This Week's Gym and Food

Location: My House and Woodcock Sports Centre, Aston University
Date & time: about 7 am - Tuesday & Thursday - 16th & 18th November

Tuesday (30 mins)

• dumbbell chest - 2 x 10 @ 27.5kg, 9 @27.5kg (took a lot to get that 9th)
  
• dumbbell shoulders - 5 x 5 @20kg
  
• upright row - 2 x10 @37.5kg, 10 @35kg
• 3 x 20 ab crunches (1-2 second hold)

BCAA before and after session during the morning.

Cucumber, sardines, tuna & coconutty egg for lunch; slow-cooked chicken bones with veg for dinner

Thursday (20 mins)

• Romanian deadlift - 3 x 10@38kg
• weighted chins - 5 @12.5kg, 4 @12.5kg, 4 @5kg, 2 x 4 @bodyweight
• one-arm dumbbell rows - 3 x 10 @24kg

BCAA before and after during the morning.

Coconutty scrambled egg and cold pork for lunch; tuna steaks, fried sweet potato, steamed broccoli & kale for dinner

I worked pretty hard this week. I had no training partner, so the sessions were pretty bisk. My main goal is to avoid strength loss while I lose a little fat.

This is the second week of fast stripping, which I am trying to achieve via more frequent full day fasting. This week I managed Monday and Wednesday, but was too hungry on Friday and caved into some supermarket chicken and fish, which left my mouth tasting nasty from the added salt and sugar.

I plan to carry on leaning up for another couple of weeks, then (assuming I have trimmed off enough) go back into a gaining phase again. But I will be mixing it up in the following ways:

• More 24-hour fasts & breakfast on gym days
  
• Different exercises (e.g. pistols, hand stand push ups)
• More rest between sets (perhaps 2 minutes instead of 1)...
• ...but fewer exercises overall (since I want to keep to 2 x 30 mins per week)

By having breakfast on the gym days I will be able to return to my Paleo roots by not taking branch chain amino acids before and after gym session. But by doing extra 24-hour fasts, I ensure that overall fasting time is the same as Leangains recommends.

My training partner has been talking about trying creatine for a while. I am considering it, if only to shut him up. Again, it would be only on an experimental basis. Perhaps 3 months. I need to do some reading first, to be sure I know the facts.

Either way, nothing's going to happen before Christmas. It will take all my concentration and focus to steer clear of dietary collapse during that time. ... Read more

Pre-Race Chest/Shoulders & Why it Needed to be Light

Location: My House
Day: 6.45am - Tuesday - 31st August

3 x 6 Dumbbell Chest Press (@28kg)
3 x 10 Ab Rollouts (using the wheel)
3 x 10 Upright Rows with barbell (EZ bar - 35kg, 30kg, 30kg)
16 Push Ups (using strict style, fully extending as per this video - except I was not doing them weighted!)

No training partner today, so I took minimal rest between dumbbell sets and alternated the rollouts and upright row.

Total Time: 15 minutes

Nutrition (higher carb, lower fat on workout day, based on my Leangains experiment):

20 minutes before: 10g BCAA
1 hour after: 10g BCAA
3 hours after: 10g BCAA

Lunch (12:00pm) - 2 tins of tuna, 1 tin of sardines, a sweet potato, beetroot, lemon juice

Dinner (7:15pm) - chicken-bone broth, fried cauli+onion, courgette, kale; banana & 4 plums

I took it easy on this session. I have a big mountain race on Saturday, so I want to let my body accumulate stored energy rather than batter it with weights to failure. More to the point, steep uphill racing is made easier by pushing the knees with the hands, something experienced fell runners can often be seen doing. This is like doing hundreds of close-grip push ups. So I stayed away from failure today on chest.

There is also the general sense of 'reserve'. Even if this were not a steep run, my experience has been that having too tough an upper body session does affect how prepared I feel for a run up to a week later.

Lunch was startlingly similar to the lunch on my last high carb day. Otherwise, I think I kept to the Leangains rules pretty well. I have to stop eating those plums. Our bedroom was like Chicago last night. ... Read more

15-Minutes of Weights Takes Heart Rate to Max

Wednesday, at home - 15 minutes of weight training with no real rest between sets.

Exercises:
Dumbbell Bench Press (10 @ 28kg)
Alternating Dumbbell Upright Rows (10 per side @ 20kg)
Ab Crunches (20, slow, bringing legs towards my head at the same time, and squeezing hard for 2 seconds.
Single-Arm Dumbbell Bent-Over Rows(10 @ 28kg)

I did the exercises in this order, rotating through them 3 times.

Heart Rate: ignore the dark blue bits. The red dots show where the workout started and ended. I peaked at 181. Since I am 38 years old, the formula suggests my max is 220-38 = 182. By doing my weights as a circuit without rest, I am clearly increasing the intensity. However, I do think my heart rate goes higher when I do Tabata rows, which I hope to record properly next time, suggesting that my max could be higher than the formula suggests.

Food: Egg, fruit, coconut cream, cocoa, 90 minutes later:

... Read more

Upper Body Tabata Intervals

Location: My House
Date: 23rd April

Workout: Mixed Tabata Intervals

Total Time: 9 minutes
Post Workout Nutrition: sardines and boiled eggs, 1 hour & 10 mins later.

I only wanted to hit the upper body, so I took the four exercises that avoided the legs and did each one twice in each Tabata set of 8. It did two Tabatas in total. It was, as any Tabata should be, tough, but the absence of quad involvement did keep me out of the vomit zone.

Floor Press - 20 seconds
10 seconds rest
Bent Over Row - 20 seconds
10 seconds rest
Seated Knee Raises - 20 seconds
10 seconds rest
Upright Row - 20 seconds
10 seconds rest
Floor Press - 20 seconds
10 seconds rest
Bent Over Row - 20 seconds
10 seconds rest
Seated Knee Raises - 20 seconds
10 seconds rest
Upright Row - 20 seconds

1 minute rest, then the same again.

The weights I chose we pretty low, but I find that when you are doing Tabata-style high speed, high intensity reps, it's very difficult to go too light. Lighter means faster, which means more effort. You still end up struggling towards the end of the 3rd and 4th set.

Update: I have changed the exercise from Press Ups to Floor Press - this was a copy and paste error - my comment below about not doing press ups should now make more sense!
... Read more

20-Minute Stay-in-the-Game Glycogen Dumper

Location: My House (and the scaffolding outside a neighbour's house)
Date: 7th March

8 Chin Ups
15 Press Ups
x 3 (no rest except to quickly move between locations)

1 minute to walk back into the house...then....

10 x Dumbbell squats (35 kg in each hand)
10 x Ab rollouts from the knees using the wheel
x3 (no rest between except to reposition)

Total workout time: 19 minutes

Post-workout nutrition: this, an hour later.

This session was really just to keep me in the game. I'd had a pretty heavy Easter weekend (too much booze, too much food) and I wanted an intense all over workout that was quick but dumped some of the muscle glycogen it felt like I had crammed myself full of over the weekend.

Normally at home I would not be able to do pull ups or chins, but a nearby house has some scaffolding up at the moment and at 6.30 am there was no one around to object to my using it... ... Read more

Mixed Tabata Intervals

Location: My House
Date: 19th March

Mixed Tabata Circuit Intervals x 2 (1 minute rest between)

Total workout time: 9 minutes

Post-workout nutrition: none - fasted until dinner.

This was a carbon copy of the session I did last month, so not much to add. Paradoxically, considering the garbage I ate and drank last weekend, I felt, if anything, marginally fitter this time. Perhaps before the garbage I was even fitter... ... Read more

Tabata Burpees and Some Press Ups

Location: My House
Date: 16th Marcy

Part 1 at 8am: Tabata burpees - 4 minutes

Part 2 at 11am: 30 push ups - 45 seconds

Post Workout 'Nutrition': this load of junk, at 1pm.

It's been a weekend of drinking and eating junk, which spilled over into the start of the week because I had time off work and met up with some of my co-conspirators today for lunch.

Today's exercise was largely medicinal. I am looking forward to getting back into the groove with the workouts and the food. For now I must accept I will not feel great for a couple more days and resist the temptation to do counterproductive amounts of exercise.

Better to avoid illness and carry a little extra fat for a few weeks that to be lean but ill.... ... Read more

Mixed Tabata Circuit Intervals x 2: A Good Toasting

Location: My House
Date: 10th February

Mixed Tabata Circuit Intervals x 2 (1 minute rest between)

Total workout time: 9 minutes

Post-workout nutrition: none - fasted until dinner.

I had intended to do three of these, but was utterly toasted after the second.

As I mention in my post on Tabatas, the idea is to do every 20 second burst of exercise as if your life depended on it.

I can feel myself getting fitter... but not as fit as I have been, or I would have pushed through into that third round.

Give this a go. It will hurt, but you'll be fitter. ... Read more

5-Minute Chin, Push-Up & Squat Combo

Location: My New House
Date: 9th January

Chins - 13 (bodyweight)
Swiss Ball Squats - 25 reps, slow, holding 2 x 15kg dumbbells
Push Ups - 35

Total workout time: 5 minutes

Post-workout nutrition: this, 25 minutes later

In each case, I did as many as I could before failure. In other words, I wanted to avoid failure, but come close.

I would have managed 14 or 15 chins, tops, had I continued. This is considerably less than the 19 I was doing at the start of my '300' workouts last year, which makes me feel I need to get back into some of those other routines this year. More on that later, when I draw some conclusions about my Body by Science Experiment. ... Read more

Heavy Weights Circuit: A Lot of Volume in 24 Minutes

Location: My New House
Date: 6th January

this list x 3, no rest except to change weights.

10 Dumbbell Bench Press
10 Single-Arm Dumbbell Bent-Over Rows
10 Dumbbell Shoulder Press (seated)
10 Romanian Deadlift (with dumbbells)
10 Bicep Curls (with dumbbells)
10 Swiss Ball Squats (still doing these to protect the knee)
10 Ab rollouts from knees (with dumbbells)

Total workout time: 24 minutes

Post-workout nutrition: this, 25 minutes later.

I've documented this sort of routine before:

Compressed Volume, Upper Body Focus and Compressed Volume, Back Focus

It's a good way to do a lot of sets on multiple body parts without spending a long time in the gym. By rotating the exercises you allow different body parts to rest. It also gets you fit because there is no real rest except that required to change weights or move to another spot. ... Read more

Improvised BBS Session + Assisted Pistols on Remedial Knee

Location: My New House
Date: 30th December

My gym was closed AGAIN yesterday, so I again improvised (previous session here) with some free weights at home instead of doing the normal BBS workout.

Dumbbell Bench Press - 20kg / dumbbell - 127 seconds to failure (exactly the same as last week)
Dumbbell Bent Over Row - 20kg/side - 128 (R) and 118 (L) seconds to failure
Dumbbell Shoulder Press (seated) - 15kg / dumbbell - 85 seconds to failure (exactly the same as last week)
Romanian Deadlift with dumbbells - 37.5kg (82.5 lbs) / dumbbell - 98 seconds to failure (6 seconds more than last week)

Random squats with 15kg dumbbells for about 2 minutes - some normal reps and some super-slow reps without locking out.

Assisted pistols on remedial (left) leg (right hand on weights bench to steady myself)

Total workout time: 21 minutes

Post-workout nutrition: this, 15 minutes later.

This time I did single-arm dumbbell bent over rows instead of using the barbell. Turns out this is much better for getting the squeeze with superslow. It also requires less back stabilisation, which was preventing me working my lats to failure last week when using the barbell.

I got spookily identical times for the pressing exercises, but I guess I should be grateful for the consistency given the amount of sleep I am getting at the moment.

The quad work was good - Mrs M had deflated the Swiss ball, so I had to do the squats free-standing (instead of these) - but it felt fine, suggesting my knee is getting stronger. Unfortunately my lower back was so tired after the deadlift that I could not take the quads to failure with the squatting, instead resting it at various points by locking out.

I was especially pleased with the pistols, as I was able to do them on the knee that was operated on in November, supported, from a point where the thigh was parallel to ground. This implies I am getting close to former strength. Now I just need stability. ... Read more

15-Minute Superslow Session with Free Weights

Location: My New House
Date: 23rd December

My gym was closed yesterday, so I improvised with some free weights at home instead of doing the normal BBS workout.

We've just moved house, where I now have a room semi-dedicated to training. Once set up, I'll add some pictures to the workout locations section.

For this session I used the BBS superslow protocol with free weights - something I've not tried before:

Dumbbell Bench Press - 20kg / dumbbell - 127 seconds to failure
Barbell Bent Over Row - 38kg - 108 seconds to failure (sort of)
Dumbbell Shoulder Press (seated) - 15kg / dumbbell - 85 seconds to failure
Romanian Deadlift with dumbbells - 37.5kg (82.5 lbs) / dumbbell - 92 seconds to failure

Total workout time: 14 minutes

Post-workout nutrition: scrambled egg, apple puree, cinnamon, 15 minutes later.

On the pushing exercises, the superslow felt natural... but for bent over rows it was awkward. First, because my back was not used to the exercise. It has become lazy with the machine version and I was not able to take my lats to failure because the stabilisation muscles gave up first. It is also difficult to get a squeeze in the same way as you can with the machine. The temptation is to jerk the bar, which of course you cannot do with superslow.

Romanian deadlift with dumbbells is the one exercise I was able to replicate at home, and I managed to increase the weight to 82.5 lbs from 74.8 and just get into the 90-120 sweet spot. ... Read more