Knowing what “knob” is slang for in some places, I burst out laughing when I read this.
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Always a pleasure to provide a laugh!
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I didn’t think you were allowed pictures of these around here
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Saturday 2020-10-03
Weight unknown, didn’t wake up at home
Off-day
Orthorexia hitting me in a big way today. Breakfast was toast and really fatty cheese. I am not down to mix carbs and fats today nor having carbs unrelated to exercise.
Was arguably pushing my luck by eating a carby dinner, drinking wine, eating candy yesterday again not adjacent to exercise but that felt okay then. Was delicious too.
Or it’s because I’m cooking with friends today and my thought was to save my carbs until then.
It’s just one day.
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Sunday 2020-10-04
Weight 75 kg
Climbing
| Grade | Set For | Climbed As | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6a | Lead | Lead | Std. Warm-Up (blue) / GO FAST (soft) |
| 6b+ | Lead | Lead | Std. Warm-Up (pink) / GO FAST (soft). Slipped and had a good fall |
| 6c | Top | Lead | Same as last time, finger hurt on the crux, abandon session |
Not angry, upset or sad. Just resigned. Will try and climb Tuesday with tape and see how that feels. If that goes OK great. If not, then I think I need a mental break from climbing even though that might not be best for rehab.
Mental note: lot of tendon related things going bad again toward later half of my hrt.
Lifting
| Exercise | Set | Reps | Weight | Rest | Tempo | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. Press | -2 | 10 | bar | short | Normal | |
| -1 | 6 | 30 | short | |||
| 0 | 4 | 40 | moderate | |||
| 1 | 3 | 47.5 | 3-5m (work sets) | |||
| 2 | 3 | 47.5 | ||||
| 3 | 3 | 47.5 | ||||
| 4 | 3 | 47.5 | ||||
| 5 | 6 | 47.5 | ||||
| B. Toes-elevated RDL | 1 | 15 | 80 | 2-3m | Accentuated ecc | Went lighter but higher reps |
| 2 | 12 | 100 | Reason: Glute is bent out of shape | |||
| 3 | 20 | 80 | Greater total volume. Felt rehabilitative |
RDLs here feel as if they have a lot of potential for negative carry-over into squatting/bench. Might be better to do single leg KB RDLs here
| Exercise | Reps | Notes | Rest | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C1. Rear Delt Machine | 8/8/6/6 | double contraction | 45-60s | |
| C2. BB Upright Row | 8/8/6/6 | double contraction, sucked for shoulder health | 45-60s | |
| D. Yin Yoga cool down | 20m |
Post-workout: traditional Swedish meat soup with a form of dumplings they only do (I believe) in my mom’s home town which is just wheat and water tossed into the saltiest boiling water you can imagine. Meat was elk. Traditionally served with thin white bread that you often dip in the broth.
Dessert, apple pie and vanilla quark
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That soup looks genuinely hearty. And dessert looks delicious too, you always post the coolest meals lol.
I’ve been trying to coax pops to treat me to “blodbröd” which is bread baked with blood. Then your definition of hearty might change! Appreciate the compliment :3
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Your log becoming the neater and cleaner there is lol. Are you using your coding competences to present your training like that ahah?
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I write out my sessions in Google Sheets beforehand, and update it afterwards if I didn’t meet reps or do some on-the-fly adjustments. When you copy from there to here it becomes automatically formatted as a table.
I’ll sometimes even write out my reps on the AMRAP sets before even stepping into the gym, to create a competition for myself. Same with climbing, if I have an idea of what routes I want to do I write it all out, and then go and try to deliver on that.
I haven’t begun doing this yet, but it’d also make it fairly trivial for me to track progress over time.
Some people use FitNotes and other apps, but they never worked for me personally as the intended workflow just isn’t for me. Also, using Sheets/Excel is an important life-skill that can be leveraged elsewhere (plan a budget, …) while FitNotes et al. has no other utility.
In the past I used Google Keep, and would just copy my old workout and add reps/weight, but the formatting was anything but consistent. Have been thinking about building a small utility for creating my posts (date, weight, …). Could probably go so far as to have it scrape my Google account to get the content even but that seems like a really boring thing to build.
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Life-update: I’ve been referred to an endocrinologist finally, and have had my first meeting there. I was met with respect and patience for the first time since having presented with my hormonal issues.
He seems pretty sharp. We’re going to attempt to discontinue my TRT by simply stopping treatment and observe if my anemia returns, T will naturally go down some in relation to my current levels as they are above average on Nebido. This is to exclude that my original readings weren’t caused by my eating disorder which hadn’t fully developed at the time and certainly did not predate my complete loss of libido that I had.
If the anemia returns we’ll resume Nebido treatment but unlike my urologist he offered that we can split up the injection.
If it doesn’t return, and I were to feel okay, there’s no argument to continuing TRT.
Hopefully, my fertility will return if the outcome were to be that positive.
This experiment is a really good motivator to continue pushing my bodyweight up. One factor I find hard to gauge though is, and I’d appreciate if people cared to share their opinion, is doing
- 4 days of lifting
- 2-3 days of climbing
- Avg. 10k steps per day
I feel as if my training volume now makes a lot more sense, it’s the main lift for 5 sets of 3, supplemental (also a compound) at 3x6-10, some back work 3x15, and 1-2 hypertrophy exercises. Before it’d be a whole lot more.
an excessive amount of activity and I should consider that it’s possible that I’m driving down my T simply by being too active.
I know you are fairly sedantary yourself, @Pinkylifting, but honestly it was a remark you made with regards to people overdieting and tanking their T values that led me to consider exploring that maybe I’ve been the one at fault here and underate my way into a hormonal disorder.
I will however add that while anemia and low T can be explained by bad nutrition I do have woefully undersized testes so it’s quite conceivable that this experiment will just make it clear that yes, TRT is warranted. But then it won’t be a question mark.
It’s definitely possible, but more likely that caloric restriction, rather than excess activity, is the cause of tanked T levels but high activity levels can contribute.
It depends on how much you’re eating, how much time you spend climbing, and how much volume you are doing at the gym. The answer is that it could be too much, and it could be fine.
How long have you been on TRT? That could be a direct cause.
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I would also add
T will drop significantly, rather than just dropping some, in the short / medium term after stopping your exogenous source of testosterone. Once you’re on TRT after a relatively short time your T level is entirely made up of the exogenous T, not a combination of exogenous and natural production.
They were small even beforehand, I should’ve written more clearly.
I believe that when I first presented and had my original blood tests my calorie intake was okay, but not ideal. It was a deficit, but not a harsh one. As time progressed the intake became less friendly, and not to mention that the duration of the caloric restriction had been ongoing for quite a while.
It’s a bit muddy, which is why I’m happy about taking this path to explore what the inputs/outputs actually are.
Not actively tracking calories at the moment (relief). I’d guess at 2700 avg/day and gaining weight at the moment.
2 hours per session, maybe 15 minutes of that is just warming up before touching a hold. At least half is belaying other people. Let’s call it 45 minutes of moderate exercise, with maybe 10 at a high intensity level. Bouldering sessions are overall more intense and count for more exercise minutes but I rarely boulder.
I used to spend 2 hours in the gym, and most of that time actively lifting weights. Now I’m at 60-75 minutes with a lot more rest and way fewer work sets. Way less everything. Fewer non-worksets too. I’m still conceivably bad at keeping to an acceptable RPE but before I might have combined high volume and HIT… >_<.
Yeah, I understand that this will be reality at the moment and that some of the weight I add now won’t be as much muscle as it could’ve been but that’s just something I have no other option than to accept.
We’re following up with tests in 3 months, leaving in total almost 4.5 months since my last depot injection.
I definitely do this. I’ve even gone as far as to post it in my online training log before doing it before, if I know I the challenge is purely mental.
Your exercise load doesn’t seem excessive to me.
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Thank you
Monday 2020-10-06
Weight 77 kg
| Exercise | Set | Reps | Weight | Rest | Tempo | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. Squat | -3 | 10 | 50 | short | Normal | ||
| -2 | 6 | 70 | short | ||||
| -1 | 4 | 100 | moderate | ||||
| 0 | 1 | 120 | moderate | ||||
| 1 | 3 | 125 | 3-5m (work sets) | ||||
| 2 | 3 | 125 | |||||
| 3 | 3 | 125 | |||||
| 4 | 3 | 125 | |||||
| 5 | 6 | 125 | Bad-ish depth, residual fatigue from RDL | ||||
| B. Smith Machine Incline Bench | 0 | 8 | 10/s | 2-3 | Normal | ||
| 1 | 10 | 25/s | |||||
| 2 | 10 | 25/s | |||||
| 3 | 6 | 25/s | Residual fatigue from press |
| Exercise | Sets & Weight | Distance & Rest |
|---|---|---|
| C. Farmer Carries | 4x80/hand | Available space, 2m rest |
That’s maybe 25 metres so not exactly the achievement I had outlined historically but that’s a >2x BW carry so I’m going to be happy with it.
It takes a long while to set up and it’s not always safe to do in our gym so I won’t be doing it again soon. Anyway, my direct core work has been paying off!
Will either sub RDLs with single leg KB RDLs and do dumbbell inclines here or move the exercises between the two days making Su/Mo into an U/L affair
Tuesday 2020-10-06
Weight 78 kg 
Was not very good at logging today, so no fancy table stuff. Rather, something more free-flowy.
My intended purpose for today was to,
- Check the quality/recovery of my pulley after Sunday
- Don’t
- Go on the long 7a red.
- Touch the 6c purple that I’ve been projecting for a while (gnarly pinch)
- Avoid the 6b yellow pump-fest because some of the grips aren’t friendlies
- Do
- Try out the new routes that look like friendlies
- Re-do purple on overhang to figure out weird “flow” that follows
Intended intensity: hard breaths and maybe some elvis legs but no falls and pumps (a 3-4 on a 1-7 scale)
I managed to hold myself to most of my don’t. I did go on the yellow pump fest, and came away unscatched. I did however end up at an intensity of 5 on that and a later route that looked friendly from below and grade-wise had me operating at a soft 6. I was very tired today, so it wasn’t a 6 with regards to my “true” capabilities but a daily 6.
Even though I deviated somewhat from my plan I learned a lot, that tang I felt in my tendon last time wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated (for which I’m most joyous and thankful) but that I also should hold myself more accountable to my intent as I enter the hall as I was arguably pushing my luck.
How tired was I today? Well, things I ordinarily speed through I couldn’t even complete. I think this is because of the squat workout yesterday and I find that whenever my weight starts climbing (pun!) I move to the non-nice side of pulling power/bw ratio. Solution: get more power maybe. I’ve observed this many times in the past, and granted I’ll await and see if it’s just the squat workout that did me in (but, tomorrow is deadlifts so… expecting fatigue on Thursday also) before I invest in added vertical pulling training.
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Also I have (D)OMS in my hands, that’s… a new sensation. Not the forearms. In the hands.
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This sounds very unpleasing ahahah…
As for your weight… I’m guessing climbing if one of these sports where even 1-2 kgs make a significance difference so that’s annoying