Raashid’s BodyBlog

First post-vacation workout oday and felt weaaaak.  Got a few months of bulking up to do, people think I look skinny, the ignoramuses don’t understand that’s what low body fat % does whilst you’re wearing clothes, the effect is when you’re not wearing a shirt!

Just one week left of this gruelling cut cycle and I make the mistake of going to a work-organised fitness "analysis".  These know-nothings passing themselves as experts gave me a bodyfat measurement of a whopping 17%, and gave a waif-like female colleague a classification of borderline obese.  Just goes to show that for real fitness analysis one should consult proper bodybuilding sources of knowledge!

Not tha I’m the only one who ever took up bodybuilding, in fact judging by Nasser El Sonbaty it’s no hindrance as such.
I’m talking about the hassle of the specs themselves.  In my haste to get out of work and straight to the gym I forgot to put my contact lenses in and didn’t have any in my bag.  So I get a workout with the annoying frames jerking and slipping down my nose over each rep.  On top of that, colleagues are saying my specs make me look like Gok Wan (disgusting!) or better, Dean Cain (Superman yaaay!).  Nerds just get it in the neck whether they have a great body or not!

Yes I know, makes me sound like a right scrooge bah humbug and all that.  ANy normal person loves the Xmas holiday period.  But there’s the rub - bodybuilders are no normal people.  If we were we’d be happy to be stuffing ourselves with chocolate cake all week and add an extra inch to our midriffs and then make a resolution to get fit in the new year, which would last all of a week!
Actually, I liked the time off work of course, in the UK we get 3 extra days off (my last job gave us the entire week!) but as any bodybuilder knows, the workouts are all important and of course the gym’s opening hours are erratic over that period.  You’d think working in the fitness business they’d understand how we feel and stay open as normal!
Anyway, I’m glad that from tomorrow I can stick to my proper training regime, I have 2 months to get ripped before I head to Brazil and it’s sunny beaches!

Second attempt at a dedicated cut cycle began today.  I’m trying something different this time.  Last time I cut calories to 1500-1800 per day and found myself seriously weakened and lost loads of muscle

This time, I’m going to eat loads of meat and fish, supplementing with protein shakes and just cut out all carbs except for breakfast.  Do that for 3 days then have a day of carb indulgence before starting the 3-day-on, one-day-off cycle again.  Also aim to keep increasing strength as I go on and consume some more essential fats.  I need to find me a supplier of flaxseed oil!

As someone who was plagued with lower back pain for most of his youth, it was pleasant tohave enjoyed a few years of back-pain free training - until last Monday.

"Heavy" squats did for my lower back again and put all my training out for the rest of the week, eating into my bulking.  I put heavy in quotes - because of late they’ve not been as heavy as they were at the end of my last bulk cycle.  I now seem to have identified the cause of my back problem:  a left leg slightly shorter then my right.  Whether this is some natural defect or something that has been caused by years of bad training form I don’t know, but squats have of late always tilted to my left.

Anyway, I’m going to have to put squats on the back burner for the foreseeable future.  I’ll have to use hack squats as my main thigh exercise and use light squats as my supplementary exercise.  Let’s just hope it doesn’t result in dramatic decrease in leg strength!

After a two week hiatus from training to allow myself to get accustomed to the hardest Ramadan fasting I can remember I finally mustered the will to go to the gym today at 1.30pm, having not eaten since 04.20am.  I immediatley felt the difference the lack of food makes to training.  My squats, which had been performed with impeccable form with 80kg I could just squeeze out 3 sets of 6, my chins with 10kg were pretty slack in form and I had to lower the weight for my skullcrushers, which have become the only effective tricep exercise I can perform.
Rehan Jalili’s advice to train after breaking fast would make sense, but after a long day at work without food and the long journey home (I started a new job just as Ramadan started) I just cannot muster the energy to get to the gym and back before evening prayers.
It’s times like these I need a 24 hour gym!

I got a timely reinder of the dangers of training without spotters yesterday.  When lowering the EZ bar for my aptly named "skullcrushers", I hit my head and had a headache for the rest of the day feeling unwell.  Though it weren’t serious, it could easily have been.

A pity, the workout was going so well but that and a backpain made me cut it short!

My workouts have been starting off quite lazy of late.  Catchingthe tube to the gym in the July heat, I normally wake up abruptly at my stop from a fairly good slumber.
Which makes me wonder, the alternating cut and bulk cycles are meant to be timed so that we look our best when we’re likely to be flashing the most flesh: summertime?  Makes sense, but for that to work, we’d have to begin a cut cycle before the sun comes out.  For those of us in the northern hemisphere, summer typically means June-August.  Given that bodyfat can generally only be reduced by around 1% a month, presumably even a reasonably in shape guy will therefore need to start cutting from March/April as I did.  I finished my cut cycle at the end of June and am now bulking up again, whereas I see most guys in the gym are still cutting.  What gives?  Shaping up those abs, just to show them off for a week at the end of August?

But this attempt to bulk up in summer doesn’t sit right either.  These long summer afternoons induce a laziness that winter doesn’t.  As I stated earlier, I’m just waking up from commuters siesta when I get to the gym.  And I tend t not have the appetite in summer so am having to resort to meal replacement drinks. Yuck!

So it begs the question for obsessed bodybuilders.  What to do in summer?

Just when the second week of training was going well, an old weak link prevented me really blitzing my lats: "*** hands" as Jake La Motta called them.  Puny, girly small hands which cause me to lose grip before the actual lats are fully  pummelled.  Skinny forearms fail as well.
UPDATE: Apologies for the offence that seems to have been caused judging by the first comments I’ve got on my blog, put it down as the eccentric British sense of humour.  I’m more surprised that somone actually read one of my posts