Things have been going great training wise and I have not been updating this blog as much with training logs. The truth is they do not change that often and I tend to post when I do make changes. The facebook page for our gym Deadlifter's Fortress has more regular updates on our training.
One thing of significance we are changing is taking our training from 6 training days out of an 8 day week to 5 training sessions out of an 8 day week. That might seem a bit confusing but bare with me. We train on an 8 week rather than a 7 day week. We did not want to sacrifice a training day but we felt we needed to days off a week so we used an 8 day rotation not a 7 day rotation. Here is an example.
Sunday- Max Effort Squat/Deadlift
Monday- Heavy Lat and Bicep Training
Tuesday- Max Effort Bench Press
Wednesday- Off
Thursday- Dynamic Effort Squat/Deadlift
Friday- Shoulders and light lat and bicep day
Saturday- Dynamic Effort Bench Pres
Sunday- Off
Monday- Max Effort Squat
And So On.
While this meant that what day you trained what changed it wasn't that big a deal. It is not like your legs know or care whether you trained them heavy on Tuesday last week but now Wednesday this week. The good part about this was if I was sick or something came up we could just do that days training session the next day and it did not effect the rest of the week. There were some downsides though, namely having three heavy training sessions back to back. The first thing we altered was to switch the heavy lat and bicep day with the light lat and bicep day. This changed things up a bit. I think that Missy and I really needed to drop another training day though. So we have decided to make some minor changes. Notably we will now be training our lats on our squat and deadlift days and our biceps on our bench press days. The shoulder day will stay the same but we will really hammer our upper back that day. So our training schedule now looks like this.
Sunday- Max Effort Squat and Deadlift
Monday- Off
Tuesday- Max Effort Bench Press
Wednesday- Off
Thursday- Dynamic Squat and Deadlift
Friday- Overhead Press and shoulders
Saturday- Dynamic Effort Bench Press
Sunday- Off
Monday- Max Effort Squat and Deadlift
And So On.
This will give us 3 days off every 8 days so we can do more non training things and also allow us some recovery between our two heavy training days. Now while they are off days that does not mean we won't be staying active it simply just means we won't be training with weights that day. When the weather gets nicer we will be going on walks again and we do a lot of sled dragging and other conditioning work.
I have completed three weeks of a circa max phase for bench press. On my dynamic bench press days I am using 25%-35% of bar weight plus enough chains and band tension so that at the top of the lift there is 90% or more of my one rep max. This has been very hard on my elbows but I definitely feel it helping my bench press considerably. It is not something I would advise people to do very often unless you are an advanced lifter and peaking for a meet. If you don't know what you are doing you can hurt yourself quite seriously trying to do a circa max phase.
As far as diet and nutrition goes I have went from one extreme to another. Early on as I got back into training I was weighing out all my food and tracking absolutely everything I was eating. I had almost zero "cheat meals" and kept up a steady regime of vitamins and supplements. Protein shakes and other concoctions made up a large portion of my diet.
My results were less stellar than I expected. While I was getting stronger and felt better I didn't really see the kind of weight drop that I had expected. It seemed like my body was rejecting the intense regime I was subjecting it to. I decided to slowly but surely back off the strictness and started having more cheat meals and did not track what I ate nearly as closely. The funny thing was that the less "clean" I ate the better results I have had dropping weight. I have lost about 2 pounds a week and lost a total of 22 pounds since the second week of December. During this time I have gotten stronger on all my lifts, even breaking all time records for myself. This lets me know that I am on the right track.
While I have experimented with eating 5-8 small meals a day I have found 3-4 to be ideal. It seems like any more frequent than that and my body simply does not have time to digest the food from the last meal fully. I really don't take any supplements. I should be taking creatine but honestly things have been going so good for me I just don't feel the need to. I have had maybe 2-3 protein shakes in the past 3 weeks. I get almost all my food from whole foods. Lean pork loins, ground turkey, chicken breasts, potatoes (white and sweet), and rice make up the bulk of what I eat now. I tend not get enough fruits and vegetables sometimes but I do try to have some everyday. For breakfast I have been on a kick lately to have McMissys. That is two fried eyes, two slices of cheese, and two turkey sausage patties and four slices of whole wheat bread. These are made into two breakfast sandwiches. They are tasty and I love them.
I don't really have a set plan for cheat meals. When we want to eat something out we do it. We do not do it often and even when I do eat out I don't go all out all the time, although sometimes I do. Well that is it for now. I will post up a few logs over the next couple days so you know where we are at.
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