Samul's Training and Nutrition Log

so i haven’t updated my log in a while.

i’ve now been working with paul carter for 2 weeks and i thought i’d compile a small diary to tell you guys sort of what he’s had me do so far.

first of all, paul told me the first step would be to lose fat so i could be lean enough to get the most out of a mass gaining phase. so, i’ve now been dieting for 14 days and i have already seen some pretty impressive results. i won’t reveal the whole meal plan or training program but i’ll post some pics of my meals and logs of my training sessions.

first some thoughts:

repetitiveness

albeit i was already used to eating similar things every day, this is the first time i’ve followed i plan where i eat exactly the same things day in, day out. when i saw the meal plan, my first thought was, “man i’m never going to be able to stick with this.” but quite honestly, when i’m set on something i become a machine, so from the get go i stuck with the plan and i haven’t failed one single meal.

eating the same meals every day has its advantages: first of all, it removes the guesswork. i don’t have to wonder what i’m going to eat when i’m at school or out with friends, because that’s taken care of.

second, you eventually learn to enjoy even the meals you don’t like a lot. now i am grateful for every meal and just eating feels great, even if some of the things aren’t the best tasting. every time i sit down and eat my due meal, i know i’m a meal closer to my goal, and that feels great.

food quality

this is a big one. i’ve always been a proponent of flexible dieting because it looked better to me. with this plan being the opposite of flexible dieting, i’ve had a chance to see for myself what it’s like to eat very high quality food.

i’m spending lots of money on food each week to follow this plan, as it’s composed by lean meats, various types of good fats, and relatively expensive items like blueberries. but, i’m feeling great. way better than i was, despite the fact that i was already eating better than most normal, non obsessive people. and as you’ll see from the pics at the end of this post, progress has been great as well, and i am convinced much of that is due to the amount of high quality food i’ve been consuming

meal prepping

although i don’t do a whole lot of meal prepping per se, outside of cooking rice for 3-4 days ahead and storing it in the fridge, this diet has taught me to be more “regimented” when it comes to my groceries.

after having bought more than 4 kg of meat, my freezer now looks like this:

every day i remember to unfreeze the chicken and steak for the next day, and i make sure i have everything ready for the other meals. during breakfast i put my whey powder into my shaker for mid-morning, at-school snack, and so on.

so here’s some pics of my meals

i’ll also post a couple of logged training sessions later.
but now, here’s the interesting part. progress pics:

week 0

week 1

week 2

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Just to keep anyone interested updated, here’s the log for my last two training sessions, just to show what I’ve been doing with Paul.

Weights are in kgs and I’m putting the numbers in the format
Weight x reps, (second set) reps, (third set) reps and so on.

Monday
Incline db press 26 x 15, 12, 28 x 9, 30 x 8
Dips bw x 10, 8, 6, 7
Plate front raise 5 kg x 100 (pause at reps 40, 60, 80)
Rear raises 5 kg x 4 x 20
Triceps superset 3 rounds (Rope pushdown x 20 superset with Seated overhead Triceps extension x 10)

Tuesday
Underhand lat pulldown 70 x 8, 65 x 9, 8
Pullups bw x 8, 6, 6, 5, 5
Cable row 70 x 12, 12, 67 x 10, 62 x 12
Biceps superset 4 rounds (barbell curl x 12 superset with Seated Incline curl x 12)

Now here’s another pic of my meals, this time it’s what I’ve had for 20 days for lunch now:

And finally here’s a quick physique pic

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Training looks really Carter-esque (no surprises there), how have you liked it? It seems to be very straight to the point and simple. Also, meals are looking pretty good

So far I liked the training quite a lot. For the most part, I am able to leave the gym feeling better than when I got in, while also having worked really hard.

Yeah the meals are awesome, pretty Carter-esque on the diet side too. Was totally expecting the egg whites and blueberry breakfast to be in the plan lol.

Overall, this experience is feeling very solid so far.

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Samul! Very disciplined, great progress brotha, I see a few cuts in there. Good stuff

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Update as we enter week 4:

Coach Paul predicted I have 10 more pounds to lose to get to the optimal condition to start a mass gaining phase.

From now on, he’ll have me do 30 minutes of cardio a day every day on top of the diet I’ve already been following for 3 weeks.

I decided to extend my coaching period by 3 weeks (and I want to thank him as he actually gave me a small discount on that; that didn’t go unnoticed Paul) and since I’m predicting it’ll take me about 2 more weeks to reach the desired level of leanness, that means we’ll have 6 solid weeks left to dedicate to pure muscle mass gain. Neat.

Meanwhile, my hunger levels are starting to rise: these next 14 days will be a grind.

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A little update pic just because

Is it weird that I’m slowly actually starting to kinda enjoy the cardio?

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Usually it is the other way around; first couple of cardio sessions are fun and all but after that they start sucking

Looking good man!

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thank you!

yeah you know, i think it might have to do with the fact that my cardio fitness has actually gotten better recently. even running for 30 unbroken minutes seemed like a challenge up to a couple of weeks ago, but now i really feel my lungs have gotten a better endurance and when the 30 minute mark is hit, i feel like i could keep going for another 10 minutes or so.

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When you are in week 4 and start being so hungry you have problems falling asleep but then you get this email from your coach…

You can goddamn bet that I won’t cheat! Let’s get shredded :muscle:

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We’re nearing the half of week 5 and man I can see the shreds coming out with the right lighting.

Can’t wait for that refeed next week tho.

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You know you’re doing well when your coach posts your picture in his IG story. Nice work man

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haha thank you! glad you noticed that. yeah he too told me he’s proud of how i’m doing.


a little update on how things have been going:

i’ve been doing cardio every day, and i’m getting the hang of it. my lungs have gotten much better and i can notice better recovery during workouts too. that has long secretly been a concern of me: i hated having poor cardiovascular fitness (i actually mentioned it a couple of times on here) but i hated doing cardio more so i couldn’t get that sorted. never would i have thought i could run 30 min at a decent speed with relative ease, and as much as it still sounds pathetic, that’s way better than when i started.

diet wise, i have long developed “tolerance” to what i eat, meaning i don’t even care anymore and am way past the “oh god i’m going to eat the exact same thing again” phase. actually, i kinda like what i eat now. dinner especially, which if i haven’t mentioned yet is: 8oz steak, 6oz sweet potatoes, a green salad, 1tbsp olive oil, and 1tbsp vinegar. i don’t know how it was intended to be eaten when paul designed the plan, but i’ve just been throwing everything together into the salad and it tastes great. yesterday out of boredom i threw in a piece of purple potato (i’m not sure that’s its correct name, that’s just what it’s called here in italy) along with the sweet potatoes and that alone was enough of a change in taste to keep things interesting. i know, i’m getting crazy.


now a last thought for this post:

this journey to getting super lean has made me think that deep inside i probably want to stay that way once i get there. i haven’t discussed this with coach paul yet, but since he’ll coach me through a mass phase once this dieting phase is over, we’ll address that too. i’m wondering if it’s really possible to keep adding muscle while staying leaner than most people. i’m tired of bulking and getting fat, and i sure as hell don’t want to waste ANY of the progress i’ll have made with the diet. on the other hand, i don’t want to give up on the good food that i love.

two examples of meals that i miss a lot: scrambled eggs with cheese and bacon slices, and chili con carne with tortillas. those are very, very tasty foods and probably very calorie-dense too, but i wonder if i’ll ever succeed at creating a meal plan that allows me to have foods like those and still keep my lean gains.

it wasn’t until i saw some heads turning at my gym that i realized that the key to being impressive is not being big as much as it is being lean (and i am not even that lean yet!), and factoring in that being massive has always been my goal since i’ve trained, it becomes clear that i should pursue getting bigger and bigger with a special focus on staying lean. that’s my new long-term goal.

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Sounds pretty familiar

It definitely is. Most people are far too fat to gain muscle optimally anyways. If developing your physique is the main goal for you (and you don’t have an abnormally high bf setpoint) there is no need to ever go to a place when you can’t see your abs. (After building a solid foundation, that is)

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That is the whole point tho. How close am I to being able to call my base “solid?”

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You’ve got a pretty solid base in my opinion. Can’t say for sure (really you never can) but I don’t see you benefiting from a massive bulk, it’s not like you had 20 kilos of easy muscle to gain.

Let’s put it this way;

When you reach the point where it’s as fast to gain muscle by doing a very slow bulk (no to minimal fat gain) as it would be to do a “traditional” bulk and then a longer cut bulking no longer serves a purpose. That point comes pretty quickly, for most people it’ll be within 3-5 years of serious training.

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Thank you man, I appreciate that.

You know, I don’t know what I’d rather it be: for one, I would like to know I’ve already built a good foundation because that means I’ve got a good ish physique already. On the other hand tho, I don’t think my physique is as impressive as I aim for it to be, and if I already have a foundation that means there is relatively little room for growth at this point, which might mean I won’t be getting much more massive in the future.

Btw, I haven’t reached my third year of training yet. I’ve only been training since February of 2016 (and I would refrain from calling the first year anything “intense”).

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If you’ve been training for sub three years I can guarantee you that you still have a long way to go before reaching your limit. See, even if you don’t have a lot of easy gain to make, you can still probably build 10-15 kilos of muscle mass with time. Maybe more than that, maybe less, depends on your genetics. What you do have is a very good structure, so any muscle you pack on will show, and even a couple of kilos in the right places can drastically change the way you look.

I’ve got to say that your physique is rather impressive for your training experience. I thought you had been training for longer.

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Day 35 of diet

This has definitely been the worst day since i started this journey with paul carter.

I woke up looking very bad, like seriously watching myself in the mirror made me think that i am not lean at all after all of this. weight is down to 70.4 kg, and last week it was 72 kg. but still, to my eyes, i am soft.

Here’s a couple of pics from this morning:


paul told me that tomorrow i’ll get a refeed after training, with these guidelines:

150 g carbs
about 30 g protein
as little fat as possible

and also told me i still have a few weeks to go before getting to the point i need to be. Honestly, i keep going but i am very demotivated. but again, so was i last Sunday and i had just made some good progress.

this morning i went for an uphill, 1.5 hour long walk and during the afternoon i tried and walk as much as i could but i started feeling very bad to the point of almost fainting. i came back home and had a meal and i’m now feeling much better, and i think i will head out for another 30 minutes of walk after having had dinner. i need to keep my mind occupied because all i’ve been thinking about is food. this whole evening has been an arm wrestling with myself to resist the urge to eat like everything i could possibly go out and get my hands on. i have never fought this hard but apparently i won.

meanwhile, i think i have chosen what i’ll eat tomorrow for my refeed meal:

60 g cream of rice
1 egg + 200 g egg whites with low fat cheese with 4 small tortillas
100 g whole grain pasta with tomatoes cooked in half a tbsp of olive oil

these are some of the things i’ve been craving so i’ll go with that.

man now i’m REALLY grinding, but the worst part of all is that i dont like what i see in the mirror anymore, at least i havent today

This is all part of it buddy, everyone goes through it and thinks the same. You have good days and bad days, one day you think your getting there, then the next you think you look like shit, nothing much has changed in that 1 day, it’s just self perception!

Pretty jealous you are working with Paul, Keep grinding.

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