I have to admit I am in a bit of a coasting phase right now, my focus is primarily on my weight cut and as such I am basically cycling through the same workouts over and again. The cycle looks something like this.
Bench, flys and pullovers for chest
Pullups and deadlifts for back
Squats extensions and hamstring curls for legs
Presses, raises, upright rows, cleans and KB work for shoulders
Curls, dips and close grip press for arms
It’s very basic, easy to stick to and infinitely scaleable. Depending on how I feel I can go from a bench day with 300 reps to a back day with 80 reps without feeling like I am cheating myself. I am really just trying to maintain my strength and mass while allowing the diet to cut the fat.
My current progress is pretty good for me 🙂 and as an aside I thought I would include a screen shot of my spreadsheet but the long and the short is this…
Since Jan 1 2015 I am down by 33lbs. Since September of 2014 you can make that 46lbs meaning that in a few days I should actually celebrate a 50lb loss. As for bodyfat I have managed to come down from a whopping 26% fat down to just 19% while losing just about 5lbs of muscle mass meaning I have dropped almost 40lbs of fat.
40lbs of fat.
Just writing that makes me feel physically sick. There is a downside though, and that is my strength is way down. I know at the end of the year that I was basically prepping for a competition in the way I was training but the other day as I struggled under 325lbs on the bench I realized just how much of my strength was gone. I know a lot of it is glycogen loss and if I was to carb up again that I would probably gain 10% strength right away but it still hurts my tiny weightlifting brain. What I need to understand is that I am not weightlifting right now, I am body building which means my focus is on movement, muscle activation and lean protein sparing.
One other thing, my Tanita scale likes to guess my age and in January it was thinking I was 47. This week he told me I was 29. We are on good terms right now!
I am still working on between 500-800 calorie deficit a day, not including the extra burn I get from participating in the conditioning at gym. My loss is slowing a little bit but that’s because the last time I was below 230lbs I was in University. I am happy to take it slowly now. I know I will never get back to the 190lbs I was back then simply because of all the mass I have added since then but I do know that when we got our body comp tested that I was 14% and I would like to be there again some time. In the past that would have seemed like a ridiculous statement but the way things have been going recently I can actually believe that it may be a possibility.