Official T-ransformation 2017 Thread

man, absofuckinglutely. This can’t be emphasized enough. Salt should literally be considered a performance enhancer. Stan Efferding was the first guy I heard talking about it, and honestly I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say increases my sodium intake immensely was a game changer.

I also wanted to add to kd’s situation, when you start to get really lean, you’ll begin to notice changes DAILY sometimes. Water retention or lack thereof, a good or bad day of eating, and all sorts of other factors will affect your appearance. You’ll learn to not get caught up too much in how you look on any particular day, and just focus on your ‘mean’ appearance/progress. I have days when I feel like I’m not really vascular at all, and other days when the veins that run down my obliques are prominent (this is kind of the hardest area for me to see veins, so it’s not everyday). And yea, sometimes the abs will look blurrier than other days, and you really can’t tell why. No big deal.

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@flipcollar Good stuff as always bro. Same here. Recently increased sodium pretty significantly, currently on 1500 cals and 2hrs cardio a day (2 weeks out of a show) and I feel better than I have in weeks. Strength is solid and body comp is improved. It’s hard to describe how much better I feel, only thing that has changed is sodium, while cals were lowered and cardio increased. Good thing Franks Red Hot isn’t on the banned list :joy: @kd13 lack of sodium could be contributing to water retention if your body is producing too much aldosterone. Salt up baby!

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Thank you all for the info. I’ve graduly been looking worse over the past 10 days. When with the increases activities I was expecting to go the other way!

The salt thing is interesting, I’ve not been actively avoiding salt, just when looking at what I eat nothing is really salty. I used to salt my meals and use in cooking until I met my wife. Since then I’ve grown to just not use it. Will change that now.

Will keep every thing unchanged but just add some salt.

I actually feel great, best I’ve felt in years, sleeping great ( for now) and performing well again in the gym.

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This is probably the end of the road for me in terms of this transformation, I knew that I only had until may to really put the effort in. But for a very very good reason.

I’m currently holding in my arms the winner of this transformation, developing from a microscopic embryo into a gorgeous mini version of me in just under 9 months!

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Congrats, man. Being a father changes your life for the better!

Congratulations! We want pics!

Damn, kid put on some serious mass in he last few months

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Congratulation KD13, mini KD should win this for sure, put up a pic and he should be sent a prize.

Congrats KD!

congratulations, mate

Congrats man!

@kd13 CONGRATULATIONS!

Okay, monthly check in for me. Last month I didnt see as much fat loss as I would have liked, but thats because I am trying to say as “sustainable” as I can for my own experimentation purposes… But I will probably go a bit unsustainable this month to dial it in.

Waist measurement is down 1/2" and lb’s are dropping down still though, so even though it wasn’t much improvement I did move in the right direction.

Pics are:

Beginning
Last Month
This Month

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A picture I took this morning inspired me to go back and look at some OLD pictures to gauge progress. I figured I’d post a couple of them here.

First picture is more or less what I looked like when I started lifting almost 6 years ago, the second one is what I looked like after almost 2 years of consistent hard training and dedicated eating, and the final one is from this morning. It’s a good thing I’m not easily discouraged, because I don’t think anyone can accuse me of being genetically gifted for this pursuit. But, things really have started to come together over the last few months… finally. Ha!


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Looking good man!

you’re the man to beat here, brother

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Thanks man, but my money is on @littlesleeper after that crazy check-in early on.

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Lonnie, looking good man that’s some serious progress! Quads even coming in latest pics, mid section looking more dialed in as well. Keep up the good work!

@TrevorLPT looking good dude, serious progress right there from the before photos. You may have mentioned this earlier, sorry if I missed it, what have you been doing with nutrition/cardio? Do you feel that what you’re doing now is sustainable? Keep up the great work man!

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Thanks man – I’ve been following along with your logs for inspiration, so it’s cool to have you chime in.

Re: nutrition and cardio, I’m actually working with a coach so he makes all the calls and I just implement. I’ve found that the big benefit of this for me is that it keeps me out of my head and allows me to focus on executing the plan. No worrying about if I’m losing mass, no worrying about if I need to refeed, no worrying about if I’m losing weight too quickly, etc. Which, in the past, were all things that I got caught up on while handling my own diet.

All that said, we’re not doing anything too crazy or anything that I haven’t done on my own in the past. Training days are high protein, low-moderate carbs, and lowish fat, and off days are high protein, low (at one point 50 g/ day) carbs, and slightly higher fat. Recently I’ve been having refeed meals once every couple weeks, and yesterday was my first proper high carb day in 4 months. I don’t think I got a refeed meal for the first 10-12 weeks though, because I was a fatty and didn’t need one.

Cardio has progressed as you probably would expect it to. Started out with two 30 minute sessions of LISS, then added an interval session, and now I’m up to 3 interval sessions and no LISS. So 8 total training sessions per week – nothing crazy.

Whether this workload is sustainable or not, I can’t really answer. I kind of hate doing HIIT, so 3 sessions per week feels like a bit much to me. I think if I got it down to 1 HIIT session and 1-2 LISS sessions a week I could do that long term. As for the diet, the only part that I think is unsustainable is the rigidity with which I’m following it. If I had room to eat out 1-2x per week with family or friends, I’d have no problem doing this forever. All that said, I’m losing fat on a pretty much daily basis right now, so I think I definitely have some room to ease up a bit once I’m ready for maintenance mode.