One Week Down: Observations

It's about 4 weeks at this point:

• I have a temporary crown in, so chewing is a real nightmare. Actually it's okay most of the time but sometimes the thought of eating is a real drag, so I'm leaning heavily on the blender to hit my calories.
• I had a massive, massive overage on the weekend -- and then followed that up with a day where I was on my feet for about 12 hours on and off. I kind of front-loaded calories in anticipation of so much walking.
• Waist measurement seems about the same.
• Calipers indicate two pounds of LBM in just shy of a month; about 1.5 pounds of "other" in the same period. So about three pounds gain total.
• I also had a deload week because my back was killing me and pretty much every exercise in my full body routine touches on it in some way. I'm feeling better now but, cautious.

The rolling average is starting to move upwards again, which is good:



Pants still fit.

I told myself I'd give it a month, which it hasn't quite been yet. I think at this rate I'll continue since I don't have full confidence in the fat calipers. I have some anxiety surrounding stalled lifts but I imagine that attempting and failing that last set still creates stimulus for growth.

I'm starting to see results with a surplus in the 600 calorie neighborhood. If that speeds up the fat gain too much I'll back it off but when I was hitting 400 and 500 over I wasn't seeing a lot of movement.

My initial goal was to stop when my rolling average hits 200 lbs. So maybe another month of this?

schpitt wrote: »

I've also had weird results - I gained 1kg this last week. I thought maybe its just all that extra food sitting in my stomach. It really is a pain to eat so much, but that's good because I don't want it to become a habit once I've reached my target. I can't see any difference body fat or otherwise.

[...]

So you raise an interesting point, one that I feel like I've noticed too. I'm, at this point, pretty much used to the extra food. And watching the scale swing five pounds in three days and then swing back.

But I still feel like it's inconvenient to eat this much. Programming in extra snacks when I'm not hungry kind of sucks. It's fun to be looser with the stuff I get, but it's not fun to have to constantly eat and worry about whether I'm going to have to make up 600 calories at the end of the night.

I hope that mentality can carry me through my eventual cut.

JoRocka wrote: »

keithcw_the_first wrote: »

MrM27 wrote: »

keithcw_the_first wrote: »

Finally hit 120 5x5 on the OHP so I guess that food is going somewhere.

That's nice right there. It's frustrating for me how slow the progression on that lift is

You should tell that to the guy in the power rack next to me. Warmed up with two plates on the OHP. Then grabbed two more. Then two more.

Then two more (three on a side now).

Then two 25's.

He was doing really quick sets of 3 and even heavy singles but... still. I was shocked. I know I couldn't have even unracked the bar. With the help of his spotter he managed to get a single OHP of 365. That's some next level *kitten*.

was he over head pressing or was he doing a push press?

Because a strict OHP is different than a push press. (I mean- 365 is pretty impressive either way- but they aren't they same movements)

It wasn't a strict OHP I don't think. He definitely wasn't locking out over his head. Actually I think if he was locking it out over his head he would quite nearly have died. Probably a push press then. Still, super impressive.

The graph! I forgot it. Blue dots are scale measurements, red line is weighted average, thin blue line is .5 lb/week.

I may be headed for another plateau, judging by the way things are heading. If that's the case I'll bump it up by another 100 calories but I won't really know until the end of the week.

Thanks to food, I finally got two plates on the OHP.

135, only twice.

But still, I can cross that off my list.