Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log

THe doms in my hams and glutes has been unreal. I almost dont know if I can justify squatting anymore. MAybe I'll figure out a way to do both sq/leg press in one workout.. maybe 10s up to a top set then straight to leg press and do only 2 working sets. But then I'd have to put SLDLs later in the workout and I like the idea of ham curl+sldl being my first major lifts, even if I do leg extension before that which are not really taxing. I'll do at least one more squat workout next week but with how amazingly good this leg press machine is I should probably just go ahead and shelf squats again for a bit. I've also lost a significant amount of bodyweight from water/waste/glycogen. 96.5kg in the AM and I was around 101-102 just a month ago. How much you squat is dependent a lot on bw/leverages, whereas for less press this is less the case.

Dorian, Nick Walker, John Meadows, Dennis Wolf all did 4x/wk through most of their careers, and 3 of those 4 guys were bbing full time with no job and lots of time to rest/recover. Some people just don't have very good recovery capacity and I am probably one of them. If I trained 6x/wk again I'd need to be setting a hard 40 minute limit on sessions or something or I'm just gonna bury myself.

I'll consider a 4th day eventually, but gonna try out 3 for at least a month and just see how I feel.

Excellent workout. Feeling a lot better with the tren+ment getting outta my system. I'm thinking maybe test gh or test+primo/mast/eq+gh only for my offseasons going forward. I don't think this is more effective way by any means, but of all the roid side effects everyone scaremongers about, the neurotoxicity of 19-nor derived peds is probably actually understated. The mood changes from these PEDs are totally real. Not rage, more anhedonia.

If I'm going to strictly limit alcohol over neurotoxicity concerns, it'd be consistent to also stop tren/ment/deca. I'll take a lil microdose tren 175mg/wk last 10 weeks of a contest prep still, but even that doesn't seem to be essential. Paul K Barnett won master's nationals on a gram of test, a gram of primo, and a gram of mast and then 200mg winstrol per day the last 10 days. I'm very okay with slower progress at this point; I don't need to become a low/mid level pro for this. My coaching career is still going well and my physique is already good enough to be taken seriously even at the highest levels of coaching. I'm thinking maybe I will focus on hardcore competitor crowd for coaching though as it seems to be much easier to demonstrate my competence to these people than to the casual fitness crowd and there's never much worry about compliance with the hardcore competitors.

Back+arms
chins: bwx19, 12, 10 99.75kg with clothes and shoes hydrated
bb rows: 60kgx12,9 long pauses
hs high row: 2ppsx13, 11, 9
machine row: 3 sets failure forgot

superset ez curls and tricep pushdowns: 5 rounds

Do you think one component of the stack (likely the T) is mostly to blame or do you think it's just all contributing.

As an aside, I'm having an argument with some bros (unlike loco who I think was at least somewhat joking) who truly believe you can just shoot up some T, sit on a couch, stare at a bar, and make gainz in perpetuity. It's exhausting.

read more carefully. explicitly referring to 19nor aas. test and dhts basically only positive mood changes.

I guess you're not really into the steroid lingo or science. 19-nor derived PEDs/AAS would mean nandrolone, trenbolone, and trestolone. There are probably several others that aren't commonly used who come from this family. All of these (save ment, just for lack of testing) have been linked to neurotoxicity. Nandrolone has even been linked to depressive behaviours and anhedonia in rats in mg/kg amounts similar to what bodybuilders would use. I've noticed myself that using these my emotions feel very off. Lots of people report rage on tren, but there's bioindivudality. I don't think anyone who's used them for extended periods of time would claim they had literally 0 personality changes acutely while using them. The extent to which they might be causing more permanent changes in neurochemistry is unknown, and that should be scary.

Testosterone and most testosterone derived peds (dianabol especially) is generally associated with positive mood changes. It makes effort feel good, sense of fairness and justice elevated, higher chemical rewards to exercise, and in the case of dbol especially and anti-depressant like effects. Testosterone monotherapy seemed to have some promise as a psychiatric treatment for unipolar depression.

But alas, given bio-individuality, all I can say is this: I feel good on testosterone and testosterone has no known mechanism to cause neurotoxicity, and if anything the estrogen being converted from test is neuroprotective. As I've gotten older and walk around leaner, I no longer need any AI and when I use even small amounts of AIs, I end up with low estro symptoms and crushed libido. So for me at least, test is effective and very safe. 19-nors, I feel sorta shitty on them. Ment and tren aren't as severe but still very noticable, and nandrolone makes me feel very shitty. There's also clinical data to show they are neurotoxic. I'm gonna stay away.

For some people, the extra aromatization from test could 100% be causing negative mood changes, especially if they are higher bodyfat and aromatize a lot.

chest+arms+delts

40 degree incline: 40kgx13, 10, 8 all paused
flat db: 30kgx16, 13, 11
machine flies: 3 sets failure
Cable side raises at hip height: 5 sets each side wow this felt great. Glad I tried this. STart your lateral raises from hip height omfg

superset
ez curls and pushdowns 5 sets each, first set did 25 on 25kg ez curl and 25 on 28.75kg pushdown

An idea occurred to me on how I can keep training 3x/wk and still get what I feel is enough volume for everything to be close enough to optimal

Do a bi+tri+side delt tri-set after training on chest and back days 5 sets each. Do the same tri-set before training on leg day. It'll take no more than around 7-12 minutes and I'm basically getting in all the volume I'd get in a dedicated arm day but spread out over 3 sessions instead of just 1.

With how dogshit my recovery/injury resilience genetics are and my recent lack of enthusiasm, maybe 3x/wk is going to be a long term thing for me. I can imagine doing 4 again, but for 5 days I'd need to be walking distance to both work and gym again like I was before, otherwise forget it.

Correct!

Interesting stuff. Thanks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsteroid

Think this is the relevant wiki article on the subject.

Arms+delts+legs

Arm+delt triset:

ez curls 25kgx25, 3 more sets failure
pushdowns 28.75kgx23, 3 more sets faillure
side raises: 4 sets
leg extensions: 3 sets
lying ham curls: 39kgx15, 12, 11, 10
HBBS: 140kgx11, 120kgx10x2

pretty poor workout, but I got sick with a cold. I felt like I couldn't get a pump on anything but my glutes during hbbs. Trenbolone probably almost totally out of my system around now, lost a bit of water+glycogen from being sick. Any or all of those could have negatively affected my performance today. I'll try to squat again in 2 weeks but if I'm still not feeling it I'm taking it out. If I'm not feeling the arms+delts 3x/wk, I'm gonna do something like this:

monday chest, tuesday back, thursday legs, friday arms+delts. Still fairly short sessions under 50 minutes each.

Cable lateral raises at hip/hand height are great. Doing these as lengthened partials when you can't do full reps anymore are pretty great too.

Monday Chest
Incline db press: 3 sets
Flat db press: 3 sets
Machine flies: 3 sets

Tuesday Back
Chins: 3 sets
underhand bb Rows: 2 sets
HS high rows: 4 sets
Row machine: 3 sets

Thursday Legs
Leg extensions: 3 sets
Ham curls: 4-5 sets
SLDL: 1 set of 15-25
Leg press or FFESS: 3 sets

Friday Arms+delts
EZ curls//Pushdowns: 4 sets myo rep matching
Dual cable curls//single arm overhead triceps: 5 sets
Seated db curls//db skullcrushers: 5 sets
Cable side raises: 5 sets
Prone db raises: 4 sets

Basically everything trained to failure except SLDL, leg press, and ffess.

Back to the pro split? Very low volume/short sessions this time though. Before I would always try to do a buncha delt+tri accessories on chest day and a bunch of biceps on back day and end up with way too much work and 80-90 minute sessions. I wanna be under 1hr even when including mobility/general warmup, and no more than 50 minutes of actual lifting. I'll do this if and only if I am not getting good pumps on arms/delts training them 3x/wk. Otherwise I'll stay with my current 3x/wk with 10-12 minutes of arms+delts each session. Yesterday was probably just b/c of sick, losing a lot of water/glycogen, and cruise dose. But if I can't seem to get good contraction/pump doing arms+delts frequently then we'll scrap that idea and give them their own day.

delts could really go on any of these 4 days.

hi, I have a few noob test/trt questions if you don't mind.

Is it normal to retain water? I've been on trt for 4 weeks now and I'm approx 2.5kg heavier and have been for the past 2 weeks. I can't believe it's muscle growth so quickly and i definitely feel and look more fluidy. is water retention normal? if yes, is it temporary as test use continues?

relatedly, I'm planning on starting hgh in a week but when I did a solo cycle of that a few years ago, that definitely held onto water too. Is it likely mixing in the hgh will result in even more water retention?

is the standard trt quantity enough to expect much much response/muscle growth from my 53yo body?

thanks

If your levels are 800ng/dl after trt and you started at 300, no you won't notice much muscle growth. It'll be maybe 2lbs more than you would have built naturally over a year. If your gh is 5+ius then that number could be as high as 5-7lbs, gh is powerful combined with androgens at big boy doses. at 2-3 iu nah not much.

The scale weight is water and also maybe a bit of glycogen storage as well.

If it's 2.5kg in the first 2 weeks, it's probably that you started too fat and are aromatizing heavily and the estrogen is causing retention. AIs are complicated and its impossible to get your dose right. I honestly wouldn't even try and low estro is way worse for your libido than high estrogen. Lose fat so that you don't aromatize as much. Your bodyfat is higher than you think (I don't mean this directed at you personally, but as a generalization to say almost everyone has a higher bodyfat than they believe). Bodyfat has a much bigger impact on aromatase enzyme than you might think.

Test can also change your mineral balance slightly and promote water retention even if your estro isn't high, which is another reason to stay away from AIs. Just lose bodyfat anyway because you wanna be healthy jacked aesthetic etc

Thanks, much appreciated. That’s disappointing re the test level. I was hoping it might have more impact.

I do agree that I and everyone is carrying more fat than they think.

Accepting that ‘lose body fat anyway’ is the right advice and I’d actually already got to that point, what is ‘too fat’ in this context? I posted a nude in my thread a few weeks ago - I was 6ft 81kg and reckon probably 15-16% on a dexa (and loco didn’t disagree…which surprised me)
Broadly how low do I need to get before ‘too fat’ isn’t a thing?

I was planning on approx 3 iu of GH

Very difficult to answer. How's libido? Any other high estro symptoms besides water retention? The problem might be more related to testosterone and mineral balance than estrogen if you're 15-16%. But some people will still be high aromatizers at low bodyfat. When I was hanging around 18-20% bodyfat offseason I aromatized like crazy, but now that I'm more around 12-14% offseason I get very little, even on very high aromatization compounds like ment. Another friend of mine also hangs out around this bodyfat offseason but aromatizes significantly. There's a lot of individual variance and without bloodwork its hard to tell. It's not even as simple as "Estrogen out of range, therefore high estro symptoms" because its based much more on the ratio of testosterone and DHT to estrogen than the absolute amount of estrogen. If you're at 3000ng/dl, an estrogen of 110 isn't actually "high" and not going to cause the classic high estrogen symptoms. But if you're at 900 ng/dl and 110 estrogen, then you've got a problem.

I know that's an annoying non-answer. Just eat healthy, do your cardio, get in a comfortable and easy to maintain deficit for around 6 out of the next 12 months, prep some >50% portion of your daily meals, and you'll find whatever side effects you're getting gradually reduce without using any other pharmaceuticals or having to do nightmare guesswork for 8 months to figure out what the right dose of AIs is for your amount of test based on bloodwork.

3iu is like bare minimum for any contribution to muscle building. It won't be drastic in that respect, but you'll notice it with hair, skin, nails, and sleep quality.

had my first "sorta high carb day" today. But last 2 days my food was lower than usual even for diet b/c I was sick. Had around 450-500g carb, 50g fat, 250g protein and even get some kung pao chicken with rice which was incredibly delicious and bodybuilding friendly if I tell them to not add peanuts. Also made a little pseudo-ice cream with greek yogurt and frozen mangoes blended together. That was ace.

I'm experimenting with much lower protein around 230-260g range. Carbohydrates, especially from fruit, oats, potatoes, and dairy, are the key macronutrient for performance. The extra protein just gets converted to glucose and is actually less satiating than fruit/oats/potatoes and doesn't have the excellent micronutrition of skim milk.

Overall things are still very much on track and I am trying to decide my competition schedule. We're literally the only country with 2 amateur feds that both feed into the IFBB and can issue pro cards. There's no conflict on competing in both. Mostly I just don't know wtf the comp schedule actually is as they tend to finalize it very late.

Training 3x/wk when you have a romantic partner who is only casually into fitness/not into fitness will probably also result in much less relationship strain. That was a big complaint from that Muslim girl a year ago, although I'm very glad that ended regardless.

Thanks again. Libido is off the charts tbh - I need a new gf. Or maybe two.

I’m getting bloods done in two weeks so it’ll be interesting to see what the new levels are.

And yep, re hgh, the skin and sleep improvements were what I noticed most last time.
I was up to 4iu by the end of my cycle and I definitely put on size and strength on during it but it was how I felt that I enjoyed the most. I only stopped because I became a rowing bro and I noticed that being on the GH increased my resting heart rate by about 5-6 bpm which wasn’t helpful for my conditioning

if your libido is off the charts, don't take an AI to fix the water retention, even if your hrt doc tells you to. （he probably won't but who knows, some real tards become docs)

Excellent workout. I guess Wednesday was just a bit too sick

Internal rotation mobs

Strapped pronated pullups: bwx16, 13, 11
underhand rows: 60kg13, 10
row macine: 40x3 sets fail
unilateral pulldowns: 27.5kgx2 sets failure
v-handle pulldowns: 50kgx10, 9

Arm+Delt triset:
Dual cable facing away curls, straight pushdowns, hip height behind the back cable delt raises 5 rounds all to failure around 12-25 reps

I think I might be onto something here... legs, back, and chest generally very CNS demanding, get a lot out of big compound movements, can take a lot of volume in one session and might actually need higher per session volume to make progress, high level of joint stress, take a long time to recover from, benefit from heavy+hard+intense, big change in performance training them recovered vs not recovered. Arms+delts can't take a lot of volume in one session without turning to junk, recover fast, almost no cns stress, very low stress on joints, still perform decently even when underrecovered.

3 days a week chest, legs, back with arms+delts for around 15-20 minutes at the end of each chest and back session and the beginning of leg session...I should rotate bicep and tricep exercises and not do the same one over and over again. I like the cable curls and ez curls and can alternate between those. For triceps I think I need something overhead. I'll buy a new attachment and do that overhead.

3 weeks since my last shot of any AAS other than testosterone. Ment has been out for a long time, tren should be out completely right around now.

Internal rotation mobs
Incline db: 40kgx13, 11, 9 pauses
flat db: 30kgx20, 11, 10 pauses
machine flies: 3 sets

arm+delt triset
ez curls 25kgx25, 4 more sets, tricep pushdowns: 28.75kgx23, 4 more sets, delt raises: wgaf lol

I'm going to lower the angle of my incline from ~40ish to the lower one which is around ~22. 5. This gym's benches are nice but have those annoying nonstandard 15/30/45 angles. 35+ is just too delt dominant and I'm hitting side raises 3x/wk now.

Did some posing after training. Attracted a crowd of mostly girls to take pics. And I am not even that lean rn. Still got 11 weeks of dieting left. NFI when I'm gonna start prepping or for what show. I'll play it by ear. I may just stick to my original plan of trying to do nationals in November for the original fed. But we're one of the only countries that has 2 ifbb associated feds. The other fed has better judging and more professional production/smaller shows and does their nationals in December and March. I am not really sure... Thinking that far in advance kinda stresses me out and detracts from the enjoyment of training/injecting/meal prepping.

God at this point I'm not even sure if I wanna do any of this ****.... kinda wanna just do some bitch ass "cycle" which is basically a cruise of like 500 test 400 mast or primo, 5iu of gh, and run a ton of stims almost year round and stay in a deficit and just enjoy shredded lyfe continuing only 3x/wk lifting. I really like the level of leanness I'll be in around 6-8 weeks and it wouldn't be all that hard to maintain 365. If things go well with this new hong kong girl, I think my probability of stepping on stage again goes to near 0 and just enjoying the gym with my partner and maintaing an appearance they like is all I'd really want. lmfao at the absolute coping nonsense 10 years ago "bro girls like fat/muscular bear mode powerlifter bodies. Not Jeff Seid!1!1!" pure delusion... amount of muscle is almost irrelevant outside of the extremes (I am barely even in the extremes of mucsularity in 2024 with physique inflation), being low bodyfat is all that matters because low bodyfat is healthy and visually appealing.

I definitely don't have the bigorexia kind of dismorphia, more the "shredorexia" type. I'd love to be like 10kgs lighter than I am now with smaller muscles everyhwere except add 1 inch to arms and just be there forever and treat the gym as recreation/social club more than serious meditative training facility.

Then just do this?

Well my PED doses and training are exactly consistent with this right now haha. 85kg with 18 inch guns and legs small enough to fit into regular people pants just walking around and having a very pleasing body that's muscular enough for what I like looking like but also appealing to mainstream everyday people but wouldn't necessarily do great on a bbing stage. I'll still obviously be meal prepping, doing cardio, eating 500g of green beans every day, and injecting. But less injecting, less training, and less calories.

But I'll give competing at least a few more honest shots. I'm not quite ready to fully quit.

I think the eating would be the most difficult part of your lifestyle for me. Are you eating before you're hungry/after you're full all the time?

The eating part is not hard. I can tolerate pounding it back really easily. I can tolerate hunger up until around ~4-5 weeks out level when hunger hormones start going a little crazy, but I'm told GLP-1s can reduce this significantly and I'm okay with trying them out.

The gaining weight and needing to walk around fairly heavy and physical discomfort when feeling heavy is hard. I'm also extremely vain and having the people of both sexes appreciate my physical appearance is important to me. Even when I am monogamously partnered it is still important to me. I think most people who say it isn't are either 60+ years old or just in denial. I'd argue maintaining an appealing appearance is kind of part of your duties as a romantic partner. I don't want me or my wife to let loose after marriage and plummet down to sex 1x/mo or less like many couples. Even just the difference between 102kg and 96kg is tremendous in this respect; I feel much better physically, less tired, almost no heartburn/GERD, much higher sleep quality, and I look much more aesthetically appealing both in face and body.

Even if (when) I got to 102kg at the same bodyfat I am at like 94kg I reckon I'd still run into some of the above mentioned problems, but I'm okay with doing some bulking and cutting rotations to try and find out how I feel at 100kg+ but with lower bodyfat. I remember being even just 95kg used to be uncomfortably heavy too. If I can alleviate the gerd/sleep/fatigue/looking shitty issues by just being lower bodyfat even at higher bodyweights, I will definitely continue competing into my 40s and maybe 50s.

Legs

Arm+delt triset:
hip height cable raises, dual cable curls, pushdowns
??, 8.75kgx22, 25kgx35, 4 more rounds to failure

Lying ham curls: 39kgx18, 14, 10
Cable glute kickbacks: 40kgx15x2, 30kgx12 each side
paused toes elevated sldl: 105kgx20 jfc this was hard. Kickbacks do not go before this ever again plz
leg press: 3ppsx25, 18, 12

you know I skipped the leg extensions b/c machine was in use.

Squats are out next week. Back to leg press and maybe ffess for a few months, but tbh maybe leg press only with how insanely good this leg press aparatus feels. I could also do one week of regular leg press and the next week of single leg press; I've never tried the lift. I heard its great for glutes and hams. Squats are never going to be permanently dropped; I'll come back to them here and there for a few months at a time especially while gaining weight.

This session was close to 80 minutes. Too much for one day. I'm going to add the 4th day probably next week. I think I can get all sessions under 50 minutes of actual lifting + 5-10 minutes of mobility and general warmup.

Chest+very little tri (5 minutes of cable triceps)
Back+very little bi

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Legs
DB ohp, 3 bicep exercises, 3 tricep exercises, 2 delt raise variations. Everything but the db ohp supersetted or tri-setted.
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Wanna bring back in free weight overhead pressing. Not bc I think it'll do anything magic for delts, but because I think it will greatly improve shoulder health, scapular control, and recruits the triceps in a unique way that few other lifts can besides gay hard to set up overhead cable stuff. The shoulder health is clearly going to be important for longevity so ohp is making a cumback. That also makes it easier for me to lower the incline on my db pressing or even focus on flat pressing instead of incline since the upper chest+delts gets hit on the db ohp very well.