Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - entropy

Pages: 1 ... 85 86 [87] 88 89 ... 104
1291
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism - w11d3
« on: September 07, 2012, 12:10:52 pm »
Training
BS 2x100, 1x110, 3x108.5
FS 1x90, 1x100, 1x102.5, 0x102.5, 1x100, 1x100 (Belt on), 1x100, 0x100, 6x1x90, 2x90, 3x90, 2x90
BP 5x81.5, 6x75, 6x72.5 (close grip), 5x72.5 (wide grip)

Long fucking workout. Took 3 hours to do all that squatting. The 90s were paused. I slowed everything down so I could really nail down form. Here is what I have learnt about good form

- strong unrack, like a powerclean rack
- pull jaw apart and hold it there, keeps my chest tight (also squeezing the life out of the bar helps for that too but i tend to forget this while in the zone)
- break at knees
- sit between legs
- make sure hips are constantly loaded in tension under the bar (this avoids the tendency to lean fwd)
- hold knees stable upon sitting
- push chest upwards by driving against the floor while simultaneously
- DRIVE TRAPS BACK out of the hole

and if i go thru that encyclopedia of details i have something resembling a good squat. Now try remembering all of it while having a heavy bar on your shoulders lol. I bet it's not this hard for *other* people, i'm just not built for this shit but no matter, i'll persevere

today my quads are pumped for a change, the paused sets really help there

oh yea and in other news i broke under 180lb today, my morning bw was 179.9lb .. yay for me. Still a big fat mess though.

Fuck this shit man, its past midnight and i have yet to bench brb

damn I didn't get a PR on the bench. I probably would have on another day). No matter, i'll get it on monday!

Taking the rest of the wkend off so im nice and fresh for next week when I start my new program.

I had 110g carb, 50g fat, 180g pro today. How many calories is that? 1760? hmm. interesting.

laters

1292
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: September 06, 2012, 03:42:07 am »
Where the hell in that quote of my post am I further pushing the calorie in vs out concept?

All I'm saying is, burning 100 calories from jacking off = burning 100 calories from HIT/basketball/cardio/whatever...  There can be a myriad of reasons to explain your argument, but to think basketball has had magical effects on your fat loss efforts is wrong.

lol i think you've made your point clearly. but what intensity are we talking? is it balls out HIIT jacking off? cos that might burn a bit more calories. Or long duration steady state - smaller burn but for a longer period. But why do you have to choose one or the other, what if you do both? Then you get the benefits of HIIT and the benefits of steady state.   :P

im actually hoping i can get the same or better fat loss effect of basketbell by not not playing basketball. i'll use sprints on a bicycle for the HIIT benefit and longer rides for the aerobic benefit. I'm hoping this will give the fat loss without the fatigue of actually playing basketball

Just play basketball and keep eating relatively clean. Do whatever your body responds well to. If that's playing basketball than play basketball. As long as you eat pretty clean and exercise than you'll lose fat without having to worry about excessive dieting. Plus eating more helps for playing sport and gyming.

This. I will eat the same as usual, but I'll just more fat loss out of it by trainer better.

1293
News, Announcements, & Suggestions / Re: any way to make a chart?
« on: September 06, 2012, 12:35:38 am »
I use calorieking and then take a screenshot, then upload it to imgurl and post that in my log.

eg


1294
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: September 06, 2012, 12:07:48 am »
Quote
-There's no magic fat loss from basketball.
-Cutting under 2000 calories doesn't fuck up your metabolism to any significant degree.
-Other ways to burn bodyfat other than diet?  Other things help, but how effective these other things are comes down to your diet...
-There's no such thing as spot reduction.
-As for an explanation of your "argument" above, it's impossible to tell from the information you gave.  There can be numerous factors involved.  
-Your plan will probably work for getting you leaner, that's not what I'm arguing.  I'm just saying your facts are totally wrong.

lol aren't you pushing the calories-in dogma a little too far dude? I agree its the main thing if you eat like crap it probably doesn't matter what you do training wise, you'll still stay fat. but that's not my situation, im eating 95% clean and under maintenance, so i've got that in check. I'm not someone spending 10 minutes on the treadmill and then going to have double whoppers "for recovery" post workout!

basically my argument is this, whenever i've played basketball seriously, i'd be unwittingly doing HIIT and aerobic training and this burns bodyfat. Period. And it does this regardless of whether or not i'm in a caloric surplus or deficit or maintenance or whatever. That's my experience. When I was in university i was on a high caloric intake and yet i was very lean because of basketball. And recently, earlier this year when I played basketball (as compared to not doing any HIIT or aerobic exercise) - i burnt bodyfat - bellyfat to be specific even though my caloric intake was slightly surplus to maintenance.

But now i'm on a caloric deficit while not playing basketball i've lost 4-5kg of bodyweight and yet I have more bellyfat than I did when i weighed more and wasn't cutting but was playing basketball. 'm not generalising to everyone out there, just describing my personal experience.

And btw there is spot reduction but not in the way you are thinking of. For example if you take someone very obese, and you put them on a low carb diet and have them doing cardio, they'll take off belly fat preferentially according to the science. Or even if you take some one obese who is sedentary, the experts say first goes the visceral bodyfat and then the subcutaneous. Is that spot reduction in the sense of someone doing high rep bench press to burn man boobs? Not quite the same thing

But if you're going to talk about facts you have to admit that aerobic and HIIT are good at burning fat and introducing them to someone who doesn't do them will have a fat loss effect (provided diet is in check which it is for me but i'm not getting the results i want with just diet alone)


1295


Conditioning will be on a mountain bike. I'm thinking tabata sprints 3 mins and 30-60mins w/o sprinting. For variety or in bad weather, once a month i'll play basketball with my old team.

Upper body assistance will be an exercise from chinups, banded chinups, curls, widegrip bench press, push presses, cable curls, hang cleans or rows.

I'm doing descending sets for backsquats and bench press btw.

When I feel like it, I can take Tue or Sat completely off.

Time to find those abs, great form, become stronger and powerful,  jump higher and run fast.

:headbang:

1296


See the homeboy above, that V - I had that visible earlier this year when I was playing basketball despite weighing about 4-5kg more. That means i've lost 4kg of bodyweight and since i'm stronger and more muscular now than then, it has been 4-5kg of bodyfat.

How do you guys explain that? Cal in vs Cal out sermons can't explain it to me. I'm willing to accept I was burning more calories then than now. But i also know i was eating more then than now. So how does that affect balance? Now think about this for a second. I've maintained a caloric deficit to lose 4-5kg of bodyfat, so im definitely in a deficit, but yet that V above, yea I dont have it right now!!

I WONT cut more calories from my diet. I'm practically eating 2 square meals, 2000-2700 calories a day. I wont drop below 2000 and if you tell me to cut more than that. I REFUSE TO CUT ANY MORE CALORIES. My metabolism will get fucked up if I have a bigger deficit from diet than I already have and that's no way to live.

But I dont need to cut any mroe calories because there are other ways to burn bodyfat than thru diet. Aerobic steady state and HIIT will do that very well. I know that from experience.

I think I have it figured out tho. It's the mix of aerobic and hiit that I need to add. And sensibly, not 10+km of cardio a week like I did last week. No it has to be a reasonable amount. And it has to be both aerobic and hiit. I cant' and wont go back to playing basketball (cos then i cant train properly), so i'll have to be really smart about this.

tentative plan
daily 500m-600m fasted TM (~5-10mins, weekly progression: add 0.1km/hr and 50m)
1x a week HIIT (tabata mountain bike),  steady state cardio (30-60 mins riding mountain bike)
3x a week - ~3mins/session - TM warmups  - before weights, stick to about 3 minutes, not too high intensity, just get warm and blood flowing.
1x week pickup basketball (max of 3 games, and no more than 2 games back to back).


Playing pickup, I wont/cant play 2-3 hours straight like i did sunday because then training gets fucked up.

But basically i'm going to keep a bit of daily aerobic work, nice and gentle, pure fat loss, little impact on lifting. And slowly ramp it up over time. Then ride a bike trying to simulate my magic fat loss from basketball (mix of HIIT and aerobic) by doing tabata sprints and then just riding casually for 30-60mins.

On off days, i might go for a long walk but not a treadmill and maybe shoot hoops. dunno maybe.

I don't want to do much running/jogging cos it fucks up my knees/ankles and tires out my calves/hamstrings/quads and makes for shitty squat sessions.  So i'm going to try riding a bike instead. Hopefully that will give the conditioning without the side-effects i just mentioned. It also gives me a chance to go outdoors since i have a nice bike trail 5 minutes near my place.

 I want a nice balance of aerobic (2x a week) and HIIT (1x a week). Just what I had when I played basketball earlier in the year and saw good spot reduction of belly fat.

1297
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism - w11d2
« on: September 05, 2012, 10:17:10 am »
Training
BS 2x110, 3x108.5, 5x105, 4x102.5, 4x100
OHP 4x55, 2x5x54.5, 4x54.5
PP 2x67.5 (PR), 4x65
CURLZ 3x8x43.5 (PR)
Chins ~ 21 reps (dead hangs)
ab rollouts 3x10

Next backsquat aim for 6x108.5. Form was ok but i was piss weak so couldn't get thru the reps as I would have liked. They were are all pretty much RM sets today.

OHP - im ok with these, i did them with a pause. Slowly going to build up to 3x5x60 with a pause, and then i'll switch to descending sets like my other lifts.

PP for some reason I thought i'd be able to add 2.5-5kg to this lift easily but it's not that easy at all. I'm going to reset a little and then take smaller jumps.

Rollouts, i did the first two sets by propping my toes under a sofa, which allowed me to roll out to a rock bottom full extended position. Then i tried it without the sofa and i lost most of my ROM. LOL. i'm still doign these from the knees. hopefully I can transition to from toes soon though, although I couldn't even do one rep that way when I tried. In the past when I used the ab wheel frequently i was doing full rollouts from standing position and I weighed over 100kg back then too. So where has all that strength gone?? may be my form was shit though, i never taped them.

Also I have a theory why my bench has suddenly started moving up. Perhaps from adding arm work (curls) and ohp. By adding these two things, ive increased upper body strength. my shoulders were always the strongest part of my upper body (I could get ~96kg close grip bp off my chest easily and snappily only to get stuck halfway becos of weak triceps). And by adding back the overhead work, shoulders have gotten stronger, which helps with the bench. Maybe the wide grip bench has helped as well out of the bottom of the bench press. Either way, i'll take it. I wont change anything, keep PP, BP, etc the same and ets see how far I can ride it out.


1298
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: September 05, 2012, 06:15:20 am »
Those are good points for why basketball works psychologically. I just don't think I enjoy basketball as much as I used to! I was pretty miserable playing in my team so it wasn't fun by any means, was full of disappointment and stuff. But one thing which you are more likely to do in a competitive game is go balls out, because someone is trying to defeat you. So you work harder, and push to a higher intensity. You aren't going to do that on a treadmill I agree. I just think the combination of HIIT and aerobic training in a basketball game has worked very well for me in the past to get me lean. And it worked regardless of my diet, just like magic. I'm not eating much these days but i'm still fat. I've eaten a lot more food and been leaner becos of training. Yes you can say that's because training manipulated the cal out part but it's more than the number of calories surely, esp when those calories aren't much compared to my then daily intake (woulda been easily 4k+)

1299
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: September 05, 2012, 05:22:49 am »
There is also EPOC (post exercise burn). The studies say the benefits of HIIT peaks at about a month. But in that month it's possible you achieve significant changes to bodycomp. I think that's what basketball brings to the table

I also don't believe cal in vs cal out is the be all and end all of body composition. Different ways of training have different results on composition imho. I believe in cal in vs cal out for weight loss but only as a simple guideline. There is more to it than that though

The reason I think basketball works so well is because its a good mix of aerobic and HIIT .. it involves
b) gives the benefits of HIIT
c) gives benefits of aerobic training

and together this works well to give great fat loss. The calories burnt during exercise aren't the whole picture, far from it, and they certainly don't consitute the entire "calories out" picture. For that you have to look at EPOC too.

1300
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: September 05, 2012, 04:50:54 am »
I am considering drastic changes to my fat loss strategy. I remember back when I was at university, I ate pretty much what I wanted (a kilo block of cheese a week, tubs of icecream, litres of fullcream milk, eggs, bacon, loads of pasta and carbs etc) and I was lean and fit. I don't think diet was the main thing. Training was.

Back then I was playing competitive basketball and I think it was *that* which had the biggest influence on my bodycomp. When I wasn't playing matches I was playing pickup games fairly regularly. Even this year when I started playing basketball matches, I found myself getting leaner and fitter, esp as the season went on. There is something about playing basketball which turns on a fatloss switch in my body. I dunno if i'll start playing again but I want to re-create that training effect.

One reason not to start playing basketball again is it gets in the way of weights training. If i was eating more I could probably do everything - including basketball, conditioning intervals, weights and even swimming. But the whole caloric deficit is a recovery deficit is a bitch. Sigh.

1301
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism - w11d1
« on: September 04, 2012, 09:10:45 am »
Training
BS 2x100
SQ 1x100, 1x105B, 1x90
BP 6x80.5 (PR), 6x76, 6x72.5

Squats sucked more than usual, i can't be bothered explaining. my next hopeful form improvement is Dan's sitting between the legs thing -
Quote

http://danjohn.net/2009/12/the-front-squat/

I think with my stupidly long legs, I need to space them out more (by taking a wider stance) - and then sitting btw my legs will bring me deeper and more upright. Yea we'll see lol.

Surprised how well my BP is progressing now. Normally whenever i've had to set a PR on BP it is a hard grindy effort which takes a lot of mental energy. But with the descending sets i'm finding the weight not heavy but light and I feel fresh and stronger. Lets see how far I can go, so far i'm sustaining 2kg/wk progress.

1302
My work on the squat video analysis is going well though. I've found some interesting things already about my squat. It turns out my negative and positive have some notable differences and similarities. I've already got the side-by-side video of positive and reverse negative - and it's quite instructive to compare them. I find my backsquat syncs well in both videos in timing, but not in specific positions. That is, my chest is caved on one side but perfectly straight in the other. That's visually apparent. My next step (which is hard) is to display a grid over both videos - so I can more easily inspect the differences in positions by scale. The last part will be the hardest, measuring angles. I'm not even sure i'll tackle that one, might let the user do it by providing an angle measuring tool. Dunno.

LBSS - you asked about the ideal squat. Well my program knows what my ideal squat looks like by analysing my squat video. See below.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKJtuwR-jvY" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKJtuwR-jvY</a>

This isn't my ACTUAL 112.5x1 PR video from friday. It's actually one that is constructed by the app. The next step would be to compare the positions (knees, barbell etc) in the actual video compared to the ideal one. The closer they are, the better the squat.

1303
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: September 03, 2012, 02:09:31 pm »
In hindsight I didn't do myself any favours over the weekend. Have to remember my recovery is finite, esp when cutting. Delayed mondays workout. Will try it tomorrow instead. Have found my body to be too beaten up lately and I need to train smarter rather than harder. My knees, lower back, triceps, hamstrings all complain that i've not been kind to them.

1304
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: September 02, 2012, 02:55:07 am »
Training
1km Fasted TM (AM)
5x30m warmups, 5x30 sprints (best time - 04:30 - PR - but I don't want to count it, see below) (PM)
5SVJ, 5 RVJs (shit couldn't jump.. may be all this cardio catching up to me now) (PM)
2 hours pickup ball (better than last week but still a little sluggish) (PM)

I didn't sprint on friday because of rain but I will sprint today instead before jumping and pickup basketball. It might be a good idea to group the 'athletic' stuff together in one day anyway, and makes fridays shorter and easier to recover from. Worth a try, as long as mondays workouts are still do-able, i much prefer it this way.

sprints felt real sluggish. I don't think i'll do them on sunday again. I perform better on fridays after squats, for some reason. I managed a 04:30 on my *last* sprint - but it's not reproducible cos a hot girl was jogging near me and my caveman instincts kicked in to go an extra gear lol, that wont happen since i normally sprint late at night when no one is at the oval.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC_t8MfGHMQ" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC_t8MfGHMQ</a>

advantage of running in the sun tho is you can record yourself. im looking at my form compared to bolt lol. trying to see how i can improve my form so it looks similar to his. i notice my upper body is very robotic. but I can't see bolt's arms moving any differently, although obviously he must be doing something subtly different cos we look a world apart in technique. the other thing i picked up is his ankle is very high on the recovery. mine is lower. so i'm gonna experiment next time with that.

Stuff to do Next Time I Sprint
high ankles on recovery leg
higher knees on striking leg
deliberately pump arms
try not be so upright, have to be leaning fwd more

1305
form is the very first thing you should be focusing on.. so you have the right idea here.

do not pay attention to the weight on the bar. just make sure there is enough load there to push you down and give you a challenged concentric. 

Understood. Learnt that the hard way but i'm doing it the right way now.

Pages: 1 ... 85 86 [87] 88 89 ... 104