[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
Day 63 - epiphanies and lessons learned
One of the first epiphanies I had is that in my previous lifting my perceived effort was way wrong. I have a phrase I like to use about effort which is, “If you can put in 105% you don’t know what you’re real 100% is.” In hindsight I think my lifting was similar. I made progress from when I first started lifting but I wasn’t putting in enough effort to make real progress.
So then that moves me to motivation. There has to be a motivator in each of us to really push ourselves to that level of effort. To be honest while I said I wanted to get bigger I could have done without it. There was no deep inner drive to get an enviable physique or lifts. So I recognize a major fault was lack of real effort.
I do believe that I made some real progress with this experiment, but it was not with the experiment parameters itself. The real progress was finding that inner motivation. After the last 2.5 years of research and experimentation how can I really show others I’ve learned something? How can I get others to believe what I have to say has more credence? Without the normal credentials I need an enviable physique and strength to beginners (who I’m gearing a lot towards) and that’s going to take me getting to intermediate/advanced levels. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this thread. It ended being a major part of that inner motivation and these realizations.
So right now I have what I was missing before - a deep, inner motivation to push myself. From my experiences so far I know that rest-pause is a very effective technique to enable me to push myself, but I also acknowledge there are many other basic techniques that might be more effective to reach my goals. That brings me to my next point about sticking with basics. I’m a beginner I don’t need anything fancy. I think before I got way ahead of myself and was trying to use far too advanced schemes for my level. Combine that with a lack of real effort and it is most likely the ultimate reason why I haven’t made progress in years.
During this experiment the parameters I set provided a way for me to find motivation and stick to the basics. Coincidentally this is what I needed. I’ve re-examined several facets about my nutrition in prior attempts and I believe that I could do it better now. Although I haven’t been working on my physique during my experimentation I have found out many details about how my body reacts to different foods, different macronutrient intakes, and different caloric intakes. I believe that I’ll be able to utilize this information to make solid gains post experiment. While my diet still won?t be traditional, it will be based on traditional diets applying my personal findings.
Part of the issue with my diet before is I ate way too much way too quickly when trying to bulk. Bulking is a gradual process and I’ve learned that once I get above 11% body fat my body starts packing on fat quickly. I need to be patient. Watch and adjust my diet to avoid fat gain. Stick to the basic lifts and put in true effort.
So these lessons put me at a bit of a quandary? Is this experiment worth anything more at this point? I do think the methods I’m experimenting with (fasted lifting, suboptimal condition adaptation, and high protein high fat dieting) have merit but noting all the above changes over the last 60 days can I ever compare this against another timeframe? I think at this point it’s time to get my blood work, DXA scan, and chalk this experiment up to lessons learned. If I can make some real progress over the next year I think I can revisit this and do some better baseline comparisons.
I do feel significant improvements in my lifts from the advice received and I’m working on it. Once I make some real notable progress I’ll post some more vids somewhere.
Again, thank you all.
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Also keep your goals simple and basic. I would suggest a 405lb squat. Get there and everything else will fall in place