In the last 8 weeks I've been madly rushing to increase my weight to 80kgs. The pre-story is long, and the information I've learned along the way is a-plenty. I'll try and break it all down into factoids and snippets.
- ~2008 my weight managed to drift from 75 to 85kgs. I'm a raging ectomorph with a swath of related cortisol issues, so this was a BIG deal.
. Seriously, buy it.
- Began a beginners workout regime with some limited equipment, supplemented by a slightly curbed eating habit.
- Throughout 2009 this got more serious, including lots of reading and experimenting trying to get the eating and workouts right. This was REALLY hard.
- ALMOST ALL of the information available is built around success stories. Which evolves around the EXTREMES, which is generally WORLD CLASS title winners. These are ENDOMORPHS of the highest order, who have worked hard. Most literature is built around these guys and simply does NOT work for ecto's.
- Crappy relationship with a self destructive woman at the time was absolutely no help at all. Get rid of garbage people in your life. Your best friend will tell you when you're being a dork (Kudos Tux btw), without pulling you into the soap-opera-scene.
- End 2009 I managed to scraaaaappe my way back up to 70kg's, but I'd lost a lot of the hard work I'd put in. The original goal was 80kg's and CUT.
2010, correct the madness.
- Mid 2010 finally read enough literature to work out what was going on, and started to re-take control of insane gain and loss, and reclaim muscle mass I'd aimed for.
- stopped ANY cardio exercise. Almost no cycling for 6 months. (It's cold anyway)
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Switched to a 4000 calorie / day eating regime. Avg for most people is around 2000+ if they're very healthy eaters. Take-away food eaters blow this out of the water.
- Switched to a technically-simple compound weights plan
here. This is a short term training plan, but a good mix.
- 4000 calories with clean low fat food is HARD. I took some advice and simplified this by mixing in some dirty-weight gain. Double Whoppers and Strip-Sub combos 3-4 times a week work FAST.
- increased protein intake from about 160grams/day to over 250. Getting enough protein daily is hard yakka, and also expensive. Best price/quality I've found is
http://www.proteindirect.com.au/ which is about 3 times cheaper than supermarket/mainstream retail costs.
- increased omega fats from 2 to 3 grams / day via supplements. Decreased ratio of omega 6 due to take-out diet.
SO. Today (9.9.2010) I weighed in at
79.5kg's this morning at 7am. I bought 3 pizzas yesterday for dinner and have finished them off this evening. Dirty...dirty, naughty gain :D
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This was an exercise in weight gain while still maintaining a vigilant workout regime, not a specific muscle gain plain, though for the first time I've had the fat reserves to feed my body effectively. What now?- Essentially do what I did in 2009 for the next 12 weeks, but with a few revisions.
- Will aim to maintain just over 3000 calories per day of lean food.
- Sticking to ~250 grams or more protein.
- lifting Omega 3 to 2-4 grams, and keep 6,9 at around 1000mg as supplements on top of whatever the diet manages.
- Alternate between the 6-week progressive overloading plans, and standard weekly plans.
- Pick up the cycling (cardio) again in October.
- Stay above 77.5 kg after cutting. I think this is achievable given the protein, calorie and omega changes. I'm seriously going to cry if I drop below 75 as this will indicate muscle loss again.
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End Feb next year, switch to a massive calorie loading again and
aim for an 85kg fat-fest, with a cut weight after that of 80kg by June.
- The long delay to gain again is because I'm happy to idle at a maintenance stage over the summer period, and I also need to measure the current eating plan over a reasonable period. Previously ~2500 calories / day was resulting in loss, but my protein intake was low, and my cardio regime was too intense.
A few tips and things learned.- Double check the advice and material you're reading. There's LOADS of stuff that's written as "common sense", that is completely WRONG. If it reads as common sense, and makes logical sense from a non-technical standpoint, it is probably wrong!!
- Most of the material available is for
cyborg tank men from planet Krypton. Read that stuff, but supplement it with data for your current build, weight, and body type etc.
- PILATES in all its forms is complete rubbish.
- The exception to the above statement, is if you're a 45kg skeleton with no muscular motor control, and need a starting point. That is the extent of it. (Kat says I'm not allowed to say it's rubbish. :P )
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advice from anyone without abs, and/or below the age of 28 is to be dismissed immediately. They don't know, and anything that comes out of their mouth is based on their own bodies experience...which is still in a nubile Kryptonian cyborg state of improbable good looks with little effort.
- You're doomed if you don't love chicken.
- It's not really about eggs. It's all about chicken.
- Frozen vegetables FTW. Fresh is too much work.
- Hungry Jacks Onion Ring farts will continue for 2 days. True story :)
- Putting on weight is harder than losing it while still working out.
- Losing weight comes with anxiety, because you're looking in the mirror for results. Keep long term viewpoints in perspective. Use fortnightly or monthly photos as reference, not what you looked like yesterday.
- Losing weight has mild headache effects with most people. Remove stress and learn to play computer games.
- Keep other hobbies in play and active. I'm so damn competitive that gaming sometimes reaches a point where it fails to reach the relaxation goal. Find a girlfriend who will play computer games with you. Hobba I hate you. :P
- You'll always feel tired if your sustained carbohydrate intake is low, and exercise activity is low, a perpetually catabolic weak state is bad. (really common if diet and exercise are poor.)- Failure is an option. Expect to see huge results, and fall flat on your face a couple times. Your face looked like a dropped pie anyway. :D
- mmMm, pie.
Trav threw out his old bed base so I ripped it down and decided to salvage some of the timber. One of those fake-matress ones with castors that's essentially a timber frame with a material outer over a cardboard shroud. It's pretty ordinary, really soft knotty pine. Not quite good enough to bother dressing down for real furniture. So I knocked up a frame to become a weights bench of sorts for my clutter. The top rail is actually made up of two T-pieces with a 10cm gap between them, so that loaded dumbells can sit safely on top without rolling.
The other side of the room however, still needs work!!! I think a 2nd shelf, and possibly another rack entirely will end up in here soon.
