Hey guys, I don’t post here very much… but I do have a question.
I’ve been through two bulking phases during my nearly three years of training. My first bulk was from 120 at around 10% body fat to 150 at 14% body fat, so I gained about 20 pounds of muscle during my first bulk.
I then began a cutting phase and went down to around 135 pounds at 7-8% body fat… the cut was done rather badly. Basically what I did was kept my calories the same but started doing 5 hours of cardio per week.
I then began a slower, cleaner mass building phase. I went from 135 pounds at 8% body fat to 155 pounds at 13% body fat. So a pretty substantial amount of muscle gained over 18 months.
I decided to carb cycle and add a little cardio to my diet and training program to see what would happen and I’m actually kind of happy with what I’ve seen… My abs are much more visible and my muscles look alot more separated and most of all I LOOK bigger than I did when I was five pounds heavier.
I assumed that I wouldn’t be as strong while carb cycling but I didn’t expect this:
My workout yesterday was this-
Dip/Pullup superset failurex3
Bench Press/Barbell Row superset 10x3
Power Clean and Press 6x3
I rest 2-3 minutes between sets.
Anyways, my performance was much different from the last time I did this particular workout. I was doing 20 dips on each set and 15 pullups, this is up from my usual maximum of 15 dips and 12 pullups…
But my bench was alot weaker. I usually do 5 reps of 185 for three sets… but on my warmup set of 135 on which I usually do 15 reps without even getting close to failure I failed on my 11th rep. My barbell row was equally bad. So, kind of worried I did my workout…
My power clean and presses were fine.
So can anyone explain to me why I’d be doing significantly better on vertical movement but significantly worse on my horizontal ones? Do you think the problem will correct itself after the cutting cycle is over and I go back to eating and training normally?