Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log
You know you who it is already. Can't recall my old password or even what email I used so here we are. I promised I'd start logging if legend n1h did. So that's why I'm logging.
Short term goal:
Successfully formulate a relatively optimized and easy to adhere to offseason diet model. In terms of food selection, I am more or less following Chris Tuttle's recommendations. Our very own BGP has been getting some free diet stuff from Chris since he has a full client load but will send a handful of emails to people for free if you ask nicely and want help. If you don't know who that is, go on youtube/instagram and see the man's work.
Remain injury free, which is easy with my new exercise selection which loco would describe as "leg press and lat pulldown 4 lyfe"
Adjust to a more strictly bodybuilding programming style as opposed to a "powerbuilding" style.
Here is the medium term goal:
2024 summer on stage in classic physique division at a level that would be competitive for winning a pro card. Winning the card itself is immaterial for the medium term, it'll happen when it happens and I will be patient.
Possible obstacles to this goal are gym closers due to continued zero covid policy, possibly moving countries and being unable to focus on prep in the interim, or international political disaster. All of which are legitimate risks.
Ostensibly we will start competition prep late winter 2024 and do a very long slow 20-24 week prep where I never need to bring carbs lower than 200g/day.
Long term goal:
Compete in one professional level show in the classic physique divison in the next 10 years. Don't really give a **** about placings.
Natty: No. Test, deca, mk677, humalog, cjc with 1295 with DAC, berberine (although the last one is both a PED and a general health supplement). Low doses. high dose AAS are massively overrated for hypertrophy, the real magic is the insulin and gh (or gh secretagogues in my case). less than 1g of injectables with PEDs that work on the IGF pathway is much better than 3g of injectables, for example. I'd advise anyone who wants to go down the PED route to incorpoate gh or gh secretagogue peptides along with insulin while they are still taking 1cc of test per week before you ever add any other AAS or increase test dose. You can keep your AAS doses much lower if you actually address this very critical muscle building pathway rather than solely relying on AAS, which are harsh... man...
No prep drugs or harsh AAS until the aforementioned 2024 late winter date.
Diet: High carbohydrates with carbohydrate cycling (2 high days the day before my 2 leg days, 1 low day on the day off, 4 medium days per week offseason), moderate protein around 1.125g/lb of bw, low to moderate fats. I tried a high fat Palbumo approach in both offseason and precontest this academic year. It was a ****ing disaster; this is a terrible way to diet for bodybuilding. Although if somebody is not trying to look lean/dry/hard on stage and maintain athletic performance in the gym, it'd be a great diet to follow because antecdotally it can lead to very high compliance for some individuals because it just destroys so much of your physiological cravings and lowers appetite considerably. Somebody like the apple-pied obese woman who's username I don't even remember might do well on this because she could probably eat 80/20 ground beef bunless bacon cheeseburgers twice a day for an emotional high, not feel hungry the rest of the day, and have only consumed like 1800~ calories daily.
More detailed post with training program and food log to follow. I'm a busy man.
ABP doesn't like me, doesn't really know who I am, and probably would attribute 100% of the way I look to PEDs. He's definitely never been in my log. I'm probably among his most grunched log posters.
I'd coach him for free for sure. I've coached 2 natty girl powerlifters to around the wilks he's at now starting from 0 to about 3 years in. I coached one guy who was already advanced from 290kg sumo to 320kg conventional in about 4 months, but it was mostly nutrition/peds.
ABP is a very bad candidate for PEDs, he needs to stay 100% natty for life. But the approach wouldn't be any different. Get him on an actual meal plan, hammer the volume, hypertrophy, endurance, and high reps for a good 12-16 weeks with a lot more variety, move into a strength block that's still higher on volume but more 3-6 rep work in the 70-80% range, then back into essentially the same peaking block he does now minus heavy OHP and probably minus workload overall.
Plus he's not in abject poverty or anything. He'd be in better hands hiring Shane Hunt or Pete Rubish, who are both around 150-200 usd/mo. Pete doesn't give a diet, Shane does. Even if he just did one 6 month block with him and then bailed and re-ran that block he'd probably make great gains for the rest of his training career.
Plus he's not in abject poverty or anything. He'd be in better hands hiring Shane Hunt or Pete Rubish, who are both around 150-200 usd/mo. Pete doesn't give a diet, Shane does. Even if he just did one 6 month block with him and then bailed and re-ran that block he'd probably make great gains for the rest of his training career.
$200 USD a month for someone who knows their **** to tell ABP what to do seems like a great deal. Especially for him, because he would actually probably do it exactly as prescribed.
We'll know he is truly on his purpose when that happens.
$200 USD a month for someone who knows their **** to tell ABP what to do seems like a great deal. Especially for him, because he would actually probably do it exactly as prescribed.
We'll know he is truly on his purpose when that happens.
bbing coaching is a lot more complex. But yeah for PL I feel like you could spend 6-12 months with a coach and be basically ready to do your own thing indefinitely afterword. If I were doing this these are the two I'd wanna hire. Shane or Pete.
Flying on Friday again, so doing Sunday to Thursday workouts.
Pronated chins: bwx18, 13, 10
machine ng press: 64kgx23, 15, 16
Chest supported t bar: 1.5px18, 11, 9
plate loaded incline thing: .5ppsx13, 13, 14
ng pulldowns: 115x15, 8 8
incline selectorized machine: 140x15, 10, 9
ham curls: 3 sets
hyperextenions: 3x11
damn bro 18 chins at your BW which is guess in the 3 digits (in kg) is really ****ing good.
Oh, no problem. Blurred for privacy.
Thai woman broke up because she very correctly identified that with our respective locations and schedules, every time we met it would take away from time with her son. He was briefly considering quitting BBall and going to a "normal" school and then transferring to China and attending wherever I work, but later decided to stick with Bball. That would mean she and he wouldn't relocate here until he's 18. Neither of us were willing to do 4 years of long distance. No h8. I think her son and her both made the right choices. I'd feel ****ing awful if the kid went to a normal school then regretted not pursuing his dream of an athletic career. The probability of him succeeding is probably very low, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't try and strike when the iron is hot to find out. Won't post her pics, sorry.
If these ***** Thai schools didn't discriminate against Americans who teach British curriculum so much and I had been successful in finding a job there, things may have turned out very differently. I've also been hearing from my colleagues here that BRitish schools might pay much less than I thought in Thailand, as many of them worked there. 120k baht/mo is really just not enough if I were a 37 year old man. Chinese retirement is actually very good and I've been contributing to it for 9 years already. If I found something over 150k baht/mo I'd consider it, but I think these jobs are rare/don't exist/inaccessible for people who don't have direct uk experience.
So anyway, talked with another foreigner in CHina BB friend and decided I will continue being self coached in offseason but I need to hire a coach for precontest. $1200 for 16 weeks of Chris Tuttle coaching is very much worth it. It's not like I can't write my own diet, training, steps, and cardio, but more just that the last few weeks bodybuilders get so brain fogged and scatterbrained and make some irrational and strange decisions. Like my 2500g carb days toward the end of last diet phase. THat was dumb, I should have been doing 2x/wk of 1000 instead. Or doing over 20k steps, that's just silly. There's huge diminishing returns on steps past 15k or so. Max maybe 17k. It's probably best to not even try to have a non-lifting girlfriend when you are training for a pro card. Figuring out when to refeed, refeeding by how much, when to drop down calories, when to increase or decrease steps/cardio, when to decrease training intensity, and manipulating water/sodium/carbohydrates in the days immediately before the show are difficult decisions that you can make easily when you are well fed and thinking rationally or doing it for someone else, but when you're starving and doing it for yourself and it's something really important to you, it's easy to mess up and go too far toward one extreme. Like that keto disaster I did 2 years ago where I was consuming way too few calories and lost muscle and looked worse as the scale went down.
damn bro 18 chins at your BW which is guess in the 3 digits (in kg) is really ****ing good.
Yep, around 101kg rn. I did 20 ng chins last time. I think my all time record at this bodyweight is around 23 neutral grip 21 pronated with straps. Hoping 20 supinated without straps is in the works very soon.
I need to finally break up with barbell rows. I didn't do them last workout and it felt a lot better. If I'm already hitting ham curls+hyperextensions on Monday/Friday, either squatting or SLDLing every week, do I really need more compound work for stabilization/hams/glutes/lower back? No. Just do chest supported and get better lat/upper back contraction.
I'll probably relapse and do them occasionally to feel like more of a man.
OKay last long rant. I gained the ability to squat pain free by literally not squatting for 1.75 years and then reducing squat training frequency from before after I came back. I think the same thing will happen with free weight pressing motions. IDK if I can make it almost 2 years, but let's see what happens if I almost never/actually never free weight press, keep doing my internal rotation mobbing, and see what happens when I return to DB pressing after several months. Gym only has 1 smith machine and its overused and the other machines generally don't feel great, but I'll see what I can do. Pushups probably need to come in given limited/shitty chest machine availability. MAybe even ohp machines. Maybe even free weight vertical pressing but not horizontal pressing, as vertical pressing didn't seem to bug my tendon and vertical pressing still gets a solid upper pec contraction.
Arms and delts
EZ curl: 25kgx22, 3 more sets myro rep match
Pushdowns: 100lbsx22, 3 more sets myo rep matching
Cable facing away curls: 40-50lbs x 4 sets failure
overhead cable tricep extensions unilateral: 40x4 sets failure
concentration curls: 7.5kgx4 sets failure
skullcrushers: 7.5kg dbsx4 sets failure
Prone db delt raises: 7.5lbsx23, 4 more sets failure
Yep, around 101kg rn. I did 20 ng chins last time. I think my all time record at this bodyweight is around 23 neutral grip 21 pronated with straps. Hoping 20 supinated without straps is in the works very soon.
I need to finally break up with barbell rows. I didn't do them last workout and it felt a lot better. If I'm already hitting ham curls+hyperextensions on Monday/Friday, either squatting or SLDLing every week, do I really need more compound work for stabilization/hams/glutes/lower back? No.
Read you dont really vibe with non chest supported rows in another post.
Keep doing chest supported rows in that case.
Why?
You are pretty ****ing strong, you put a lot of strain on your lower back when you do really heavy rows without chest support.
Read you dont really vibe with non chest supported rows in another post.
Keep doing chest supported rows in that case.
Why?
You are pretty ****ing strong, you put a lot of strain on your lower back when you do really heavy rows without chest support.
No, actually. I haven't had any lower back pain since 2017 when I did some dumbbell rows. I just want to avoid the lift because it's engaging other muscles I don't want to train, the fatigue cost is high, and its cardiovascularly taxing leading to longer sessions.
Since I started doing hamstrings 3x/wk and part of that is hyperextensions, it doesn't seem like a great idea to give the pchain even more loading.
Legs
Leg extenions: 3 sets
FFESS: 20kg dbsx16x3 felt very hard
ham curls; 3 sets failure
Paused SLDL: 120kgx14+f
Rough session. Felt weak today.
My glutes are actually super sore. I tried to FFESS emphasizing glutes rather than quads yesterday, maybe thats why I found it way harder. I don't think I should attempt a 140kgx20 next leg day. I'm open to the idea, however. I'll see how I feel on that day, but I may either do a normal workout of 140x11-12 or even straight up deload legs next week and do something like 100kgx20 then call it and do the ffess/paused sldl workout the next week going medium. I'll see how I feel.
BAck+chest
Chins: bwx17, 10, 11
incline smith: 90kgx11, 70kgx16, 15
machine press 70kgx12,11, 13
chest supported t-bar: 70kgx18, 13, 11
machine fly: 3 sets failure
Underhand high row machine: 70kgx15, 10, 8
I might not be able to work out today and do arms as I've got to pack+clean. I'll try my hardest to get it in. At worst I can at least go to the school gym and do sum banded pushdowns+barbell curls just do get something done.
lol@ doing cleans as a bber. I did clean 115kg after never squatting more than 70kg for sets of 12. Now that I actually sldl and squat regularly I imagine I could clean a whole bunch of weight if I took a few weeks to re-gain skill and mobility.
Did arms last night. Terrible workout because of terrible equipment at a terrible gym. Oct 25 the 24/7 fitness place will open and I'm just praying they have good upper body equipment. I have one good gym with great lower body equipment... the little hardcore place with the unilateral ham curl machine, dl platform+dl bar, and good rack. The one gym in my latest squat video.
EZ curls: ???x20,20,13, 13, 15
pushdowns: 5 sets failure
cable curls: 5 sets failure
Rope single arm overhead extensions: 5 sets failure
db hammer curl//db skullcrushers: 5 sets failure
The cable machine at this gym sucks, the ez bar sucks. It's 100% dudes in there b/c it's a "hardcore" gym but not really I am the only srs lifter.
plz gief good gym soon. The gym with the good AC has sorta crappy machine for pressing motions where I just don't feel much of a pump and there's way too many people to use the single smith machine. They have 3 cable machines though which is super nice and the equipment for pulling motions is very good.
I regret coming to this Island. I needed to move jobs for sure, but I was too hasty and too scared of being "late" in the job market. But if apply in May/June you're basically guaranteed a job as the schools are increasingly desperate at that point and sometimes plenty of very desirable schools still haven't filled openings.
Guess it's time to move again, eventually?
Heard Koh Phangan is popping off.
Minor existential crisis. Didn't bring oly shoes either. Didn't train legs. Back to PPL. Here's what I've done the past few days.
Sunday
Push:
machine press: 3 sets failure
incline db press; 30kgx18, 13, 10 paused all obv
machine fly: 3 sets
Prone delt raises: 7.5kgx5 sets
pushdowns: 5 sets, no myo repping
Tuesday
Pull:
Chins: bwx22 (?), 14, 11
BB underhand rows: 70kgx10, 10, 10
Existential crisis 1x1
No tldr emo. realized I need to quit my job. I can't stay in that location without going completely insane. Tiny on campus apartment, can't get fresh groceries easily, can't get to a gym without a 17 minute taxi each way. Not even teaching the things I've built my whole career around for the last 9 years. I can't live this way. I'm leaving either in January or in July. No leg training b/c crisis.
ok a little bit emo. In every job you need to be fake. In a job at a british private school you need to be even more fake. I can't handle this level of fakeness for 2 years. I need to break my contract and go.
I find arm+delt days really boring. PPL is easier to adapt to training at my school gym, especially if I moderate intensity and volume of pressing motions. I can train biceps before training on both push and leg days very easily. I need to fix my life in terms of career/location before I start actually bodybuilidng for real, but I don't know if I even want that. I might not be doing real hamstring training until I can live in a place with a real gym with legitimate equipment. I can do more barbell work but be very ***** careful on load/volume/intensity. Maybe I'll take a taxi to a gym once a week, otherwise train at the school gym.
I'm unsure if I even want to competitively bodybuild anymore... maybe just reduce my PEDs to test+mast+gh only, get on low dose ozempic, get down to 88kg, and try to maintain there without ever eating to grow or get bigger, just have a strict diet+low dose glp1+caffeine+yohimbine nearly year round and be a lean shredded gym rat on a very safe dose of mild steroids without much side effects and don't worry about competitions.
sounding veerrryyy emo and stuff but I am not sad. Just feel like I'm due for life re-evaluation+shift in my goals and identity. Gym is still part of that identity.
It sounds so incredibly trivial, but I need a lifestyle where I can walk 12k steps a day, the gym is walking or bicycling distance rather than driving distance, I do the things I actually signed up to do at work and am good at, I can have fresh meats, vegetables, and fruits when I want instead of having them be very far away and hard to get, and I don't feel cramped and clausterphobic in my living space. I can't handle the way things have been since i moved to the new city. I traded one set of problems (urban density, high average age, smelly, ugly, cold, and polluted) for a much worse set of problems.
"why are you making such a big deal about this then just quit herp derp?" Breaking contracts as a foreigner in China is a complicated and nasty thing.
Just wait for vacation and never come back.
This only works in countries where you don't require a visa and work permit. and it's just a dick move. They're doing the best they can, I don't hate the school or anything. I just find the location unlivable. Stick a gym and a sam's club within a few km away and i'm suddenly there for 10 years.
