I’ve been doing Rippetoes on and off mostly on lately, and have made some pretty nice strength and size gains. I went from 6’4 187 to 228 in about a year with some missed weeks in between. For 5 reps I now bench 230, squat 325, and deadlift 360, and the gains are still coming especially with the squats.
I"ve always been a skinny guy, and I put on some nice size, but a lot of it has been fat which went straight to my gut. I have a super pregnent looking stomach that I can tuck in and make it look like its flat and hide it, but its annoying to have to tuck this in everyday. I bought a bodyfat scale and found I have 160 pounds of lean mass, and 68 pounds of fat bf % of 30% which is alarming. So I gained about 10 pounds of muscle and 30 pounds of fat.
Whats my best bet here? I’ve been adding 5 pounds to squat everytime, 5 to deadlift, and 2.5 to bench and military and havent stalled lately. My goals in order of importance are to squat 400+ to increase my vertical jump, get down to about 10% bodyfat so i can not have to hide the gut anymore and show some abs for the summer, add on some nice size by increasing reps in the 8 to 12 range, bench over 300 and deadlift over 450.
My dilemma is that I really need to cut this fat off, but I know you cant build muscle and cut at the same time. I have to lose 45 pounds of fat which if taking 2 pounds off a week would take about 23 weeks which is a looong time to cut, but at the same time I still want to increase strength and some hypertrophy for the upper body especially. Whats my best bet here.
1st, great progress. 2nd, don’t go by those scales man. They suck, they tell me im something like 35% bodyfat when that’s impossible. If you want an estimation, you could post a pic. That routine looks good except on leg day I would throw in a couple more exercises. 2 just isn’t much for legs compared to the rest of the program. So I would add something like RDLs and lunges, you could use the same sets and reps for the rest of the program.
I’m basically lean all over hardly any fat on my legs, back, shoulders, arms, face, but my stomach pokes out like I’m 6 months pregnent if I let it go. I ignored that for a while so that I could bulk, I really just want to get that 400 pound squat which I think is doable since 325 isnt too hard right now, lose this gut , and get on some hypertrophy program once I lose the gut. I was thinking about keeping the squats 3 days a week but not sure how that’d work. Also it looks like maintenence calories for me are between 3000 and 3400, so I was planning on eating 2700 calories on 3 training days and around 2200 on nontraining days, want to lose fat while maintaining muscle.Any advice on all of this.
Just throwing something else out there for you to think about. some of that pregnant gut could be due to poor posture. read up on posterior pelvic tilt. post a picture
<–Highly skeptical that you gained 30lbs of fat and 10lbs of muscle while experiencing early gains. Congrats on the progress.
But OP, seriously, you’re at a really precarious spot in your training. Don’t go on some crazy diet and/or lose a lot of the progress you’ve made from base speculation about how much fat and muscle you’ve put on.
[quote]dapunisher1 wrote:
I’m basically lean all over hardly any fat on my legs, back, shoulders, arms, face, but my stomach pokes out like I’m 6 months pregnent if I let it go. I ignored that for a while so that I could bulk, I really just want to get that 400 pound squat which I think is doable since 325 isnt too hard right now, lose this gut , and get on some hypertrophy program once I lose the gut. I was thinking about keeping the squats 3 days a week but not sure how that’d work. Also it looks like maintenence calories for me are between 3000 and 3400, so I was planning on eating 2700 calories on 3 training days and around 2200 on nontraining days, want to lose fat while maintaining muscle.Any advice on all of this. [/quote]
Right, so you got jacked, don’t realize that added bodyweight (of any kind) increases your strength via increased leverages, and you want to diet until your skinny again and lose all your strength. Just maintain, stop bulking until you densen up.
As far as diet, I found that my maintenence calories are somewhere between 2900 and 3300 calories so I created a nice diet plan where I’m getting 169 g of carbs, 316 g of protein, 67 g of fat on the 3 lifting days basically a 50/25/25 getting roughly 2500 g of calories, and on non lifting days carbs 94g, protein 294 g, and fat 73 g for 2200 calories. My diet is mainly going to be egg whites, chicken breast with salad, yams, nuts, whey protein, fish, cottage cheese with blueberries and protein powder.
I’m lifting in the morning and doing jump rope on non lifting days in the morning, and eating all of the carbs before 3pm to avoid insulin spikes. I was thinking about staying on rippetoes to maintain the strength and muscle and hopefully get closer to the 400 pound squat that I want.
Does this sound like a good plan? I have the 5 3 1 book, but I did some research and it seems like Rippetoes is linear progression which I’m still getting results from, something like the texas method or madcows would be next since its weekly progression and 5 3 1 would be advanced since its monthly progression. What is bbb template?
Also I’m thinking once I’m done with rippetoes I want to do something with higher reps to get faster hypertrophy once I’m a little stronger
[quote]dapunisher1 wrote:
I have a super pregnent looking stomach that I can tuck in and make it look like its flat and hide it, but its annoying to have to tuck this in everyday. [/quote]
Second thought, your body has a limit to the mass it will put on comfortably. So just keep lifting and be patient, else you’ll look stronger than you really are and prove to yourself that you don’t have the character to stick out through difficult times.
Its just annoying holding it in all day. If i let up and relax for a second people will see my huge gut and I’ve had young girls in the mall laughing at it lol. I swear the rest of my body is really lean, legs are long and muscular now, arms arent huge but definately hardly any fat, shoulders too. I just got a huge bulge in the gut lol. I’m going to commit to this diet for like 10 weeks because I was eating similar to this before with a few cheat meals every week or so, and would probably overdo the calories with all of the pre workout and post workout carb/protein drinks, and probably too many carbs and no cardio, so I’m going to take like 35 g of protein and 30 g of carb pre and post workout to cut back and eat more salad instead of yams.