SO i dont know if it's the rest or what .. but holy crap do i look "jacked" lately .. upper body, legs, all of it! My shoulders and arms look bigger cold than they wud after a workout pumped. I wonder if i missed a beat in doing TOO muh training and sacrificing gains of muscle? Less is more?
LOL. Highly unlikely. Hate to break it to you but you didn't just put on a bunch of muscle. Nor have you ever put on much actual muscle tissue.
Rule of thumb. How you look == What you ate. How you perform == how you trained.
What I mean is if you wrote "Holy crap I was jumping out the gym today I felt soooo light - even though I took some days off training and haven't squatted n two days!... maybe less is more?"
Then my answer would be - yes. Allowing enough recovery for you to super compensate allowed you to improve your athletic ability. In this case less is more.
BUT... when you are focused on how you look in the mirror in the short term the answer almost always involves two things; salt or sugar (carbs). Look at your journal. You are perpetually eating under maintenance (this actually does sacrifice your ability to gain muscle) in your quest to not be fat and be 165... But recently you fell off the wagon and gorged and went above 180lbs. Your actually had a full gut for the first time in awhile. Now that food has moved from your gut and you are carb loaded and since you are lean this makes a dramatic difference in your appearance. Before and after pictures of bodybuilders who carb load are ridiculous. Carb loaded at low bodyfat will make you look jacked.
It's not the lack of training though (except for in so far as not training maybe lowered TDEE slightly so your effective net caloric intake was higher) - in fact it's more likely you don't train often enough to build muscle - not the other way around.
