Patrick227’s BodyBlog

My friend Daemen in Belgium sent me this link on an easy way to calculate body fat:

http://www.he.net/~zone/prothd2.html

My latest progress has come from a new exercise technique I got from Jeff Anderson, the Muscle Nerd.  It works best with a selectorized machine.  The idea is to start with as heavy a weight as good form allows and push out 10-12 reps.  Then, quickly reduce the weight 10-15 lbs. and push out as many as possible reps.  Then, reduce the weight again and do as many more as possible until you are "pushing air" as Jeff says. This is ONE set!  Wow!  Does this make my muscles sore! 

For a long time I have had difficulty inducing that soreness which I’m told is necessary for growth to occur.   A couple days ago I worked out on the hip adduction and abduction machines.  Wow!  Were my inner thighs sore. And, my upper thighs have taken on a completely different sinuous shape they’ve never had before. 

Today, I worked out on my 10-speed bike on a nearby old military base and gave my thighs a really hard work out.  The bike riding has done more for my legs than the weight training.  My thighs are taking on a kind of carved appearance like you see in statuary and muscle seems to be replacing subcutaneous fat which had been quite thick!

I’m a committed bike rider now - even going at night and using the illuminated streets on the old military base for safety sake because I achieve some pretty goods speed in order to work my thighs as much as possible.  

I became a member of Bodybuilding.com in July, 2006.  Since then I have experienced gradual physical changes.   As I have become more and more lean the changes have happened more slowly - this despite my having recently added regular bicycling to my training regimen and having continued to maintain a very Spartan diet.  

 This morning, October 12, 2007, I noticed that the area between the serratus anterior group of muscles and the external obliques, where the latter insert themselves into the pelvis, has become noticeably sunken and more defined - suggesting a further loss of subcutaneous fat. 

 This confirms, however, my suspicion that the fat on the lower most portion of the external obliques (the love handles) will be the LAST to go.  Body builders, new to the sport, should bear this in mind.   If they attempt to build muscle through cycles of “bulking” and “cutting” they may never get rid of those stubborn fat deposits holding out in problem areas like the external obliques. 

There are programs out there, such as the Muscle Nerd program, that I follow, which allow one to lose fat and build muscle.   Bodybuilders can follow such a program and never accumulate fat in the wrong places or do it the HARD way, as I am doing, and take a couple of years  to  get their bodies right!

Tom Venuto in his book, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, says that it is not possible to build muscle simultaneously with burning fat.  Unfortunately, many if not most, bodybuilders interpret this as requiring extended periods of ”cutting” and “bulking”.   This is obsolete and discredited bodybuilding technique.   Above all, this is not what Venuto means when he says you cannot build muscle and burn fat simultaneously.  For example, his accelerated fat loss program permits one to burn fat for three days and then take on enough calories to maintain or add muscular weight on the fourth or fifth day.  Big difference and good news for body builders who don’t want to waste time, effort and money in achieving their body building goals. 

Yesterday a fellow user of this website agreed to grant my request that he send me his abs routine, because I am really  focusing right now on abs and this guy, gettherefaster,  has KILLER abs.   Those are abs to die for!  Haha! 

 Anyway, I was going to give him my gmail address so that he could send it to me when he said that he would just put the routine on his blog and I could get it there. 

THAT IS WHEN IT HIT ME!    In just a few weeks there have been over 700 hits on my blog.  Little ol’ me is getting over 700 on my blog; and the hits on my BodySpace have been over 6,000!  This isn’t a brag - just stating a fact! 

My point is that knowledge is power!  If we put good information in our BLOGs, the technology being what it is, a lot of good will come out of it.   

So, BOTTOM LINE, don’t just trade information through posted comments.  If you have something good to share, share it with the other users of the site by following gettherefaster’s example and post it on your BLOG.

There was a person very near and dear to me who taught me that a delicious dessert at the end of the day’s principal meal was something we earned, deserved, and, by God, we were going to eat! Boy, did I eat it!  I developed a real reputation around the dessert table!  I became kind of a laughing stock for the way I went after desserts at parties and other social events. 

After living to a ripe old age, that very near and dear person contracted bone cancer and died a lingering and painful death.  This shocked me, and, suddenly, I concluded that it was the refined sugar in those desserts that had resulted in the person’s death from bone cancer.  Like that, I was off refined sugar.  Dessert became some fresh fruit - that’s all! 

That was going on two years ago.  Lo, and behold, I started losing body fat. For years I had been going to the gym and pumping iron.  Now,  things began to happen physically that never happened before as I started to get more and more defined.

I have discovered a number of things in the last two years that helped me to build a better and better body, but, going off refined sugar has to rank as the biggest contributor to my physical improvement.  I would like to think that I could have done this without the death of a loved one.  I’m not sure about that. 

I suppose each one of us must find his own motivation!

http://www.sharebigfile.com/file/117780/Muscle-Nerd-Outline-pdf.html

Wish I had pictures to show how I looked a year ago.  So, you’ll just have to take my word for it that there has been a transformation in the way my physique looks now compared to back  then.

 I owe most of this to the Muscle Nerd program which has a link on Bodybuilding.com.  Muscle Nerd has two free chapters which give you for nothing a tip you will likely never see anyone else using in the gym where you work out. I haven’t.  This tip shows you a iron pumping technique which recruits both the fast twitch and slow twitch muscles in your body.   This alone is a huge advantage and really starts things growing.

The rest of the program tells you how in various ways to stimulate the body naturally to produce testosterone, which Jeff Anderson says is the ONLY way to produce muscle growth!

Check it out!

Maffie2 of Singapore put me onto the carb cycling diet.   His progress photos indicated that he made some awesome progress with it.   I’m already pretty lean - just going for the nth degree of leanness before I stop cutting.  So, I am not doing all three days of this diet - just the NO carbohydrate day.  Otherwise, I am eating pretty much as before while taking protein in between the normal meals.  Anyway, it is already working even as modified and I have lost 1% of bf.   The diet may be found at:

                      
               http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/par30.htm 

BODY FAT CALCULATOR

I had been looking for a good way to measure body fat after I got too lean and I ran off the chart of the Muscle Nerd program that I follow.  The calipers that I had first used, also, were useless after a certain leanness was reached.  I talked to one user of the site and he said that he paid an instructor at the gym, where he works out, to have his bf measured. He said the instructor used a set of calipers.  Finally, Daemen, a user of this site from Belgium, referred me to, of all things, the United States Navy circumference method of body fat calculation!  It can be found at:

                                  http://www.he.net/~zone/prothd2.html

Welcome to the Bodybuilding.com BodyBlogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!