What does your plan look like?

Lyadeia

Hi everyone! I am really curious as to what your plan looks like, whether you are trying to burn fat or gain muscle (or both!), and how much success you have had so far?

I am definitely an endomorph body type trying to lose fat, so when it comes to exercise, I really am a busy little bee. I am currently doing strength training 3 days per week (I try for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). I am doing full body routines, and I have actually made up 3 separate routines. I work chest, back, shoulders, biceps, triceps, quads, hams, and calves in that order on each of the workouts, I just pick a different exercise for the different workouts. I do 3 sets of each trying to get to 8-12 reps (unless I am doing push-ups when I do as much as I can. I try for 5 cardio workouts a week, but sometimes my schedule doesn't allow that much. But I always get in at least 3 cardio workouts. I feel better if I do 4 or 5, though.

As far as nutrition goes, I try to stick with eating around 1500 or so calories per day at a 45/35/20 (protein/carb/fat) split. I am not too worried if I go a little over that, but I try not to go too far under concidering all the wokouts that I get in each week.

So far I have lost 3 pounds and 2% body fat. That was between the middle of October and Monday of last week. I am hoping to keep up the fat loss through the holidays!

Who else is entering the Holiday Challenge???

delipidation

My goals are all around reducing body fat and rehabbing a couple of damaged joints (one shoulder, one ankle) by early summer of 2012.

When I started in October of 2011, I was at nearly 26% body fat, which was way further into that red zone than I had ever strayed before. The interim goal was to be below 23% by year's end -- instead I hit exactly 23% on the 31st of December, so I'm at least in the ballpark. The last time I saw a "1" in the hundreds place on the scale was in the spring of 2009, and the last time I saw a "1" in the tens place of my body-fat percentage was in the summer of 2008; I will find some small ways to reward myself as soon as I see either of those on two subsequent weigh-ins!

Longer-term, I want to be at or below 15% body fat by the end of May, and to have strengthened my knees and ankles enough to reduce the likelihood of re-injuring myself when I counsel at camp a few weeks later (the ankle injury occurred at camp in the summer of 2010, and the joint was still sufficiently unstable to keep me from counseling during the summer of 2011).

Tom's book has persuaded me that weight is not the focus: as long as I am stronger, leaner, faster and have a higher cardiovascular efficiency, things are headed in the proper direction.

Burning the fat: I picked up a Bayou Fitness Total Trainer DLX (http://www.bayoufitness.com/bayou-fitness-total-trainer-dlx-home-gym-149) gravity trainer a couple of months back for both strength and cardio work, and it has had the wonderful side effect of almost completely restoring a full range of motion to the damaged shoulder in that time frame. I'm also planning to get a rebounder in the next few weeks, both as a cardio alternative and for some more specific low-impact strength and range-of-motion work on the knees and ankles.

Feeding the muscle: My lean body mass has never varied more than about 5 pounds either way from 155 pounds. I'm currently feeding it at the rate of 1500 calories per day, of which 50% is carbs, 30% protein and 20% fat. I'm logging everything, but not really obsessing about the intake side of the equation, because it is already clear that just seeing some of the high-calorie items that do nothing for the muscles (ice cream, tortilla chips, etc.) on the screen gives me a way to evaluate, then reduce or eliminate them, which puts me in a dramatically better position than I was. True, you can't out-exercise a bad diet, but if the diet is more or less under control the focus can return to exercise, which is a lot more fun. As I get closer to that 15% goal I may have to experiment with carb cycling and some of the other tricks that Tom mentions, but for now just having the big picture on how much is going in and how much is being burned is a sufficient level of detail.