Might do a 3 day FB routine once my hemorrhoid goes away and my glute tear heals
Lots of carries, pull ups, dips, t bar, etc…
1 Like
I lived on supplements… my whole food were way too low
1 Like
Great stuff everyone! I like seeing both some common themes (trust the process, get under some big weights) and some variance (mostly around volume and periodization) - we’re all different just like everyone else!
For my part, I definitely fell into the “eat big to get big” world a bit too much and just justified being fatter than I needed for longer than I needed. I don’t know that I’d trade it, because I would rather just go all-in on a goal than half ass it, but I didn’t need to justify pizzas and cake quite so much.
I also fell into the “perfect timing” trap for a bit - where you have to do cardio first thing or it doesn’t count, and it must be separated from weights by 6 hours, and 61 minutes in the gym means the whole thing that didn’t count.
I don’t think I got into looking for perfect programming too much, which is good in my case. “Muscle and Fitness periodization” worked great for me, whether or not it’s the “best” way.
On the other hand, my current dogma that I’m sticking to whether it’s real or not: carbs around training. I swear I notice a tangible difference in both my recovery session to session and my overall body composition.
6 Likes
This is 1000% my point of view. I have no room for pessimism in my life and I try to reflect that on to the people around me. Negative thoughts and speech poison the mind. Life isn’t worth living without excitement and enthusiasm. I have no clue how people get through their days with a negative mindset.
6 Likes
Great thread idea. Interesting how we all tend to have similar experiences and have to learn the same lessons.
Biggest for me was spending far too long with a hyper focus on the Olympic lifts and not rotating in periods of training focused on building up other qualities. I’m still proud of what I accomplished in that sport (202 snatch/255 clean & jerk/308 front squat) but I likely could have done more, and sooner, if I had spent some time becoming a better athlete and not just a better lifter.
Eating way too much food was another one. I fell for the “eat big to get big” trap and was putting down frozen pizza, fried chicken and chocolate milk after training. I understand there are some beanpole teenagers who might need that, but I didn’t need that as a 20something office worker hitting the gym 4-5 times a week after work. I just got fat.
8 Likes
Another great point! At one time, it took my wife pointing this out to me. I had always been in sports and then the army, and we’d either be in-season/ gone or totally in feast mode. When I got out and got super fat, she noted I was still eating like I was home for 2 days… but now that’s just a Wednesday night. At the time it was like this great epiphany.
7 Likes
I love this.
A colleague of mine once said in conversation “we get to choose how we see the world, why are they choosing the world view that makes them the loser?”.
4 Likes
I didn’t realize I even did this until reading this, but it’s definitely something I do about everything. Going to be something I have to work on.
This really comes through in your training log and is very admirable.
Funny in a training thread, the biggest takeaway for me is a mindset/mental change. Thanks guys!
6 Likes
Here’s what held me down in the past-
Believing that hard gainer is real and less volume is the answer you’ll get big arms doing only compound lifts.
Eating on the clock didn’t feed my muscles, it fed the fat.
Took 25 years and to debunk the myths and I’m now coming through like a jacked train, near age 50.
Once again you and I are as far apart as the east is to the west.
IMO, eating on the clock was the greatest strategy that I had for adding muscle and losing fat.
1 Like
Conversely, is there a “truth” you’re clinging to now that you think is moving you forward (published evidence be damned)?
Totally forgot to talk to this.
Through out it all, and no matter how much it upsets folks, I keep beating the wardrum that carbs are overrated.
But I actually think this ties in pretty well with @BrandonCrawford and your observation: how much fuel do we REALLY need? For some athletes, maybe they DO need 200+ grams of carbs per day to get through their training sessions. If you’re a crossfit athlete training 3x per day, or a decathlete, or a professional, maybe you really DO need to always be in the process of topping off your glycogen stores so that you have fuel for the next workout. But so many office drones who ONLY lift weights a few times per week have it in their heads “1g of protein per pound of bodyweight, .3g of fat, fill in the rest with carbs”, and are taking in SO much carbohydrate all to do…what exactly?
The more I cut them out of my nutrition, the better I feel. That said, I’ve found that completely eliminating them isn’t as beneficial as including 1 meal per week where I eat them. Which goes on to show just how little I need to be effective.
5 Likes
@RT_Nomad I was not very physically active during my teens, sitting around smoking pot was my daily goal in life, not really into sports or banging out chins and dips.
I did lift at age 11-12. But once I took that first toke, my ambitions were over.
I grabbed a FLEX mag at around age 19 or 20 saw that I had to eat 5-6 meals a day and proceeded. This developed a habit.
It was ok at first because I was still skinny-ish But I was not lifting the kinds of weights that support this.
Then I fell into the hard gainer and began doing less and less thinking I’d get more and more, combined that with the eating habit, eventually I got nice fat wide waist even though I was somewhat strong.
Some days now, I only eat just over 1,000 calories and hit 1-rep PRs. I’m probably in the best shape I’ve ever been now. This means muscle separations and strength and conditioning.
1 Like
It’s taken me a loooong time to embrace this but I’m slowly coming to a similar conclusion. I’m down to eating carbs once per day in my pre-bed meal to help with sleep, plus some after my hardest workouts to top off the tank when insulin sensitivity is highest (credit @QuadQueen for those ideas as I wouldn’t have been smart enough to figure all that out on my own). The rest of my meals are just meat, eggs, and veggies.
The results: I’m down 3lb in a month while simultaneously hitting several rep PRs on the main barbell lifts in that same timeframe.
5 Likes
The old “some is good, so more is gooderer”.
What’s kind of cool about this and @BrandonCrawford’s note is, even though we seem like we’re all really far apart on carbs, we’re just at slightly different points on a relatively narrow spectrum. We all limit them somewhat to when we feel they improve some aspect of recovery/ performance, and that’s in both quantity and timing, but we do all still use carbs for those purposes.
4 Likes
but we do all still use carbs for those purposes.
“Use” is absolutely the appropriate verb, and I feel like this speaks to one of those “things that held you back”: eating without intention. It’s really the same thing as training. If I look at your training program and I see you’re doing cable curls and preacher curls, I should be able to ask you why and you should be able to explain why those two movements are there. And if you can’t explain why, then you shouldn’t be doing it. Nutrition should be no different: I see a bagel in the morning, potatoes at lunch and rice at dinner, I should be able to ask why it’s there and you should be able to provide an answer.
So many people just eat “ad hoc”. They sleep as long as possible, because they’re exhausted, so they skip breakfast and just grab something at work/on the way, and just base their decision on how hungry they are. They feel like garbage and are immediately hungry again, so they get some workplace snack or rob the candy dish until lunch rolls around, at which point they go out to eat and just pick whatever sounds good, only to crash at 2:00pm and need another snack, just to get home completely exhausted and defeated and either throw something from the freezer into the microwave or just door dash something. There’s no intention behind any of it.
It helps to know what you’re putting into your body, and it helps to know WHY you’re doing it.
3 Likes
I generally think eggs are gross unless they are cooked perfectly.
Am I realistically going to be able to cook them perfectly everytime? NOPE, so how I get them down besides drinking them is with a baby potato and a slice of bacon.
1-tiny tiny bite of potato with a big scoop of eggs.
Scrabbled eggs and steak = boring long meal.
Sunny side up eggs and steak or ground beef = meal gets sucked down, no problem!
Fantastic - love this. I think it happens on the other end of the funnel to nowhere, too: folks will get caught in not adding something that might help meet their intentions:
“I want big arms, but I don’t do isolation movements, because compound lifts should be enough.” Maybe, but it’s not getting you where you want to be.
“I am not gaining weight, but I’m eating as much as I care to eat, what magic can we apply?”
Obviously some recent ones come to mind as well… but I think the whole concept of matching behaviors to desired outcomes really does bring this back home.
4 Likes
Not arguing, I genuinely don’t understand what you’re trying to convey here. Are you trying to get potatoes out of your diet? Is there a reason you’re determined to keep eggs in?
I think im just missing what you’re saying.
2 Likes
It’s okay, I feel this way about most of his posts honestly
6 Likes
Emphasizing eccentrics held me back. It got to the point where I was focusing on the eccentrics more than the concentrics, and my progress definitely stalled. Obviously you don’t wanna throw negatives out of the window, controlling the weight and not using a ton of momentum is still super important. But for me personally, having a 4-5 second squat or leg press descent wasn’t doing much for me in terms of strength and progressive overload.
2 Likes