Bahloo’s BodyBlog

I’m feeling a bit down about my lack of workouts for the last month or two.

I has a much deserved, two week break from work in early March (with one week at a beach house) and was pretty excited about getting some good workouts, resting and eating well. Sadly I came down with a terrible throat infection and flu that took three weeks to shake off. My wife claimed it was from being overworked, but I’m not so sure…

Then, I got sick again after a week back at work.

I’ve had two or so weeks of workouts since that sickness and now I’m sick again.

I’ve been taking multi vitamins, sleeping a lot (at least as much as you can with a one-year old child) and I keep getting sick. I seriously can’t believe it. It has been full-on at work but there have also been a lot of sick people around, so I’m not sure of the cause.

Either way, it has me feeling pretty down. It seems like all I’m doing is waking up, going to work, coming home and watching TV and then doing it again, all while feeling like shit and not getting better.

I’m hopeful it’s just a run of bad luck and things will turn around but it’s really frustrating. 

It’s 6 or so weeks into the year, so I thought I’d update my progress for 2009.

To re-cap from my last post. I’m looking to gain some mass for at least the first six months of the year. I did the same thing last year without a lot of success, so I’m trying to take on what I learnt and improve.

I think I’m doing fairly well so far. I’ve gained 3kg so far which is a steady increase of 0.5kg per week.

One of my main goals was to put some size on my chest. As much as it pains me to say it, I’m not sure if I have at all. It’s measuring a little bit bigger so I’m not sure if I’m being impatient.

My shoulders are looking pretty good though. I’ve been doing push presses which seem to make a huge difference.

As much as I’d like to cut, I’m going to stick with this for at least six months!

It’s almost 2009.

That’s crazy, it has been such a big year for me, both on a personal and professional level. On a personal level it has been huge with my first child being born and I had a nice promotion at work and feel like I’m making big progress in my chosen field.

Fitness wise it has been decent too. I spent the first year with a bulk followed by a cut and gained a bit of lean mass. The second half of the year has been maintenance after my daughter was born.

So what about 2009?

I’m planning on bulking for the first 6 months. Nothing crazy but just a steady increase in my food intake until I’m gaining some mass. A bit more protein, a slight increase in some of my meals. I will need to get some bodyfat callipers to really closely monitor things.

There’s no set time for this phase, I’ll just see how I progress, make any changes along the way and see where I’m heading.

I thought I’d write a quick entry on training. What’s been happening and what I’ve got planned for the next 6 months.

I’ve been making it to the gym twice a week 90% of the time. It’s my goal to try and make it three times a week, but working 10-12 hour days and trying to spend time with family has made it difficult. I got a pretty sweet promotion at work recently which has made work just that little bit more exhasuting. 

The only way to make it to the gym three times would be a 5:00am start. And that’s pretty tough with a 5 month old baby that wakes during the night. I’m going to see how it goes next week.

My time in the gym has exclusively been weight training and no cardio. I’ve been doing full body workouts with a focus on chest and quads. Just to test my cardio fitness, I went for a run about 3 weeks ago and found that my fitness is as good as when I was doing cardio 4 times per week. I was really surprised by that. 

I’ve been working out for years but have actually found that over the last 3 months I’ve been really finding what works for my body. Learning which body parts are out of balance and adjusting my workouts to compensate. In many ways it has made workouts fun again.

I’ve also been thinking a bit about an old article I read. It was about the optimum workout frequency and was written by a fairly famous trainer. Anyway, what he was saying is that he found that a good workout every six days maximised muscle gain.

I’ve been working out a little bit more than that but have found that my muscle gains have been really good. I’ve gained at least 2kg muscle in the last 8 weeks. I’m going to try and find that article and post it….

While I haven’t been making it to the gym as much as I’d like to, I have been getting there fairly consistently and trying a few new things.

Now that I’m reasonably lean after my bulk at the start of the year, it’s my goal to slowly build muscle, particularly my chest.

Upon doing some research, I decided to give pre exhaustion training a try. In a word, it has been awesome.

I’ve always had troubles getting decent stimulation in my chest and to a lesser extent my quads. PET has been amazing. I’ve been sore for three or four days afterwards and have really been felling the stimulation.

There are plenty of good articles about it on the net, so I won’t go too much into it other than to say if you have a weak area, you should really give PET a try.

I’ve been managing to get to the gym at least twice a week for the last 3 weeks and feel really good about it.

My schedule is something like this:

 - Wake up at 5.20am
- At gym by 5.30am
- Back at home by 6.30am to shower, dress, eat and then head off to work

I haven’t yet found a good workout routine to fit into two days but have been mainly doing full body workouts. Sometimes I’ll skip a muscle if it’s too sore from the earlier workout.

I’m not really sure what my future goals are, but at the moment it’s pretty much just maintenance and I’m enjoying it.

Life has really changed so much over the past 6 weeks.

The big change is that I’m now a Dad. And that big changes has a ripple effect, changing everything else in your life, especially workouts.

In the last five weeks I think I’ve been to the gym about three or four times. That’s an all time low.

In my past life I would have gotten home from work, had something to eat, maybe cleaned the house a little and then hit the gym.

Now I’m doing things like bathing my daughter, offering my wife support and then doing the everyday items. By the time I’ve finished that the gym is usually closed.

I have investigated a few other options, like working out during my lunch break. Unfortunately the gyms close to my work all charge a fortune.

My only other option is to wake up really early and visit the gym before I head off to work in the morning. I work quite a long distance from home, so it would be an extremely early start on the back of fairly broken sleep thanks to the little one. 

It has given me a lot of time to think about the gym and life.

I guess for a lot of people on Bodyspace, the gym is their life, their love, their passion and their obsession. I’m starting to question that to a degree. I’m sure a lot of people will disagree with what I’m going to say, but I don’t really care.

The thing I’ve realized is that the gym will never hug you, smile at you or love you. It won’t support you in tough times. It doesn’t care. If you are on your deathbed tomorrow, would you be regretting not spending enough time at the gym? Missing out on that chest workout? 

Fitness is still important to me and always will be, but life comes first.

I haven’t updated this for a while. I’ve been quite busy.

I’m happy with how things are going. I’ve lost bodyfat and my clothes are all fitting as they were prior to the bulk. I haven’t had my bodyfat tested but I’d say it’s more or less the same as it was.

My weight is about 3kg above what is was before the bulk, so it seems like I put on some decent muscle. I think most of it was in my legs, arms and shoulders.

I’m now planning on adding mass to my chest and back to balance things out. I have a lot of trouble getting my chest to grow because my arms tend to take the load on movements like the bench press.

 I’ve switched my workouts to a four day split rather than the full body workouts I was doing. I’ll also slightly work chest a bit more and add in some more isolation exercises.

Nutrition wise I’ll just slowly add more calories and protein. I’m not planning on doing a bulk as such, but slowly and consistently increase calories.

I’m also going to be a Dad very soon which is exciting. I’m not sure what sort of effect this will have on my workouts. If if they need to take a backseat for a while, so be it. As much as I love working out, family comes first.

I’ve spent the past few weeks changing my workouts.

I’ve been really working hard on my chest. I’ve been trying more isolation work because compound workouts seem to be pretty ineffective, working my arms hard but not my chest. I have also added in partial bench presses, only doing the bottom third of the full range of motion, which, apparently works the chest but not the arms.

I have also been doing some wide grip pullups. Pullups in themselves aren’t hard but a really slow technique with full extension at the bottom really works the lats.

For shoulders I’ve been doing cable lat raises. I find that the cables constantly exert stress on the muscle where dumbells don’t. I have also been doing clean and presses which also work a few more muscles at the same time. Even abs!

 For legs I’ve just stuck with squats. Can’t go wrong there.

My plan is to keep this up for a few more weeks and look to up my calories slowly.

I’ve spent most of week 16 thinking about where I want to head in the next few weeks. I feel like I need to focus on my chest.

Cutting is going well. I’m trying not to cut too fast and lose muscle. Did a few cardio sessions and lifting sessions. My pants are looser and I can see better ab definition. I’m not planning on getting ultra ripped at this point though.

In my last bulking phase I added a lot of size to my arms and shoulders but not to my chest.

After reading a couple of articles, I realised that when I do exercise like the bench press, my arms take most of the weight.

Yesterday I tried only doing the bottom third of the bench press movement, which is when the pecs are taking most of the strain. My chest is really sore today, so it seems like it worked.

I’m keen to really work my chest hard from here on and see what improvements I can make.