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Messages - maxent

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2132
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 20, 2016, 11:40:19 am »
Quote
Essential fat and storage fat. As its name implies, essential fat is necessary for normal, healthy functioning. It is stored in small amounts in your bone marrow, organs, central nervous system and muscles. In men, essential fat is approximately 3% of body weight.

 Play on words to talk about an "essential athletic bodyfat" -- which might be defined as the amount of bodyfat you need for optimal athletic performance depending on the sport. I'd guess you can look at the best athletes in a given sport to see what bodyfat% they have and it's prob a close approximation to "essential athletic bodyfat"?. I'm talking about basketball so for me 10% bf makes sense, which amounts to 7-10kg for the average player weighing btw 70-100kg but for another sport it may be different. For the average guy who wants to be athletic (run/jump well) it's prob also ~10%. I wouldn't call 10% pretty low though. Low is 6-8%.

Anyway the reason im talking about essential athletic bodyfat isn't even to do with performance .. it's to do with the maximum bodyfat amount you should have before you start gaining weight (-> for muscle gain). If you start off at 15kg of bodyfat and gain weight your gains will be mostly fat. If you start with 7-10kg of bodyfat and gain weight your gains will be more muscle and less bodyfat. it's to do with insulin sensitivity and p-ratio. Telling me to "stop cutting" and "gain muscle" is stupid because i already have 10-15kg of bodyfat and my gains will be mostly bodyfat instead of mostly muscle. I'm not interested in gaining only weight and strength. I want mostly muscle and strength together.. dont need useless bodyweight gains which aren't lean. Doesn't help my goal to be a better athlete becoming stronger and fatter.

btw i wish everyone here dishing out advice and upvotes/downvotes would stop projecting. I'm not telling ANYONE else how they should structure their diets and training. I'm talking about myself. I wouldn't apply advice pertaining to myself indiscriminately to another individual who may have very different needs than myself. i'll only ask others to do the same when dishing it out others.

2133
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 20, 2016, 06:22:08 am »
It seems like you didn't even read my post. wtf is that essential athletic bf you're talking about you make up all these "fancy words" but it doesn't really make any sense at all! haha

Essential atheltic bodyfat is around 7-10kg (15-22lb) for most males. It's basically 10% of 70kg-100kg.  I have a lot more than 7kg. I have something like 12-15kg which is too much. Hence i wanna reduce it to 7kg. Then i'll start gaining weight and muscle.

2134
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 20, 2016, 06:16:26 am »
Btw acole thanks for the TENS/EMS recommendation. I used one for the first time last night and couldn't believe how amazing it felt .. next day im good as new .. so this is a game changer. I owe you a lot  for putting me onto compression gear and now the TENS machine. I only wish i had read your post again because you suggested getting one with an AC charger, mine is just battery. But i'll prob get another one and see if i can get my health fund to cover the cost.

Also came across this book, The Lean Muscle Diet so far im digging it a lot, it puts maintenance first which is exactly what i'm after .. cause im good at dieting and cutting but need help in maintaining my gains once i get them. So very timely coming across it!

ANother thought i had recently .. low carb diets work a lot better for me in bodycomp change and fat loss. My next cut will def be a keto diet .. no doubt. I just hate the lack of sleep and having to piss all the time but whatever.

2135
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 20, 2016, 02:22:02 am »
I really don't get it why you are so stubborn when it comes to achieving a certain weight. Your mental occupation with dieting and achieving "X" bodyweight or bodyfat level is pathological. I mean as T0ddday said, I saw you going through several phases where you made some decent strength gains only to kinda lose most of it during your "cuts/recomps/whatever" It's like you're complaining about a headache while repeatedly banging your head against a wall. 

Goals like bw are measurable and concrete but ones like actual bodyfat% values are not. Unfortunately this means i'm coupling my bodyfat% milestones to bodyweight milestones like 80kg->77.5kg ->75kg ->72.5kg ->70kg etc or in pounds 185->180->175->170->165->160->155->150. Thats how I arrived at 165 .. there is nothing to say it will correspond to any meaningful bodyfat% -- it's useful only in relative terms that losing 1kg ~ 1%bf and so 5kg ~5%bf. In other words bodyfat changes go like 20->17.5->15->12.5->10->7.5 and so on. It's a rough approximation of meaningful milestones of relative bodyfat% CHANGE not actual bodyfat percentage values that are meaningful to us (15% vs 10% for example). 

I know from past experience I can afford to get down to 72kg from my current 77kg and still not be "ripped" -- which tells me i can afford to lose 5kg yet. But working backwards that means i have a surplus 5kg of adipose above and beyond my essential athletic bodyfat of ~7kg(10% of 70kg). If i do a bulk that +5kg will only increase .. and it's easy to imagine it going to +7kg. That's 7kg on top of the essential athletic bodyfat amount of 7kg. Too much fat. Good luck bulking, gains will be mostly fatty bulking from such a high bodyfat percentage.

I've talked about this in the past but there is a  lot of value in getting down to ones bare "essential bodyfat" - not because that is desirable from an athletic or aesthetic viewpoint long term.. it's just a good starting point to start training and eating properly. Maintain it for a while (say at least a few weeks or months) then start gaining weight SLOWLY after getting as strong as possible at that bodyweight/bodyfat%.  If i take it real slow from there and gain weight in a decent fashion (say at most gaining 0.5-1.5kg (1-3.5lb) bodyweight per month) while eating clean (oats + low saturated fat etc) and small surpluses (<+200-500kcal a day) i'll gain mostly muscle and good (male) bodyfat distribution. Obviously gaining some bodyfat as well which is okay cause bodyfat% will go up proportionally to bodyweight and you can more or less maintain your target bodyfat (say 10-12%). But if bodyfat% goes too high, cut for a few weeks and then repeat. Basically the most common advice from the bodybuilding community which has long figured this stuff out..

2136
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 20, 2016, 01:54:28 am »
^^^ I think I have you pretty beat on the letting your bodyweight drift past its setpoint.  In fact im pretty sure im forum wide champion.

True. You and mutumbo have gained the most weight in recent times. But i think you were both pretty lean in your teens and 20s. In comparison, I think i am still holding adipose from ages 14-23 -- those were the years i was pretty physically inactive & ate like crap because i didn't know any better ... sucks.. cause i cud have made amazing gains in those years if i had been more active. I really didn't start lifting til 25 and learned the wrong stuff to start with and let myself go in a big way (intentionally) topping out at 115kg / 250lb at my heaviest from "bulking up".''

2 years ago i did a pretty decent job at cutting to 163 .. however as soon as i came off that diet, i rebounded hard, eating so much junk in the space of 10 days. Lmao, i used to go to the shops and buy a box of brownie mix and make a batch and eat the entire thing in one sitting. i quickly found I had had bounced back to 175 and kept going up. My body just wasn't ready to maintain 163. I had got there too fast, via hardcore ~1000kcal/day dieting. This time around my plan is to maintain 165 for a while before attempting any future cutting .. and let my body become accustomed to new set points of bodyfat% along the way. The mistake i made previously was i had never given myself that chance to make intermediate setpoints .. and when i reached my goal weight, i was not prepared to maintain it. Maintaining lower bodyfat% is going to be my biggest challenge to come .. not so much getting there but staying there.

2137
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 19, 2016, 02:59:07 pm »
Yeah forgot you were special man.  Just keep going to 155lbs at 6'4" lol

There's 2 parts to this but only a few ppl on this forum would be able to relate to this. Those who have allowed their bodyweight to drift wayy past their setpoint (from injury induced layoffs or whatever). So i dont think i was born to have this storage pattern. There is a good quote on this if i can paraphrase it fairly, "As men get fat they take on female storage patterns" and vice versa, "as women get fat they take on male storage patterns". So as a woman gets obese she'll start to grow a protuding gut and pile on the lower back fat when women normally wouldn't store fat there. Similarly when a man gets obese he'll start to store fat in his hips/butt/thighs/chest when normally he wouldn't. This does bad things for a man hormonally too, reduces testosterone production and increases oestrogen production.

The point is if a male has "let himself go" at some point, that fat is there and it must be dieted off or whatever. And then maybe if you do it right, ie minimise saturated fat intake and overall fat intake for that matter and keep calories in check not gaining weight too quickly he will be able to gain weight in a more "normal" manner for a male, which is good.

The thing todday doesn't get and it's easy to understand if you do make a quick table like i did on this thread:


The difference between the guy who is 10% at 90kg and 10% at 70kg is ONLY 2kg of adipose. SO it's only wishful thinking to say you should "just gain some muscle" - of course you should gain muscle! But if you already more than say 2-5kg of extra adipose, you would have to gain wild amounts of muscle to nevertheless improve your bodyfat% appreciably. This is all very depressing of course but the numbers are undeniable...

2138
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 19, 2016, 07:25:59 am »
Cause photos dont help anything. We've been down that road on the forum.  Oh you have visible abs you must be X% bodyfat where X is estimated at ~10% except I had fkn visible abs when i started cutting 10kg ago.. so either im 0% bodyfat now or visible abs dont mean anything. The thing which confounds this is i dont have typical male fat storage and im not going to take photos of my butt so this whole exercise is pointless

2139
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 19, 2016, 06:16:16 am »
But that's confusing, i always thought I was hip dominant... so im not sure if this is me.. b/c i too was able to dunk while heavy (~220lb) .. and quite obese, it wasn't pretty, it wasn't athletic but i could do it. I always thought my quads were not strong enuf, that was why i started to front squat. And so on. Later i decided the front squats did help me but only indirectly cause the ATG FS is a great glute and pc chain exercise (for me and my build type) and it wasn't really the quad panacea i had thought it to be, and rather the BS was superior for my quads .. but i digress..

I dont think im as lean as you think i am. I get it, at my height and weight i should be quite lean. I'm actually obese though, so maybe im an outlier an exception to the rule. I do actually believe that strongly. I dont want to cut forever but i do want to cut enough to be lean and then start from scratch, building myself up slowly and staying lean and being super patient when i do right i may be able to be a lean 80kg/175lb .. but right now im an obese 168 (in athletic terms) .. and will prob be around 15% bodyfat give or take when i reach my goal weight of 165lb. Is 15% lean enough? fuck no but i will stop and take a diet break. This thing isn't going so smoothly anymore .. it's taking ages to lose weight now and i think my body needs a break from dieting. Later on  when im fresh i'll tackle the next cut from 165 down to ... maybe 155 (75kg -> 70kg) --somewhere in that range i may hit 10% hopefully.

2140
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / chasing mediocrity (W1D3)
« on: February 19, 2016, 05:24:34 am »
BS 3x125 (LPR), 1x127.5, 2x125, 2x6x107.5 (LPR)
OHP 2x60, 1x62.5, 5x3x60 (LPR)
RDL 8x130 (LPR), 8x135 (LPR)
Hip Thrust 2x8x100 (PR)
WCU 3x100, 5x95
Thick Band TKE 2x25 (PR)
Thick Band Glute Bridge 2x20 (PR)

BW: 76.3kg / 168.21lb (2016 PR)

Squat notes:
Forced some heavy squatting even though i was supposed to just volume .. but i wanted to see if i could recover some more ground after being unable to squat 132.5kg anymore. 6 reps at 125kg or more is decent. Will work up to 12 reps. Sucks that i cant squat leave alone rep 132.5kg anymore though :(

Accessory notes:
Game changer on hip thrusts .. i realised my plates were bit small.. so i put a set of plates underneath and this made a huge difference. Otherwise it was scary ending the set cause i'd have to lower the bar to the ground and it was too far away and I worried for my back. Now i can just go straight down, easy. But these sets were brutal. If i had considered doing a 3rd set i decided against it after the 2nd, just too painful lol.

RDLs - Did heavy RDLs again for the first time since I injured my back! Now gotta work up to 8x150kg which will be 2xbw once im done cutting to 75kg. Wicked. Excited to see how this translates to athleticism once all is said and done.




2141
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 19, 2016, 04:18:46 am »
That's amazing. That's the first time anyone has ever told me that. Wow. Question is, How do I make these changes happen?

2142
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 19, 2016, 04:02:36 am »
Look i'm not really focusing on sprint mechanics right now but if this can help me become a better basketball player, im all ears. Specifically in driving with the ball in a half court set. Or fast break offense and defense. Or blocking a shot (which i invariably end up doing SL for some reason even though it's my weakest jump form)..

2143
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 19, 2016, 01:45:02 am »
if ur quads are sore, chances are u are push running and not pull running -> dynamically weak hams

sorry i dont know about running dynamics. is this the same as forefoot v heelstrike?

2144
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 18, 2016, 08:21:42 am »
^true, but they werent short sprints (~100-150m) however if i did short sprints (say <50m) with recovery, i would def have some even more pronounced and crippling quad doms .. i know that with probability 1! To be honest i wouldnt call these sprints .. i was soo out of if that day, i could barely call it a sprint .. esp after the first rep, 20s isn't quite enough recovery. felt too slow/unaccalerated  to call it anything like a sprint.  But i'm still interested in hearing the explanation.

2145
Progress Journals & Experimental Routines / Re: chasing athleticism
« on: February 18, 2016, 03:31:31 am »
If sprints make your quads sore you have problems rdls and glute thrusts wont fix...

oh??

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