TLC: Trust, Love, Consistency

Are you having a good day or a bad one? How about your workout? Are people hassling you at work?Too much to get done?

How you perceive all of the above has much more importance than what’s happened. If you got all that crazy work done, or even planned how you’re going to get through it then why isn’t this a good day? If you even made it to the gym, you did better than a lot of people. If you resisted the urge to crawl under your desk, well done!

So, if you’re having a bad day, what are the good bits?

If you’re having a good day, stay focused, stay strong and create your future.

Me? I’m flat out, but I had a lovely 45min walk with the hound this morning and I’ve got Pilates at lunchtime and the best shoulder workout of my life this evening.

Morning weight: 62.5kg (137.8lb) down 1kg
Yesterday’s cardio: 30 mins/139calories neighborhood dog walk
Yesterday’s weights: 50 mins/ 149calores, lats & traps
Yesterday’s water: about 4L

I didn’t get to bed early enough last night and then I lay in bed getting anxious about the weight not dropping and whether I should have carbed up last night. Consequentially I got 7 hours of very poor quality sleep. I almost ditched my morning walk, but luckily I have a demanding training partner, who, after a few throws of the frisbee will drag me up and down all the hills in my neighborhood.

Here’s my training partner, Kevin, ready as always for action.

Before I left for my walk I put some quinoa on in the rice cooker. I swear this is the best and easiest way to make quinoa. Rather than one big carb meal at the end of the day, I thought I’d steel just a tiny bit of the carbs for breaky and my pre-workout meal this evening. It was nice and fluffy and warming but not really enough to bring me back to life. I made sure I had my almond butter with it, to avoid the insulin spike.

Please excuse my diet addled brain in yesterday’s ramblings. I now realise oatmeal isn’t made from wheat, it is however a more refined grain than what I was thinking of.

So, what have I decided on for my carb meal? If I’m feeling a bit Gordan Ramsey (actually I prefer Bill Grainger, he’s much more down to earth and cuter), I’ll be fixing the following:

Grilled polenta, topped with a organic tomato & onion sugo.
Served on a bed of green beans with a side of roasted sweet potato, sprinkled with pepipitas and drizzled with Fleaureau Penisular extra virgin olive oil

If I still feel like death I may just opt for a traditional cut diet carb up. Yawn!

Either  tonight or tomorrow I’m planning, what the lovely boy calls, a power-up. Really just a carb refeed. I was strictly following the cut diet’s carb ups, but have made a slight adjustment as I am avoiding wheat (and dairy), so oatmeal is replace by quinoa.

My meal was going to be:
1.5cups green beans
15 almonds
1/2 grapefruit or 100g blueberries (I can handle this sweetness without cravings OK)
75g quinoa
1 tablespoon almond butter
200g sweet potato

This has some sort of crazy science behind it with the greens being a good idea because they provide a base for the onslaught to come. However, I was thinking I really should have a bit more fun with my refeed. But what to eat? I still would like to avoid excess sweetness, dairy and wheat. Fruit isn’t meant to be very effective for carb-ups, though the berries would be nicely replaced with a banana in the quinoa, yum. Rice springs to mind, but I actually have had real trouble digesting rice for about a year. Which really only leaves me starchy vegies and ancient grains. I’d be willing to bend the dairy for fermented or cultured dairy maybe (yoghurt, keffir).

As I type this a plan is starting to form:
Green beans as planned.
Buckwheat or quinoa pancakes made with goat/sheeps/soy milk slathered in Sweet William Dairy Free Chocolate Spread, almonds and banana/berries. This might trigger my sweet tooth but I have a feeling the dairy is the thing I really need to avoid, followed by wheat.

I never really considered dairy or wheat a trigger food before. But the other day I came across several figure gals who are doing the same thing as part of their prep so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s fantastic, all desire to peak into the pantry have subsided. Annoyingly the no-dairy rule  rules out whey, but this just forces me to eat real food for protein, giving me a metabolic advantage.

Maybe I’ll have a look through my old vegetarian cookbooks and come up with something to fit the bill. A big bowl of lentil soup could be nice on a winters night.

I’d love to hear what suggestions y’all have, so leave ideas for future powerups in the comments. Or just taunt me with you’re no rules refeeds!

82 days, 6.5kg, 7.5% to go.
24 hours fog free!

A quick follow up on yesterday. The slight changes to my diet (adding in dextrose to my workout, eating my weight in greens afterwards) seems to have done wonders to my energy levels. I’m sure the seista helped too but I can’t do that everyday.

Saturday, I bought the Nick Jones training DVD (view a sample here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNaJYFu94Dg).

I’d heard great things about it and was also hoping to spot myself in the background as it was filmed in my gym and I was there when they were filming leg day. It was weird watching something filmed in my gym but I didn’t make a cameo. Nick’s attitude is so fantastic. This is a guy who really loves his art. He totally thinks of BB as an artform. Nick was a pro BBer for many years and did well in untested leagues until he came down with cronic fatigue several times, prompting him to reassess his career and turn natural. He has since won MuscleMania  titles and had a fair bit of success. His attitude towards training and life really impresses me. I really love his idea of quality over quantity when it comes to training. He’s a big clock watcher and keeps his sets within the 40-70 seconds window, which studies have show to be the best for hytrophathy with very strict rest breaks of under 2 minutes. He aims to be in and out of the gym in 45 minutes. I’ve started to workout in my lunch break so this is an ideal concept for me. I also love his warmup activation routine and gave it a shot yesterday before my leg workout.  You can see it here (http://www.myfittribe.com/jamcoretraining/men/warm.html), he stole it from his mates at JamCore. I’ve still got 2 workouts to watch, but it made me think about my split a bit more, and how I was going to try and target my weaker areas in the next 12 weeks.

My strongest area is my hamstrings. Apparently they are slightly superhuman, which means I want to have the calves and quads to match. Also, I need to regain some of the lost size from my upper body after my injury so targeting some form of upper body work daily is pretty crucial to me. So I’ve split my leg day in half. Yesterday I hit 3 quad exercises, 2 exercises for biceps and 1 exercise for triceps and 1 for calves. Friday I’ll do 2 exercises for hamstrings (bent-deads & curls), death step-ups for my glutes, 2 exercises for triceps and 1 for biceps, 1 for calves. This sounds like a fair amount of work, but using Nick’s ideas about strict timing I was in and out of the gym, including warmup and extra exercises my physio gave me for my shoulder, in under 1 hour.

Today is back day and it’ll stay the same; lots of rowing for my stuffed trap but I also really want to work on bringing up my lats. I’ve dropped back extensions from my routine and am debating bringing them back in but am worried they might make me too thick where I should be tapering. I guess I can’t gain too much in the next few weeks anyway.

Tuesdays, I train with Joe and we’re doing chest at the moment. Last week’s chest workout was really full on; and although I felt very comfortable with the movements while doing them, my shoulder has been complaining ever since. I’m going to have to kill BB bench in favour of DB bench, which is recommended in the Shoulder Savers articles , in the hope that I can still train heavy without the pain in my bones.

Shoulder day, I need to concentrate on putting some size back in my anterior delts (front raises and front grip presses?) and getting the area where my delts join my  arms up a bit (cable laterals and single arm db laterals). As much as I enjoy the 2 sorts of shrugs I might just alternate weekly between DB and BB. I’ll throw in 1 set of calve here too.

I do a pilates class on Thursday’s so this takes a good hit at my abs, and they’ll get worked directly on my other non-weight day too.

I feel like I’ve missed something in my re-division. If anyone can see anything let me know.

Generally, this week I feel I’ve got diet and exercise under control and am much more optimistic than last week. I’m just getting impatient for all the great work I’m doing to start showing up. I had a carb-up/refeed planned for tonight, but right now I’m feeling so good I might leave it until after my chest workout. I plan to keep these wheat, sugar/sweetness and dairy free as since I’ve ruled these things out I’ve virtually stopped grazing/snacking.

To answer V’s question from yesterday. My 2 month out goal is: to be down to about 14.5% which by my math is just under 62kg (136lb). My final goal being 9.5% which is about 57kg without all the depletion, so I imagine my onstage weight being below 55kg (121lb). For the record I calculate my LBM as 53kg (117lb).

People complain that their workouts become shit once they start a hard cut. Me, it’s the reverse, my workouts are wicked; it’s the rest of my day that’s turned to shit.

My carbs are low and green for now. Which means I live ‘in the fog’. Luckily though Gen-Tec and Scivation make fog remover. I’m really good at fog removal for workout purposes. I’m not sure I want to even think about how many more sups I’d need to take to stay out the fog on a more full time basis.

After 5 days of following the cut-diet very strictly I’ve made some slight adjustments. In the interest of science and for future personal reference I document  them here.

6am I wake after a patchy nights sleep where I was waking sweating every few hours until I opened a window (ooops I left the heater on). The hound is ready for his walk, doesn’t he understand Sunday’s!? Energy levels at 6.5/10 which is good for me.

6.30am Start cracking eggs (8), sauting spinach, grilling kangaroo and chicken for later. Breakfast before cardio today or I won’t get all my meals in.
Who the hell eats this much food for breakfast anyways? (7 whites, 1 whole egg, 1/2 grapefruit, 50g roo, 120g spinach)

7am sups 5g creatine, 5g glutamine, 3g fish oil, 2 fat burners, 1 multi, 1 scoop Xtend, 1 zinc+magnesium+b6, 1 litre water

7.20am Energy level 8/10

8am wrangle hound, and start 6km walk to the farmers market, by the time I’m half way there (sipping 2 scoops Xtend + 5g creatine) fog is starting to set in for the day; at least it’s not too cold and beautifully sunny for mid-winter.
9am Energy levels 7/10 calories burnt: 125 (note to self: your hilly walk shits on this flat one). Headache in the top, front of my brain moved in for the day.
I just bought 60 (Free-range) eggs!
11am Hope that chicken salad and coffee will pick me up. Nope, no carbs in that one!

Midday: Time to start getting ready for the gym. Screw this cut-diet, I’ll keep the macros but I’m putting pure-carbs in my drink.
What I actually put in my pre and in workout drinks is a bit of a vague ramshackle of sups from my kitchen bench but WOW! did it work.
Pre-workout pick-me up (aprox): 1.5 scoops Xtend, a bigger than usual slug of thermofuel (couldn’t get the doser to work), 5g creatine, 5g glutamine, 2.5gish alca, 3g pure carbs, a tiny pinch of beta-analine.

The beta-analine was a new one to my arsenal. Sean at Aussie Muscle wouldn’t tell me what to expect when I asked if I needed it, but gave me a free sample bottle and told me to report back on what I thought (’don’t take too much or you’ll get twitchy’ was his warning). In this sludge of a cocktail I can’t be certain but I think my power was up and I felt more ‘twang’/tension in my muscles. Is this the right answer?
Boy was I raring to get in the gym, headache gone. The bus couldn’t get me there fast enough. Good thing I chose not to drive.

1.15pm in-workout drink: 4 scoops  Xtend, 12g pure-carbs, 2.5g creatine, 2.5g glutamine
Feeling: Strong, fit, focused, creative (good thing too as this is the mantra I use while I lift rather than counting reps). Shoulder had stop hurting and, wow, new PR’s on everything. Calories burnt: 300 (quads, bi’s, tri’s, calves). I was taking very short rests and pyramiding my sets hard and everything seemed easy.

3pm: home. 150g green beans, 150g brocolli, 150g chicken breast, splash of soy sauce (low-GI fiborous carbs + lean protein, no extra fats). This was monstorously filling and a new part of my experiment. Approx. 25% of my day’s carbs, all green. Will this keep the fog away?

Now/4.30pm: Still feeling mild buzz from stims. No headache since before my workout. Stomach starting to growl, needs water, not food. I think I’ve supped out for the day. I’ll take 1 more serve of creatine/glutamine before bed and some zinc and at that I really should stop.

1 p/c/f meal and 1 p/f meal to go. Will make notes on how I ride out the remainder of the arvo.
Siesta time, I love weekends!

Just like V, I’ve been keeping a dirty secret. My weight hasn’t dropped. In 2 weeks my scales have been laughing at me. Tuesday confirmed my awful secret, with caliper test and tape measurements saying I hadn’t moved. This pissed me off no end. As I’d been eating at 1550 calories for 2 weeks and done several huge cardio sessions. I’d known I was going nowhere for a while and time getting tighter everyday I’ve decided to do something about it. I’m back up to 1900 calories, cut diet style. I’ve played with the cut diet before and it is effective, but it left me feeling like a zombie. I became obsessed with the low carb speedy weight loss that I never did the carb ups; the carb-ups are just a weird combo too. So for the last 3 days I’ve switched my macros towards cut-diet, with a few non-cut ingredients (wheat and legumes) still in my diet. I’ve already started to see my weight drop a little. I’m imagining this is some water weight, but I was already dieting anyway. Tonight is my 18th meal which means it’s carb-up time. I’m hanging out for it. I don’t care that I’m going to be eating the worlds weirdest combo of foods. Who knows what’s up with my metabolism. 18 months of under-eating and not losing weight has got me here. Here’s hoping the scivation kiddies can get me out.

So today I’m off to the central markets to get my body weight (63.8kg) in green beans, asparagus, chicken, fish and kangaroo. Sunday’s farmers market will see me purchasing eggsessive (sorry) amounts of eggs and broccoli and then I’m all in for the next 13 weeks.

I’d like to thank Kim for his words of inspiration in the latest Aussie Muscle newsletter. I was fooling myself when I thought I could cruise through this process. There aren’t more bodybuilders and figure competitors for a reason. This stuff hard-work.

Two competitors come into Australian Muscle and we ask them both the same question, “how’s the diet going?”

Competitor #1: “Great! I feel fine, looking forward to the show.”
Competitor #2: “I feel like crap. I got no energy, I’m irritable, and I’m starving all the time. I feel like puking every time I look at my food!”

Fast forward to competition day. Competitor #1 finished last, Competitor #2 wins.

Shoulder day has always been my favourite. I love shoulders, I love my shoulders, I check out other peoples shoulders in the gym and that’s how I gauge their physique. I know there’s more to it than that, but I love all the tiny lumps and bumps that show up in a good shoulder workout. Good news for those with broken collar bones and a love for shoulders, they recover a lot better than pecs!
Today I managed to squeeze my shoulder session into my lunch break.  Here’s what I did.

3 minutes rowing machine to warm up, 1 x stair sprint (4 flights)
Arnold press (my injury has finally allowed me to do these-hooray)
4kg x 15(warmup)
7kg x 15
8kg x 12
9kg x 10
10kg x 7
12.5kg x 3 (left shoulder couldn’t really handle this)
Cable side laterals (never done these before- will become regular)
2.5kg(left)3.75kg(right) 10×4
DB lateral raises + bent-over lateral raises (super+drop-set)
6kg x 15 + 5kgx12, 3kgx12
7kg x 12 + 6kgx10, 3kgx10
8kg x 8 + 6kgx10, 4kgx10
9kg x 5 + 7kgx8, 3kgx10

BB shrugs behind back /superset w seated calves (this bizaar combo got the heart pumping!)
30kg x 10/40kg  x 10
30kg x 10/40kg x 10
35kg x 9/40kg x 9
35kg x 6.5/45kg x 7

I so love the lateral raises tri-set but am thinking it should for fear of over-training now I’m starting to lower my calories. Thoughts anyone?

The BB shrugs are new, replacing DB shrugs. I really felt these all the way through my shoulders and back. Sometimes a simple change makes such a difference.

I was reading about the cable lateral raises and never imagined they’d be so hard. I was on the top pin, how weak I felt!

As mentioned above I’ve started to drop my calories slightly. Paranoia setting in. This week’s intake has been around 1700. I’m planning on going at 1550 next week and then I’ll go back up to 1900 for a week to see how the metabolism reacts. It seems that I loose weight really quickly when I do a really low week followed by a maintainance week. My widget’s telling me 92 days to go. Time to start getting serious. I’m anxiously looking forward to Tuesday when I’ve got pinch and tape measurements. I’m looking leaner but weighing more which is both good and scary.

I also, finally managed to get hold of Mareike from ‘one life live well’ who’ll be doing my posing coaching. Annoyingly, she’s heading away on holidays for the next 2 weeks, but I’ll meet with her on my lunch break in a few Tuesday’s time. I told her about my routine music, Paul Oakenfold’s Pink Panther theme, and she was going to look for some cool fabric for my suit today.

So the ball keeps rolling.

Just a quick catch up on the last few days of training.

Tuesday evening’s workout was chest, to follow after my energetic cardio in the AM.Chest is former favourite, recently  however, it’s become my dreaded hour of shameful effort due to my injury. This week’s workout, however, left me grinning from ear to ear (and nice and sore). I don’t think anyone has grinned as hard at being able to do 3×12 pushups (toes). Until last week I was able to do 3×5 on my knees. I don’t know where my strength came from, though I find chest the day after back seems to do wonders for my shoulder. For the next 3 weeks I’m training chest with my trainer so hopefully we can get the ‘missing muscle’ to show up.

Yesterday morning I figured I was onto a good thing with the thermofueled manic elliptical session and had another crack at it. Only managed 300 calories in the 20 minutes this time but that’s not to be sneezed at. The rest of the day was a ‘rest day’ which i spent trecking around Chinatown photographing (greasy, unhealthy, tasty) food. One client gave me a bubble tea (can someone say insulin spike) but I’m just not a sugar fan and politely only sipped a small amount. Most of my meals were in store-bought bar form. I did find a new favourite, rising from the world of crapness that is protein bars. Horley’s carb-less made me think I was eating a snickers or picnic. I’d eat them everyday but they’re $3+ each and no real fibre to speak of. I did get a nice bowl of fresh Phö for lunch which is always a decent bet on a cut. I was exhausted by the end of the day and had to nap before dinner.

All refreshed I managed a fairly decent arms workout with stair runs in my rest periods and now I’m off to pilates. Have a great day.