matthearn.com

So as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been doing the Lean Gains diet, along with an RPT routine. Methinks it’s time for an update on progress, and a general review of the programs.

Short version: everything is awesome. Well, pretty much. I’ve been on Lean Gains for about 8 weeks, I’m down 11 pounds, and the bodyfat percentage number is down about 3.5 points. In case you missed the post about it, here’s a bit of detail on how the diet works.

LG was developed by the remarkably shredded Martin Berkhan. It’s based on Intermittent Fasting, the gist of which is that you go for significant periods without eating, usually from 16-40 hours, although some folks go nuts and shoot for 72 hours or more; at that point you’re losing as much muscle as fat so it’s usually not recommended. The Lean Gains protocol calls for 16 hours of fasting and an 8 hour feeding window every day, with macronutrient cycling, which is just a fancy way of saying you eat more on training day (usually lots of extra carbs) and less on rest days.

The original design specified that on training days, you eat 20% more than your “maintenance level” (the amount of calories you would eat to remain at exactly the same weight), with about 3 times as many calories coming from carbs as fat, and on rest days you eat 20% less than your maintenance, with fat and carb calories being fairly equal. The idea is that on training day, you build muscle with plenty of protein and carbs, and then on rest days you’re cutting fat by eating fewer calories overall, and reducing insulin response by keeping carbs low. It was designed to help guys and gals who are already at low bodyfats get into shape for bodybuilding competitions without having to crash diet, and while building muscle at the same time. It basically turns the “cut and bulk” process, wherein you spend months building muscle and then months cutting fat, into a daily system that keeps you relatively lean all the time (instead of developing the major chubbiness that pro bodybuilders usually have in the offseason when bulking up).

While it was designed for those already in pretty good shape, an enterprising young man named Andy realized that there really was no reason that an out-of-shape person couldn’t do the program and lose a bunch of fat while maintaining, or even gaining, muscle. So instead of the -20/+20, he devised the -35/+10, which is what I’m doing. My maintenance level is approximately 3000 calories (based on weight, height, age, gender, and general level of activity), so on my rest days I eat 35% less (about 1950), with half of the calories coming from protein and the rest coming roughly equally from carbs and fat. On workout days, I eat 10% more, with about a third of of the calories from protein, and at least 50% from carbs.

My feeding window is usually about 1pm to 9pm, which means of course that I don’t eat breakfast. This has been less difficult than I thought, to be honest. Coffee helps a lot, but even without it, it’s not really THAT hard to just not eat. In fact, to compensate for going away to the beach a few weeks ago (where I ate and drank like a Walmart shopper for 3 days), I did two 40-hour fasts (one before the trip, and one after), where I took in nothing but water and coffee. 40 hours. I won’t say it was easy, but it sure was interesting, particularly after the hallucinations started (just kidding, I’m sure that talking pink moose was totally real).

As to the workout, I honestly can’t say I’m enjoying it, but I don’t think I’d really enjoy any routine while losing fat. If your lift numbers aren’t going up, it’s not fun. It’s almost like practicing the piano for weeks and never getting any better at the song. I do see the results at the scale and tape measure, but it’s awfully slow, and adding weight to the bar at every workout is nice and fast. Also, I’ve been fighting a weird hip pain that doesn’t want to go away; I injured it squatting over a month ago, stopped all the lower body stuff for a few weeks until it felt better, and it basically came back as soon as I lifted again. Right now I’m working around it (a narrower squatting stance results in almost no pain at all during the actual workout), but it’s a nuisance.

Still, I think the Reverse Pyramid Training workout is generally easier on the body than SS and Madcow, while achieving similar volume. It makes more sense to do the heaviest set when the body is freshest, and then tack on longer/lighter sets afterwards to achieve the necessary volume. I’ve got my squat numbers back to maybe 25 pounds under my January maxes, my bench press is down only about 10 pounds, my overhead press is about the same, and my deadlift is almost back to the 405 max I pulled in February before the lack of carbs hit me. I’ll probably be on the “Lean Gains cut” for another 5-6 months (gotta get that 6-pack, son), and if I can keep my bench press over 200 pounds until then I’ll be pretty happy. Plus, I can do chins again (4 in a row!).

The gist of my program is that it’s a bit of Madcow plus Starting Strength plus RPT:

• Monday:
  
  
  • Back squats – Warmups, then a top set of 5, then 6 at 90% of that weight, and 7 at 80%.
  
  
  • Bench press – Warmups, then a top set of 5, then 7 at 85% of that weight, and 9 at 70%.
  
  
  • Chins – I do at least 15 total reps, divided into however many sets that takes. When I can get 5 reps a set, I’ll start just doing 3 sets of however many reps I get. When I reach 8 rep sets, I plan to start adding weight, but that’s months away.


• Wednesday:
  
  
  • Front squats – Warmups, then a top set of 5, and 6 at 90% of that weight. Really just resting my legs from Monday’s heavy routine, and preparing for deadlifts
  
  
  • Overhead presses – Warmups, then a top set of 5, 7@85%, 9@70%.
  
  
  • Deadlifts – Warmups, top set of 5, then 6@90%.


• Friday:
  
  
  • Back squats – Warmups, then a set of 6 at about 94% of Monday’s max, 7 at 90% of the 6 rep set, and 8@80%.
  
  
  • Bench press – Warmups, then a set of 6 at about 94% of Monday’s max, 8 at 85% of the 6 rep set, and 10@70%.
  
  
  • Chins – Same drill as Monday.

I’m very happy with the routine. Fairly quick (under an hour), and only three workouts a week.

If you’re having trouble losing fat and getting/staying strong, I’d give LG and RPT a look. It’s working like gangbusters on my big ol’ gutty gut.

This will have to be quick ’cause you know how time be all CRAY CRAY. So, two things: the first, a fitness update, and the second, the greatest music video produced since Journey’s “Separate Ways“.

I spent about 6 weeks eating very few carbs and a great many hunks of meat and cheese, a diet that has worked well for me in the past, and did so again, sort of; I lost about 20 pounds in those 6 weeks, but unfortunately, lifting weights without any carbs to help rebuild muscle suuuuuuucks. My strength dropped rather precipitously (after squatting 347.5 pounds for 5 solid reps in January, I’ve been having trouble with 315, and anything above 250 or so feels dangerously heavy). My bench press has dropped about 15 pounds as well, and after hitting 405 pounds on the deadlift for 5 reps a few weeks ago I was able to lift it exactly once during last Wednesday’s workout.

So, ’tis time for a change. After doing some googlin’, I decided to go with the LeanGains diet that Martin Berkhan came up with. It’s an “intermittent fasting” plan that involves 16 hours a day of not eating anything (o nooooes) and 8 hours of getting the nutrition you need. You then cycle your intake so you take in a bunch of carbs and protein on workout day to keep muscle mass, and eat at a significant deficit on rest days to keep fat loss rolling. If it works as advertised, I should be able to lose about a pound of fat a week and keep all my pretty musckles that I’ve worked so hard to develop. I started on Saturday, and I can report that the deficit days are somewhat difficult, particularly on a weekend when there’s Happenings happening that usually involve food and booze, but I managed to be fairly good and not blow out my intake. The whole “not eating until after noon” thing actually HELPS, once you get used to it, because then instead of 3 small meals, you get 2 larger ones. Supposedly after a week or so, your body just gets used to not having breakfast, and stops signaling you to eat in the morning. I’m interested to see how that works out, what with my love of donuts and pastries and eggs and…sob…bacon.

Workout day is great, of course. After not eating all morning, I worked out over lunch and got back to work and ate 2 pork chops, a big bag of broccoli, a turkey sammich, an apple, a bag of potato chips, and a huge cup of milk and protein. Total caloric intake: 1900 calories. 206g of protein. I was so full I thought I might asplode.

I’m also switching workout programs; the Madcow 5×5 routine is probably a great workout when you’re eating enough to gain weight, but it’s nearly unbearable when you’re trying to cut fat. Too much volume, and with the ramping sets, you get pretty worn out by the time you hit the max weight. The aforementioned Martin (read the LeanGains site, it’s super informative) recommends something called “RPT,” or Reverse Pyramid Training. The idea is that if you ramp your sets upwards, hitting your max only on the last set, you’ve already tired yourself out and won’t be able to lift the biggest weight as well (exactly what was happening with me on Madcow). Since the biggest weight is theoretically the most important set, Martin advises you lift it FIRST (after a few easy warmup sets, of course), and then back the weight off for 1 or 2 subsequent sets. You’re more likely to get all your reps that way, since you haven’t blown out all your energy on lesser weights. Since the muscles are pretty glycogen-depleted (as a result of not eating anything all morning), they don’t have enough energy, and getting the hardest work done first is the best way to achieve, if not muscle gain, at least minimal muscle loss.

I can report it works pretty well, although I have to admit that after squatting 315 for 5 reps earlier, the thought of taking off 30 pounds and then doing a set of 6, followed by taking off another 30 and doing a set of 7, did not please me. I survived, however, so I’ll add more weight for the next workout and see how things feel.

Okay, enough of that nonsense. This, right here, is the top video of 2012 as voted by a Team of Professionals, consisting of me and some of my friends and relatives.

It’s still Monday in Guam or somewhere, right? Good enough.

You may or may not (probably not) be curious about what’s been going on with my fitness program. Well, here’s the low diggity down. Since mid-November I’ve been what’s called “bulking,” which means deliberately putting on weight to add muscle. You’re probably thinking, “Dude, uh, you weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 pounds, I’m not sure that ADDING weight is what you want to be doing. Why don’t you diet and just turn that fat into muscle?”

I laugh at you. Har! Hardy har!

A common misconception, popularized by almost every fitness or health magazine in every single issue, is that turning yourself into Chris Evans is merely a matter of craploads of cardio and occasional weight-lifting. I believe we’ve talked about this previously, but in case you missed it: it don’t work that way. The human body has three modes: gaining fat and muscle, losing fat and muscle, or staying pretty much exactly the same, depending entirely on caloric intake. If you eat less than you burn, you lose fat and muscle, and if you eat more, you gain it. The proportion of muscle to fat lost or gained depends on whether or not you stress your existing musculature with weight training, signalling it to divert calories to muscle gain in an effort to adapt to that stress.

Short version: if you want to add muscle, you have to gain weight. If you want to lose fat, you have to lose weight. Those two processes cannot happen simultaneously.

So, I decided that over the winter I would do a “bulk,” which means eating more than I burn, and lifting weights in sufficient volume to stress my muscles and signal them to grow. The decision was based solely on the fact that I’d been “cutting” (losing weight and fat) for 3 months and my lifts were not progressing in weight, for the simple reason that in order to get strong past a certain point your muscles have to get bigger, and mine couldn’t get bigger because I wasn’t eating enough for them to do so. And it was pissing me off to be bench pressing 180-190 for 5 reps over and over with no gains.

So in mid-November, my stats looked like this:

Weight: 242 pounds

Bodyfat Percentage: 20% (estimated)

Squat: 280x3x5 (280 pounds, three sets, five reps per set)

Bench press: 190x3x5 (and badly stalled)

Deadlift: 370x1x5

After 3 months of hardcore bulking (eating like a pig, and lifting like a beast):

Weight: 271 pounds

Bodyfat: 24%

Squat: 345x3x5

Bench press: 217.5x3x5

Deadlift: 395x1x5

Now, you’ll probably say, “Man, your deadlift didn’t go up, are you a wuss?” The problem there was that I actually ran out of weights, and was stuck DLing 390 for about 4 straight weeks before I got a bunch more 45 pound plates and rocked 395×5 yesterday like Paul Bunyan. You may also say “271 pounds? Holy crap you’re fat!” Here’s the thing, though: my BF% (estimated, but measured using the same function each time, so accurate relative to itself) only went up 4%. If you do the math, my “lean body mass” went from 194 pounds to 206; LBM includes bone, muscle, and most importantly water, so don’t think for a second I actually gained 12 pounds of actual muscle in 12 weeks. Still: if even HALF of that LBM gain is muscle (and I bet it’s more), that’s 6 pounds of muscle. That doesn’t seem like much, but believe me, pro bodybuilders would sell a kidney to gain 6 pounds of lean muscle in 3 months.

It’s also worth noting that the squat and bench press lifts went up 23% and 14% in 3 months, which are significant gains.

So, what now? Well, I won’t lie, I have a pretty significant gut going on. Oddly enough, though, I’m still fitting in most of my regular 38×34 pants, although I have in issue in that my thighs have gotten so large that I’m in constant danger of hulking through them if I bend over, twist awkwardly, try to walk, etc. I could continue bulking, really get my lifts up to the “advanced” level, but frankly I’m in this to look rad, and being able to lift heavy crap is a secondary goal, so I think it’s time to lean out a bit and see if I can get myself reasonably svelte for summer so the ladies be all “wooooo” and the dudes be mad jelly. With that in mind, I’m going to start a low-carb diet, as well as switch routines from “Starting Strength” to “Madcow 5×5.”

Why low-carb? Well, one of the problems of cutting fat is that, as mentioned above, you tend to lose muscle as you lose weight. You combat this by making sure you have a LOT of protein in your system (your body is less likely to start tearing down muscles to get protein if you have plenty of it available via food), and continuing to lift heavy so your muscles are signalled to maintain as much size as possible. Well, there is no more protein-heavy diet than one that consists mostly of meat. Yesterday, my first day on the diet, I managed to get 365 grams of protein, a pretty staggering amount. I believe the RDA recommendation for someone my size is 80 grams. And today’s lunch consisted of an entire rotisserie chicken. So from a protein perspective, I should be A-OK. Some folks also say that the reduction of insulin production from eating so few carbohydrates also contributes to the body losing fat, although I think it’s more that after a while you just naturally start eating less because the protein and fat sit in your belly and make you feel full. The downside of this diet is that until my body gets used to burning fat for energy, my workouts will suuuuuuu-uuuuuck, and I will likely be missing a lot of reps.

I combat this by switching to a routine that incorporates a 4 week “deload” period, namely Bill Starr’s Madcow 5×5 program. This gives me time to rest my body (which has been taking a beating over the last 5-6 months, and I can feel it) and also give it time to learn how to burn fat instead of carbohydrates so that when I got back to setting PRs in a month my body’s all “Yeah word.” It’s also a slightly lower volume program than Starting Strength, but still features plenty of intensity and aggressive weekly progression, and includes 2 weeks of “deload” out of every 6 to keep me from burning out. So instead of squatting heavy 3 times a week and hitting a new PR each time, I get a “rest” day on Wednesday with fewer, and lighter, sets. It also includes curls on Fridays so I can get crazy big arms, so don’t you worry, ladies.

My lifts will undoubtedly stall as the cut goes on, so I’ll just try and stay about where I am strength-wise until the end of the summer, at which time hopefully I’ll be down to a slim 235 with a 15% body fat and I’ll just be wearing a speedo everywhere including work and church.

Look forward to that.

I hope you all had a blissful, gift-filled, alcohol-fueled holiday season, which of course doesn’t FULLY conclude until my birthday later in the month. Like most Americans, I have made resolutions. Unlike most Americans, they don’t have much to do with fitness, because I am already in the middle of my lifelong fitness resolution (more on this later), which is to get crazy jacked and look vaguely like Daniel Craig but without the haunting blue eyes and luscious, pouty lips (my own lips are quite full and luscious but I cannot maintain the same extruded pout without looking like a fish and/or duckface, aka duckfish).

My resolution is to attempt to produce, on time and without exception, a new update to this website every Monday that is insightful, enjoyable, and full of both fun witticisms AND as many pictures of Daniel Craig as I can fit given current intellectual property law.

What will it be? Who knows. It’s a Presidential election year, so I’ll probably make fun of the GOP. It doesn’t appear that Sarah Palin is running, as of this writing, so sadly that eliminates some easy humor, although Rick Perry is doing his darnedest to be equally stupid in public, and then there’s good ol’ butt juice Rick Santorum, and it’s only a matter of time before Ron Paul says something hilariously racist, which is a shame because in a past life I probably would have been a big Paul supporter, at least until the realization some time ago that the Libertarian ethos of “everybody get yours before I gotta get mine” is not really an effective way to govern society.

I may also do the occasional movie review, although I should warn you the movies will not be recent as I don’t like going to movie theaters, and I’m certainly not going to beg my wife for 2 hours away from her and the roughly 7 million children I appear to have at home to do something I’m largely indifferent to doing, with the obviously exception of any James Bond movie. So there’s a strong chance that any movies I’ll write about will be along the lines of “Street Kings,” a film from 2008 that I watched about 75% of the other night. (I can report that Keanu spends the entire time being Keanu, and Forrest Whitaker chewed so much scenery that I suspect he pooped drywall for a month, although at least a lot of people get shot, so it’s really the perfect thing to watch while rocking your infant son to sleep.)

I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about my fitness progress as well. A short update: I’ve been lifting hard and eating like a pig since just before Thanksgiving, and have gained a rather significant amount of weight. The gut has come back a little, but I see a big difference in my shoulders, my butt has become extremely Kardashian, and my thighs are getting so thick that 1) I’m having a very hard time fitting into pants, even though the waist and inseam fit fine, and 2) there’s not much room left for my testicles and I keep sitting on them. My back squat has gone to 327.5lbs, and my bench press is up to 212.5, although my deadlift is hampered by the fact that I only have 390 pounds of weights so I’m stuck there until I can buy more. I’ve been pretty strict about the Starting Strength program (not adding or replacing any exercises), but yesterday I decided it would be extremely nice if I had big ol’ swole-up guns so I’ve started adding a few curls and tricep extensions to the end Friday’s workout so the ladies will look at my arms and go DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN.

I was planning to start dieting again around my birthday, but I may push it off until later in the winter. I’d like to cut down to a trim 230 by summer and see how close I can get to having visible abs (something I’ve never had, EVER), but I hate, hate, HATE cutting because my lifts stall, and squatting over 300 pounds makes me feel like a real man.

So, uh, that’s what you have to look forward to. It’s gonna be real. Really real.

Been hell of busy. Three kids, man. Three.

That being said, there’s been much going on. Our good friends Sarah and Zak got married over the weekend; my own personal Sarah was the matron of honor, and I did me some singing and guitar strummin’, and also got a small group together to sing an arrangement I did of “Seasons of Love” from “Rent,” a show that I have not seen and will endeavour to avoid seeing forever because I figure if I want to see La Boheme I’ll go damn well see La Boheme, but I shall admit that the song I arranged is catchy and fun.

The wedding took place at Sweetwater Farm, which I cannot recommend highly enough and which I hope to visit again at some later date and stay at the bed and breakfast. Grace Winery is on site, and the wedding actually happened in a renovated barn that also contains most of the vintnering equipment. There are little cottages and several acres of extremely pretty land to admire, ideally while drinking a nice glass of pinot noir and/or Scotch.

And now, we find ourselves in the holiday season. Thanksgiving is, in case you haven’t recently checked a calendar, merely 2 days away, and Advent starts on Sunday, even if most commercially made Advent calendars will not recognize this fact until December 1st because Advent calendar-makers are bloody HEATHENS! As usual, my holiday season is spent either singing in concerts and services or rehearsing for concerts and services, so my wife will spend most of the month single-handedly trying to corral all three of our semi-truculent children. This means that I had better come up with one hell of a spectacular Christmas present for my wife, because no matter what it costs, the inevitable divorce will be more expensive.

Since I’m all over the place anyway, might as well throw in a little fitness update. As of a few weeks ago, I’ve switched over to “bulking” mode, which I like to pretend is “clean” but which consists of large amounts of meat and the occasional Twix bar. As a result of deliberate weight gain, my lifts have been progressing nicely. Today’s workout I squatted 290 pounds for three sets of 5, failed spectacularly to overhead press 137.5 pounds (5 reps, 4, and 3), and successfully power cleaned 155 pounds for 3 sets of 5 (all this with warmup sets, obviously). The other day I also bench pressed 192.5 pounds (I expect to get to 200 next week, woooooo) and deadlifted 370 pounds, which is 1) really bloody heavy and 2) not far from what’s going to be the maximum for a while because I only have 390 pounds of weights.

Another pair of 45 plates will be needed, but my options there are either to spend $100 on a set of brand new plates, or to call the guy I know downstate and go get a used set for $50. I’m leaning towards the latter, but don’t have the 3 hours to get down and back. Plus, if I do that I’m leaning towards getting TWO sets so I’m never likely to run out of weight (I’ll keep progressing as long as I can, but I highly doubt I’m ever going to need 570 pounds). Maybe the next time we go to the beach I can stop en route, but we probably aren’t doing anything like that until January, so I suspect I’ll just get to 390 and then keep adding reps and/or sets so at least I make progression in volume if not weight per rep.

I hope that your Thanksgiving is chock-full of tryptophan and red wine, and that you enjoy parades and football all the live-long day.

Last week, Tuesday to be precise, was the anniversary of the day I finally decided that I’d better start taking my health seriously before I hit three bills and had a heart attack climbing up to the third floor of my house, if only because that staircase is really narrow and I’d probably get stuck and they’d have to either cut away pieces of the house, or pieces of me, to get me out, and my corpse is worth less than the house, so we know what HW would be advising.

If you need help parsing that sentence, shoot me a comment and I’ll break it down for you.

Anyway, I know I’ve already done a post listing some of the things I’ve learned about diet and exercise, but I wanted to offer one more bit of handy advice, then talk a bit about my current workout routine(s), and then, the pièce de résistance, a few before-and-after shots of my husky torso.

Advice: if you are currently out of shape, do not listen much to advice from someone who has never been out of shape. The reason for this is that they simply do not understand how difficult it is to get from “fairly chubby” to “crazy ripped,” and they will say “It’s easy! Just make a few dietary changes, add some simple exercises, you’ll be there before you know it!”

Horsecrap. If it was easy, the average American BMI would be 20, not 30. Admittedly, it is easy to start the process. If your current diet consists primarily of Whopper Juniors, Mr. Pibb, and Devil Dogs, simply replacing one meal a day with a light salad is going to lose you some pounds. If you also start walking a mile a day, that’ll also lose you some pounds. But after you lose 10, maybe even 20 pounds, the weight will level off. 20 pounds is no mean accomplishment, but if you went from 280 to 260, and you’re 5’3″, you’re going to be irritated when you can’t get further without making bigger sacrifices.

Eating right to lose weight is really, really hard. I really only manage to do it about half the time; weekends are a REAL challenge. I’m trying to limit myself to about 2300 calories a day, while getting 250 grams of protein, which means I get to have 1300 calories of carbs and fat. That ain’t much. When I eat what I want to, I can reach 4000 calories a day without thinking (something that will come in handy later in the year when I switch to bulking). Taking myself from 265 to 245 was easy; going from 245 to 225 has been really hard, and I’ve barely gotten started (although the creatine I take throws off the weight measurements).

The problem is that guys who look like this:

have never been seriously overweight. They’ve been making good food choices and working out for so long it’s not really an effort anymore; the idea of having a large McDonald’s extra value meal revolts them. These are people who ENJOY eating salads. If they have spare time, they go running, instead of watching TV or surfing the internet.

Ideally, if you need some weight coaching, you need to find someone who can show you a picture like this one:

That young woman had an ass the size of a Renault and it is GONE. She knows what it takes to get this done, and won’t sugar coat her advice.

Here are the important facts: don’t expect to lose more than, say, 40 pounds of fat in a year. That’s basically the top, and accounts for holidays and other weeks where you just can’t meet your goals, along with other minor setbacks. If you’re six feet tall and weigh 260, you’re looking at a two-year process of remodelling yourself. If you’re a lazy turd like me, it’ll take even longer. I don’t say this to discourage you, but to make you aware of what you’re in for.

What’s my diet and exercise routine, you ask? Well, I eat a lot of chicken, and I go through a lot of protein powder because it’s super convenient. 4 scoops a day, usually, which is about 96 grams of protein. I was drinking it with milk, but the extra carbs in the morning meant I’d be hungry at night and couldn’t eat more without going over the calorie limit. Those big bags of frozen veggies are the bomb; usually about 4-5 cups of broccoli in each, totalling maybe 120 calories. I pretty much eat one of those at every meal, or a big ol’ mixed salad, but to be honest raw vegetables suck without ranch dressing. I was eating a lot of pretzels for a mid-day snack, but cut that out too. I still do usually have a banana and a granola bar in the late morning, particularly if I plan to do some cardio over lunch.

As far as workout, I do:

• Cardio: a couple times a week, I’ll go for a run, or do some “speedwork” (short sprints with walking in between). If my legs are sore I’ll stick with the exercise bike to limit impact on my knees and feet. If I have time, which is not frequent, I like to bring my road bike and do a short ride over lunch. To be honest, I don’t really like the cardio; I just do it so I can eat a little more. If I set a limit of 2300 calories, but I run 3 miles and burn 400-ish calories, guess who has two thumbs and can now eat 2700 calories that day? MATT HEARN.


• Weights: I do standard “Starting Strength,” which looks like this:

  
  Workout A: Back squat 3×5, bench press 3×5, deadlift 1×5.

  
  Workout B: Back squat 3×5, overhead press 3×5, powerclean 3×5.

  
  “3×5” means 3 sets, with 5 reps in each set. I also do warmups of each exercise, usually a set of 5, then a set of 3, then 2, then 1, with weights increasing up to the work weight. I increment the work weights every workout, unless I miss reps. My current maxes are:

  
  Back squat: 250×5
  
  Bench press: 175×5 (was up to 190, but my arms are really starting to suffer from the caloric deficit and I just couldn’t handle the weight anymore)
  
  Deadlift: 340×5
  
  Overhead press: 125×5 (Probably my max until I start eating more to gain mass)
  
  Powerclean: 115×5

  
  I workout three times a week, MWF, and the workouts simply alternate.



• Bodyweight: I’ve started adding a simple workout called “PLP,” which stands for Pullups, Lunges, Pushups (although technically I do chinups, not pullups; the former have the palms facing you, the latter, away). On the first day of the month, I do one of each (one lunge with each leg). Second day, I do 2. Et cetera. I find it’s a nice way to get a little pump in the arms and legs, even on days when I don’t lift weights, and also I just like that I can actually do chinups now. Obviously the reps get broken up into sets, I can’t do that many chins in a row.

And now, with no further ado, you can look at pictures demonstrating how I am somewhat less fat than a year ago. Try not to get too excited, ladies.

As promised, here is the list of important facts that I have learned about fat-loss and weightlifting over the past 10+ months. It is not what you would describe as “exhaustive” for the simple reason that my memory was pretty bad before I started cycling Oxymetholone. (Just kidding! Har!)

Important fact number 1: it is impossible to cut fat without a caloric deficit, which is to say, eating less than you burn over a given period. Any successful diet, no matter how it’s structured, leads to caloric deficit and thence to fat loss. (We’ll define “successful” as actual fat loss, not just water weight; most “lose 10 pounds in 10 days” diets cause you to just lose water.) Even low-carb diets, where you theoretically can eat as much as you want of carb-free foods, only work because you eventually find yourself eating less than you burn.

This makes dieting really simple. Calculate how many calories your body burns in a day (more on this later), and eat fewer calories than that. The amount of deficit you can create will determine how much you lose; a pound of adipose fat is roughly equivalent to 3500 calories, so if you can cut 3500 calories a week (500 a day), you’ll lose a pound a week. You can track the calories with spreadsheets, smartphone apps, websites, etc. Easy-peasy, bacon cheesey. (Bacon and cheese, while delicious, contain a lot of calories, sadly.)

There are a bajillion ways to calculate your caloric requirements, and of course there are knock-down drag-out wars over it on any fitness message board you can find. Some folks use online calculators that take into account muscle mass, activity level, gender, waist and neck measurements, IQ, credit score, and number of living uncles named “Ricky.” The one I use is simple, and based on something stolen from the Men’s Health forum, which says that you should take your current bodyweight in pounds and multiply it by a value from 13-15, based on your activity. If you don’t get out to exercise much, you use 13. If you are constantly getting your workout on, 15. 14 is obviously in the middle. So, a guy like me who weighed 244 when last on a scale, and who tries to ride or run at least 3 times a week, would use 14 and get 244*14=3416 calories a day to maintain my current weight.

My problem with this method, and this is where I differ with most of the Men’s Health Forum cultists, is that it doesn’t take into account weeks where I work out less or more, and it also doesn’t allow me to balance a day of heavy eating (holidays, weekends, etc.) by doing extra cardio to burn some calories. For example, yesterday I went on a 17 mile bike ride, and then ate like a pig at various social functions that night. At the end of the day, I basically met my maintenance calories (although I’m usually shooting for about 750kcal deficit). Not taking into account that morning bike ride means I’d’ve been over and probably unhappy with myself. Plus, it seems kinda dumb to go to a lot of trouble to be very accurate with my caloric intake only to make a complete wild-ass guess on my expenditures. So, I use the minimum 13 multiplier and also track individual workouts. I do, however, stay conservative and ignore calories burned weightlifting, because they aren’t much, and calories spent doing low-intensity things (like walking).

Related fact number 1A: It doesn’t matter what time of day you eat, or how many meals you eat, except from a psychological perspective. If you need 2000 calories a day to meet your goals, and you eat all 2000 calories at 7am and then don’t eat the rest of the day, and your brain allows this, then rad. If you want to eat 18 tiny meals all day, that’ll also work, but don’t think you’re giving yourself a physical advantage by doing so. Anyone that says “don’t eat after 8pm” or “you have to eat frequent small meals to ‘prime your metabolism'” doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Eat on whatever schedule you want that fits your caloric needs.

Important fact number 2: You can’t just do a bunch of cardio and eat whatever you want, if you want to lose fat. Successful fat loss is about 3000% diet (an estimate). An example: a Big Mac contains roughly 500 delicious, succulent calories. To run that off, the average 180-pound individual would have to run, at a 6-mile-per-hour pace, for a little over 36 minutes, just over 3 miles. Isn’t it easier to just…not eat the Big Mac? The last time I tried the “eat anything and run a lot” I was doing 10-12 miles a week, 2+ hours of running, and I think I gained 10 pounds in a month. Diet is more important than cardio by far.

You can, in fact, lose a lot of fat by simply dieting and not doing cardio at all. Weight-lifting, however, is another matter.

Important fact number 3: When your body is in a caloric deficit, it will burn fat to make up the difference, but sadly it will also leach protein from your muscles, because your body is a self-destructive prick. The away you can help it avoid this is by 1) not trying to lose too much fat at once, no more than 1.5-2 pounds a week, and even less if you’re already fairly low on the body-fat percentage scale; and 2) convincing your body that it actually needs that muscle mass by lifting heavy things and putting them back down. Also make sure you get a large protein surplus in your diet, which can be tough while eating at a deficit, but something along the lines of a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight, or more. Chicken, rare tuna, skim milk, and powdered whey protein should be your friend. Ho-Hos and Devil Dogs, sadly, contain very little protein.

Important and really sucky fact number 4: Your body cannot grow muscle at the same time as it cuts fat. It’s an either-or situation, and I hate it. Because I’m still 20-30 pounds overweight, I’m in the midst of cutting fat like a champion, and lifting heavy, and I’m bumping up against the maximum amounts I can lift with the muscle mass I have. It really sucks not being able to bench press more than 180 pounds for 5 reps, but I’m basically stuck there until I start eating again (although creatine has helped, more on this later). Hopefully if I get my body fat down into the low teens by the end of autumn, I’ll be able to eat “above maintenance” through the holidays (mmm…pie) and start progressing on lifts.

Important fact number 5: Accountability and logs are more than necessary; they are completely vital. Whatever you can do to track progress on workouts and diet is going to make a big difference, whether it’s a spreadsheet, a website, or just a yellow legal pad filled with numbers. The good news is there are lots of useful online tools for this:

• LoseIt.com: tracking of food intake and exercise calories. Huge database of foods (including restaurant and brand name processed stuff), and you can add your own individual foods and recipes. I don’t think I fully trust their calculations on exercise calories, so I fudge that a bit with values from the websites where I track my workouts.


• Runkeeper: a smartphone app with a nice website as well. Helps a great deal with tracking cardio. The iPhone app uses the GPS to track your location and elevation, so you get accurate distance and timing for running, cycling, etc. Plus, it interfaces with Facebook and Twitter so you can post your workouts and get Likes from your pepys.


• Fitocracy: currently in beta, but invites are fairly easy to come by. It’s great for logging weight training workouts, something that Runkeeper doesn’t really do, but also interfaces with Runkeeper to get cardio information. Every exercise you do earns you points that correspond to “levels,” so you can compete with your friends and other Fitocrazers in groups. Roleplaying nerds give it a big thumbs up.

Important fact number 6: Most health supplements are wastes of money. Even ones that are relatively beneficial are usually too expensive if purchased from, say, a GNC. Exhibit A: 5 pounds of Whey protein for $65. I use this for under $40 a 5-lb tub (I “subscribe” to it and get a fresh tub every month).

Diet pills and “mass gainers” are dumb. Depending on your goals, you don’t need anything other than whey protein, a vitamin, maybe a fish oil pill, and possibly creatine if you’re trying to bulk up a bit. If you’re trying to gain weight/muscle, a “mass gainer” is the stupidest thing you could possibly buy. Would you rather eat a nasty sugar+protein powder, or a big ham sandwich? Diet pills simply don’t work, unless you don’t care about fat loss and just want to lose a few pounds of water.

Important and staggeringly depressing fact number 8: Getting into shape takes time, and often a lot of it. Not necessarily from an “hours per week” perspective, although the more effort you put in, the faster results will come. If you want to go from 30% body fat (roughly where I was last October) to a 10%, that’s a multi-year project. After almost 11 months of working out and trying to be a good boy with my nutrition, I’m at roughly 20% body fat. I’m hoping to be somewhere near 15% by Christmas. So get ready for a long haul, and keep in mind that this is a life change, not a diet. If you want to be healthy, you’ll have to work on it for the rest of your life, and stop eating bacon at every meal. (I myself have cut bacon back to only 2 meals a day.)

With this, I conclude the fitness-centric portion of the bloggage. I’ll post more on my progress and other fitness-related jams here and there, but you can expect to see more random funny crap in the future. Thank God for that.

To recap a bit: so far on my journey t’ward fitness, I’ve done a low carb diet while doing various dumbbell and bodyweight exercises; an extremely ill-advised hypertrophy routine while eating like a pig; and Starting Strength, while alternately dieting and eating. From a weightlifting perspective, I had the most success doing SS, getting my back squat up to 265 for 5 reps, my deadlift to 335 for 5 reps, and my bench press up to 190 for 5 reps. The progression may have been too fast, unfortunately, since my right hip started acting up, to the point at which it felt like a muscle was trying to tear away from the bone when I squatted. Finally I had to stop doing leg exercises altogether, substituting a rather intense upper body program while eating to lose fat, eventually making it possible for me to do a single chin-up, which made me feel like a bad-ass. (I can do 4 in one set now. Pimp, right?)

While waiting for my hip to heal up so I could back to working the lower body, I started reading again about hypertrophy programs, and discovered something called 20-rep squats. The workout consists of warming up and then pounding out one long 20 rep squat set, as you’d probably imagine, but with a weight that you would normally consider your 10-rep maximum. The idea is that you do a bunch of reps, then stop for a bit and catch your breath without racking the weight, and then doing another rep, until you finish all 20. It’s incredibly taxing, but supposedly many of the pre-steroid body-builders got huge with it (and also drinking a gallon of whole milk every day). I said hell, I can do that, and it gives me a chance to get my hip back into shape with low weights, instead of trying to pound 225 on it again.

So I launched into it, and was having success. I was gaining weight as expected, although I realized that a gallon of whole milk contains about 2400 calories, probably a bit more than I really needed, so I switched to half a gallon of skim. I was building strength, and appeared to be building muscle, until an incident with a ceiling fan, a ladder, and an awkward fall resulted in my right knee being wrenched so hard that I cursed rather eloquently…while on a training conference call. Unmuted, of course. It’s probably worth noting that if I hadn’t been on the phone while trying to install a ceiling fan I probably would not have fallen off a ladder, but I never pretended to be smart.

Obviously, the knee injury put me out of the weightlifting for some time. I got back into gentle upper body work, but could neither squat nor deadlift, and also came to a rather obvious realization: my body fat was like 25%. Why was I attempting to GAIN weight? What, exactly, was the point in gaining 5 or even 10 pounds of muscle, if it was encased by 50-70 pounds of succulent meat jelly? It’s not like I intend to get into powerlifting. I just wanna be jacked like a stock car in a pit stop, shredded like a credit card statement, yoked like an ox. If I want that, I need to get my body fat down into the low teens, and THEN worry about developing the gun show.

This has brought me to the current situation, which is very simple: Cutting. No, not the thing creepy emo girls do to their inner thighs with razors. I’m cutting FAT. I have figured out a level of caloric intake that will (theoretically) lose me about a pound and a half a week, although I’m less careful on the weekends, so my loss may only be about a pound a week. I do a bunch of cardio (normally something I dislike) to improve my conditioning and also allow me to eat more than I otherwise would. And now that my knee is mostly healed, I’m back to squatting and deadlifting, with very moderate progression, in the SS framework.

The downside of cutting is that it limits your lifting; your body really doesn’t build muscle and cut fat at the same time. So, my bench press has been stuck at 175×5 for about 2 months, and I suspect my squat and deadlift won’t get anywhere near my maxes from February. I have recently been able to add a slight amount to my lifts by adding creatine to my diet (more on that later), but it’s not going to do all that much. I’ve also started doing a bodyweight program called “PLP”, which stands for pushups, lunges, and pullups (although I’m doing chinups; the difference is a chinup is done with the palms facing you, and seems to be easier for me). The gist is that you start on the first day with one chin, one pushup, and one step-back lunge with each leg. The next day, you do two. Third day, three, etc. After a while you have to break up the sets; I’ve discovered I can do 17 pushups (yesterday, in fact), but I can’t do more than 3 or 4 chins in a row, so I sort of spread them throughout the day. I have to knock out 18 today, so I did a set of 4 and a set of 3 while getting dressed this morning. The program specifies you go to 60, but I don’t think I’ll be able to quite manage that; I may reset at 30 and go back to 1. It’s gotten my chinup sets from 2 to 4 in just a couple weeks, though, and that ain’t nothin’.

So, that’s where I am. I feel like I’ve made remarkable progress (eventually I plan to post some pictures), but I’ve got quite a long way to go; I’m at about 245 pounds and maybe 20% body fat now, and I’m hoping to get down to around 225 and 15% BF by the holidays, and then probably be a bad boy over the holiday season and pack on a little bit of muscle before going back to the cutting after the new year, with the goal of getting down to maybe 10% BF and bulking through the spring.

Next time: I summarize the things I’ve learned so far, and bust a couple of remarkably still-common myths about fat loss and muscle growth.

So after spending 3 months dropping fat like it was hot, and building strength, I found myself wanting to switch programs. I was tired of doing rinky dinky stuff like “scapula raises” and “seated rows to neck,” and wanted to do a complete barbell routine with bench presses and squats and deadlifts, oh my. I also wanted to start building muscle more quickly.

When beginners take up weight-lifting, they experience an effect known affectionately as “noob gains,” in which one gets a bunch stronger in a hurry, even while cutting fat. Some folks feel you’re adding muscle mass at this time, although personally I think you’re just learning how to use more of your central nervous system to transfer signals to the muscles, and aren’t really getting any “bigger.” After a few months, though, if you aren’t eating enough, your muscles can’t grow, and you can’t get any stronger or bigger. My noob gains period, I guessed, had run its course.

I was also tired of not being able to eat mashed potatoes and pie. You can see how this is a serious concern, particularly as it was around the holidays.

So I googled around a bit looking for a “hypertrophy” workout that I could fit into my schedule, and found the “Anti-Bodybuilding Hypertrophy Plan” by Chad Waterbury. It had everything I wanted: barbell exercises, and 4 relatively short workouts a week, divided into what’s known as an “upper/lower” split: upper body one day, and lower the next. I was well on my way to super-jacked gunz, son!

Except: I wasn’t. I kept running into problems, like the fact that I was having trouble getting all the reps at the prescribed weights (which were determined by a certain percentage of “1RM,” or one-rep-max, the maximum amount you can lift one time in an exercise). I was trying to do 3 sets of 10 deadlifts at 60% of 1RM, and was hitting something like 8 reps, then 5, then 4. My bench press wasn’t anywhere it was supposed to be, either, and I was having a lot of difficulty knocking out anything CLOSE to the chinup and dip numbers I was supposed to (even using an “assistance” machine, which helps by supporting some of your weight as you move).

Also, since I was supposed to be “bulking,” I was eating like a pig. No real veggies, lots of fat and protein and schleck. As a result I gained back a fair percentage of the weight I’d lost from careful dieting, and if my arms and chest were getting bigger, I didn’t much notice it, seeing as they were covered up in delicious, succulent fat.

After posting a few queries at the Men’s Health forums, and doing some more research, I concluded that doing a hypertrophy plan was a stupid idea for anyone as new to lifting as I was. Strength was what I needed, and a lot of it. On the advice of knowledgeable folks, I started eating properly and doing a program called “Starting Strength,” which is both a book and a very informative online wiki. It, once again, had everything I wanted: barbell exercises, a plan for progression (gradual adding of weight as strength improves), and just three workouts a week.

There are a few different programming techniques you can use, but the one I selected features back squats at every workout, bench press and overhead press on alternating workouts, deadlifts once a week, and pullups twice a week. (I like pullups, although at the time I could not do any, so I had to do “negatives,” wherein you use a stool to raise yourself up to the bar and slowly lower yourself down.) Dropping one workout was key, and also I was exercising just about every muscle in my body at every workout, instead of just twice a week. To recap: 25% fewer workouts, 50% more muscles worked.

I made great progress quickly…too quickly. I was adding lots of weight every workout (10-15 pounds to my squat every workout, 20 to the deadlift, 5-10 to the bench and overhead press) and after a couple weeks had quickly stalled out the upper body lifts. I reset (basically went back to the beginning) those, but kept adding to the squat and deadlift, eventually getting the latter up to 335 pounds, and the squat to 265, before a nagging pain in my right hip (I suspected the sartorius muscle) basically shut down all my leg exercises for a couple weeks.

I rested a bit (and was a lot less careful about my diet, unfortunately) and got back to it with more careful progression (no more than 5 pounds per workout to any exercise), but the hip injury kept lingering, and eventually I had to stop for a month. This, of course, was when I outwitted myself yet again, and convinced myself it was time to try another hypertrophy routine…more next week, and be sure to stay tuned for when I blew out my knee because I was stupid!

When last we left the narrative, I was eating enough rare red meat that I was becoming ruminant, while doing an odd variety of exercises designed to keep me interested and build muscklez. I did some poking around on the Men’s Health TNT Diet, and discovered the Men’s Health Forums, which led to significant changes in my diet and exercise routines. Here are the things you need to know about the forums:

1. there are separate forums for weight lifting, running, miscellaneous cardio, diet, injuries, general health, as well for specific Men’s Health diet plans (TNT, Ab Diet, Huge In A Hurry) and also a few “off-topic” forums where folks espouse remarkably narrow-minded conservative political philosophies;


2. there is a lot of good information on the forums, particularly in the “stickies” (post threads that have been deemed especially useful and always appear at the top of every forum);


3. there are a lot of well-meaning folks on there with anecdotal experience but not a lot of actual fitness or diet expertise;


4. there are five or six smart, knowledgeable people who want to help you, particularly if you demonstrate some intelligence and ability to comprehend science; and


5. there are five or six utter douchebags who, while they may be knowledgeable, simply crap on everything with which they disagree.

I tend to put the douche-bags on “ignore” and just don’t respond, because I’m tired of arguing with trolls.

Having gotten that off my chest, I will say that the forums are a great place to find a whole wealth of information (even if it’s just links to other sites) about how to lose fat, gain muscle, proper exercise form, a whole host of stuff. It also alerted me to the fact that the rinky-dink routines I was doing as part of the TNT diet may have been effective, but they weren’t ever going to be as effective as barbell training with big ol’ compound movements (even though much of the TNT stuff was still basically compound movements, many of them involved dumbbells or just bodyweight, which is less effective).

A “compound” movement is an exercise that involves more than one muscle group (such as deadlifts, back squats, and bench presses); exercises that target a specific muscle (like bicep curls, or calf raises) are called “isolation” movements. Compound movements are the foundation of any serious muscle-building routine, for the simple reason that you exercise a whole lot more muscles at one time. For example, a leg press machine works primarily the quads; doing a barbell squat exercises the quads, the hamstrings, the lower back, the upper back, and the abdominals.

(Squatting is rad. I’m a fan.)

Now, my focus is to try and get big ol’ muscles. Getting strong is handy, but to be honest if I could get big ol’ freaky muscles and not really gain any strength, I’d take it, because I’m no professional athlete and a 500-pound deadlift doesn’t really have any use in my daily life. So, I started googling up hypertrophy plans, which is where I made my misstep, about which I’ll talk later this week.