TPower81’s BodyBlog

I’ve been back in the gym this past week and its been rough and slow!  Anyways, I weighed myself the other day and I’ve lost weight…this coming from a person who is trying hard to gain weight!  I think I must just not be eating enough (thats obvious) but I’ve really been trying to eat more.  I eat a lot of red meat, as well as other meats, and have been eating protein every 3 hours.  I’ll post my diet one of these days…

The other thing I’ve been stuck on is my back.  I can’t seem to get growth out of it and I haven’t been able to up weights.  I have two problems, other than I can’t seem to gain muscle back there.  First is most of the time I can’t hold on to the machines long enough to get a good back workout in.  I generally do 10 sets of 10 on the lat pulldown followed by 3 sets of 8 on the iso row machine to finish.  By the time I get to the end of my 10 sets I can barely hold on to the bar, and then on iso row its just excruciating to hold on to!  I feel like my grip is keeping me from progressing in my weight.

I started using those straps which helps a bit but I have such small hands that it almost makes it worse, because I can’t around the bar as much as without the straps.  Any ideas on this would be a great help.

 Also, if you have any ideas on a better back exercise to be doing with GVT I’m all ears.  I think bent over barbell rows would be great but I don’t know with my lower back issues, how well that would actually work out.

My chest workout which consists of med grip bench and either cable flys or dumbell flys is going great.  I’ve been able to add 10 lbs per workout to the bench and now I’m up to 165.  This is equal to a max bench weight of 300-320 lbs so I feel like I’m making progress.

Me legs are going great too.  I had to switch to leg press instead of squats but I’d like to work squats back into the routine when I’m not trying to do the 10 set method.  I’ll probably do both squats and leg press to get more weight on my legs without worrying about my lower back limiting on the squats.

 I’m not sure how much the sled weighs on one of those things but last week I did 10 sets of 360 lbs pretty easily.  Then 195 on the leg extensions, and 125 on leg curls.  Today is another leg workout and I’m going to try and increase sets on leg curls to get a good hammy burn.  I’ll throw another 45lbs on the sled too for the leg presses.

 So in summary, lol, GVT gives me great workouts and I’m glad I’m feeling sore afterwards again but so far I don’t see any muscle growth and I think that is because of my diet.  I’d like to stay away from creatine type supplements but its hard not to when you feel like your gym workouts are being wasted.

So…I’ve gotten so used to eating around 2400 calories that eating 3000-3500 is pretty hard, especially on weekends when we sleep in late and go to bed a bit earlier!  Today I felt full pretty much all day, and only ended up eating roughly 2600 calories. 

New favorite food is tuna though.  I grew up not liking it for some reason…but now I love it.  Had a great tuna/tomato omlette this morning.  Good stuff. 

 Back has been bothering me a bit today, more than usually.  Hopefully a good sleep will heal it up.  Tommorow I’m going to do cardio and core, which usually aggravates my back a bit.  We’ll see how it goes.

 Watched biggest loser tonight, the series premier.  Wow.

Good luck to everyone in 2008, here’s to achieving!