Well i've def injured myself. I forced myself to trian through it because A). its my team and B). if i dont play how can i expect others to play? Went by the after hours clinic after the game but they wanted $70 to see the GP. Fuck that. I told them I didn't need to see a doctor just a nurse to bandage my chest but they don't allow that. So went by the pharmacy and picked up some stuff. Will tape myself up and then rest all week. Aint nobody got time for this injury - it's a bitch to heal and last time I had to rest completely for weeks before it healed up. FML. Just when I needed to turn training up to 11 I have to pull back because of this!
Oh forgot to mention, I only attempted 1 dunk today. No warmups, landed a nasty one hand SVJ. Then I didn't try dunking again because I didn't wanna worsen my intercostal injury.
I didn't take any chances last night and I taped up my chest before bed just in case I had torn something. It meant I could only sleep upright because leaning to the side would pull the tape apart which would cause pain. Now i'm not sure if the discomfort i'm feeling is because i've taped my chest, or because i've torn/strained an intercostal/pec.
I still have NO idea how I picked up the injury. I woke up fine so it must have been during training. All I did was squats, jumps and sprints. Any of those could have caused it. But it didn't manifest itself until hours later when I realised I had hurt myself.
Tomorrow is bball training, so i'll try to take it easy. I don't lift til tuesday anyway so hopefully by then it's all healed up. But what i'll do on tuesday is take off the tape and see if it feels good, and if it does, then i'll train.
Great deal of quad soreness after teh sprints. It's been ages since i've had these.
Didn't deal well with the injury scare, I kinda binged today. Ate some m&ms and bag of crisps. I hate myself .. lol.
Honestly I just saw other guys doing short sprints when I first started logging here and I thought I should try doing them too. They were doing 20-25m sprints I think, which are ever shorter. I guessed it was to do with the length of a basketball court (~25m) but I have no idea what the actual rationale is behind them. For that you'll have to ask the other guys here, hopefully they'll chime in. Another guess would be the 30m sprints test max acceleration since you try to go from rest to your top speed as quickly as possible? I don't know.
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That distance is almost immeasurable as far as hand-timing goes and thus really hard to gauge improvement. It doesn't even let you hit top speed. I doubt Usain Bolt could hit 4s for 5 reps without spikes.
Interesting to hear that! I went with 30m because it coincides perfectly with the length of the cricket pitch at the park, which allows the convenience to run the same exact distance each time. That's the only reason i'm doign 30s. I dont have any trouble measuring with my gymboss because I set it to count down to 0 then it beeps, I take off, and then it beeps again exactly 4s later. So I use that 2nd beep to see how close I came to the end of the 30m. If it beeps after I pass the 30m mark I know i've broken 4s. It hasn't happened yet though, and hearing how Usain would have so much trouble with it, maybe I never will either!
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Why not just run 60m and 100m sprints. They will allow you to measure your improvement with much less noise, allow you to work on accelerating to much faster speed, and have measurably good benefits for body competition, which you are concerned with... I would be afraid an athlete training his self timed 30m is training moreso his ability to reflexively react to his stop-watch press than actually training his legs to get stronger...
Sure. I'm happy to run 60m instead. Will have to mark it out though but that's ok, i'll take the measuring tape next time. I dont think I can run 100m at full speed yet, i run into endurance issues but i'll switch over to 60m first and see how that goes. Thanks!
Training (Lower) FS 2x90, 1x100, 3x104.5, 3Fx105.5 BS 3x90, 1x100, 5x95, 5x90 SVJx5, RVJx2 5x30m sprints (~4s per 30)
And that was it. Then 8 hours later when i'm driving home, I realised I had this weird thing going on in my right pec. It's a kind of searing pain. It scares me because last time I had this was when I tore my intercostals and I had to stop training completely for weeks before it healed. Back then I made it worse by training thru it. Hope this is nothing and it goes away but i'm going to be cautious. Bother.
Anyway the sprints were good. I've never been this close to breaking 4s. Which is remarkable because I haven't been sprinting for months and this was the first time. So hopefully once i'm done cutting and I work my sprinting harder i'll be under 4s.
True Lance. I'll keep dancing with the girl who brought me to the ball. Thanks for reminding me. Btw do you think it's ok to keep cutting to 159? Or do you think I should stop now? I don't want to give up when i've come so close. I don't think I have long to go now.
edit. Thinking about it, there are only 3 weeks left in Feb. I can't lose much weight now anyway and 159 is out of the picture from around 165. At best I'll be in the low 160s at the end of Feb. So how about a compromise. I'll cut to say 163-162. And stop cutting there. But since I'm unhappy with my body composition, i'll believe T0dday that thru training I can continue to improve my body composition, or specifically that doing tempo work will improve body comp, I can continue to improve bodycomp even once i've stopped cutting come march. This way I'll be able to train better by getting off the caloric deficit and my body comp will improve thru training. Sort of a best of both worlds.
If I were you, i'd first do whatever you usually do to get into PR territory.
Then once there, transition into a 5/3/1 like program where you PR only very infrequently and do the lifts infrequently too. This will probably be sustainable even when life gets in the way. But if you're trying to keep your gains from 3x a week squatting in the face of intermittent week long breaks it will always be a case of spinning ones wheels.
In 5/3/1 squatting 1x a week will probably hold your lifts thru breaks better since they're not predicated on high freq/volume as much as say 5/3/1 or whatever traditional PL program you use.
But I am just theorising never actually put this into practice.
Training (Upper) DIPZ 3x5x15 (PR) BP 5x74.5, 6x70, 5x70, 5x67.5, 6x65
BW: 75kg/165 lb Something funny going on with my left forearm just below the wrist.. like RSI or something. Im gonna try use the right hand for the mouse/kb til it goes away.
Mad doms in the quads, adductors and hamstrings. Knees dont feel amazing, otherwise i'm tempted to go for a run or practice some jumpshots but will just wait til tomorrow practice. And sprint on friday.
How is the sprinting coming? How have your times coincided with your diet?
I'll find out for you this friday, I haven't tested since I weighed mid 180s. Should be interesting to see how it goes!
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While at first glance it seems you should stop trying to lose weight.... It seems you have gained strength despite getting really small. This certainly isn't in-line with extreme weight loss.
I have to agree with this. If I was as lean as it would seem for my height and weight, then I would be struggling bigtime with trying to progress my squat. But actually I am progressing even though it's very slow, my lifts aren't plummeting by any means, if anything im consistently adding weight to the bar (albeit over a timescale of several weeks and months). The fact that I originally thought I was 20% doesn't mean i'm 5% now, it just means I was a initially lot higher than 20% - prob high 20s? It's most likely that i simply underestimated my initial bodyfat which a lot of people do when they're fat.
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Either:
1) you have hollow bones (pretty awesome, like a bird) 2) Your scale/ruler is broken 3) You think you look fat but suffer from body dysmorphia (you should post a picture for the sane members of the forum to evalute) 4) You were extremely inactive/fat for a lot of your life, have a small frame, and have added decent squat strength despite an overall lack of musculature and some stubborn fat deposits/extra skin which keeps you from looking lean with your shirt off despite the fact that you actually have a low overall percentage of bf. You store almost no fat on your legs, glutes, back, but have a bit of adipose on your love handles/chest where a few pounds can keep you from looking lean...
Straight away we can rule out 2 because I've checked my bodyweight against the scales at the gym and it matches close to the pair I have in the bathroom. I dont think I have body dysmorphia, I don't think i'm someone anorexic thinking he's fatter than he is. I don't want to be super skinny in the first place! It's something i'm having to do so that I can gain mass optimally later on.
This is taken 2nd of Jan this year. I'm leaner now though but not significantly. Weighed around ~168.
So that leaves hollow bones.. and small frame and inactive during the ages 18-21 and then 22-27. I was very active as a teen but my diet was terrible and I was almost anoexic thru puberty (how I wish I could go back in time and change that!). I think this is probably it. For someone who weighs 165 at 6'3" I don't look small at all, I look pretty big. I think that's an illusion due to my small frame. I'm tall yes but I don't think i'm that wide? So the 165 is distributed in a way which makes it seem plentiful and as a result I look a lot heavier than I weigh (in my admittedly biased opinion). But then again I don't have tiny wrists or ankles, mine are 6.5" and 8.5" respectively, which I think is average or above average? I honestly can't explain it. Your guess as good as mine.
For what it's worth, I woke up today looking and feeling (=pinch test) a lot leaner than I did the day before. So it's like i've had an overnight transformation. It gives me confidence that i'm on the right track. Steadily with time, the pinches are getting smaller, and there is less jiggling in the mirror when I jump about. I dont think i'm in danger of getting into single digits of bodyfat .. yet. Yes, that goes completely against intuition, I don't expect you to believe that someone with my height and weight is still this fat.. but it is what it is.. i'm not sure what I can do about it short of staying the course.
Let me put it this way. The fat around my waist and chest wont disappear if I suddenly gain 9lb of muscle. It will still be there. I'll still LOOK fat even if my objective bodyfat % has gone down from adding more muscle. And that what really matters to me. I guess at some point I decided I didn't care about what a DEXA would say about my bodyfat % (whether it's 7% or 17% means nothing to me), nor skinfold calipers and what have you. The only test that matters to me is looking in a mirror and seeing someone lean and athletic - or not - and since i'm not - i'd like to keep dropping bodyfat until I get there. I dont expect I have very long to go now. I'd say about 1lb of fat in my upper body, 1.5lb around my lower back. 1.5 around my gut. Maybe another 2lb around my body in general. A total of 6lb. At 159 I think i'll definitely be done. I'm around ~165 now. So it's not a long way away. We've all seen the video below or some model of bodyfat before, that's what i'm using for my rough estimate.
Just my two cents, but you are at a good point and here is what I would do if I were you. Stop cutting. But DO NOT BULK. At least not the bulk that 95% of people do to gain strength. You are spot on when you say you fear spinning your wheels by making your progress and then fattening up and adding some strength but losing or maintaining relative strength. You have built up a lot of discipline from dieting. You can summon on that discipline to maximize your potential. Keep the training up. Add some carbs post-workout [~50g] and one other time per day (preferably morning unless you train really early) get a minimum of 100 grams of protein and some oils in your diet and when you are hungry try to reaching for primarily good protein sources and eat until your almost full. You still shouldn't eat that "hot chip" and probably never should. Stay away from alcohol and keep the training intense try and the volume decent. Consider adding other compound movements like standing barbell presses, oly lifts, and deadlifts to your training. You could even bench press. Get on the track all the time. Do speed work but don't neglect speed endurance workouts. They will hurt but they will get you to win races and they will get you lean and they will get you to recomp. I have yet to see a guy who doesn't neglect his weight training and runs himself into basic track shape (example: 3 400m's in sub 60 w/3 minutes rest or 10 200's under 30 with 1 min rest) who looks "fat". This holds even for idiot college athletes who subsist on orange soda and dorm food. These guys look remarkably leaner after a couple weeks of two-a-days despite binging on pizza each night. You get sufficient protein and don't binge eat and you tilt the equation even more in your favor. Take a picture now and take a picture after... My bet is you might be a few pounds heavier... But who cares. You will be a hell of a better athlete... and that is what you are chasing...
I pretty much agree with everything you've written here starting with being patient with gains and not trying to gain too much weight all at once. That's definitely how i'll be doing it. My diet has been dialled in for a long time now, I get around 160g of protein a day, and keep fat intake low but I do eat healthy fats like egg yolk and fish oil and use minimal olive oil in cooking. Will def keep that up long after I stop cutting but i'll increase the amount. Carbs i dont mess around with, if i eat too little my mood plummets and my physical performance goes along with it. So I keep carb intake around 100-150g a day. As I get leaner I might have to manipulate carbs though - but so far I haven't needed to. I already use heavy compound movements like bench and overhead press and will keep that up as well. I do need to add heavy deadlifts though but i've had problems with form which scare me off. But yes i'll def try the 2-a-days and heavy track work. That sounds like a great change of pace. And to make it worthwhile i'll put myself down to enter a meet this year too to motivate myself.
LMCD says to take a 2 week maintenance break after a cut. After a cut (or during for that matter) your body is primed for fat gain, which is why you don't want to do a bulk straight after since you'll store more bodyfat that way. Go from the caloric deficit to maintenance and keep it there for a few weeks. This will reset your hormones etc to baseline which will allow the bulk to work better for gaining more muscle:bodyfat. That's what I've read.
This is how I would do it :-
Day 1 of maintenance: (make it coincide with a higher volume training day). Start doing a carb refeed in the morning. If you take any stimulants like caffeine DONT take them today since they kill insulin sensitivity. You want to eat around 200-400g of carbs throughout the day. Focus on complex carb sources. Bread etc. Just watch the sucrose/fructose intake though and keep it to around 50g though but that still allows you to have some icecream or cake. Important to keep fat intake down to 50g as well for the day. Your body will store carbs as glyocogen etc but fat will get stored as bodyfat so that's why you minimise it on a refeed. Anyway so that should signal your body that the diet is over. Then..
Day 2: What you'd eat normally on the diet + 500kcal more food than usual. I suggest making a good chunk of that extra 500kcal up using CARBS because it will help keep leptin and what not elevated. But a bit of extra fat will help too if you've been lowfatting.
Day 3-7: Same as day 2.
Day 8-14: Same as day 2 but add 200cal more.
End of maintenance phase, do the bulk. Throughout the maintenance phase, your bodyweight shouldn't exceed what it was AFTER the day 1 refeed. If it does, you're probably gaining weight which should suggest checking cals.
And that's it, keep it simple and avoid binging by all means. Personally, I'd treat it as a diet as usual, same amount of discipline, only with slightly more calories.
FS notes: Form was good. Was real rusty warming up though but it all went ok. I avoided failure didn't attempt the 5 rep PR on the 104.5. I figure there is no point grinding myself to dust this workout, save that for the 2nd workout of the week. Could have muscled up a 5th rep on all those sets but didn't court failure on those either.
BS notes: Did 20 reps today, the prettiest set was the last one, nothing heavy. Will go for a 5 rep heavy set next time. And that's it. Decent amount of squat volume, nothing else. Tomorrow i'll do upper body. In promptu decided to try a bodypart split again cause I wasn't up to full body death by volume.
Also re above posts, not going to do a kneejerk reply, have to read your post carefully and understand it before responding. Thanks so much for the advice, i'm very lucky.
So i'm still not fully recovered from the hectic basketball training session over teh weekend. In hindsight I went a bit too hard, esp on my first time playing basketball since July last year. I've got a lot of assymetric soreness, left side of my body, starting from foot, calves, hamstring, glutes and all the way up to lower back. I guess i'm just that much left side dominant.
But either way i'm going to train today (tuesday) - i figure i'll do a lot of volume today. Then take 2 days off, and go heavy on friday. Rest saturday, and then basketball training sundays. Only 2 weights session a week? Enough to maintain my lifts/mass? Hope so. Enough to build strength? Doubt it very much. Esp while cutting, it's probably too little. Which makes me think perhaps I should just accept it as a compromise, force my way to say FS 5x105 (PR) and then hold it there thru feb while I cut the last few pounds of adipose. Then starting march i'll go maintenance/slight surplus and maybe start pushing them up again? We'll see. I hate planning this far out when i'm strugglign so much with day to day planning and scheduling.
Yeah mutumbo my conditioning is terrible. Like really bad. I regret not keeping it up, esp when at one point last year I was well conditioned. Hopefully it will come back quickly though. I need to raise my game to another level.
Re lower back strength, you guys have convinced me. Im going to push my lower back strength up like crazy. My legs are weak but my back is even weaker. Squatting makes my legs a bit stronger sure. But nothing is making my back stronger which is a problem. If I want to be a good sprinter i'll def have to prioritise my lower back.
From what i've pieced together from reading internet forums, a lot of this came up as a result of the HIT nonsense that was once in vogue. The idea of doing one hard high intensity set and going home promulgated by Arthur Jones or whatever it was, was intended to get guys in and out of gyms quickly since they were mainly in the gym business.
You don't want ppl sitting there in the squat racking doing 8 sets of 5 or something because it inconveniences other customers. As far as HIT goes, It didn't really work though because ppl didn't make good gains and it's kinda well known now that naturals need a lot more volume to make progress. Anyway just food for thought, a lot of this stuff is just conjecture and I doubt it matters in the end. Maybe the explanation i've given is bs too, who knows.
So had the first training session with the new team. Had a decent turn out, 9 guys came down. But that's not as great as it sounds because only 4 are committed atm. I made the typical retard mistake I do soemtimes where I played on an empty stomach. I guess I thought I would go super light weight and land some dunks or whatever but I was so gassed running up and down the court that the one time I had a fast break I hit the rim on my dunk. lesson learnt, will have my weetbix (metaphorically speaking) in the morning before practice.
Lots of good signs, I'm liking the team quite a bit. As a team we have good defence. I was pretty dominant on defence too. Didn't really come into offence much short of drawing double teams opening up lanes for team mates. Which is ok. I wanted to show my boys I can put the ball down or pass the ball well but my conditioning let me down. Guys expect me to post up and play with my back to the rim, which I hate because it's not my game. Hopefully next time we will have an extra big so I can play my natural game. It's okay. I'll work on it. And I think having played so hard today, I wont be able to train weights tomorrow. But that's a trade off I'll have to make.
So yea lots of things to fix. I'll have to raise my game a lot, i was fairly disappointed with myself, but it's early days yet.
Btw, weighed 74kg when I got home. Damn this heat wave .. crazy summer ahead..
Oh shit! First of all I appreciate the looking out dawg! And I totally get the impression of being reversehypetrophy 2013 EDITION. You'll prob seize on this revelation but the other day for the 2nd time this year, I put a hot chip (or french fry in USA speak) in my mouth, savored the taste but then sooner expelled it into the bin than injest the unwanted calories. And that sounds borderline admittedly lol. But you'll have to believe me when I say i'm still very much fat..! I've got snitch tits that could fill a 34A cup (i just measured lol) and a generous gut and plenty of back bacon around my waist.
Plz alow me at most another 6lb weight loss - at 159lb i'll be done cutting and then i'll be in that kyle macdowell ideal zone of ~10% bf for bulking. I'm terrified of doing a bulk now in case I end up spinning my wheels only to wind up where I first started off so I wanna finally do things the right way by finishing the job (cut). I'm hoping to spend the rest of the year either bulking or maintaining - so it's not like i'm going to cut forever, just enough to reset my bodyfat to athletic levels. Also I think i'm a special snowflake because most ppl who lift, nevermind guys above 6ft would be ripped at 165 and i'm definitely not.. so i have to accept the painful reality that i'm always going to be a lot lighter than most ppl unless i'm fat.
The point T0dday made is a good one but the difference between those 3 guys when ordered from lightest to heaviest is 9lb of muscle and 1lb of fat for the guy next to him. So to go up a 10lb weight category i'd need to add a whopping 9lb of muscle and only 1lb of fat. I'm not confident i'm in a position to naturally add that kind of ratio of muscle and fat, even if I allow for cutting excess bodyfat, it's just too much to ask, knowing my body, and it's reluctance to build mass. But the one thing I can control is dropping from a higher weight category to a lower one by cutting, that's totally in my control. If I could click my fingers and and add 9lb of muscle to maintain my bodyfat, I would so do it. But unfortunately in the real world the only way to add 9lb of mass is thru a decent bulk, and it will invariably also push my total bodyfat to unacceptable levels. Im not willing to risk making no progress by bulking now, only to undo my hard work cutting so far, ending up spinning my wheels because I started bulking at my current level of fatness esp when i've worked so hard to get where i'm atm.
No idea, it's on my TODONE list to make a vertec. I'll prob get around to it when I've finished the cut which is prob gonna be the end of feb. I dont want to cut any longer than that, i'm sick of cutting it's destroying my soul (diva mode enabled).. lol.. but yea once i'm done cutting, i'll focus on pylos and stuff to maximise my vj. It's probably low 30s now conservatively? i dunno. im hoping to have a solid 36" vert when the big bball tournament rolls around in 56 days.
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