Carb Day

Yesterday was my carb day, the one day a week you reload on carbs. I ate most of a pizza... it was sooo good.

Hitting the gym this morning should be fun with hopefully lots of energy stored in my muscles again. We'll see.

Still tracking my food intake on Fitday.com. Pretty cool.

Fit Day, Low Carb and Work Outs

Fit Day is turning out to be interesting. It is a bit of a pain to log all your food, but it's also kinda fun when you do it. So far I haven't been eating out much, and when I did, I ordered a bunch of sides that were easy to track (two eggs, and four pieces of linked sausage). At 237 and moderately active ("Mostly Seated With Some Movement"), I was surprised that Fit Life decided that I burn 3,330 calories a day, but then again, it also classifies me as Obese! Okay, so it may not be calibrated for someone 6'1" high and into weight lifting, so I'm assuming that I burn about 2,500 calories a day (probably more, but whatever), and so far in my food tracking I'm under that. My average is 2,100 calories per day and I tend to try and overstate what I've eaten when I'm not sure rather than guess lower so that my total calories fall on the high side. For instance, I had just over a cup of blueberries this morning, but how much over, I'm not sure (I need a measuring cup!) so I just put two cups.

Even if Fit Day is correct about 3,330 calories per day, I don't understand what that means because it changes when I enter activities. For instance, I sleep 8 hours per day, and if I enter that activity, my daily calorie burn drops quite a bit. Work-out for an hour, and bam, I'm up to 3,900 calories per day. Seem suspicious, and I can't find any info on the site for the basis of this calculation. Rest assured that I will do more research.

I've been back on the low carb diet since Sunday. This time around I'm going to cycle it more, doing six days on, one day off, six days on. And my total daily carb intake is going to be a bit higher (around 40 or 50 grams), as I'll still be eating some fruits, especially bananas, to keep my potassium and other nutrient levels up. I need to do more research on the best way to cycle and to spread out my meals (so far, it's about every two to three hours).

My first low carb workout was on Tuesday, and it went well, although I may not have been totally in Ketosis yet. I lifted my max weights (like day 6 of 5's on HST), and had no problems. I'm still doing 215 squats, 205 bench, 120 clean and push, and 50 assisted pull ups. I did increase my back extension weight to 45 lbs., I upped my dead lift to 205 (it can go higher, as I'm not having any problems lifting this, I just want to keep going up slowly so I don't damage myself; I don't have back issues, and I don't want them!). I also upped my incline bench to 145, and I think I can go higher... not sure why my max on this suddenly jumped.

I want to start doing bar-in-front (can't remember the proper term for this) squats to warm up with, because I've found when I do these, I squat better at my max, at least the couple times I've done them. Then I get in the gym and forget up until I'm about to squat my max :P

Oh, and finally, now that I'm doing max weights, I've discovered a weakness in my shoulders that I need to address. When I'm taking two 55 lb dumb bells and lifting them up to my shoulders to do say Arnold Presses, there is a slight pain in my shoulder as I swing them forward and up that feels like a muscle that can't handle that weight. I think Kettle Bells or similar style exercise movements will address this, so I'm looking into it.

This morning I did 20 minutes elliptical (320 calories), three minutes of jump rope and two minutes of jumping jacks.

Then I weighed in at just under 235.

Round 2 Reboot - 5's Day 6

Last day of HST went relatively well. A couple of personal bests (actually, pretty much had personal bests on all my exercises but these were the ones I really cared about):

Bench 205 lbs. - Only three reps :(
Squat 215 lbs. - Five reps, but the fifth was a bit wobbly :P
Clean and Press 120 lbs. - Eight reps, then followed up with five more. Felt good, except for the first lift when I smacked myself on the chin with the bar while lifting it over my head.
Curls 45 lbs. - Only two reps, but I didn't expect I'd pull off any, so booyah!
Assisted Pull-up 50 lbs. - four reps, which was one more than I thought I'd manage, so happy.
Seated Pull-up (machine) 250 lbs. - six reps, coolio.
Lunge 50 lbs. dumbbell in each hand - six lunges each leg. Interestingly my right leg seems weaker than my left on this exercise.

Anyway, so I'm going to keep going with strength building for awhile, but I'm also switching back to low carb, which may make strength increases hard, at least it has in the past. We'll see.

Today I made an account on FitDay to track my food intake. We'll see if I keep it up.

So what's next? I'm going to do day 6 a few more times until I figure out what routine I want to do next. I wouldn't mind doing a split routine, but I haven't found one I really liked, mostly because they don't usually include full body motions like Dead Lifts and Clean and Presses, and I'm loving those.

Heading off to Google to do some split routine research.

I weighed in at 237.

Round 2 Reboot - 5's Day 5

Great workout today. I did eight squats at my previous best of 205 lbs. and it felt great. I don't think I'll have any problem doing 215 lbs. next time and beating my personal best, then perhaps going even a bit higher. It would be awesome to be doing squats with two 45 lb. plates on each side of the bar. HUGE! :P

Also matched my personal best at bench, doing 195 lbs. for six reps. This didn't feel as strong as the squats, but I'm pretty certain I'll be able to do 205 lbs. on day six for five and set a new personal best, and hey, a 45 lb. and a 35 lb. plate on each side of the bar isn't horrible.

I laughed at two things today:

1. After the awesome squats I jumped on the calf machine and on my first rep of 145 lbs. BOTH my calves cramped up! I need to eat more bananas, or stop doing jump roping on my non-lifting days (I did cardio yesterday, followed by about 3 and a half minutes of jump rope).

2. My goal for both squats and bench is to be working out with my body weight, which I'm a ways away from, but I was stupidly happy this morning when I realized that hey, at least I'm working out at my ideal body weight! That's not bad right?!? :P

Actually, I'm no longer sure what my idea body weight is. I have two free personal training sessions and a free evaluation at the gym I should take advantage of and get some opinions on where I should be. I have the feeling my body weight should be anywhere between 205 and 220 lbs.

In other parts of my workout, I did my personal best on Clean and Presses, working out with 120 lbs. I'm back up to 135 on incline bench, and should have no problem doing day six at 140 lbs., then going beyond that. Cool. Deadlift, I'm still only doing 180 (this is another exercise I should be doing at body weight), and I'm not super happy with my form, so I'm still not pushing this one too fast... perhaps a couple sessions with a personal trainer will help my form. My goal was to be doing 45 lbs. dumbbell curls for biceps, but I'm not going to make that, as I'm still not able to do more than five or six reps at 40 lbs. This might be different if I wasn't doing a bunch of back exercises first and wearing out my biceps. Speaking of back exercises, I'm having no problem with any of them; I'm on track with chest crusher, seated pull-ups wide and normal grip (this one I do my body weight), and seated rows (did 190 lbs. today for nine reps in very good form, so I'll probably go past my personal best of 200 lbs. on day six and then a bit beyond, cool). But regular assisted pull ups, I'm not quite hitting my goal of five reps at 50 lbs. assisted (I did four), so I'm not even doing my ideal body weight yet :(. Just gotta keep at it.

Good workout. Very happy with most of my progress. Now I gotta eat some bananas and blue berries so I don't cramp up next time!

Weighed in at 137 lbs. today.

HST Round 2 Reboot - 5's Days 1, 2, 3 and 4

So, E3 in Los Angeles was a blast, and it turned out that the hotel actually had an okay gym in it (for a hotel) with no only cardio machines, but several weight machines and a set of free weight dumbbells that went all the way up to 50 lbs., so I hit the gym three out of the four or so days I was in LA.

Wait, backing up a bit, so we actually left for LA on Friday night, arriving there late-ish, picking up a rental and then driving down to Orange County where we checked into our hotel around midnight. The big bummer was that I was totally ill on Thursday night, as in food poisoning ill where you just lie in the shower suffering until there's nothing left inside you... yeah, not a pretty picture, but I was feeling just good enough to still go into work on Friday morning because I had waaaaay too much to do, especially since I'd been out of the country for weeks before. I grabbed a nap or two during the day to try to recover, then passed out in the boarding area at the airport for about an hour before the flight, and when we finally got to the hotel late that night I was ready for, no in need of, some more sleep.

The hotel ended up being pretty nice, we had a one bedroom suite that she managed to find for only $89 per night, and it was only a couple of blocks away from Knott's Berry Farm, where we went on Saturday morning. I was feeling much better, although my appetite had not yet really returned, so we went on pretty much all the roller coasters before heading back to the hotel in the early afternoon for a long happy nap. That evening we debated what we wanted to do, and ended up going to Midevil Times, which as you know from the Cable Guy movie, is pretty silly, but it was actually a LOT of fun. The show was very well done, with lots of horse back riding (jousts and fights), battles and knightly endeavors. The food wasn't bad either, and I enjoyed a large beer which very much relaxed me. She wasn't too excited to go Midevil Times, but once we were there she had to admit that it was pretty fun. It was the first time for both of us.

After a great night's sleep Saturday, we headed back towards LA and ended up stopping in Manhattan Beach for lunch and shopping. I've changed a bit since I lived in LA some six or seven years ago, and while I didn't much like it then, I think I could actually be happy living there now. Why? Well, when I used to live there I was not that long out of college and was used to have one or two very close friends, but LA culture is not suited for that as much as having several or more good friends, and hopefully a partner how is a close friend. Not sure if that makes sense, but nowadays, I tend to have the later kind of relationships anyway, becuase you know lots of people through your partner and work, and just don't have the time it takes to develop one or two super close friendships. Anyway, it was a typically beautiful southern California day, and we enjoyed the afternoon near the beach before she jumped on a flight back to SF. From the airport, I took a shuttle to the hotel and began getting ready for E3.

As I already said, E3 was a blast, as well as a success for my games, and I managed to get three pretty solid workouts in during my week there, which I think maintained me. I flew back to SF on Thursday night and then went back to the gym to restart the 5's. Over the past week I did days 1, 2, 3 and today, 4 of the 5's and I feel really good. 5's are fun because you are approaching your max and feel like a bad-ass lifting heavy weights again.

Today I was able to a nice set of bench and squats at 185 and 200 respectively (with eight reps each) that make me think that I'm going to be able to blow through my maximums on day 6 of 5's. I'm hoping I'll be able to hit a bench of 215 in a week or so and a squat of 230 (5 reps of each). If I can't just do them, then I'm going to change over to splits and work on increasing my max weights for a few weeks before I do any strategic deconditioning. In general, I'm feeling strong and want to capitalize on that for awhile until I plateau. Then I'll decide what routine I want to do next, HST again or something new. I may actually hire a personal trainer for a month or two and try something completely different. I've been watching a couple of the trainers at the gym, and there is at least one that I think could teach me a thing or two.

Anyway, really enjoying the end of this HST round, although falling off the diet kinda sucked. My weigh-ins have been fluctuating between 234 and 239 since I restarted after Japan, which means I haven't lost any weight. I don't look much different, so I don't think I've actually put on any fat, but since I doubt I've put on 6 or 9 pounds of muscle, I don't think I've lost any either. I hate dieting, but I'm going to have to go back on one shortly. God. Damn. It.