matthearn.com

Belatedly, here are the promised images of our third Wunderkind, William Harold, who is extremely rad.

I wrote about 600 words of a September 11th piece and realized I was “writing angry” and was going to come off as a huge jerk. In lieu of actually posting it, I’ll break it down: Lee Greenwood sucks, we’re worse off than we were 10 years ago, the Republican Party is destroying America from within, and the terrorists won.

Nobody wants to read that crap. So, spiked.

I spent September 11th at church, mostly. I’m now singing “full time” (in the sense of singing every Sunday, not working a 40-hour workweek in the choir stalls) at the church where my parents and sister sing/play. It offers a lot of cool music opportunities, so in the afternoon we sang a Requiem Mass by Sir Philip Ledger written specifically for the church a few years back. It was pretty moving, and was topped off by going to Brandywine Prime for a light supper, dragging Sarah along for a last “date” before she has another baby carved out of her on Friday. I ate too much and drank too much, all of which is to the good.

Sat in front of the TV for a bit last night to take in a little football, but discovered I couldn’t care less about the activities of the Jets and Cowboys, and also PBS was showing the New York Philharmonic playing Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, which is superduper pimp. I performed it once in college and would like to note that Mahler was a jerk: no rational musician makes the basses hit F#s and Gs, that is just redunkerous.

WHYY apparently had the rookies at the controls, though, because a few minutes into the last movement, the TV inexplicably cut to commercials (on a public TV station, no less). Eventually the music came back on, after we’d missed several minutes of high quality German romanticism. During that time, I may have accidentally tweeted that WHYY should suck it. I stand by my statement.

I hope everyone had a restful weekend, devoid of airplane tragedies and Lee Greenwood songs. I’ll come up with something more substantive later in the week, and were I you, I would expect to see pictures of a new offspring come Friday, if we come up with a name for him.

I’ll admit: I did not follow the directions to the letter. I have a number of tools powered by 2-cycle engines, and experience starting them in adverse conditions (rain, snow, etc.), so I assumed that my brand-ass new Husqvarna leafblower would operate similarly. So I took the can of fuel (a 50 to 1 gasoline and oil mixture that I refill approximately every 2 years) and poured it in. Yanked the starter, and she fired right up! I blew leaves around in great glee for 10 or 15 minutes, and then shut the blower down to bag the leaves up.

After having done so, I attempted to restart the blower, but no matter what combination of choke, throttle, and priming I tried, it wouldn’t fire. I consulted the manual and the internet, and discovered that the engine was picky about fuel. To be specific, it required exactly the right mixture of new gasoline (no older than a month), Husqvarna-specific 2-cycle oil, a stabilizer, and three unicorn tears, stirred exactly 47 times counter-clockwise with a phoenix feather. My first thought was, “Well, this is ridiculous. I’ll just send it back.” Which is where I discovered my mistake: I’d ordered the blower from Amazon.com, and they do not allow you to send things back that run on gasoline.

In their defense, I think one leaky tank of flammable petrol in the belly of a FedEx jet is one too many. So I understand. What I don’t understand is why no warning was made of this anywhere in the ordering process. Sure, if you check their rules, it mentions it, along with 18 other pages of legalese that no Amazon customer in the history of the internet has read. It’s like expecting me to know what’s in the iTunes EULA, or my mortgage contract (“Be it known forthwith after the previous payment hath been twice En-late-enated, the Mortgageer, henceforth known as the ‘Deadbeat,’ shall release unto the custody of the nearest Notary Public Two (3) Children between the ages of 1 and 7 until such time as the Bacon shall be seen to Float from East to West despite a strengthening Jet Stream…”). I would like to think that before ordering something that can’t be returned, Amazon might put up a splash page saying “Hey! You know you can’t return this, right? Just, you know, so you know.”

So I was left with a deluxe backpack leafblower with what I assume is a clogged carburetor and no way to return it. My only option was to drop it off at a local dealer a few miles away and hope that the repairs are covered under warranty. It’s been almost 10 days with no word, which worries me a bit. Hopefully they haven’t had to surrender it to the bank for late payment.

I will admit that we are a “Dancing With The Stars” household, as well as a “So You Think You Can Dance” household. Sarah’s a dancer, so it’s sort of obvious that she enjoys them, but I like them as well, oddly. On the other hand, I can’t watch “American Idol” or “The Voice” for more than about 30 seconds before I get so angry that I fling things at the TV. I have figured out why all this is: I’m a musician, specifically a singer. So when other people “sing” on TV, I know they suck. I can hear that they sing slightly off-key, that they don’t know anything about phrasing or diction, even though the bulk of viewers cannot. When I watch dancing shows, I can’t really tell what sets apart a great dancer from one who is merely competent, I just know that a dude flung a chick through his legs and then leapt* backwards over her while peeling off the outer layer of his costume to reveal his extremely ripped physique, just as the girl catches him with her feet and maybe accidentally a little bit of boob falls out for a second.

None of that is relevant to what I’m about to say. The take-away: we like the dancing shows, we Hearns.

Anyway, there’s quite a hilarious uproar going on over at the DWTS (that’s Dancing With The Stars for you un-fans) Cast Announcement page. You see, Chaz Bono is participating in this year’s competition. Chaz is famous for two things: being Sonny and Cher’s son, and until a little over a year ago, being Sonny and Cher’s daughter. That’s right, DTWS is having a transgender competitor!

Now, those of us who are rational human beings think this is either a non-event, or possibly an indicator that maybe network TV is nearly entering the 21st century on the subject of LGBT issues. Those of us who are not rational human beings are predicting the end of the world and/or a general boycott of the show. Some of the better comments:

_cindyk52

1 hour ago

Irregardless of all that is said; with both sides hammering away at each other with their opinions; the bottom line is, for me, Chastity Bono has made her choice to flaunt her lifestyle out into the world, and now I make my choice to not watch DWTS. God says her choice is an abomination, and I will honor what the Creator of the universe has commanded. She needs to repent and get right with God.

“Irregardless!” Classic. This one’s tip-top too:

mamafranof4

7 hours ago

I have not missed a season of dancing with the stars, but this one I will not watch until Chasty is voted out, God created a women and God does not make mistakes,God is very loving to his people ,but is very clear about hating sin, and it is very clear in the Bible that if YOU lay down with the same sex you will burn in hell. So who do we pick God or Dancing with the stars( HUM LET ME THINK)

I think this is the best of the bunch:

zorinsecurity

1 hour ago

Well let’s get to the point.Chaz is a women.DNA says so.No matter how many bmw emblems you put on a honda doesn’t make it a bmw.Call the dmv. Ponder this.If there was a crime and they had chaz dna.what would they be looking for? wait for it….. WOMEN. She has a mental disorder.She thanks she is a man,lol Next week maybe she will thank she is a dog.

I’d like to remind you that “zorinsecurity,” whoever s/he is, is almost certainly eligible to vote. Not just in DWTS, but in actual American political elections. Just, you know, pointing that out.

The best part are the replies, mostly from open-minded folks, simply tearing these people apart. For example, here are some replies to zorinsecurity’s last post:

LIGHT2YOU

50 minutes ago

Actually…Not. Your ignorance is showing. Go read up on the subject.

Just.DFax

35 minutes ago

Transgender is not a mental illness, look it up. A lack of education and understanding leads to fear, which leads to hate. The cure is education. If you read up on the subject, the fear will go away and maybe you’ll cure yourself of the hate… and maybe even your English.

VermillionR

1 hour ago

Your spelling and grammar should make you think a little harder the next time you post something online…

I haven’t chimed in yet, because I try to avoid interacting with the catastrophically stupid, but y’all are welcome to. Have at it!

(Personally, I’ll be supporting Carson Kressley, that guy KILLS me.)

---

*I’m a little annoyed that Firefox doesn’t know the word “leapt.” Ain’t nobody down with archaicisms. (It also doesn’t know the word “archaicism,” possibly because it’s not a word.)

I probably should not have spent Friday and Saturday making fun of all the people who were frantically running around buying up all the batteries, milk, bread, and gasoline. Irene exacted a measure of revenge, although I should be clear nothing terribly serious happened, nobody was hurt, and I suspect insurance will take care of everything. Still, we got home from a short road trip to Virginia to find the following backyard devastation:

I may have to purchase a more substantial chainsaw before tackling any of this, although if Liberty Mutual will pay for it I’ll just get somebody out to chop up everything into firewood and grind the brush up and haul it away. Hopefully everybody is dry and warm and not missing parts of their homes or persons.

Holy natural disaster week, Batman! First we get the strongest earthquake on the East Coast in over 60 years, and then this weekend we’re getting treated to a Category 4 hurricane this weekend. Hearnwife, who loves a good disaster (she once forced me to watch a movie entitled “Atomic Twister,” which was as painful as it sounds, although in her defense Mark-Paul Gosselaar was in it and he’s so dreamy Freud has a chapter about him in Die Traumdeutung), is so excited she’s having trouble controlling her bladder, although that also because she’s 8 months pregnant with what we can only assume, based on how hard he kicks, is a wallaby.

(Here’s how you can tell Matt Hearn is back in the blogging groove:

1. One paragraph with 17 million links


2. A 79 word run-on sentence


3. A lengthy, pointless parenthetical remark


4. A numbered list

)

Sadly, it turns out some Washington, DC landmarks sustained damage. The Washington Monument and Smithsonian Castle are both closed pending repairs and structural analysis, and the spires of the National Cathedral got straight jacked-up, son, although at least it happened yesterday instead of, say, early July when I was singing there, so on the plus side I do not have a gargoyle-shaped dent in my cranium.

We’re all particularly excited by the prospect of Irene, since it looks like we’ll be travelling while it passes through, so we get both the thrilling possibility of being blown off the road into a bridge abutment and minimal traffic because everyone with any damn sense is staying home. As an added bonus, I’ve still got plenty of big trees available to fall onto my house in high winds.

In case you’re curious about the best way to prepare for a hurricane, it turns out it’s also the best way to prepare for a big snowstorm, and handily enough, also earthquakes and riots of soccer hooligans: the makings of french toast (stale bread, milk, eggs, and honey), a flashlight or two, and at least two cases of really fine india pale ale. In the case of hooligan riot, you might also invest in a shotgun, or at least a big katana.

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.

In order that this site feels less like a juicehead blog and more like something that the average person would actually enjoy reading, I’m taking a quick break from the recounting of my “fitness journey” to hit on a few things that have been bothering me lately.

• Can someone explain to me how the “offsides” rule in soccer came to be? I thought of this during last year’s World Cup (USA! USA! USA!), was reminded of it during this year’s Women’s World Cup, and then again now that the English Premier League season kicked off over the weekend. It’s almost as if some FIFA official sat down one day and said to himself, “There is altogether too much scoring in football, we have to cut down on all these goals.” It’d be like moving the outfield fences 40 feet out to cut down on all those pesky home runs…something I would actively support. My point is…I have no point.


• I would just like to remind everyone that the Phillies are 9 games up on the division and on pace to win 106 games. Daddy like.


• The downside of dieting: sometimes my farts are just unbelievable. I laid a sulfurous bomb at work earlier that subtly altered the DNA of everyone in nearby cubicles. On the plus side, if any of ’em reproduce, the kids should be able to fly, or detect cesium with their toes, or something.


• I was pretty excited to see Michelle Bachmann win…whatever the hell it was that Iowa just did. It wasn’t a primary, right? Just some kind of “proof of concept” vote? Whatever it was, I was pretty stoked. I mean, the GOP’s batting a thousand with its presidential front-runners since 2008: every damn one of them has been bat-shit crazy. I think they’re 3 for 3 now, right? Hopefully Rick Perry will talk more about Texan secessionism or attempts to pray away droughts and they can lock in 4 for 4.


• “Texan Secessionism” would be a pretty pimp name for an alt.country band.


• The other downside of dieting: HOLY CRAP I’M SO HUNGRY ALL THE TIME.


• That reminds me, I need to do a post about Creatine and why it’s very effective and really annoying. So, uh, look for that.


• I cannot recommend highly enough a band I have discovered named “Passion Pit.” The fact that I have now purchased their album means that 1) they’re completely mainstream and everybody already knows about them, and 2) they’ll probably break up within the next two months, but I am a HUGE fan. I’m somewhat indifferent to electropop, but something about PP makes me happy in my bones. Go grab their album “Manners” and give a million listens. Apparently they’re working on a new album to be released next year, which would be hella rad.


• HW and I are having a boy and are having a hell of a time thinking of a name. Any suggestions? I open the floor to you.

Peace, playaz.

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!