Thursday workout and more about my approach

Yesterday I did my second strength workout for the week and it felt awesome!

It has been quite a while since I did overhead pressing and Romanian dead lifts so I am a bit sore today.

Session went great and I was fairly happy with my form in most of the exercises. I see that I can go lower with the barbell when doing Romanian dead lifts and work a bit on my shoulder mobility.

Here is the video of what my Thursday workouts will look like:

About my approach

Some of you might have noticed that I use low frequency, low volume and high intensity for my strength workouts. Well, the intensity might not be through the roof quite yet but I promise that it will increase over the next 8-12 weeks.. :)

My goal is to pack on muscle while staying below 12% body fat. Since I plan on doing this for 12 months I will design and work my way through several training cycles.

This first cycle consists of a hard-gainer-type of routine where I focus on compound exercises, two full-body strength workouts per week and one high intensity interval session. I will also do one mobility/flexibility-workout each week to avoid injuries.

I am a big fan of intermittent fasting and have been using Martin Berkhans "leangains"-approach with 16 hours fasting and a 8 hour eating window for over a year and simply love it.

I will probably not go into much detail regarding IF (intermittent fasting) in this blog, but in short; I do it to make my body into a muscle building, fat burning machine. You can read more about IF over at; http://www.leangains.com/ , and Brad Pilons blog;
http://www.nutritionhelp.blogspot.com/ .

My eating goes something like this;

• 3-4 meals per day (and maybe a power shake),
  
  
• one medium meal to break my fast (on weight training days I consume this meal about two hours before my workout),
• one big meal for dinner,

• maybe a power shake (1 scoop of ice cream, 2 cups of milk, 1 banana, two scoops of peanut butter and 30-40g protein powder) if I need more calories that day and a medium meal with some extra casein (usually milk) in the evening.

Some might want to know all about macro nutrients etc... If so I might write about that in a later post. As you might have gathered till now, I like to keep things simple.

I started this period at 70.8kg body weight (weight taken after 15 hours of fasting) with about 8% body fat. That means my lean body mass is about 65.2kg. It is this number I want to increase. Hopefully I will manage to pack on around 6kg of lean body mass during these 12 months.

I use 5 spots for my fat caliper measurements.
Here are the measurements I took the 21-7-09 after 14 hours of fasting;

Left thigh: 7.5mm

Left sub scapular: 6mm

Right suprailiac: 5mm

Left abdominal: 8mm

Right triceps: 5mm

I will use the camera on my mobile phone to take progress pictures as I go along. Here are my pre-bulk pictures:

Building muscle and hopefully my bank account

I have decided to build muscle for 1 year. There will be many training cycles and I will discuss them as I go along.

My first training cycle started today. Mondays will go like this;





Low volume, fairly low frequency and high intensity. I have started with light weights and aim to use submaksimal weights the first 2-4 weeks. After that I will add weight in small increments each workout.

My other project is multi level marketing. I have started to work from home, coaching others in mlm and work for a company called Agel Enterprises. More on this in a later post.

I will add the pieces as I go along and will aim to update this blog at least once per week. I will most likely divide each post in two; "Muscle", where I will discuss that weeks training and diet and; "MLM", where I will talk about my mlm alfa team.

Next post will be on Thursday where I will have a video of my other weight training session and some more information about both muscle and mlm!

Stay tuned!