Here’s another option for working your legs without stressing your back. (Not that there’s anything wrong with leg presses.)
That’s incredibly badass. But it brings me back to the problem of the gym belts, which keep slipping off.
My back feels fantastic right now, so deadlifts really don’t irritate it at all. I heard that with pelvis rotation that the problem was on the opposite side of the pain which makes sense- it feels less maneuverable than the pained side- so I’ve been focusing on that one. I’m about to go see if I can get in an appointment with a physical therapist or see if they want me to go back to health services first.
I may be overcorrecting my squat form, so I’ll look into that too on Wednesday.
So this is what I learned from the Physical Therapist yesterday:
My pelvis is not rotated, so the last physical therapist was correct. He also agreed with them that my hip muscles were weak. However, he claimed it was my hip rotators, and not the abductors- the key difference is that the rotators cover the SI joint where the pain stems from. He’s having me do some exercises for two weeks. After those two weeks I have an appointment with an Athletic Trainer as well for a second opinion, and it may be that I need long running physical therapy rather than just this simple evaluation.
Considering he didn’t have access to any of the previous information and didn’t work for the same therapists, I can say that I trust his judgments. With that said, the exercise he made me do felt easy at first, but now the pain is blaring harder than it has for a while. I think that the hip muscle in the area is just exhausted, and the same way you find it difficult to walk after a good squat day it’s finding it difficult to stabilize my spine, which is the cause of my back pain.
I’m still going to the gym today, but squats aren’t happening. I’m currently in too much pain to try. I may try leg press, but I’m honestly not sure. I’m mostly going just to weigh myself. I might leave directly afterwards. Yesterday was a horrible rest period for me, and the worst eating day in weeks. It was an 11 AM - 1 AM day, and I didn’t have time for dinner. Managed to cram in some peanut butter out of the jar before bed but I think I’m only around maintenance at best. Combined with difficulty falling asleep due to my back, and waking up randomly at 6 AM only to find I couldn’t go back to sleep for an additional hour, my rest period has been terrible.
I’m going to relax for the next half hour or hour or so and then head over to the gym. Luckily I don’t think pull ups or military press is going to demand much of anything of my lower back, whereas deadlifts, rows, and occasionally bench all do at points.
I’ll either double post the log or just edit this post with the information.
Edit:
Just went for the weigh in. I don’t have a proper excuse for not lifting, aside from not finding any available squat rack and not wanting to wait. That’s not even a proper excuse, that’s a bitch excuse. I just lost all motivation when I got onto the scale and it read:
119.0 lb
There is no second measurement. Even if you factor in variance with food intake between today and last week on the same day, I broke even at best.
I fucked up. I need to eat more. I haven’t actually home cooked any pasta for the last week- I ran out of sauce and haven’t had time to go shopping, sticking to boxed bullshit I have in the cupboard. That may be why, as I ate pasta in the largest amounts. Burgers are high calorie for sure, but the sides of the dining center ones are often burnt and then discarded, and they take longer to digest than spaghetti.
Going to go back to pasta, with the addition of enough butter to kill an entire family. See where it takes me.
To quote Chris Colucci,
What, exactly, did you eat yesterday?
It may have actually been a good thing that you skipped training. Military presses load the spine pretty heavily which I gather you didn’t really want at the moment.
Sounds like you’re on the right track to getting fixed. Keep pushing.
[quote]pk0ad wrote:
To quote Chris Colucci,
What, exactly, did you eat yesterday?[/quote]
That was… Wednesday? Let’s see.
Breakfast: Hershey’s Chocolate
210 Calories
Something quick I could grab on the way to the Physical Therapist and eat while there. It was an early appointment so I didn’t have much time to prepare real damn food.
Lunch: Double Cheeseburger + Mozarella Sticks
1140 + 300 calories
The cheeseburgers here are honestly shit, the sides of the meat are always burned. I force them down. There’s better burgers at one of the other dining centers but I don’t have time between classes to go there.
Dinner: Spaghetti
500-600 for the pasta + 300-400 in oil + 140-200 depending on sauce or butter so it’s all ~940 - 1200 cals
It’s simple. I don’t need much in the way of ingredients and I can buy them all on campus. I’ve taken to throwing vegetables in the mix recently.
Milk: 1/2 gallon
~1200 calories
210 + 1440 + 940 + 1200 puts me at 3790 as a minimum.
The last two weeks have been crowded as shit. Classes and projects are picking up for midterms coming up, and trying to get a bunch of necessary appointments- including the physical therapist- affected my eating on my not so good days- namely Tuesday and Thursday. I’m pretty sure I hit a max of 2k calories on the most recent Tuesday. I try to eat according to a set plan but that doesn’t always go so well because there’s some variance- the availability of food changes depending on my class schedule and other factors around it.
Going back to the gym today. Skipped Friday because of my back again. Taking a higher rep approach to squats like the therapist recommended. I fell behind milk wise so I’m going to try to catch up today, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem but I’ve never tried having MORE than just a half gallon (it tends to give me liquid shits if I don’t space out my milk consumption carefully.) I’ll edit this post when I get there.
Edit: Gym Log
Pull Ups:
15/7/5
On the second set onwards I made sure I was pulling up from a dead hang. Still unsure about my form, see.
Military Press: 70 lb
8/8/4
The 8th reps on those first two sets were incredibly difficult. My legs were even shaking, so I’m positive I was recruiting a few more muscles than desired. I stopped short on the third set since I knew I was hitting my limit. Still technically one more rep than last time.
Squats: 95 lb
3x8
Lessened the load like the PT asked. I’ll still probably feel sore, but squats didn’t seem to break me as hard as they normally do, which is a nice change of pace.
Good to see you’re tracking this stuff. What about another late night meal and some snacks thrown in there?
Edited the post to add the gym log.
I’ve been slowly working towards the extra meal. It’s become viable a couple of times, but never when I could make it happen on a practical level. I’ve decided to start bringing snacks for class, because there are long stretches where I don’t get to eat. Probably more chocolate, as I don’t really want fruit banging around in my filthy ass backpack and it’s calorie dense. Wont be healthy necessarily but I’ll take baby steps- one goal at a time.
There’s some slight calorie variance due to milk consumption- it’s 1200 of my calories so it’s as significant to my intake as a meal. There isn’t much I can really do about that.
This past week’s been mediocre food wise, I feel. Mostly because Tuesday was horrible, and I feel like I’ve been trying to catch up ever since. I’m rather uncertain if I’ll gain weight again this week, although I’m doing what I can to up my intake even more than usual.
With that said, an important note-
I’m going back home this weekend to visit my girlfriend on Saturday, and spend some time with the family (mostly I just want to see my girlfriend though.) This means I’ll leave Friday and get back Sunday, and that schedule’s based entirely on my roommate and his brother due to their class schedule and such. So I have no idea what I’ll be doing gymwise, or how it’ll affect my diet. Except for Saturday. My diet is going to plummet on Saturday. My girlfriend’s on a 1200 calorie diet and even though she doesn’t like making my won goals more difficult I don’t want to spend the whole day reminding her of food and worrying about my weight like an anorexic. I’ll try to minimize the damage afterwards by binge-drinking milk but I have no idea how it’ll go.
Going to try having more peanut butter. Has anyone tried pasta and peanut butter together? I want ways to alter my spaghetti further. So far I’ve got typical marinara, and butter pasta with broccoli, but I want something else too for when that becomes unbearable.
well, when I order Chinese takeout I usually get cold sesame noodles. it looks like cold buckwheat noodles with pb smeared all over it and sprinkled with sesame seeds.
Don’t worry about the gym. Just get your food in.
Talk to your girlfriend about this if you haven’t already. It sounds like she understands you need to eat a lot, way more than she does, to reach a healthy weight. If that’s true then there’s no excuse to eat less when you’re around her. No reasonable person should wish you anything but success in this.
Made some sauce by mashing peanut butter and water together, and then warming and stirring it. The final product turned out tasting okay- not terrible enough to hate but not really good. Not something I’ll enjoy eating but the extra calories are too much to pass up. I’m pretty sure that calorically this meal was:
2 0z of Spaghetti: 400 calories
3 Tablespoons of Butter: 300 calories
3 Tablespoons of Oil: 300 calories
4 Tablespoons of Peanut Butter: 750 calories
= 1750 calories + Diabetes!
*Note that my estimates for oil and peanut butter are just estimates. My typical method is “pour oil on there and pretend whatever’s there is two tablespoons” although it’s probably more, and my method for peanut butter was “could you sculpt everything on this knife into the size of an eye? That’s a tablespoon”. So it could vary wildly.
Plus I have room for snacks and milk since it was only 2 oz of pasta.
As for my girlfriend: She’s always been supportive, but the problem is balancing her goals- her diet restricts her calorically and her vegetarianism restricts me too (no burger joints), and my goals- eating enough to not lose ten pounds overnight. More than that it’s balancing our priorities- sure, I could eat a bunch while she doesn’t, but that’s not how I want to spend the few days I get home with her over the term.
We’ll definitely be having dinner and ice cream together though (she can’t have much but we often go for ice cream) and I’ll pig out on both occasions, so the impact shouldn’t be huge, but I mentioned it because it’s there and it worries me- I do get paranoid as to whether or not I’ll actually gain weight the next week, especially after the most recent week and my poor performance afterwards.
My advice would be to say fuck the scale for a few months. Just eat, eat, eat, and then some eat some more. Keep killing it in the weight room; you will get stronger. If you don’t make any progress, then you should’ve eaten more.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that you drink something other than milk to get your calories in if drinking more than a certain amount gives you diarrhea.
it is my belief and personal opinion (OPINION, mind you. and despite my nursing background I am no expert) that excessive bloating and diarrhea means you aren’t digesting as much of the food as you should be. I’m gonna go out on another limb and say that Meadows has written quite a few articles about this.
maybe you can try something different… lactaid, casein shakes with oatmeal and pb, whey with oatmeal, pb and olive oil… something different that maybe you’ll be able to digest better instead of just shitting out.
I had been using whey, whey isolate and whey hydrolysate for the last few years, and they all gave me bloat and diarrhea to some degree as well as horrible acne. I tried switching to beef protein when Carnivor came out, and that along with ditching Vitargo for Gatorade as my intraworkout carb has eliminated the bloat, acne and diarrhea.
bring this up in the forums and see what others more knowledgeable than me say. do a search first of course.
Milk doesn’t necessarily give me diarrhea, unless I drink a lot within a small timeframe without any solid foods for a while. I experimented with it to be sure, but I’ll consider that.
No hip pain at all today which is great.
[quote]Reygekan wrote:
Milk doesn’t necessarily give me diarrhea, unless I drink a lot within a small timeframe without any solid foods for a while. I experimented with it to be sure, but I’ll consider that.
No hip pain at all today which is great.[/quote]
at that point, you might be consuming more milk than your body can digest. unfortunately, to get more total calories in, calories at each meal will have to increase. hence, combining the milk with other stuff in a shaker cup (oatmeal, pb, whey, etc). it’s all just calories after all.
Definitely something I’ll remember. It hasn’t happened in a while so I think I’m fine milk wise, but I’m definitely not trying to chug too much at once.
Last week’s weight: 119.1 - 121.4 pounds
This week’s weight: 120.6 - 122.5 pounds
Change: +1 pound
Technically “Last week’s” weight is “Two week’s ago’s weight” but eh. I’m counting a pound and a half as 1 pound for now so I don’t get full of myself.
I broke 120!
Rows: 80 lb
3x7
Bench Press: 105 lb
6/5/3
I need to take a little bit longer rest periods I think. I failed my attempt at rep 4, and managed to barely get the bar onto the second set of racks. Of course, even if I had failed I saw a hand reach for the bar anyway- someone had come to catch the bar after seeing me struggle on the last rep. They weren’t even benching at the time, they went to get some water and then headed to the squat rack afterwards. I should feel embarrassed but I actually feel great. I’ve failed so many times without help that having someone actually come in to help was a good change of pace. I’m definitely getting to the point though where I can’t chase after reps like that- especially since in trying to rack the bar it came close to my neck. I keep saying I need a spotter but I either need to get one or be more careful, since I felt like I could’ve actually hurt myself today.
With that said this isn’t 3x5 but it’s pretty damn close so I’ll let it slide.
Deadlifts: 165 lb
3x8
God DAMN these are getting hard. A staff member sweeping the floor told me I can’t deadlift on the plates, but not only was he incredibly nice about it (as opposed to the bitch who told me I couldn’t power clean) but he obviously lifted himself. He told me t o try deadlifting from a box and then racking the weight higher, and so that’s what I’m trying now. It was more frightening at first because I was worried about falling off the box but the box was actually as wide as I needed it to be, so it was fine.
One negative consequence is the bar sometimes hits the hooks on the rack and since I’m not looking, I don’t always know if it’s hitting the top of the hook or the middle where it needs to be. I’ll try taking small steps backwards to avoid this in the future but I’m taking note of it so I remember to deal with it, and that it IS a problem.
I went back to my birthday (the 7th of June) which is the last day I lifted weights on my pre-summer program and compared lifts. It’s an important comparison because I was 121.5-121.6 lb then, and hadn’t lost the strength and weight I did over the summer. I found that I’m benching, rowing, and squatting higher than then and hitting even on deadlifts. My military press was stronger then, however. But it’s a good comparison for me to make, I think, because even though I’m technically lighter I’m stronger in different areas, and I think my physique has actually IMPROVED since the last long, even though I wont technically catch up weight-wise until a week from now.
This Sunday, by deadlifting 175, I’ll be setting a new personal best for myself. I really can’t wait.
I’m back to squatting heavy again on Friday. I was told 7-10 days on light squats and and exercising the hip rotator. It’s been over a week, and I’ve only squatted once- lightly- with no resulting pain. I -should- have enough time to get to the gym before leaving back for home so that’s what I’ll try to do.
If the pain DOES return, I do have an appointment with an athletic trainer early next week and I’ll call the school PT and figure things out. I think it COULD, but the pain definitely feels reduced.
You’re getting it done step by step. 130 is next, get after it.
2 lb a month, solid progress my friend. keep it up and aim for more!
damn dude just saw this thread, good on you for the progress your making. Keep that shit up!! I was so skinny when i started albeit not quite like you. Just keep packing that food in and train hard!
130 is next.
Pull Ups: 8/7/7
I’ve been careful now to make sure I’m starting from an absolute dead hang. This number should increase soon.
Military Press; 70 lb
7/4/4
Bad day for the press.
Squats: 155
3x8
Going to see if the back pain resumes tomorrow, since it’s the end of my 7-10 day light squats period. Felt great to do these though. My confidence flew.