As regular followers/friends know, my training has been pretty unstructured for the last few months…er, years. Basically just “go to the gym and squat or deadlift, then do it again” for awhile. But now that I’ve moved, got a home gym all set up (when I was home this weekend, my dad gave me some extra change plates to compliment all the bumpers that I just bought) and things are about to settle down for me & my wife after the hectic couple of months, so it’s time to get into something semi-structured. I laid it out above, but the basic plan is:
Just curious man, your training style is unique. What does a typical day of eating look like for you? Do you count calories or just eat as well as you can?
I’ve seen your log mentioned a handful of times lately and totally understand why after giving a scroll - nice work on everything! I’ll stick around if that’s cool with you
Also, thanks for reminding me that I have a kettlebell and love using it.
I counted calories for a year or two when I was 23-24 years old. At the time I was a just-finished-playing-college-football-on-the-offensive-line 240ish pounds trying to shed some excess poundage. I got all the way down to 190ish with lots of running and calorie counting. I haven’t counted calories since then, but oddly enough I think it’s a good thing for everyone to do for at least a short period, if for no other reason than it gives you a better idea of how many calories are in things and a general ballpark idea of what you eat in a day. I ate semi-Paleo for awhile in my late 20’s, and still eat Paleo-ish, but I’ve relaxed those a little bit (FWIW, I never went full Paleotard but I do think there’s a lot of merit in basing most of your meals around meats and vegetables).
12PM - usually a sandwich/wrap and another cup of coffee
4PM - maybe a little snack on drive home to fuel up for workout (protein bar? apple?)
7PM - dinner always has protein, starch, and a vegetable. Last night I had two links of organic mild Italian sausage with roasted potatoes and broccoli. Tonight we’ll grill some bison burgers and probably roast another head of broccoli. Other common dinners are “salmon / potato / asparagus” or “shrimp in pesto and zucchini noodles” - but there’s always a protein and vegetable, and usually at least a little starch.
9PM - snack, most often 4-5 ounces of full-fat yogurt with some frozen fruit stirred in
Sure thing, man. Appreciate the compliment. I don’t profess to be a particularly high-level competitive athlete, but I do think my training shows that “regular working guys with limited time” can achieve a fairly respectable level of strength with minimalist programs if they’re consistent and working hard.
So it seems like to me your overall calories are not high and you eat a big piece of protein for dinner?
This is nice to see, it seems like you are getting a shit ton stronger eating healthy but definitely eating more along the line of “normal” eating. Meaning you are not stressing about and just eating as it goes. Much more of a sustainable way to eat that’s for sure! I’ve been trying to figure out how to eat, but I think eating a starch/protein/veggies/fat in each meal (3 meals a day) is probably a good way to start off and not stress.
Well…I’ll be the first to say that I’m no expert on the subject, but I’m in the school of thought that these two things are not nearly as mutually exclusive as they’re often made out to be. By “moving from strength towards hypertrophy” I assume that you mean “stop being such a lazy-ass that never does more than three reps at a time and start doing sets of 8-12 reps” to which my answer is…no, I don’t think that I will, haha.
One of the interesting observations from my time doing this is that I feel that I recover very well from this sort of low-volume, high-frequency training. I surmise that introducing higher-rep sets would make that recovery more difficult. If there comes a time when I can only train two or three days per week, perhaps I would do that, but (at least for now) I much prefer training 20-30 minutes every day versus training for 60-90 minutes three times a week.
Basically, that’s about right. If I had to guess my daily caloric intake? Probably 2500-3000 depending on how much cream I’ve dumped in my coffee and how big my pre-bed snack is.
Also, I dropped about 50 pounds when I was at my lightest (and running 40-60 miles per week), but I’ve regained some of them (not that I’m complaining) now that I have shifted back to a lifting-centric fitness approach. I’m probably in the mid-220’s right now, although I would like to peel that back to 205-210 and see if I can get those abs a little more visible.
Light weight, but I did these with very little rest (just long enough to strip 1 set of plates from the deadlift bar each time) so my grip was pretty shot by the end.
Haha no, I genuinely was not implying that, was just curious if you had a different type of plan going forward since you had hit both your deadlift and squat goals. And I absolutely agree, with size comes strength and with strength comes size for sure.
@littlesleeper: much obliged man. I’ve enjoyed our chat over in your log, and likewise I’m impressed by your strength and progression. One of the best things about this community is finding like-minded people working for self-improvement and using that as motivation to keep grinding.