Training Update and Random Thoughts

To keep this short and sweet I'm only going to give you the major points from each day of training.  To paraphrase my friend Tim in the food line in college, "I'm just giving you the meatballs."

Monday
Strict Overhead Press:
150x5

Wednesday
Clean High Pull:
264x3, 264x five singles

Friday
Squat: 365x5
RDL: 286x6x3

For being deep into the diet and now weighing what I weighed my freshman year of high school I'm pretty happy with how this week went.  Many people will assume strength will plummet on a diet.  It will if you don't do it correctly.  Doing a diet correctly basically entails eating enough protein to maintain your muscle mass and losing the weight slowly.  Quick weight loss diets usually emphasize drastically cutting calories and lot's of cardiovascular work.  That is definitely not me.

There is one more week to go on the diet and this is how I'm feeling about it:


Once the diet is over I'll be switching back into mass gain mode.  I'm not going to do what I've done in the past though and just start indiscriminately shoveling calories down my throat.  I'm going to be taking my time with it.  It's the flip side of rapid fat loss leading to muscle loss.  Rapid weight gain, even with hard training, leads to fat gain.  I'm going to try to maintain as low a body fat as possible.  If I feel like it's creeping up a bit too much I'll readjust.  Same as always.

I'm also going to continue with the Intermittent Fasting.  I want to see how it works with mass gain.  Hopefully it will help me maintain relatively the same leanness.  If I take my time and don't get too lazy with the diet it should.

I just finished reading Michael Lewis' Boomerang.  It's about all of the factors that led to the global market crisis we are currently digging our way out of.  It basically boils down to a few people (mostly bankers and credit lenders) gaining access to lots of easy credit and borrowing a lot of money they couldn't pay back.  If you have any interest in the markets or finances I'd definitely recommend it.  Even if you have zero experience (me) with complex money situations it's still a good read as Lewis makes the material accessible to just about everyone.

On top of doing the clean high pulls I also did some acceleration sprints.  These made me sore from my glutes to my calves since it has been a long while since I've done them.  Excited to see what kind of progress I can make with them.

That's it for now.  Working tomorrow morning and then some treadmill incline sprints.  Can't wait.