Diet

My normal diet's actually not too bad. That's partly because I've read a lot and planned it, partly because I'm vegetarian, and partly because my wife has hypoglycemia so needs a diet with zero sugar, and plenty of complex carbs and protein.

As mentioned though, for the last few months, and especially the last few weeks, my diet's been crap. When my wife and I first met we starting going out to dinner regularly and having a fair bit of coffee. That's settled down a little now, however I'm not going to cut out fun stuff just to 'be healthy'. On our honeymoon, fish and chips (well, pinapple fritters and chips for me) featured prominently, along with various snacky junky food like salt and vinegar chips and chocolate.

I'm not planning any radical changes to my 'normal' diet at this stage. It usually consists of something like this:

Meal 1: Shake - 1 (or 1/2) cup oats, 60g Mypure WPC whey, bananna, water
Meal 2: Pasta, home made sauce (including TVP)
Meal 3: Dahl (lentil curry), brown rice
Meal 4: Home made protein bar (oats, whey, peanut butter), apple
Meal 5: Shake (same as meal 1)
Meal 6: Steamed veggies or cottage cheese, carrots and celery

The shake has 1 cup of oats when I'm 'bulking', 1/2 a cup when I'm 'maintaining'. When seriously bulking I often add in another shake between meals 5 and 6. Meals 2 and 3 (the 'heavy' ones) can be stuff like pasta, dahl, lentil loaf (like meatloaf but with no fat :-) ), lentil or TVP buritos, baked beans, etc.

Eating this much means I'm hardly ever hungry, so hardly ever snack.

I haven't counted calories for a while, but for the first couple of weeks I will (using FitDay). I'll be aiming for 2300ish, and trying to keep my P/C/F to about 35/50/15.

This diet starts tomorrow. Exercise will happen this week, but nothing structured. The BMA program starts on Monday.

BMA - Ben's Modified ABBH

Week 1
Mon
Bench: 80% 1RM, 3 reps, 10 sets
Row: 80% 1RM, 3 reps, 10 sets

Tues
Run

Wed
Deadlift: 80% 1RM, 3 reps, 10 sets
Situp: 80% 1RM, 3 reps, 10 sets

Thurs
Run

Fri
Bench: 65% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets
Row: 65% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets

Sat
Run

Sun
Yoga

Week 2
Mon
Deadlift: 65% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets
Situp: 65% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets

Tues
Run

Wed
Bench: 80% 1RM, 4 reps, 10 sets
Row: 80% 1RM, 4 reps, 10 sets

Thurs
Run

Fri
Deadlift: 80% 1RM, 4 reps, 10 sets
Situp: 80% 1RM, 4 reps, 10 sets

Sat
Run

Sun
Yoga

Week 3
Mon
Bench: 70% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets
Row: 70% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets

Tues
Run

Wed
Deadlift: 70% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets
Situp: 70% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets

Thurs
Run

Fri
Bench: 80% 1RM, 5 reps, 10 sets
Row: 80% 1RM, 5 reps, 10 sets

Sat
Run

Sun
Yoga

Week 4
Mon
Deadlift: 80% 1RM, 5 reps, 10 sets
Situp: 80% 1RM, 5 reps, 10 sets

Tues
Run

Wed
Bench: 75% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets
Row: 75% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets

Thurs
Run

Fri
Deadlift: 75% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets
Situp: 75% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets

Sat
Run

Sun
Yoga

The Program (background)

Right, the details.

Back when I was at my best, I was doing a program called ABBH. It's an interesting program, and I got some quite good results from it. In essence, you use heavy, compound lifts, with the weight predetermined and based on a percentage of your 1 rep max (1RM). You also have, for the same body-part, high-rep and low-rep days.

So, for example on day one you might be doing: Bench 80% 1RM, 3 reps, 10 sets. On day four, you'd do: Bench 65% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets. On the second week, day one would be 80% 1RM, 4 reps, 10 sets; and day four would be 70% 1RM, 10 reps, 5 sets.

As you can see, for the low-rep days you increase the number of reps from week to week, where as for high-rep days you increase the weight from week to week.

Overall I found the program to be really useful. However, as always, I have some things that I'd like to tweak. I guess it's worth pointing out why I'm chaning something that I've already said that I liked.

I've been lifting weights on and off for a few years now, and I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter how good the program is, unless I'm motivated to do it it's useless. That is, a 'sub-optimal' program that I enjoy is more effective that a technically perfect program that I can't be bothered following.

I'm also aiming to make my prgram as simple as possible.

So what are my changes to ABBH? Basically, I'll only have one exercise per bodypart, and will only do a total of 4 different lifts. Those are my favourite lifts, and the ones that I love lifting heavy for: deadlift; bench; bent-over bar row; and weighted situps.

I'm also incorporating running and yoga into my program. Up until recently I've never been able to run for more than a couple of minutes, but for whatever reason I've discovered that I can now run for 10 minutes without too much trouble. As a result I'm going to incorporate running and see if I can't get myself up to half an hour or so.

Yoga's something I've been doing on and off for a couple of years too. Flexibility and strenght in supporting muscles really help when you're lifting heavy, and I've found that yoga can be quite useful for this. Of course there's the mental elements as well.

I should probably note here that 'lifing heavy' is a relative thing. I don't mean squatting 500kgs - I mean lifting heavy relative to my ability. That is, relative to my 1RM. So my 'heavy' days are the ones where I'm lifting 80% of my 1RM. The beauty of using your 1RM as the yardstick is that you increase the weight you're trying to lift relative to the strength you've gained, rather than some arbitrary amount.

An introduction

Hi there,
My name's Ben, and this is the BensFitness blog. I'm going to use this blog to track my progress as I shed my post-wedding chubbyness.

About 8 months ago, when I first met the girl that's now my wife, I was in fairly decent shape. Nothing spectacular, but at 73kgs I could bench 80kgs and deadlift and full squat 100kgs. Not particularly impressive by any means, but I was pretty happy with it. I still had a bit of chubb, but had decent muscle definition.

Skip forward 8 months to now. The combination of a very hectic couple of months has meant my training has been crap, and for the last two weeks, non-existant. Those last two weeks were spent on honeymoon in Perth, where a lot of crap food was eaten. As a result of all that, I'm now pretty weak and pretty tubby.

I've kept a training journal before, but never a public one. I'm hoping that blogging with both make it easier and motivate me.

So that's it. I'll post my workout routine and some more detailed stats in a little while.

Ben