Hello, I am new to this board. So far, I like what I have seen. You folks are a nice raunchy bunch, that works for me.
Let me begin with a little background. I am a 50 year old guy. Been athletic and active most of my life. About four years ago there were a series of events some put me flat on my back for months at a time, that pulled me out of the gym. These things ranged from an erruptive kidney stone, which lead to a blood infection, which lead to a staff infection the MD’s thought was Mersa but thankfully wasn’t, which lead to another infection this time of my lungs.
During the years of constant fucked-up-ness I was on Prednison. And of course the weight gain that goes with that drug. Well with that tale of woe out of the way, I’m all better now and back in the gym. I had my first hard work out yesterday and loved it. I felt like a monster, (all be it a monster with a big gut) all day. Love that pumped feeling.
I was thinking about some supplementing to help me along with the workouts and muscle gain. I am confused by a lot that I read on this. I am going to start with creatine. What about other stuff like ZMA, NO, glutamine or other T boosters? I know there is no such thing as the perfect grouping, but if you were me, eating clean and working out while trying to fix a train wreck of a body, what would you use?
[quote]Rockscar wrote:
Alpha Male and Rez-V should help out.
Protein supps are always a must.
…and if you want some help in fat loss use the HOT-ROX instead of Alpha Male.
Take Fish Oil and mens vitamins too.[/quote]
Everything that Rockscar said. For the Fish Oil, I would recommend Biotest Flameout. You can also check Opti-Men Vitamins. My preference. I had nagging elbow joint pain for months and since taking Flameout it has completely disappeared. No more elbow brace!
Every meal should contain a lean protein and veggies. Lots of veggies!
3 Eliminate High Frutose Cornsyrup and all sugars. Except what you get in fruit.
4.Get all carbs from fruits and veggies.
Carbs from whole wheat and brown rice best eaten right after workout.
Drink only 0 calorie drinks. Green tea is good!
Use fish oil.
Check out Precision Nutrition by John Berardi.
The protein supplements are for when you don’t have time for a meal. Doing this will boost your metabolism and help you gain lean muscle and burn fat.
I am 44 and do use Alpha Male and HOT-ROX, Creatine, Beta 7, ZMA, Flame Out, and Rez-v. But food comes first!!!
[quote]dogsoldier wrote:
Thanks for the nput guys. I ordered up some Flameout and Alpha Male. SO I should skip the ZMA as that would be over kill right?
Of course when I see that picture of Ava Cowen on the left (Powerful Images) this old horn-dog gets to thinking…more Test…more Test…
I swear if my wife (who is a real hotty for real) catches me staring at that picture one more time she is going to crack my skull open.
All I can say is WOOOOFFFF*[/quote]
Sorry, left out the ZMA. I would definitely recommend it. I use it myself every night.
Ava does look awesome! Go to her website to see more (Google search her name), she’s hot! My wife would crack my skull too but I’m on my office computer :]
[quote]River_Master wrote:
Supplements are just that, extras.
First make sure you are eating right.
Eat every 2-3 hrs
Every meal should contain a lean protein and veggies. Lots of veggies!
3 Eliminate High Frutose Cornsyrup and all sugars. Except what you get in fruit.
4.Get all carbs from fruits and veggies.
Carbs from whole wheat and brown rice best eaten right after workout.
Drink only 0 calorie drinks. Green tea is good!
Use fish oil.
Check out Precision Nutrition by John Berardi.
The protein supplements are for when you don’t have time for a meal. Doing this will boost your metabolism and help you gain lean muscle and burn fat.
I am 44 and do use Alpha Male and HOT-ROX, Creatine, Beta 7, ZMA, Flame Out, and Rez-v. But food comes first!!!
[/quote]
What I am planning is a nutritional blast to purge sugars out of my system. For 9 days, I will be eating only veggies, fruit, brown rice, beans for protien, I don’t ever drink soda regular or diet so that isn’t a problem. Coffee (which I will miss a great deal) is going to be replaced by green tea and water, gallons of water. Chicken,fish and meat will be brought back into the feeding routine slowly. Protien drinks will figure sharply for a couple of months. I know it looks rough, and it is, but I have done this before and you would be amazed at the weight one can shed in a month doing this. It is also about rewiring my eating habits. My preferred ppost work out chow is oatmeal with some berries thrown in or an egg white and veggie omlet. Not as much fun as bacon, scrambled whole eggs, pancakes with syrup, …oh shit I’m making myself hungery…okay look at the pictire of Ava…look at the picture of Ava…
*Ouch My head!..the wife was looking over my shoulder and brained me! Got caught looking at Ava again… guess who ain’t getting any tonight!
Looks alot like the Velocity diet. You can find it here on a thread.
Just remember that you need to get your metabolism revved up before you start cutting back on the food. Just eating right and eating the right whole foods will be the best thing you can do. The fish, chicken and veggies are great. Build the muscle to burn the fat.
I never told anyone the plan that I am following. It is called the “Fat Samsh Diet”. Well I’m into it 11 days now and am down 12 pounds. We will assume it is fat for my ego. I have been alternating heavy and light in the gym three days a week. Monday is chest, back and shoulders, tuesday is arms and abs, and Saturday is leg day. The lifting heavy has surprised me in terms of what I can do, much better than expected. The gameplan was a month or two of conditioning work before hitting the building phase.
As far as suplementtion so far it has been ZMA, Flameout and creatine. I really like the Flameout. It is the only fish il pills that I have been able to take without getting gas or the trots. ZMA is wonderful. I haven’t slept this good in years. And those ZMA influenced dreams dreams of Ava Cowan…I aint rolling out of bed in the of the night.
The next step will be to do the Alpha Male. I am waiting for the lab reports on my blood work. I wanted to see where my Test and Thyroid levels were before taking any Test increasing supplemnts.
I’ll keep youposted on this as things come along. Thanks for the reposes and help.
Sounds like you have the important things under control. Diet and hard, consistent, well thought out workouts. After that, creatine, fish oil, and protein are in my experience essential supplements. I didn’t see protein as one of yours, but maybe you get enough in your diet. My wife is vegetarian, so protein supplements help with not getting enough meat. I never tried ZMA but am considering it if for nothing other than the sleep benefits I’ve heard about.
In exchange for being a vegetarian, my wife is not bothered by me looking at the Powerful Images. Instead, when she sees them, it only makes her more detemined to keep up her own training. I’m liking the results a lot.
[quote]dogsoldier wrote:
I never told anyone the plan that I am following. It is called the “Fat Samsh Diet”. [/quote]
I have heard about that diet. . .I am curious, what is the justification given in it for eliminating lean protein and just eating beans? Sounds like a good way to lose muscle along w fat.
I’m extremely dubious of this all carb diet. On the perfect diet and training program, you wouldn’t lose any weight at all, you’d just lose fat and gain muscle. Fat weighs less than muscle but muscle accrues slower so if it was all balanced perfectly, your weight would be more or less stable as your bodyfat percentage dropped.
This is the problem with confusing weight loss with fat loss. Sure, if you drop the cals low enough you’ll lose fat no matter what but you’ll also lose a lot of lean body mass. If you kept your calories at the same level but switched to a complete protein based diet instead of a carbohydrate based diet and saved the majority of your carbs for post-workout when they help the most and hurt the least, you’d have much better results. At least that has been my experience in years of experimentation with diet and exercise.
I’m 55 and went from a super flabby 375 lbs to a lean 185 lbs and made a ton of mistakes along the way. Once I started following the nutrition advice of Dr. John Berardi, my results skyrocketed. Last month I dropped 2% off my bodyfat and actually gained lean body mass at the same time! No hormones, just solid nutrition. Precision Nutrition rocks!
I work all day so I workout when I get home. You may want to try SPIKE right before you work out. It gives me such a lift, and I can sleep good afterward as well. It’s also good to take when you didn’t get as much sleep as you wanted and have to handle a lot of things at work. Keeps you sharp and focused.
[quote]happydog48 wrote:
I’m extremely dubious of this all carb diet. On the perfect diet and training program, you wouldn’t lose any weight at all, you’d just lose fat and gain muscle. Fat weighs less than muscle but muscle accrues slower so if it was all balanced perfectly, your weight would be more or less stable as your bodyfat percentage dropped.
This is the problem with confusing weight loss with fat loss. Sure, if you drop the cals low enough you’ll lose fat no matter what but you’ll also lose a lot of lean body mass. If you kept your calories at the same level but switched to a complete protein based diet instead of a carbohydrate based diet and saved the majority of your carbs for post-workout when they help the most and hurt the least, you’d have much better results. At least that has been my experience in years of experimentation with diet and exercise.
[/quote]
I have to agree with the above. While it is normal to check your weight, and use it as a barometer of sorts, what really matters is body composition. Take pictures, clothed and in shorts. USe these, along with how your clothes fit to measure progress. You can build muscle and lose fat at the same time, but you have to give your body the materials to build it with.
The poster above is right on about the diet. Berardi is the shit.
I have to agree with the above. While it is normal to check your weight, and use it as a barometer of sorts, what really matters is body composition. Take pictures, clothed and in shorts. USe these, along with how your clothes fit to measure progress. You can build muscle and lose fat at the same time, but you have to give your body the materials to build it with.
The poster above is right on about the diet. Berardi is the shit.
[/quote]
Having burned up a lot of muscle when I lost “weight” 2 years ago, I too would hate to see somebody else go down this path. Thank goodness one of the gym managers took me aside one day and said “e-loo, you are starving yourself.”
I went home and did the numbers, and basically saw that I had screwed up on my activity vs calorie consumption figures. I wasn’t getting enough food, esp protein for my activity level. Sure I was losing weight, but in the worst way possible. Paying attention only to the scale was a big mistake.
Seems to be a common one, so I hope OP can avoid it.
This article seems more aimed at women, but it is a good one to read to get you focused on body composition and not a number on the scale:
Same here. I kept my body weight the same over the years, and %BF increased to 20%. For a then BMI of 21.8, that of course meant that I had lost a lot of muscle. I have lost a lot of fat, back to size 32 which are loose and now weigh more than I ever have. I was on 100mg/week of test cyp.
It was not until I added HCG that things really started to work with muscles and strength. With the HCG the ability of my nerves to command strong contractions from my muscles really came on strong. I guess that some of this is from the testes also contributing to test levels.
I will not disagree with anything anyone said here. Mainly because I don’t know. My evidence is purely antidotal. I have moved into the next phase of the eating plan where meats are a bigger part of the program. I have been doing this for 19 days and have lost 13 pounds and dropped 1 point on my body fat %.
My original post may have been a little misleading. The vegitarian portion of the eating plan was for 9 days only. After doing this for a bit and re-reading the book, it seems like it is more about portion control in the long run than anything. There has been no decrease in my lifting weights. They have actually gone up. Today I did 100 crunches while hanging on to a 20 pound plate. Not to bad for a fifty year old 4 eyed fat man. This eating plan is pretty similar to what the doc put my buddy on after he had a really big mutha f**ker of a heart attack. I don’t know what is the best nutrition plan.
This one seems to be working okay for me and my lifts are heavy and gaining. SO I will look at the Bernardi system after a few months of what I am doing. I will probably ask more questions on nutricion as time goes on, so bear with me.
