Todd’s BodyBlog

I’ve been taking all of your advice (thanks for the supportive messages!) and have backed off heavy pressing movements or direct shoulder work due to this "twinge" in my left shoulder.  It is still surprisingly not healed after almost 10 days…I guess that comes with being 40?  Funny, I never seemed to notice slow healing before.  Sigh.  Enough of that.

Good thing I am in a weight loss stage as not having access to a good portion of my chest/shoulder exercises isn’t such a big deal.  I had been losing 2 pounds a week but no change in the last week.  Funny how my body does that, just seems to say "Whoa!  I ain’t losing no more."  So I continue to be patient, focus on good eating, getting my workouts in and keeping up with the cardio.  Eventually my body will give in…it always does.  The key for all of you out there with the same issue is not to react by dropping calories excessively or stressing out.  Just stay the course, make sure you aren’t cheating and make small changes.

I guess it happens from time to time, the dreaded injury.  I had warmed up with two light sets of 15 reps on Incline Dumbbell then got to my main set of 8 reps.  I did 8,8,15,15 reps at 70/25 lbs (?).  I was really working hard, no pain or discomfort.  Then I moved to flat bench to do another 8,8,15,15 and somewhere in there I noticed that my left shoulder felt "strained".  No sharp pain or anything sudden, just felt a bit…strained, that really is the best word.  Well, that was 10 days ago and my shoulder has been sore ever since.  One of those weird "deep" pains that you can’t quite put your finger on.  Yesterday it felt about 70% better and I was smart enough to do only a few sets at 15 reps (light weight).  in fact, I even quit working chest when the shoulder got sore on, once again, the flat bench.  Now it is as sore as ever a day later.  GRR!

Patience, I remind myself.  I guess I will take another 10 days off from direct chest/shoulder work and when I come back to it will stay with dumbbells as that didn’t seem to cause as much discomfort as barbell.  I’ve been around the block long enough to know that to push things only risks a more serious/long term injury but still, after all these years it is so frustrating to get an injury especially when recent progress has been so good.

Speaking of progress, I stayed the course even though my moderately low calorie and workout regime failed to produce any weight loss over a week and was handsomely rewarded with a drop of 3 pounds over 3 days.  It’s like the body finally gives up and says, Ok, here!  Here is your weight loss you jerk."  I am on track for no more than 2 pounds loss per week so all is coming along nicely but ohhhhh the waiting can drive you mad.  There simply is no fast way to lose weight properly.  So, enjoying each and every day as much as I can.  So far so good!

Ok, fun is over   I stopped my mass gaining regimen 3 weeks ago at a peak weight of 202.6 pounds.  I started eating less and continued a weight-training schedule with higher reps and in the last 3 weeks have dropped to about 198 pounds.  So, 4 pounds in 3 weeks with no real change other than diet.  Problem is, some of that weight is just water from the lack of creatine supplementation so, it’s about time to add in lots of cardio.

I will add 3-4 days a week of cardio, 30-45 minutes per session.  Let’s see what that does.  i hope to lose about 2 pounds per week.  As long as I lose 1-2 pounds per week I won’t change a thing.

I’ll keep ya posted!

Due to popular request (lol) I have posted current progress pics.  Now you are all on my journey to drop the bodyfat before summer!

What a wild ride!  This week I finished a 3 month program designed to increase overall strength by 25%.  Today I tested my strength on 5 major lifts and these are the results:

Bench Press + 28%
Squat +30%
Deadlift +60%!
Bent-Over Row +28%
Overhead Press +21%

Wow!  True to its word, the article said I would get about 25% stronger and they were right on.  Overhead presses were a tad low but still significantly improved.  I am hoping to take what mass I gained into my cutting cycle to get ripped for Summer.  I hardly lifted weights for the last couple of years and to see this kind of improvement in 3 months is astonishing, especially considering that I set personal records in a number of these lifts after all that time off.

I did it!  I broke the 200 lb barrier.  Not that I was aiming for a specific weight because anyone knows that if you really want to just "weigh" a number all you need to do is eat pizza and dessert and candy for weeks on end and you’ll get there   No, I wanted to follow a 12-week strength routine and add mass along the way, all the while keeping my bodyfat down as much as possible.  Based on my trending I saw that the 200 pound mark was possible so was excited to see that with 1 week left in my training plan I achieved that.

Staring March 1 I will be cutting back calories while continuing to hit the weights and adding lots of cardio.  Let’s see if I can achieve success in the other direction, getting down to 8% bodyfat.  As usual, diet will be the difficult part.  As hard as it has been to eat as much as I have it will be a different challenge to maintain a caloric deficit.  But I am up for it!

I can’t tell you all how happy and excited I am to be nearing the end of a 3-month workout that really, really WORKED!  In the last 2.5 months I have gained more size and strength that I ever thought possible.  Thanks to heavy lifting (5 reps) and heavy eating (3400 calories/day) none of my clothes fit right and friends ask if I am dabbling in steroids.  I had been working out for 20 years and though I have shown steady progress I have not experienced these types of gains (in my fourties, no less!) ever.

At the beginning of March I will re-test my strength and see i I did, indeed, increase my major lifts by 25%.  But if anyone is curious on how I did it, check out my workout logs for the program.  As for diet, just focussed on getting my 1g-1.5g per pound of bodyweight per day.  The carbs and fat took care of themselves as I could eat almost anything I wanted to make up for the rest of the calories.  Supplements were: creatine, Tribulus Terrestris (crap, but I paid for it so I took it), BCAAs, whey protein, beta-alanine, mulitivitamin, fish oil capsules (more for health than mass gains).

Wow, I don’t know about all of you but it sure is a chore to get all the protein in that I need per day.  I am only shooting for 195g but still, that is a constant feeding of protein shakes, eggs, turkey meat, chicken, beef and what else?  Dunno.  It feels like I am eating all the time.  I guess it is working though because I am steadily gaining weight every week and by my calculations have only gained about 0.6% bodyfat since Oct 22.  Sure, some of the 11 pounds gained is water from the creatine (about 3 pounds) but that means that in 3 months I have gained around 7 pounds of actual lean muscle.  Yee haw!

A couple funny stories from the past week:

I noticed a trio of age 16-something girls enter the gym and stand awkwardly around the dumbbell rack.  They nervously pulled some weights from the rack and started moving them around.  It looked kinda funny as they were so NOOB but you know what, everyone starts somewhere so good for them for having the guts to even start somewhere.  It turns out one of them seemed to know a few exercises and showed the other two how to do Incline Rear Delt Laterals.  I was only half noticing this stuff while I took my 3 minute rests between heavy lifts.  Then I sensed some disturbance amongst the trio - two of the girls told the other that when she lay on the bench you could see down her top (from what I could make with bodylanguage)!  LOL, so she lay on the bench to see for herself and lo and behold you could see some cleavage.  The funny thing was 90% of the girls that workout there show some amount of cleavage, no big deal, it’s just part of working out IMHO, but these girls were really concerned by it.  It was cute.

Then, a few minutes later, I heard a male voice speak up and say "Uhh, you are doing that the wrong way" and there was cleavage-girl with her legs all twisted spaghetti-like through the leg curl machine, trying to use it like a leg extension.  They were so embarassed, even though no one around them paid any attention.  They left shortly thereafter

DOMS in the legs as I type from yesterdays session   Doesn’t that feel great?  Anyhow, I am in the middle of a M&F routine and unfortunately my gym doesn’t have a Hack Squat machine so I start with Leg Press, do Front Squat (Smith) and then I go back to the Leg Press and place my feet very high on the platform to try and simulate a Hack Squat.  Is that reasonable?

This month I am only called upon to do 3 leg exercises.  The cool thing is that even though it is only 3 exercises (total of 15 sets and 180 reps) I am pushing so hard that I still get DOMS.  Strength continues to increase every single workout, now 7 weeks in.  What a great feeling.

I am eating like a pig, about 3200 cals on training days.  On non-training days I eat a few hundred less, but still careful to get my 1g protein/lb in.  I was reading in this month’s M&F that they recommend 2g/protein/lb while mass gaining.  That sure sounds excessive to me…thoughts?