Thank you all very much! I can’t express how honored I feel by your posts, kind words and best wishes.
I know it’s just cyberspace, but behind every avatar “hides” a real human being - and I believe on this site one finds some impressively noble versions of our species.
I would like to let you know what I am currently doing in order to regain strength and some weight. Here we go:
TRAINING
As I’ve always done when it comes to build muscle and strength, I currently keep a very low-tech approach with my training. I work out 6 days a week. On 2 or 3 of these days I work out twice a day. I used to schedule in a lot more sessions in my weeks, but currently, this is about the maximum I find the time for and, even more importantly, my body can handle.
I limit myself to the following:
- Olympic Lifts (Snatch, Cleans)
- Powerlifts (Bench Press, Front and Back Squat, Overhead Press, Deadlift)
- Dips and Chins/Pullups as auxiliary exercises
- Additional Band Work, Tension Holds, Ring Work and TRX Work.
That’s it…
I don’t have an exact plan, I just follow the following rules:
- Mondays (usually 2 sessions) are fully dedicated to the Oly Lifts.
- Fridays are fully dedicated to the powerlifts, or one or two of them I feel I need to work on the most
- I lift heavy stuff whenever I hit the gym…
- I try to be as explosive as possible in a rep range of 1-5 reps and 40-90% of my current 1RM
- I don’t have a real rep or set target for each session. I just want to “spend time” with an exercise “in the zone”
- I usually don’t do more than 2, sometimes 3 exercises per session
- I don’t grind…
Point 5 might be a bit confusing. I give you an example. Last Friday I did a deadlift workout (regular deadlifts, raw). I worked in the range of 350-375lbs, which are very light weights for me. But I was so incredibly explosive, my performance was fantastic and I just “felt it”. I was “in the zone”. I ended up doing roughly 35 sets and a hundred total reps.
Another workout last week consisted of nothing but 3 sets of front squats. Performance was so poor, I just couldn’t accelerate the weight, technique was limited, nervous system activation was poor. So I stopped the workout to come back 6 hours later for a great front squat workout. I did 10 sets of 3 with 320lbs, which, again, is a rather light weight for me. In between sets and after the squats I did pullups for a total of 195 reps.
It’s pretty much autoregulation. If the energy is there, my CNS gets activated properly and I feel I am “in the zone”, I just want to spend time with that exercise I am doing as long as possible. I always make sure I stop before me performance decreases.
The additional work with bands, rings, TRX band I do before the main lifts as part of the warm-up, in between sets and after workouts as a cool down, over lunch break, or in the evenings at home. In short: as often and much as possible. I really just want to add some volume here and increase my motor skills, especially my ability to create whole body tension, and, what I call “explosive tension” (i.e. being able to create maximum whole body tension as quick as possible).
The latter not only improves technique and quality of the main lifts, but is also very functional and protective in daily life. Imagine you stumble over something. An untrained individual with poor motor skills will fall and get injured. A well-trained athlete with great motor skills (that would be the ability to create whole body tension quickly as well as explosive force production) will be in an immediate “alert state”.
All the body’s muscles will immediately tension up, hips, lower back, thorax and shoulder girdle will be stable, one leg will drive explosively to the front and catch the whole body in some sort of split squat position. The arms will be tense as well and stabilize the whole motion, which will have been completed in only a fraction of a second.
But I digress…
CONDITIONING
I do some sort of conditioning work 3-4 times a week. I like to use a mixture of Prowler work, sprints, Kettlebell work, sandbag work, jump rope and jumps of all kinds. Jumps are really more to work on explosiveness and less of a conditioning drill, but I still ist them here.
NUTRITION
Again, I keep it fairly simple. The first meal of the day is always my peri-workout protocol:
- 2 Finibars (run out of them just the other day and will have to reorder this week)
- 3-4 scoops Surge Workout Fuel
- 20g additional BCAA
- 10g Glutamine
- 50g Whey Protein Isolate
I know it looked different in the past, but this is what I am using at the moment.
Then I’ll have two more meals every day. I prefer a few big meals over many small ones when I try to gain size and strength.
My meals consist of:
- unlimited veggies
- 1-2 pieces of fruit, 1 portion of berries
- 50g of mixed nuts, almonds, pumpkin seeds, or peanut butter
- 10g olive oil
- 5g fish oil
- 2 to 5 eggs
- 350g meat (beef, venison, buffalo, ostrich), chicken or fish (mostly salmon)
- 150g probiotic yoghurt
If I get hungry in between meals (which usually happens mid-afternoon) I snack on veggies and nuts and sometimes another piece of fruit.
If I have another training session I follow the same peri-workout protocol as in the morning. For conditioning workouts I only use the BCAA and Glutamine/Whey shake post-workout.
SUPPLEMENTS
I use the ones mentioned in the peri-workout protocol above. In addition to that, I use:
500mg magnesium
30mg zinc
4000 IU Vitamin D
Superfood/Greens supplement
MY NEXT ORDER
Funny, but some PM’d me and asked about my supplement strategy and an next order… Honestly, I love supplements and I have been a very loyal Biotest customer for almost a decade. But still, it’s “only” supplements. The things people should really care about more in order to get strong and gain some size are:
- lifting heavy stuff as often as possible
- eating a lot of animal protein, some fruits and tons of veggies, berries and nuts/seeds.
Another answer to a question I was asked twice: I always try to buy organic. I buy organic, grass-fed beef, organic veggies and fruits, etc.
I know there is a big debate going on whether this is any better than buying non-organic. I just like to keep my life simple and don’t over-investigate or over-intellectualize it, and just buy organic whenever possible.
I will order some supps by the end of this week, though. Here we go:
- Finibars (by far the most underrated Biotest supplement and my personal favourite)
- Surge Workout Fuel (also a reorder)
- Superfood (I just like it much better than all the other greens supplements)
- Flameout (use another brand right now, but Flameout is the gold standard)
- Elitepro Minerals (to cover my magnesium and zinc supplementation)
That’s it. Very simple and pretty basic 
Happy to answer any questions.
Yours,
PA
