Getting Ripped

andrewnd92

Firstly I do apologise for the length of this but would much appreciate community feedback!

Basically my goal is to improve my upper body strength and get somewhat ripped. Currently, I attend the gym five days a week for a round an hour doing weights. One day a week, usually after a weekend, I also include 30 minutes of cardio. I am a 21 year old male, weighting 144 pounds, 5 foot 8 tall and have a waist of 33 inches. I calculated my bf% to be about 17%. I know that to get ripped I need to lower this to around 10% - however I am unsure on how to do this correctly as I am getting contradicting information.

My diet is mostly healthy. I eat three medium sized meals a day; weetabix / oatabix for breakfast with semi-skinned milk, wholegrain bread sandwich for lunch and chicken / pork / beef with potatoes or brown rice with mixed vegetables for dinner. Pretty boring and repeatable however it was easy to fall into this diet plan as it is convenient for work and university. I have snacks during the day between meals; fruit / oats / nuts / Greek yoghurts and three protein shakes; one before and one after a workout and a third before bed. On average, I get about 120g protein from my meals and shakes.

So my aim is to get a bf% of 10%, however I am not sure how to achieve this. I was told that to build muscle and strength, I need to have about 2800 calories a day – which I have been doing so far and have noticed significant muscle improvement in my arms and chest, however the information I have received about what I achieve to be like says that I need a deficit and should be only consuming 1800 calories a day in order to lost 0.5 lbs a week – which I can do physically do as eating limits is not a problem for me. So my questions that need to be answered are;

> Is it possible to continue to build muscles in my chest and arms on such a low calorie intake? If not, can you recommend an appropriate intake?

> How can I successfully and quickly lower my bf% from 17 to 10 percent? Should I focus solely on lifting and diet or do some cardio too?

> What type of workouts should I be doing to improve my abdominal muscles? Thus far I do various versions of weighted trunk rotations as well as weighted crunches and sit-ups, five sets with twenty reps of each.

> Does creatine help or hinder this process; I currently take 10g on a workout day.

> Can you tell me anything important that I am not taking into consideration, and recommend me foods.

Thanks for reading – I look forward to getting some feedback.