D.Alan’s BodyBlog

Last night was my monthly measurement night and for about the third or fourth straight month in a row, there are no significant changes.  My chest is down a quarter inch this time, but everything else is the same as last month.  I am not surprised at the chest measurement as there is still fat there and on my midsection to lose, and the BF% pinches keep coming down, albeit very slowly.  The BF pinch total is down another mm or so over last week.  Again, slowly but surely.  My pinch total for some time now has been less than my stomach pinch alone was the first time I did a BF pinch.

So, I guess I am officially on a plateau.  I have made steady progress for most of the time I have been at this, starting in late October 2007, until the last few months.  Time to change things up, I suppose, but it’s tough to come up with other things to do when one has only a set of dumbbells.  I can’t do anything involving cables or barbells since I don’t have any of that stuff.  I have slowly upped the weight on some of things that I do, but I try to do it when I can handle the weight w/o sacrificing form, so weight-upping has come very slowly.  Any of you CPTs out there looking for a challenge, PM me and I’ll let you know what I have been doing and maybe you can come up with a new routine that’ll get me making some progress again.

It’s not to say that I haven’t improved in the time I have been at this.  One of the things I have upped the reps on is close-hand pushups for hitting the tris.  When I first started into this seriously it was all I could do to get three sets of 10 reps in, and I even found I note in my exercise log from those early days that "close hand pushups are HARD!"  I can now do three sets of 20 of those, and can probably bump those up a couple more reps each again.  At first it was all I could do to lift 20 lb DBs for alternating bicep curls, now on a good night I can do 10 reps of 25 lbs on the last set!  I’ve previously mentioned being now able to do a sitting leg lift thing where when sitting on the floor you put your hands on either side of you and lift your butt and legs off the floor in a pike or "L" position… I never could have even thought of doing that before I started lifting seriously.  It’s not like all my hard work hasn’t resulted in any improvements.

We’ve been having some summer-like weather here the last few days and I have been outside in the sleeveless shirts… not quite ready to shed the shirt entirely yet!  Still not ripped enough, and probably won’t be this summer as I had hoped all through the winter.  Also my arms don’t look all that great out in the bright sun, despite all my work.  That was a little depressing.  But it’s great to have the good weather around and get outside and do some yard work or whatever.  It also means it’s bicycle season again so I can get some add’l exercise riding the bike on errands and such.

However, I still need to drop some BF and build some muscle so I need to keep liftin’.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2009 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Training, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.