Hey Mark, hope all is well man. I think I must have missed it, where are you working out these days? A friend’s home gym? Nice to be back under the weights, I’m sure.
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Hey, how is your biceps doing? Did you try any of the rehab stuff to any degree of success?
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Woke at 254 lbs, maybe looking a tad bloated. Legs are feeling yesterday.
@littlesleeper yes, a couple of weeks into the shutdown he contacted me and offered use of his gym. I get to go twice a week, which is plenty to keep things ticking over.
@Koestrizer it’s better. After getting everyone’s advice I jammed a broomstick into my pec at the armpit where it was tight it as well as kneaded the shit out of it with my hand. I’ve been doing arm circles every morning as well. I’ll find out tomorrow what benching will do to it.
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Extra workout
Two rounds of
25 pull aparts
10/side kb bottoms up press with 17 lbs
4 pullups
25 air squats
Stopped reading the post after this, will be operating on a pretty strong assumption hereafter.
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I needed a strong ASSumption to survive it
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You spelled it out
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Fuck. Talk about subliminal messaging
I’m starting to look at the short flight of stairs we have at home as something I could use for conditioning.
I could go across the road again, but I’m wary of sprinting on concrete. I suspect doing those sprints weekly may have not been the smartest idea.
I wonder how much effect I could get out of a short flight of stairs
@Cyrrex @dagill2 tried the 70 lbs kb for a bottoms up press again. I can hold it stable in the rack position, don’t have the shoulder strength to press it. When I try to press I just feel my lat conctracting really hard.
So, sorry to disappoint
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It sounds like it would even be hard to just hold it in the rack position. I assume you would have been able to press them if they were DBs? Just for comparison’s sake.
But yeah, so disappointed, mate. My whole day is somehow diminished.
(I jest)
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Well that’s today ruined.
Honestly, holding it bottoms up to start with is a feat. I’d be putting that on my resume
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Seems like I’m a little late to the topic, but I think one thing that wasn’t mentioned is a propensity to rely on “frankenfoods”. I’ve had acquaintances that start training, set a protein target, and then meet that goal through ingesting a lot of shakes and protein bars because yummy while paying no need to micronutrients.
This might work for a while, until their digestive tract has a riot.
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Probably? I generally sit between 40 and 50 lbs for DB press, which is at the end of a session for sets of eight to 12. So I should be good to press a 70 lbs DB a couple of times.
Pretty sure that comes under idiocy. Unless shakes are made with just water, it is SO easy for them to eat into carb and fat allowances. Same with bars.
And I guess that is where the argument against IIFYM comes from, no?
I.e., the reason the preferance is for “eat whole foods 90% of the time” over IIFYM is that it affords less idiocy. But, “eat whole foods 90% of the time” would be equivalent to “IIFYM, but opt for quality foods”.
Either would be fool-proof for most. There are a few other varities other than those “two” that I think would play out for most people. Admittedly, there’ll be some outliers.
I had a 700 calorie breakfast less than two hours ago and am already raucously hungry. All whole foods. Decent distribution between macros. Yesterday was a rest day. Have done no physical activity yet today. Hydrated. 
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Specifically to your point about protein shakes, I’m convinced these are poorly absorbed by the body. At one point in my training life I was hitting 5000 kcal a day through mostly protein shakes. I wasn’t gaining weight at less, so I was convinced I was just an ultra hard gainer who needed ridiculous calorie intakes at ~180lbs to gain weight. I have nothing else to back up my thoughts here other than experience and guesswork, but I just don’t believe protein shakes count 100% to protein or calorie counts. I’m 100% sure that if I’d eaten 5000kcal of actual solid food, I’d have grown like a weed. Mostly around the waist.
Maybe
I’m convinced that all of the sweeteners and artificial flavourings does a number on the digestive tract, so I alternate yoghurt/kefir and also make an effort to eat kimchi and saurkraut to offset that.
Further, I mean, maybe you are right but could it conceivably be explained by the thermogenic cost of digestion? I’ve read that 30% of the calories provided by protein are lost in the digestion process. That, combined with that as far as protein sources go protein powder provides trace amounts of the other macronutrients (with the exception of tuna, and egg whites, protein powder is one of those rare protein sources that are almost “pure”).
I.e., had you taken in all of those calories through meat you would have had a lot of accompanying fat even opting for lean meats, and that would have skewed your P/C/F-ratios to something a bit less heavy on the P, and rated higher on F which has a negligible thermogenic cost by comparison.
I don’t have a counter example to your claim, as I had protein coming from powder sources at the time, but I’ve been able to maintain weight “at” 3000 kcal, and also gain weight at 2800 kcal with similiar activity levels and the difference was how I prepared my meat.
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You might be right, but just to throw a spanner in the works, all my protein would have been mixed with milk. So that would provide carbs in spades, and a reasonable amount of fat (I used semi skimmed at the time).
I don’t know the reason for why I failed to gain much weight, but I’m pretty sure the heavy reliance on protein shakes was a pretty big contributing factor.
Maybe it plays in well with my theory about its impacts on the microbiome of the gut. If you kill the bacteria there, what’s going to break the food down so that you can digest it?