UncleverName’s BodyBlog

I currently have 2 upper body days a week, and 2 lower body days. I pair them together, and do heavy upper body followed by light/stability lower body, then vice versa two days later.

Recently, I realized that I wasn’t spending enough time on my shoulders and arms, so I crammed those into the tail end of my upper body workout. To make this work, I basically changed my upper body workout to be 3 sets each of upper cable flys and lower cable flys, supersetted with upper and lower reverse cable fly for my back. I did some warm up of my shoulders, chest and back, but that was about it, followed by exercises for my arms and shoulders.

Last week, when doing the flys, I went a bit heavier, and I really concentrated on contracting my chest muscles. It worked great, but left my back feeling really tired and sore for the next few days. I didn’t stretch enough afterwards, and doing anything that resembles an incline press tightens the crap out of my pec minor muscles, which causes them to pull on my rhomboid area, which causes my back to get sore (in the area between my shoulder blades). So…

I’m going to throw in more stability work after my cable flys. I’m going to start doing scapular retractions, reverse scapular retractions with a barbell, and an exercise that is like ’stirring the soup’ with a dumbbell. Hopefully that will help expand that tight region around my rhomboids. The trick will be fitting those new stability exercises in with the arm and shoulder work, and not going too much over an hour.

I just clicked through the most recently added photos in the galleries yesterday. I used to do this more often, but realized that wasting time looking at other people’s (amazing) bodies wouldn’t give me more time to work on my own. One of the programs I work in was taking a long time to process something, so I switched over to glance at some photos, figuring it wouldn’t waste time I didn’t really have anyways.

And I got a bit discouraged! Does anyone else react like that? Looking at the average photo posted on this site makes me feel fat and small. I keep reading about how most magazine cover models are photoshopped to hell, and that most of them do steroids. While that’s believable to me for most magazine covers, I seriously doubt that most people posting here have photoshopped their pictures. I doubt that the majority of them are on steroids as well. At any rate, looking at many of the photos here makes me think that I could never look like that. The upshot? I need to stop looking at photos on this site again for awhile

Something else I’m struggling with recently is being tired all of the time. I started doing HIIT this week again. About 3 times this week, for no more than 20 minutes each time. So I’m doing that, four (intense) 1 hour work outs a week and one 1 hour indoor rock climbing session. That’s about it for now. No yoga, no 10K runs. I’m getting 8+ hours of sleep a night. And I’m eating 2200 calories a day, at least. Yet I’m still tired. I’m wondering if it’s lack of calories, or lack of sleep. When I wake up in the morning, I’m still dead tired, and it’s a struggle to get out of bed. It wasn’t like that a couple of weeks ago. Maybe that’s normal? Or maybe it’s a lack of calories? I’m trying to cram more food into my mouth, but 2200 just isn’t enough. I should be getting 2500 at least, I think. But I have actually managed to put on a pound or two in the last couple of weeks, consistently. I guess I will up my calories again, and see if that makes a difference.

I just had an awesome deadlifting session yesterday. Managed to do 3 reps at 295lbs. Not a ton of weight, but a lot for me. Almost twice my body weight. That’s exciting, for me.

I’ve decided to set some new goals for this year. I still want to have visible abs, and I still want to put on some muscle. For the moment, I’m going to put the abs on the back burner. I’m going to focus on putting on quality mass, and lifting heavier weight.

My goal for this year is to lift 900 pounds. I’m going to divide this up between deadlifting (400 lbs goal), bench press (250 lbs goal) and power cleans (250 lbs goal). Should be tough, but achievable. I can already deadlift 300 lbs (almost), bench press 200 lbs (almost). My weakest lift is the power clean. And of course, getting my lifts up to those numbers will be tough. But the power clean is the one I’m the most worried about.

To facilitate this, I’m going to continue on with my quest to eat as much good food as possible. My last 4 months of bulking was actually going ok, until christmas. I took a break from training, then got sick. I managed to lose weight after this. How, considering how much pure craptastic food (health-wise) that I ate, is beyond me. I think my body only wants to put on weight when I’m training hard, and eating harder. To make the weight gain work, I’m keeping a food log. This will force me to be honest with myself about how much food I’m actually eating.

Hopefully this will make for a great 2009

So I’ve decided to get serious about bulking. Over the next two months (till christmas) I’m going to basically eat as much as I can. I’m trying for at least 3000 calories. To get there, I’m going to continue eating the way I normally do (around 2000 calories a day) but throw in a couple of extra peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Two of those a day should give me an extra 800 calories at least. I also bought a tub of cytogainer. I’m going to try half a serving of that. Hopefully combined with 3 days of heavy lifting, 1 - 2 times a week sprinting (4 x 400 meters), 1 time a week indoor rock climbing and hot yoga 3 times a week, I will put on some decent muscle. I’m going to completely ignore the mirror, and not worry about any fat I put on. The limit will be that I’m not willing to buy any new pants, so if my waste line gets too tight, I’ll reduce my calories. I have a couple of inches space to spare on most of my pants, so that should give me plenty of space.
In the new year, I will reduce the number of calories I’m consuming again, try to eat cleaner, and focus on a bit more cardio (if I need to). I have my suspicions that if I reduce the calorie intake a bit, the fat will come off on it’s own.
I’ll see how that goes.

So I’ve decided to get serious about bulking. Over the next two months (till christmas) I’m going to basically eat as much as I can. I’m trying for at least 3000 calories. To get there, I’m going to continue eating the way I normally do (around 2000 calories a day) but throw in a couple of extra peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Two of those a day should give me an extra 800 calories at least. I also bought a tub of cytogainer. I’m going to try half a serving of that. Hopefully combined with 3 days of heavy lifting, 1 - 2 times a week sprinting (4 x 400 meters), 1 time a week indoor rock climbing and hot yoga 3 times a week, I will put on some decent muscle. I’m going to completely ignore the mirror, and not worry about any fat I put on. The limit will be that I’m not willing to buy any new pants, so if my waste line gets too tight, I’ll reduce my calories. I have a couple of inches space to spare on most of my pants, so that should give me plenty of space.
In the new year, I will reduce the number of calories I’m consuming again, try to eat cleaner, and focus on a bit more cardio (if I need to). I have my suspicions that if I reduce the calorie intake a bit, the fat will come off on it’s own.
I’ll see how that goes.

So after having it for years, I finally decided (a few months back) that I’d get surgery and have it taken care of.

The surgery occurred 3 days ago. From what I’d read, I was expecting to be walking around fine, and without pain, within 2 days. Turns out that’s not quite the case. The swelling has gone down around the cut itself, but certain other unmentionable areas are really blue and bruised looking.

The surgery I ended up getting was a large incision (not laparoscopic, as I was expecting), and insertion of a kevlar mesh. So I’m bullet proof now, but it will probably take another month before I’m ready to hit the gym again. Which really sucks; I’m having a really difficult time taking it easy. I want to be up and about. I already miss doing weights, yoga, rock climbing, running and being independent. Not that I really need someone to wait on me, but just getting out of bed hurts right now.

Ok, until I really need it again, enough whining. It’s not like it’s going to heal faster if I whine more

Timing wasn’t working out with my trainer last week, and I did rock climbing about 4 times, so with all of the training and yoga I had done, I was pretty beat. I took last week off and did yoga 3 times. I also did a 45 minute run, as training for the Sun Run that I’m doing on Sunday, the 23rd of April (or something like that). Because of the Sun Run, I took it easy with my trainer this week, doing stability stuff (wobble board, single leg deadlifts, core work). I’m going to do the same next week, and the following week, I’m getting my hernia operated on, so we’ll see how that goes.

Now I realize that this post isn’t strictly about bodybuilding, but it is about ab/core work, and I thought it was relevant.

So I’m doing hot yoga the other day (on Wednesday). It was the afternoon class, and it wasn’t that full (maybe 12 of us, total). It’s Hot Yoga, but not Bikram’s. I don’t know what Bikram’s is yet, but this is Asana, I think. Since Christmas, they’ve gotten requests to do more core work, so about halfway through the class, the teacher has us flat on our backs, feet in the air, toes pointed towards the wall behind our head. They get us to breath in and lift our sacrum (so our feet are up even higher), then breath out and lift our shoulder blades off the floor. We do this about 5 times, and my core is really tired, plus my shoulders/neck/back are tired as well. This is about the time, doing the crunch where I bring my shoulder blades off the matt, that I can’t hold back anymore, and without even realizing it, a short and fast fart leaves me. It didn’t smell thankfully, but it was quite audible, and someone on the other side of the room laughed. I couldn’t help but smile, even though I was embarrassed. I suspect at this point that I’m taking too much protein. Anyways, doing core work sometimes brings out the worst in me.