Okay, back after a long Hiatus. I stopped working out right before Christmas, when I went back to California until the middle of January, and then when I got back to Kansas I got asked to cover in a new unfamiliar position in Training which took all my time trying to learn what I was doing, then the plant outage started in the middle of February, and… Bottom line, I did pretty much nothing but work from the end of December until the middle of April.
So, here I am in May, starting over. I ended up taking the new position I was covering for, in Maintenance Training, so while I’m still putting in a lot of hours, my schedule is now predictable and manageable, and I’ve decided I’ve been sedentary long enough.
I started going back to the Gym regularly a little over 3 weeks ago, first doing whole body workouts, no real structure, just hitting all the big exercises and getting my body used to moving weight again. Then I moved to doing Deadlift/bench one day, squat/press the next, 2 days week for 2 weeks, mixing up the rep schemes and getting back into a routine. Finally, Thursday and Friday I (conservatively) tested current one-rep maxxes, and now I have a starting point to jump back into my old 5/3/1 program.
So now, the good: Even after over 4 months off, the base I built over the preceeding years hasn’t totally gone away. My rough guess is I kept about 90% of my strength over the break. My tested 1RM’s over the last 2 days were: Deadlift: 345#, Bench: 215#, Squat: 305#, Press: 155#. These are all conservative numbers, I didn’t want to really push myself since 3 weeks back isn’t very long, and I’d rather start back on the program light than have to reset too early.
The bad: 2 months of working 6x12’s through an outage, eating all the delicious but horrible junk food people bring in to chow down on during an outage, and I’ve gotten fatter. I’m sitting at about 205#, I’ve lost some muscle, and I’ve gained a gut. I hate looking at myself in the mirror right now… after the last 3 weeks my muscles are starting to show through again, but the gut has GOT to go!
So, I’ve gotten my diet back under control, not going to do anything stupid like starve myself, just eat well, get plenty of protein, and let my program take care of the rest. If my gut isn’t moving after a couple of months, I’ll look at tweaking my diet, but for now just eliminating the junk food and eating right should get me going in the right direction.
Anyway, I’m back!