rawpower405’s BodyBlog

I’ve been very pleased with how I’m progressing while using DoggCrapp training. My lifts really suffered after my last diet excursion (strength peaked on February 11, 2008), but I’ve finally got my weights up higher than ever. Here’s how bench has progressed. 2/11/08 is strength peak, 6/23/08 is start of doggcrapp, 8/4/08 is today.
2/11/08 205-8 (max 255)

6/23/08 - 185-10 (max 247)

8/4/08 - 195-10 (max 260)

BB Shoulder Press:

2/11/08 95-6 (max 110)
6/23/08 90-8 (max 112)
8/4/08 110-11 (max 152)

13lbs to bench and 40lbs to shoulder presses. These are my two weakest lifts and I’ve had pretty good gains so far. I’m very satisfied with my bench gains even though they are small. It’s the one lift I have the hardest time gaining on for some reason. Had I actually lifted 3 times a week instead of twice a week I could probably increased those poundages by 50% (since lifting 3 times in 2 weeks is 50% more than lifting 2 times in 2 weeks). Looking forward to continual gains!

That’s what I’m going to call my new system of lifting. No, I do not have a world renowned physique. No I dont have rippling pecs or washboard abs. I do not have 22 inch guns. And No, I am not in shape.

That being said, I’m a 23 year old pudgy statistician who wants to find the most efficient way of doing anything. I started on a quest last january as a new years resolution to become fit. Yes, I started lifting weights and joined the fitness lifestyle as New Years Resolutioner. But I’ve stuck with it for almost 20 months now. In that time I have used myself as a guinea pig and tried a crapload of systems of weightlifting and I know what is wrong with them all. They ALL claim to be the end all be all of how to Gain 20+ Pounds of Muscle in only 30 seconds!

So last night, my old roomate and workout partner told me I should come up with my own system. Only this one will be similar to Doggcrapp training because it’ll be open source. And I’m going to use myself as a guinea pig, of course. This new system I’m going to call Consolidation Training since I’m going to consolidate the best aspects of a number of systems into 1. That’s right, what I’m going to do for 30 days is something I rarely, if ever, see in this hobby of mine. Without further ado, for all of the 10 people out there reading this, is go over the structure of what I plan on doing.

I really see only 4 variables at work in any workout scheme: frequency, # of sets, rep range, and intensity level. There are some added goodies in other workout schemes, but for the most part, they all vary on those four variables. Before I get into those four variables there are other things I will hit on that are not common in all workouts but should be.

Progression: Yes, progression is absolutely neceassary to increase muscle mass. Studies have consistently shown that progression (notice that I did not say failure) is a precursor to muscluar adaption. If you are not increasing the work done, than your muscles have no reason to adapt. I do not think ANYONE debates that progression must occur.

Stretching: One of things I love about doggcrapp is the extreme stretching. Do I think it aids in building muscle? Until I see a study to prove that it does, I’m going to go with no. But stretching does increase flexibility, reduces the risk of injury, and aids in muscular repair after intense weight lifting. All of those prove the merits of streching. Unfortunately though, many people stretch BEFORE lifting instead of AFTER lifting.

Streching before lifting actually reduces the force you are able to exert on the lift. Yes, you read that right. So stretching before working out reduces how much you can lift. That is not good for muscle building. To get all of the benefits of streching (see above) without the negatives, you have to stretch AFTER the lift. Stretching must also be held for at least 60 seconds. Do you think gymnasts, who are incredibly flexible, hold a stretch for 15 seconds? No, they spend at least 60 seconds in any stretch and so should you. It also acts as a great cool down after lifting.

Warmup: I know tons of people get flamed for ignoring the warm up, but honestly, too many people warmup TOO MUCH. Warm ups are for warming up and thats it. You dont want to get a burn in your muscle. Warm ups in my system will come from Max OT, a progressive warm up. Start with a light weight and then decrease the reps as you increase the weight until your right below the weight you want to lift for the set. This means you wont over work your warm up, gives you the psychological benefit of experiencing a heavy weight in your hands, and lets your tendons and joints get accomodated to heavy weights before you lift.

Frequency will be borrowed from Doggcrapp training. Lifting will be 3 times per week, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and will be in an A/B form. A on Monday, B on Tuesday, A on Friday, B on Monday, etc. One of the things I do not like about doggcrapp is the emphasis on an A/B/C routine. That allows for too much time between exercises and the neuro-muscular connection cannot be improved by doing bench press only once every 7th workout. If I feel an exercise stops yeilding improvements, than i’ll switch it. Until then, I’m not going to fix something if it aint broken.

# of Sets: 1 working set will be performed, this comes from Hight Intensity Training. Less is more in weight lifting. Seriously, you only need to stimulate the growth response. We can then enhance the body’s response to the stimulus, but I’ll tackle that later. Its hard to get used to but its totally logical. Each additional set adds diminishing returns. One set provides the most stimulus in the least amount of time. That’s what I call efficiency.
Rep Range: Duh, rep ranges should be 8-15. Everyone’s sweet spots are different, there is no research to show that 4-6 reps provides the most muscle building potential, as Max OT uses, but there is a ton of research to show 8-12 provides the most bang for your buck. But all of this is dependent on weather or not you have mostly fast-twich or slow-twitch muscles. Increasing the ranges encompasses more types of people and more types of fibers.
Intensity level: Intensity is hard to describe, but intensity should always be high. Working 1 set to failure is generally a high level of intensity, but performing only 1 set to failure is not going to capture all of the muscle building potential. In order to do that, we need to apply partial reps to the end of a set.

Research has shown that partial reps build muscle just as efficiently due to the tension they place on the muscle group. And it has the added benefit of sparing your joints of having incredible forces bear down on them. If we combine the muscle building qualities of HIT training with the added bonus of partials, we end up with a wham-bam-thank-you-maam for muscle stimulation. This would be accomplished by combining HIT and applying what the X-Rep dudes use.

Go find the video online of Ronnie Colman leg pressing 2400lbs. Why is an 8-time Mr. Olympia only doing partial reps? Or better yet, find the video of Ronnie doing the DB presses with 200lb dumb bells. Again, he’s doing partial reps. Or go watch Pumping Iron and watch the scene where Lou Ferrigno is doing overhead presses and going "Arnold, Arnold, Arnold" after each rep. Wow, in all three of those examples (with world class bodybuilders, mind you) the bodybuilders are doing partial reps! Tom Platz also used partials at the end of his leg sets. Not coincidentally the dude had GIGANTIC legs. And partials are the reason why Ronnie could still compete at age 43!
So ultimately, this training regimen that I’m going to start following shortly is a combination of Max OT, DoggCrapp, High Intensity Training, X-Reps, and some info from Christian Thibaudeau. This is taking the best of 5 different muscle building information sources and putting them together. And best of all, none of this is simple guess work (hint: that’s how arnie built all his muscles) and is instead the result of exercise science.

There’s a TON of information here, but I really think I’m on the verge of applying a year and a half’s worth of experimentation and scholarly research and consolidating my knowledge into one system that I really truly think is going to work. All of the benefits of all the programs I’ve done (except german volume training) and none of the drawbacks.

There has always been one major thing that has bothered me about HIT: What is intensity? Sure we have Arthur Jones’ definition of what excercise should be, "Exercise should be brief, infrequent, and intense." And we have Mike Mentzer’s where he says if the world was going to explode if you couldnt do one more rep, could you squeeze it out? If you could, then you’re not at failure.

But these definitions are to ambiguous. I constantly find myself coming back to square one, scratching my head going, "Ok, I finished my workout in 30 minutes, so I have brief, check. And I only lift two or three times a week, so I have infrequent, check. Intense. Crap, how do I know if I was intense enough?"

Where intensity lacks in precision, strangely enough, almost every other endeavor IS precise. We have watts to measure power output for light bulbs, volts and amps to measure power usage, and we have horsepower to measure power in cars. If we can measure power output in light bulbs, can we do the same for weight lifting?

Well this got me thinking and I just read an ebook that addressed this very issue. I started thinking about this after I finished my leg presses on monday. Last workout I had leg pressed 500lbs for 17 reps and I wanted to make my goal of 20 reps on monday. When I got to my 17th rep, I was pretty spent. In fact, I was wiped out. So I held my legs fully extended for a few seconds and then did another rep. Then I took my time, gathering my energy, and did another. It took me about 35 seconds or so, but I made it to 20 reps. My logbook should have said 500×20 in the leg press slot, but the numbers somehow rang hollow for me.

See what I was failing to understand with my current definition of intensity was time. In fact, we ALL neglect this aspect of the iron game. We all measure our 1 rep max, we measure everything in weights x reps, number of sets, etc. But we fail to capture the essence of time. If someone you took 2 people and told them to do 60 pushups and person 1 took 45 seconds and person 2 took 60, who has done more work?

Horsepower is the end-all-be-all of auto measurement. One horsepower, in case you dont know, is when you move 33,000lbs one foot in one minute. That is a pretty precise definition. You can increase your horsepower by increasing the load lifted but keeping distance and duration the same, increasing the distance in one minute but keeping weight the same, or move the weight the same distance but faster. All three of those ways will increase horsepower. Increase weight and distance, and decrease time.

If we apply the same concept to weight lifting, we should have an objective measure for intensity and an easier way to measure progression.

January: 223, 23% bf, 51.29lbs of fat, 171.71lbs of LBM
July: 208 (-15lbs), 15.7% bf (-7.3), 32.66lbs of fat (-18.63), 175.34lbs of LBM (+3.63)

So far the year is looking pretty good. Compared to when I started weighing 228 with 30% bf, 68.4lbs of fat and 159.6lbs of LBM, I’m down 14.3%bf, 35.7lbs of fat, and up almost 16lbs of LBM. For a year and a half that’s not to shabby. Good progress so far.

Weight: 208 -3lbs
Body fat %: 15.7 -1.4%
Lbs of BF: 32.66 -3.42lbs
LBs of LBM: 175.34 +0.43lbs
Metabolic Index: 18.02 (+1.23 but still -3.98 away from goal of 22)

Pretty good if you ask me. 4 weeks worth of diet and excercise and I’m down 1.4% bodyfat and up almost half a pound of muscle! And I did it all while drinking beer on the weekends, eating pizza on the weekends, enjoying bacon cheeseburgers, scrambled eggs, and doing NO CARDIO!

I’m losing weight and building muscle on my own terms. Sure I could lose fat faster if I didnt drink and did cardio. But I’m losing at a very solid pace without compromising my lifestyle. And I’m okay with that.

I was going to do a post about the last 6 months in review, but I’m getting my bodyfat checked on monday, so I’ll wait to post all the changes in the last 6 months then.

Great workout today, blasted through the sets like crazy! With the proper training routine, you can do anything! Lift strong, duders!

An absolutely amazing workout today! Energy levels were high and every single lift improved! I even knocked out an extra 8 reps on BB shoulder presses! I can definitely feel the difference between normal HIT and Doggcrapp training and Doggcrapp is like HIT on steroids. My body responds well to HIT, but my body is responding like mad to doggcrapp! Lifting like this really makes the iron game a ton of fun!

Diet is still looking good. We’ll see where I’m at on Friday when I’m leanest. One of the things I really like about this diet is the convenience. If I’m ever on the run or just dont feel like cooking, I can simply stop off at a fast food joint, grab a burger and throw away the bun. So on Thursday when I’m going to end up spending like 4 hours in an airport, I dont have to worry about trying to find something on a menu that’ll work for me, I can simply stop off and grab a burger real fast. It’s so easy to have a diet with a ton of fat!

Great weight loss this week! My weight has been bouncing between 206 and 211 since I started this diet on June 1st. Today I weighed in at 203.5! I’m figuring that’s a loss of about 2.5lbs of bodyfat! On sunday I’ll really know how much I’ve lost after I carb up and see exactly how much water weight I’ll put back on.

This is the first week in the last 4 that I’ve actually lost bodyfat and that’s because I didnt do the 12 days of no carb, I went straight into my first carb up on the first weekend. The good Dr says that if you dont go the 12 days it can take up to a month for your body to go through the metabolic shift from carbs to fats. Well, it’s taken a month! So I’m expecting more weightloss next week too!

Wow. That’s all I can say after reading an article online about maximizing the potential of gh and testosterone for both building muscle and losing fat. It has TONS of studies to back up the authors conclusions about maximizing hormones. I definitely feel MUCH MUCH MUCH more enlightened about the subject of weight loss and muscle building than before. It’s a little long, and broken down into 3 parts, but is absolutely fantastic! There is simply too much information in the article to try and summarize it here, and I’ll probably mess it up if I do. READ THE ARTICLE!
http://www.fitnessforoneandall.com/nutrition/article/hormones/part_one.htm

Well 32 days in and my waist is AT LEAST down 2.25 inches. I say at least because I measured the way I normally hold my waist at the beginning and then about 2 weeks ago or so I decided to measure my waist by pushing as hard as I can out. Well, I’m down 2.25 inches from pushing it all the way out, and down 3 inches by the way I normally carry it. Today is only wednesday and I still have 2 more days of dieting before I reach my leanest for the week on friday. Weight is remaining constant and all lifts are increasing, though slowly. Slow and steady wins the race.

I was worried about my bench press. The most I’ve ever benched is 205 for 6 reps back in the days of Max OT last September, but that was also with terrible form. I’ve never been able to match that. When I was on my last diet I got up to 205 for 4, but again with terrible form. The last 3 months have been wasted with inefficient lifting routines and I watched my bench dwindle down to 185 for 6. Well after 2 weeks back on routine I know will work, my bench is up to 190 for 9, and I could’ve pushed it to 10. Good progress there.

My shoulders have always been my weakest body part, in my opinion (do I even have a good bodypart?). They never seem to do anything but sit there and never grow. DB presses 2 weeks ago were 60lbs for 8 and on monday they were 60lbs for a struggled 8. I cant ever seem to get my shoulders to go anywhere, so I’m going to try and change the position of my elbows (its hard to explain) during the lift. Apparently if you push your elbows backwards on the lift, it will place more emphasis on your delts. Try it, you’ll see. Usually my elbows are too far forwards, so I’m hoping flaring them farther out will blast my delts enough into growth.

Overall, the last 32 days have been remarkably easy. I completely quit counting calories, raios, you name it. I basically just eat when I’m hungry and stay away from carbs. I have been drinking on the weekends and getting pretty slammed, but I’m still seeing progress despite the alcohol. This past weekend got me really in tuned with the way my body is reacting to carbs now. For the past 3 weekends I’ve been engourging so much that I’ve felt bloated by the time I go to sleep, and you’re supposed to stop eating carbs if you BEGIN to feel bloated. This past weekend I really was in tune with my body and the moment I felt like I was going to get bloated I stopped.

I still have to wait for my body fat test on July 14th to really come to a conclusion on the diet. If I were to rate my effort on the diet, I would give it a 6/10 simply because I no longer care about the amount of calories in a food, no longer care about maintaining macro ratios, and drink beer on the weekend.