knee replacements tbh. Also my diet sucks (a little more on this later).
Secondly - sex. Well, not just sex, but general confidence with women (mostly sex). My success with women is pretty much entirely tied to how I feel about my body. Which is not good. If you think I’m focussing on sex and this itself is the issue, there is a reason for this - it has been a long time (read: loooooong time).
What am I doing about it?
Well, I’ve just about finished ‘High Performance’ from Eric Cressey. This was a bit of kickstarter for me in more ways than one - it got me going regularly to the gym, gave me a bit of variation, and got my body working in ways it hadn’t for a long time. My strength has rocketed (relatively), I feel I know a lot more about what to check for in exercises and have started to feel cues from my body. I need to pick a new programme - am tempted to go for 5x5, but will decide in the next few days. However, my diet is diaboloical - it’s gotten marginally better in the last couple of months after recording all the junk I ate in a week (around 17,000 calories in non-meal, non-healthy snacks, excluding alcohol), but it’s pretty hit and miss. Whereas strength has improved continually, weight loss has stalled - this is my main area of focus for the next few months. I’m planning on creating a full food schedule and tracking macros in myfitnesspal and applying the kind of programming that worked on the exercise side.
Stats
Height: 6ft 5
Weight: Around 110kg/18st
Deadlift: 145kg x 3
Squat: 100kg x 8
Bench: Around 75kg
Immediate goals
One proper, no shit, honest-to-goodness pull-up
Deadlift 1.5x bodyweight
Weight to 100kg
Pic - From April 2015, just before starting exercising again
