engineer88’s BodyBlog

My wife and daughter fly out Wednesday and I have everything in place.  I am aiming mostly for cutting so I have my calories and my meals planned out.  I am hoping to drop at least ten pounds by the time they get back.  I have been dialing in the diet a bit tighter and with the exception of a week or two here and there I have been getting my lifting in pretty regularly.  Now I have just started to add some cardio.  I have purposefully not weighed in two days.  I am not gonna weigh until Wednesday when I start my program.

One crazy thing is I have went from 2-3 meals a day max to now eating literally 6-8 times a day.  Sometimes it is just a a lowfat cheese stick, an apple, orange or some other fruit, handful of nuts or sunflower seeds (unsalted),  heck sometimes I just eat 3-4 peices of coldcuts (none of the ‘honey roasted’ variety), or if at home I will cook some meat or oatmeal, etc.

It has been hard to make myself eat so often and to eat less per meal at lunch and dinner (my former two meals a day), but I am starting to get the hang of it and I feel a lot less weighed down during the day.  I am hoping the metabolism will speed up and my insulin level will…well level out.  I was getting the leathery back of the neck, which is a sign of insulinemia or insulin resistance, one or the other,  I forget which.  Would figure my fat arse would give myself AOD with all those sugary sodas.  But after only having 3-20 oz. sodas in 2 and a half weeks, the back of my neck is clearing up, it is crazy how resilient  the body is.

Now I am buying no sugar added fruit juices only for my daughter and myself (although I hardly ever drink any myself), everything is no preservatives added and low sodium.  I am not all over the low fat, because those are often packed with HFCS and salt to make up for lack of taste and I am not a fan of man messing with how the Good Lord made it for us.  If it is that bad for ya (whatever it is), just leave it out of your diet.

Anyhow, hopefully it goes well!  I am looking forward to being a little lighter.  =)

All my numbers look so small, because I do dumbbells on almost everything but bent over rows and I am just now starting to bench with the bar.  Plus my deadlift numbers are for stiff legged only.  I am using the calculator on everything, I never go for maxes so I am not sure how accurate it is.  Oh well, I guess it is not really important.  =P

The big thing is to keep on moving back up on the poundages to my original weights and that I am getting stronger and not fatter.  =)

I just realized that I hit a goal and I have had a gallon of water a day for over two weeks now.  I set the goal and forgot about it because I have made it a routine to do so every day.  Sometimes habits are actually good, LOL.

Missed working out all last week, it sucked.  So whaddya do?  Work out that much harder.  Which I did tonight.  I added some new exercises, tweaked some stuff and went up 5lbs. on several more exercises.  I didn’t have a partner tonight and sometimes those are the best workouts.  I was supersetting and trisetting like crazy.  I actually got my heart rate up for a while there.
Felt great, then I felt like puking for an hour and a half, and now I am shaky, a bit dizzy and completely tired.  I am headed to bed to get a full 6 hours of sleep.  Just what the doctor ordered.  Would have liked it to be seven but I could not do that and work out tonight.  It is still better then the 4 and a 1/2 hours I got last night.   Well, glutamine and some gabba and I am  off to dreamland.  =)

Very soon my wife and daughter are going to be out of town for two weeks.  I am going to miss them, but it does give me a heck of an opportunity to punish my body in a big way.  So I have devised a 6 day workout schedule to completely shock my body and get some fresh gains going.  I have purposely planned it to be heavy on the upper body since my thighs are naturally pretty large and do not need a lot of work, just some tightening up every now and then.

I have gotten my home gym set up pretty good, I even have a plate rack.  It is a very nice one made by Reebok that I got from Target.  My only problem is I just really need some dumbbell handles that allow me to put more plates on them.  I am starting to run out of room on them and it is bugging me.  Right now it is only affecting shrugs and chest presses but I am almost out of room, my next gain will force me to have to figure something out.  I think the ones I have are 14 inch and that seems to be the standard.  Hopefully I can find something longer out there. If anyone knows of one, please let me know.
I have also been tweaking the diet a bit and trying to eat smaller portions and do so more often.  I find it really hard to do, probably THE toughest thing I am doing with the diet.  I usually do good until dinner and then end up eating big.  I know, I know!!!  The worst thing/time I could do it.  I think I just need to up the portion a tad bit more in the afternoons or at lunch time and that may help with it I guess.  Any suggestions on that would be much appreciated.

Well, after lifting steady for a couple of months now and not changing the diet I have managed to gain 12 pounds.  Although this would make a lot of people absolutely ecstatic I am focusing a bit more on moving the scale the other way at the moment.  So now I need to get myself into a minor calorie deficit and start slowly dropping some fat.  I gotta be honest though and admit that I still have not added the cardio, so that is also a factor, but I wanna get the diet nailed in just a bit tighter.

I am going to automate a few meals a day (a term from the You book series where you basically eat the same thing every day) to make it easier to control the numbers/amounts.  So probably breakfast, first snack and lunch will be the same every day and possibly second snack time too.  It makes it easier to plan and to go grocery shopping as well.  I will see how this does, but I am also going to try getting in cardio a few times a week too.  That should strat sending the scale in the right direction.  =)

I picked some up and have been using it now for the past couple of nights and I gotta say: WOW!  It works wonders.  I had been waking up 2-3+ times a night, and so far 2 nights in a row with not waking up once and feeling much more refreshed in the morning.  I take it an hour or two before sleeping and I am taking the recommended dose of 750mg.  This may become a regular supplement for me.  It is pretty dirt cheap too, $14.95 for a 3 month supply.  Not too shabby.

Moved up 5 pounds on about 1/3rd of my chest exercises tonight.  A few of the sets I ran 2 reps short, but it was still nice to pile a little more on.  My biggest problem has been how weak my arms got in my time off.  They were so weak I was having a hard time getting a killer workout on my other body parts.  But the good news is I am starting to catch up.  It is close.  Probably another month and I will be where I need to be.

Tonight was a killer though.  I have been done working out for almost a half hour now and I am still a bit nasueated.  So I should be good and sore in two days.  I am looking forward to it.  That will be back day and I will get a good stretch in my chest.  Good timing.  =)

I may have to do some measuring soon.  I know the sleeves of my shirts are getting nice and tight again.  Man I LOVE that feeling!!!

I took a step back recently and took a hard look at my habits and normal daily routine in an effort to find a root cause for some of the lackluster gains (and losses) I am currently making.  I am always tweaking.   =P

One of the main things I realized is that since my college days I have been getting 2-5 hours of sleep a night and crashing once on the weekend to try to catch up.  Well, it is a bad cycle because even if I catch up by Tuesday or so I am sluggish and wore out again.  The time I felt the healthiest in my life was a stretch of about a year (5 years ago) since college where I was getting 8-10 hours of sleep a night and working out 5 days a week.  I felt great and lost 8% body fat at that time.

Since then my diet is way better now, and I am back to working out but I seem to be losing less body fat and feeling more run down and catch myself cheating more often.  I finally figured it out (I am not the sharpest tool in the shed), that the sleep is drastically affecting me.  The less sleep I get the more I reach out to food or sugary/caffeinated drinks for energy.  I have been sabotaging myself with the lack of sleep on a regular basis.

So I am now making a concerted effort to get at least 7-8 hours of sleep a night and to do so I have dropped some other activities that were taking up too much time and this will hopefully give me more time to sleep.  I am also gonna see about picking up some Gabba or maybe ZMA to make my sleep a bit more steady as I have been waking up 2-3 times a night now and I never used to do that.  The increase in GH while I am sleeping and repairing my body cannot hurt either, LOL.

My only issue with ZMA is the no dairy thing and I like some cassien before bed to keep me from going catabolic while sleeping.  I will have to try it out and see what works best I guess.

As I am getting back steady into lifting, I am moving the lbs. per set up as much as possible. It is amazing how much more 5lbs. per set will kick your butt.  I moved up again tonight and I am positively beat.  I feel like I was in a fight.  Here is my current set (I am now doing 1 set of 16-20 with 4 seconds up and down on rep speed and 2 sets of 8-10 with the second set being 1-2 seconds on the push and 3-4 seconds on the lowering of the weight and as absolutely much weight as I can push up without my eyes popping out of my skull):

Incline Dumbbell Press

Flat Dumbbell Fly

Bench Press

Dumbbell Shrugs

Side Latteral Dumbbell Raises

Front Latteral Dumbbell Raises

I really like the higher volume of total reps.  I feel much more fatigued and muscle endurance is important to me as well as looking better.  It just feels like a better workout that way.  I am going nice and steady on my lifts and feeling every rep work the muscle I am trying to grow.  Making my form as perfect as possible (aside from a lil shaking on the last rep or two on occasion, haha) is a focus for me every time I lift. I am feeling stronger every day and the poundages I am lifting every workout are moving up more and more to prove it.  It is a great feeling!