Serge Storms Experimentation Log - New Methods to Gain Muscle and Lose Fat

Training Training Logs
141

Monday Intake

1560 calories
144g P
125g C
43g F

Tuesday AM Training - 60 minutes

Chest
High-rep extended-set stuff with drop-and-catch, holds, super-slow, explosive, twitch, shiver, and squeeze techniques.

The whole workout was based on all kinds of variations of the 1-arm cross-body partial rep fly.

DB
Low cable
Mid cable
pec dec machine
machine chest press (sitting sideways, 1- arm)
shoulder lateral raise machine

I did one set of jump rope - maybe 4 minutes total.

WEIGHT = 189.8

This morning I worked on some front/side relaxed “physique” poses to see if I could do a better job of creating the illusion of a big, broad chest with a nice chest pump on board. The problem is, more chest comes at the expense of shoulders…I think I need to find a balance in the poses and angles so the chest looks big but I can still somehow show off the shoulders. Shoulders seem to look best with almost a slight rolling forward, but chest looks best with shoulders more down and back. Hmmm.

Leave it to me to overanalyze the shit out of something as seemingly simple as physique poses.

[photo]40312[/photo]

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That is some serious rope rocking.

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[quote]marrot wrote:
That is some serious rope rocking.[/quote]

Thanks man. It’s gonna be the next big thing.

Or not.

Keeps you young though, that’s for sure.

144

Intake Tuesday

3200 cals

270g P
340g C
80g F

Wednesday AM Weight - 188.5

First day of my new “gaining phase” macros, and what do you know, a pretty decent drop on the scale! I was expecting it to go in the other direction, but I’m guessing it’s just from some slight dehydration from the strong espresso martini I had last night.

Anyway…on with the quest to add some size, thickness, and density to my chest, shoulders, and back.

The winner of last year’s NPC Illinois State master’s physique class was pretty impressive, so I’ve got a little work to do if I want to do well in that division at some point in the future. The guys who placed lower were all over the board. A few of them looked like they rolled right off the couch and onto the stage.

There will now be some pressing and pulling going on in my workouts with some significant work in the heavier ranges. Overall, I plan to decrease the amount of energy I’m expending during my big lifting sessions. I’ll still keep up my work with these different contraction techniques, but will deploy that stuff more strategically instead of randomly cycling through a million variations of isolation moves. My current approach is a great one for maintaining and even slightly improving on a certain look. But that thickness I’ve been purposely avoiding is now something I’m going to need, so it’s time to kick it up a notch.

The diet part might be the most difficult, but I’m determined to keep probing at the edges of what works to see if I can push my weight up to the 205 range. I’d like to add about 6 pounds of muscle over the next 7 months or so.

It’s not going to be difficult for me to put that weight on. I could do it in about two weeks if I really wanted to. The hard part will be to increase calories while maintaining the same kind of eating behaviors that have allowed me to stay this lean for this long. Usually when it comes to diet, if I give myself an inch, I take about 6 miles.

I’ll continue to work on getting better on weekends, too. Those weekend cheats are actually easier to control and not too counter-productive in the context of a “cutting” phase because they provide a metabolic bump and I can execute a few cleanup days early in the week.

But if I’m already in a slight surplus, those weekend binges will be doing nothing good for me. I’m kind of thinking that just being in a slight surplus and always feeling satisfied and well-fed will help me keep the eating adrenaline much lower on weekends. I’m increasing my fat limit from 60 to 80. Mostly just because a little more food generally will come along with a little more fat. But 80g is still only about 23% of total calories, so it’s not really much.

I met with an expert yesterday who really knows physique competitions and judging criteria. He looked at my physique and gave me some really great suggestions and guidance for a long-term plan. It was a paid consultation and we talked for about an hour. For such a small investment, it was probably the best decision I’ve made in a long time.

We talked about judging criteria, posing, “stage presence”, an off-season strategy…all kinds of great stuff. But the highlight for me was when he looked me right in the eye and said, “You can do this.”

This is not the type of guy who blows sunshine up your ass to try and get your business, so when he looked at me and said that, it landed somewhere deep in my subconscious brain and really made a big impact. Not that I didn’t think I could do this, but it really meant a lot coming from someone who actually judges these competitions and was able to analyze my physique - strengths and weaknesses - in-person.

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Training Tuesday - Back

Seated Low Cable Rows
4x10 @ moderate weight
worked down the rack doing sets of 3
did a few singles with the entire stack
did some high-rep sets with a lighter weight

Single arm standing cable rows
I do these in a VERY small range of motion focusing on basically just flexing my lat.
Almost like a side crunch, but there is an element of pulling from the elbow.
I did a ton of these, some heavy, some light.

Single arm seated low cable rows (aka ass-wipers)
Back to the seated rows, only this time I sat sideways and pulled on an angle almost behind my back.

Hard to explain, but the motion is like wiping your ass. I invented this one when my lat cramped up one time as I was wiping my ass after a pretty good back workout.

With lats and back in general, I am looking to find a balance between working the muscle AND the movements. I tend to work the muscle, but to develop some thickness, I need to just flat out fucking ROW and do some WORK…put the mind-muscle connection aside for a while and just go heavy.

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Jumping from not going into a show back to working towards it.

Less procrastinating in the squat rack, more jump rope, dips and handstand pushups in the squat rack. :wink:

Loving the updates, keep it going mate.

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[quote]raven78 wrote:
Jumping from not going into a show back to working towards it.

Less procrastinating in the squat rack, more jump rope, dips and handstand pushups in the squat rack. :wink:

Loving the updates, keep it going mate.[/quote]

Guilty as charged, brother.

Seems like I’ve been using my log to work out some internal conflicts lately!

Seriously though, I’m still sticking with the primary objective: Just. Keep. Lifting.

I have two months to go until I can finally say I lifted consistently and ate sanely for 12 months straight.

To never have done that in my 20+ years of being a fitness enthusiast/recreationalphysique athlete is still shocking to me.

As far as doing a show…I’ll probably flip-flop about 65 more times between now and the NPC Illinois State show in May 2015. Doesn’t really matter. Whatever my mind needs to come up with to keep my body in the gym is fine. Spring break, pool party, physique contest, photo shoot for a gay porn magazine…it’s all good.

148

Intake Wednesday

3160 calories

215g P
390g C
69g F

Training Thursday AM - 1 hour - CHEST/FRONT DELTS

CONSOLIDATION WORK
I started off by doing some light pump work and some intense stretching for my lats. I wanted to see what kind of soreness I felt from yesterdays session, but I also felt like maybe I could stimulate some localized cytokine signaling to enhance and speed up the recovery process. Especially while I have all the pre-workout carbs and aminos and creatine and beta alanine other good shit floating around.

PRESSING WORK
Then I moved to my main PRESSING movement. I wanted to try the smith machine, so I tried some pressing from every angle from flat bench to sitting completely straight up (seated shoulder press). I also tried them facing in both directions, since the bar path is a bit slanted on the smith machine.

I was looking for the angle that seemed to offer the most strength in a direction that would give deep stimulation throughout the depth of my chest through my back. I ended up using an incline about two notches down from the seated shoulder press. So it was like a very steep incline press.

I felt like this really hit my front delts and pecs without risking any shoulder issues - many of the other angles I tried seemed to be pretty shitty in that department, but I felt very good in this one.

I started with some light pumping reps and then just kept increasing the weight slowly until I was doing a few triples with two plates on each side for about 3 sets.

Then I backed off to one plate on each side and worked in a bunch of pumping reps and some of my other fun techniques. I probably did 5 or 6 sets of 15-25 reps or so.

FLEX WORK
The second half of the workout was based on the cross-body fly move. I got a ton of work done here, with lots of emphasis on more of a front raise type of angle to really hit both the front delt and the upper pec, just below the collar bone.

I like this basic workout format and will use it for a while:

CONSOLIDATE - PRESS/PULL - FLEX

Consolidate - Use the warmup time to pump, stretch, and feel the muscles worked yesterday

Press/Pull - A mix of low, medium, high reps (heavy, medium, light weights) on a big pressing or pulling movement. Less focus on contraction techniques and more on just moving the weight through an angle that stimulates some thickness

Flex - Smaller ROM movements, isolation movements to really pump the shit out of the target muscles and provide high TUT and stimulation with very low demand on tendons or neurological recovery pathways.

THURSDAY AM WEIGHT - 188.8

Overall, I’ll basically alternate push/pull/push/pull where on some pulling days I’ll focus on either upper back or lats - on pushing days I might just go from more vertical pressing to more horizontal.

There will be days where I’ll need to throw in either a “beach day” type of workout or a leg day - I’ll make those calls on the spot…I really never know what’s ready until I get in there and start moving around.

149

Train with Zane - Frank Zane: Train with Zane - Frank Zane - YouTube

From 2:09 to 2:40 he talks about lifting to the beat of music.

See, I KNEW I wasn’t crazy!

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More Zane, this one is from an interview he did for a magazine:

“And that was not the last time I made that mistake. I learned that really for me not to go above 5 percent over my competitive weight that meant staying under 200 or even in the lower 190s. I was not focused on body weight, I was more focused on what I looked like. You know what difference does the numbers make. You are not judged on that, you are judged on what you looked like. So everybody is weighing themselves and doing body fat analysis. I took photos. I took a lot of color slides. Tens of thousands, so that way I knew what I looked like. And so I had full control over that. Look, when I got on stage I knew what I looked like. Nobody else really did, because they did not do this. I was the only one that took photos.”

Poor guy.

What the hell are “color slides”…did he have to develop those things?

Imagine how pissed he was when they came out with digital cameras.

Anyway, I need to meet this crazy SOB someday. He actually looks a lot like my dad. Maybe he is my uncle.

151

Thursday MACROS

2940 Calories

410g C
215g P
59g F

Nailed.

AM Weight - 188.0 (seriously, after 400g C yesterday)

I mean seriously - if I can get away with that every day and just sculpt this shit out…[activate Arnold accent] just slap some clay on the middle and front deltoids. A little clay on the upper and middle chest, some clay along the lat region. Perfect.

Maybe I’ll pop back in later, but the big news is:

DOMS

Lats are more sore today than yesterday. I love it. I missed that feeling.

Front delts are on fire today, it’s awesome. I remember making this discovery before - overhead barbell pressing roasts the shit out of my front delts.

Only problem is that the old AC joint is barkin’ at me today, big time. That is the problem with the heavy stuff for me. These old, chronic issues in my shoulders.

The elbows and wrists were hurting a bit, too.

I do not like the feeling of being limited by the recovery schedule of my joints, especially when my muscles are ready to rock.

So today I did

TRAINING THURSDAY AM - BICEPS, SHOULDERS, TRAPS, ABS - 60 MINUTES

Basically lots of random shit to just feel things out and pump things up. I wasn’t ready for any heavy pulling or pushing after two straight days, but my body still seemed to want to lift.

I started with doing some chest and lat stuff to zero in on my soreness. The front delt soreness is a deep one, so I know I was successful there. Same for the lats..a very nice, deep, full, slightly injured and swollen feel all the way through the meat of the muscle. Enhanced ability to create a quality contraction because the pain of the soreness is right there to help.

Then I did biceps and lots of trap and rear-delt work.

I can do biceps everyday because I’ve worked up to that and because I go LIGHT and focus more on contraction. And when I say focus, I mean super focus. The reason I think more people don’t push their sets into this zone is because it is boring as fuck. That’s where the music comes in. It would be impossible without it.

For traps, I am working a lot with a slightly bent over DB front raise but instead of the arm being straight, it’s more like it’s curved as if trying to reach over a fence and set something down on the other side. It’s about as mechanically disadvantaged position as you can find, but with the perfect weight, you can seriously get your trap on that side to blow up like a little pop-up tent. I do it with the thumb down like pouring something out. Little mini drop-and-catch reps with a hard contraction pause at the top. And then mix in some squeezing and pumping reps. I love this shit.

I did some abs and it’s amazing how leanness seems to really improve the mind-muscle connection and contraction control in the abs. I guess maybe it’s as simple as less material getting in the way…just a steric hindrance thing. But seriously, it’s like each little ablet is becoming it’s own little individual powerhouse.

So for abs today, I pumped the shit out of #2 and #6.

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In the trap region, it looks like a little baby stingray landed on my back.

My goal is to make it look like the mommy stingray landed on the baby stingray.

153

AVERAGE MACROS LAST WEEK (WEEK OF 8/4)

360g C
216g P
77g F

Average calories past 14 days: 3250

TODAY’S WEIGHT = 193

Had a busy weekend, but basically I’ve been in the gym every morning just blasting away for an hour or more each morning.

Yesterday, I had a bit of a “cheat day” with the food. Although I can’t say it was strategic. It started as a high-input, high-output day because I just wanted to be active and be an athlete yesterday.

So I did some bike sprint intervals around the neighborhood, some jump rope intervals in my driveway, and then went and blasted a big bucket of golf balls at the range. Holy shit, I was crushing drives straight and long. CRUSHING drives, it was awesome.

So the plan was just to crank up my carbs and keep my fat around 75, but then my wife wanted to order pizza. She puts up with a lot of my bullshit when it comes to eating nothing but turkey and chicken, so I was go for pizza.

The good news is, we ordered one size smaller than we usually do and I ate about half the amount I usually do. I mean, this is some insanely dense pizza with more sausage and cheese than your average pizza. So even though I only ate half of what I usually eat, it still came out to about 1,000 calories or so.

Oh, and my fat-handling enzymes and stuff must be down-regulated from my lowish-fat diet, because I can’t handle pizza like I used to. Not even close. Even my wife and daughter were having some, ummm, issues.

The plan this week is to stay at around 3200 calories and under 75 grams of fat/day. I’ll try to hit at least 180g P or so, and then fill in the rest with carbs. If I can manage to keep fat even lower for a few days, especially early in the week, I’ll gladly swap that out for even more carbs.

I showed my wife and daughter this picture and asked, with a straight face, “this is what I’m shooting for, what do you guys think? too much?”

The look of panic was pretty funny.

[photo]40333[/photo]

154

Monday Intake

2800 C
183g P
360g C
61g F

Didn’t get a weight first thing in the morning because I scheduled a meeting for 8:30 this morning and it was two hours away with a time change from central to east. Had to get up at 4:30 and bust ass to get out the door and on the road.

Training Monday

Two sessions. Lots of pulling in the first one, lots of work and pump in the second.

Training Tuesday

Mid-day session - 90 minutes

I thought my workout would be shitty, since I spent most of the morning driving and hadn’t really had much to eat.

It ended up being pretty damn good. Tons of energy, I felt like I could have stayed in there all day.

Things are shifting back to my standard training style a little bit already. I’m not sure I really need to change too many things right now. In fact, the fewer things I change, the more useful my data will be.

What I would LIKE to do is adjust my intake so I can manage my rate of gain appropriately, but I’m not really all that convinced of the practicality of this approach.

Nothing happens in linear fashion, so why does it make sense to try to impose a linear rate? Also, the range of my seemingly random weight fluctuations is actually greater than the rate of gain I’m shooting for. If my margin for error is +/- three pounds, and I’m trying to gain at 1.5 - 2 pounds per month, then how does any of this make any sense?

I guess this is where the approach of taking the average weights over the past 7 days might make more sense, but still…

I don’t know.

I need to figure out a new way to manage this gaining process so I can make meaningful adjustments. I’m not really out to prove to the world that it’s possible to make gains while maintaining a perfect balance of leanness and fullness and dryness and vascularity. I think somebody already invented a program for that. I think it’s called the Predator Program or something… extremely cutting edge from what I remember reading.

I wonder if I could get really good at reading my body’s cues so that I could take a more intuitive approach…like I’ve done with my training. Is it possible to get so tuned-in that you can almost get out ahead of the way you’re body will respond? I felt pretty tuned in over the past few months when I was leaning out, but I feel like it’s harder to do when gaining. If I “try” to gain weight, I’ll be back up to 200 in about two-and-a-half weeks.

It’s like saying, “try to swing your driver at half speed.”

Does not compute.

155

Intake Tuesday

2700 Calories

200g Protein
225g Carbs
61g Fat

Weight Wednesday AM - 190.0

Those carbs are low, but I had about 450 empty calories in the form of the most glorious imperial stout I’ve tasted in a long time. Verdi Imperial Stout. It’s from Italy, and it’s made with hot chili or something. Good stuff.

Anyway, I don’t count the carbs in beers - not so I can save room for carbs, but just because I don’t feel like they are contributing to anything positive.

Along with those beers, I had some of the best grilled octopus on earth. I would challenge anyone to find anything better. Anywhere. Ever. Here’s the description from the menu:

Grilled Octopus - duck fat potatoes, red chilies, celery, aged balsamic, chive

This was an appetizer, so those duck fat potatoes were each about the size of a nickel but holy shit they were amazing.

We also had some oysters (not a fan), Hamachi, scallops, and ahi. This was called the “crudo plate”.

Ahhh, life can be a real drag when you are hanging with the big shot big pharma executives and have been designated to choose restaurants in Chicago.

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Weight Thursday 189.8
Weight Friday 191.0

Intake Thursday

4K calories

210g P
271g C
175g F

Intake Friday

2265 Calories

200g P
220g C
55g F

Training Thursday

30 minutes of easy stretch and pump

4 hours of golf (riding)

-I played in a fund-raiser scramble at an awesome course, Harborside International. It’s a links-style course, which I’ve never played. Right on Lake Michigan. It was about 81 degrees, perfectly clear, with some decent wind.

On one of the par 5s, we had about 240 to go on our second shot and I absolutely just nutted one to within about 10 feet of the hole. We hit the putt for eagle, it was sweet. We ended up 11 under, but some assholes must have misunderstood the directions, because they came in at 24 under. Right.

Food and beverage included, and I pretty muched wrecked shop on the buffet line after throwing down a bunch of beers on the course. Foot long hot dog, huge brat, huge burger, two chicken breasts, some cheesecake, and a bunch of potato chips. And some potato salad.

Friday Training

Afternoon session, was on the road early this morning to check on the height of the corn between here and Peoria and back.

I couldn’t bring myself to workout inside…it was just too damn nice out and I needed to be outside after driving for 6 hours today.

I did my stock little mini-pump workout to stay loose, get some blood moving, get a nice little pump, and squeeze the glycogen sponge a little bit.

Here’s a little clip. Super boring, not gonna lie. But I click on y’alls deadlift and bench press videos sometimes, so don’t be scared.

There are some nuances to the contractions and movements, if that’s your kind of thing. Many of these reps are little mini-explosive drop and catch hold type things.

I included some of those cross-body d-roy raise variations where I use the other arm to increase the range of motion.

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Saturday
6000 calories

385 P
515 C
200 F

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Training Saturday

AM Session - Back - 90 minutes
PM Session - Rings and Rope - 35 minutes

Intake Sunday

3100 Calories
165g P
395g C
68g F

^That’s pretty close to what I will be shooting for this week. A bit more protein, 180-200 is the goal. 400 for carbs and 75 fat.

Weight Monday AM = 192.0

Monday Training - 60 minutes

Chest with some shoulders and triceps here and there.

Practiced some “physique” posing after lifting this morning. By the way, the guy I hired for the 1-hour 1:1 consultation also mentioned that posing for physique doesn’t even need to be worked on until 2 weeks before the show, because you won’t know what the options are until you are “dieted down”.

Makes sense. Anyway, these “relaxed” poses are totally boring to work with, so I played around with some tensed-up poses too.

Weight bumped up to 192, which is 4 pounds higher than my lowest recent weight and maybe 2 pounds higher than what I’ve been averaging. I think I’ll try to hold this for a few weeks and then bump it up again by another 2 pounds when I start getting really flat and dry and tight at 192. So kind of a bump - mini-recomp - bump - mini-recomp approach.

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Intake Monday-Wednesday

Averaged 3500 calories/day

Macros are running at about 400g C, 220g P, 65g F

Looks pretty straightforward, but within those three days I had one at 2,000 calories and one at 5,100.

5100 calories on Monday included 5 pints of stout, an enormous cheeseburger, a pile of duck fat fries (holy shit awesome), and some of the best crème brulee I’ve ever tasted. The top was on the overdone side, which is exactly how I like it.

What can I say - when you’re out on the town in Nashville with the big boss, you have some beers and enjoy some food.

Training Monday - Wednesday

Same shit - chest and back and shoulders and arms and abs, inventing new movements along the way.

I did a double session on Tuesday and unexpectedly went apeshit during the second session. Burned about 1200 calories. Not sure why I had such an energy kick after a day of sitting around and a short flight…I think I was just happy to have my road trip cut short by a day…it allowed me to see my family off to their first day of school yesterday.

Last night I played tennis for two hours. Mixed doubles. It’s always great to run around and play in the outside heat in the evening hours.

Weight Thursday AM - 189.8

Training Thursday AM - 90 minutes

Chest, Shoulders, Arms

Today would have been a good day to just take completely off, but I decided to go anyway and just loosen up, stretch, and maybe get some light pump recovery stuff done. That’s pretty much what I did, but some of the chest pump stuff did get pretty deep for a while.

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I found this little mini-article about “recomp” posted over on another forum and thought it was pretty interesting. Here is the last paragraph:

[quote]

In conclusion, to recomp, eat as clean as possible but a bit above maintenance calories. Lift like you’re bulking, but also work in as much cardio as if you were cutting. Manage your diet and carbohydrate intake so as to bias your carbs around the workout and minimize them around cardio.
Add anabolics for a 6-8 week period, and pump enough cardio and/or clen/T3 to to strip off bodyfat.

Example
Epi 30/30/40/40/40/40mg (some people might need 50 or even 60mg)
T3 25/25-50/75/75/50-25/25mcg
EC stack for cardio

The reason I love recomps so much is that they have the most keepable gains. A small amount of LBM is added over a long period of time, and fat lost is unlikely to rebound. [/quote]

Throughout the article, this guy really emphasizes the importance of the “anabolics” component. You get the sense that as hard as this approach is to execute WITH anabolics, it would likely be impossible without them.

Hmmm. I don’t know.

Perpetual Recomp has kind of become my default approach, so I feel like I’ve learned a little bit about it and can add something from the “non-anabolic” perspective.

For sure it is a slow and gradual process, but if you are pretty lean as you are going through the process, you will still be rewarded with frequent visual improvements. The scale might not be moving, but you are in a gaining mindset and you feel like you are making progress.

I’ve needed to keep a pretty “clean” diet as my baseline diet, but at least twice a week I end up throwing down a pretty massive meal or three. At least once a week I throw down four or five or ten alcoholic beverages.

I do think that a g-flux/high intake-high output approach lends itself best to recomp, while periods of low intake, low output can help nudge a bit of fat loss while keeping the metabolism humming along.

Standalone, traditional cardio sessions are probably not necessary but all extra activity helps as long as you don’t get stuck in a high output/low input mode for too long.

Fat burners are not necessary, and definitely nothing as strong as T3 or even EC.