Eating for strength

I worked out yesterday in the morning. Protein intake jumped a hundred grams because of the protein shakes I drink while I work out. Carb intake almost doubled from my usual  because of the carb laden post workout meal I had.

  Here's my food breakdown for my workout day.

Progress Report

Here's me doing a 330 lb. leg press from a deep knee bend dead position. It helps with explosiveness out of the hole when doing squats.

Here's me attempting to stiff legged deadlift 415 lb. It was my second try and I could only get it up a quarter of the way. My first lift at 415 lb, I got up three quarters of the way but my phone didn't record it right so this is all I got. It's amazing how fast the central nervous system shuts itself down after a couple stiff legged deadlifts.

Eating for strength

So here's my breakdown of my macronutrients according to myfitnesspal.com. I adhere to the one gram of protein for every pound of bodyweight, so I'm trying to take in about 290 grams of protein per day and keep my carbs between 200-300 grams per day. I'm still within an acceptable range of grams of fat, but I plan on drinking a Muscle Milk shake and eating a steak and eggs dinner tonight  with a cup of rice and about two cups of salad, so this will add some more grams of fat.

I had to start supplementing my animal protein intake with synthetic whey protein each meal to meet my protein requirements. If you haven't tried it already, you should definitely check out myfitnesspal.com to see where you might be deficient.

A general check in: my thoughts about strength and gaining strength

I'm working out now every 72 hours, consequently I feel better about life.  I'm giving myself more time to rest and repair damaged muscles by giving myself an extra 24 hours to eat animal protein instead of the usual 48 hour rest between workouts.

I can honestly say my gains seem more consistent.  But even more importantly, I feel better while I workout.  The 72 hours rest helps to burn away all the lactic acid and soreness I took on in my previous workout.  It feels like my lifts are being completed with more ease and less fear of will this lift hurt because I'm already sore.

Soreness and joint pain and lactic acid muscle build up tend to mess with my head.  I get aggravated when I'm sore.  Simple movements like reaching out for something or walking while I'm aching lessen my morale and make me take on a negative disposition towards life and I get impatient and easily more agitated if something doesn't go my way. 

So I'm just going to stay with the 72 hours rest maybe indefinitely between training sessions.  The weight I'm lifting is getting heavier, and my joints and muscles really like the extra time to recuperate.



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This guy is hilarious.  I remember how I would see him on youtube promoting some supplement company called Animal Mutant Rage or some other kind of nonsense.


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Now he's saying hey forget the supplements and just eat oatmeal and egg whites.

 If you have read my blog for any length of time, I only drink whey protein while I'm working out.  The rest of the time I'm stuffing my gut with meat, eggs, chicken, low glycemic foods like oatmeal and a small percent of my calories come from fats like cheeses or sour cream. 

I used to think that I needed to drink whey protein before I worked out, after I worked out, before I went to bed or after I woke up.  But guess what?  Most of the time I was sitting on the toilet and blowing all my expensive protein out my anus. Since I wasn't digesting the protein, I wasn't making any strength gains. 

So basically I had to switch to real food.  I never had a problem digesting real food, so I went back to it and hence my strength gains became more consistent.

It's funny how these supplement spokesmen as soon as they stop getting paid, they will badmouth the crap out of the supplement companies they used to work for. 

Why the bench press and the deadlift suck

So this girl benches 240 lbs.  I'm not jealous of her first of all, and I'm not trying to take anything away from her.  But let's be honest here.  She's arching her back almost a foot off the bench and the distance the bar travels down to her chest can't be more than eight or nine inches.  Are you going tell me that's a real test of front deltoid, pec and tricep strength? 



This is why I hate the bench press with a straight bar.  The back arching severely limits the distance the bar travels because your chest gets in the way and takes the pecs and front deltoids out of the lift.  That's why I use the cambered bar bench press because it allows for full activation of the pectoral muscles, triceps, and front deltoids.  Arching your back while benching with a cambered bar will not help in the press except for providing for a stable position to lift from.

Now for my second biggest pet peeve: the deadlift.  Some say it's a test of true overall body strength.  That may be true for some.  But for me it's a bastardized hybrid movement made up of several accessory lifts.  What do I mean by bastardized?  Let's take a look at the Olympic lifts.




The Olympic snatch lift represents to me an amalgamation of accessory movements that sum up to one compound movement.  I've watched on youtube the way people train the snatch.  They break the movement down into smaller lifts which they train individually and they occasionally practice the goal lift, namely the snatch, to instill a muscle memory pattern and perfect technique.  Look at the video below:


This kind of training, this breaking up of the goal lift into smaller accessory movements, is the exact same kind of training you have to do if you want increase your bench press or deadlift.  The bench press and the deadlift by themselves should be trained sparingly and then only to accomplish instilling a muscle memory pattern and to perfect technique.  Click on my total body workout training post on the right hand side to see how I train to accomplish gains in the bench press and the deadlift.

The strength graph: the monkey on your back

 


If you're going to strength train, this pretty much represents how your strength programming will go. It means over the course of time, your strength will go up.  The dips in the graph account for strength lost through rest, strength lost through lack of motivation and many other factors like insufficient protein intake or sleep or just not having enough time to workout.

The first incline on the graph represents quick gains or beginner gains. Your body will start to align its joints and muscle fibers in response to your training, thus making it able to complete the lifts in a more efficient way enabling you to lift more.

After the beginner gains, your strength gains taper a bit and the real training takes place.  Your training program will have to shift focus onto the crux of strength training: the adding of muscle and hence strength by way of proper recovery of the central nervous system through rest and significant protein intake.

So if your programming doesn't match the above graph, that means you're the problem.  Either your training is not providing you enough of a stimulus for muscle growth.  Maybe you're not taking in enough protein to allow for sufficient muscle growth.  Maybe you're eating way too many sugary foods in between training sessions thus causing your body to lapse into a sugar coma where the body is eating away at your muscles causing you to lose strength.

A big one for me was I was over training. I wasn't allowing my body to rest adequately between training sessions.  I would go into a gym forty eight hours after my last workout and start lifting and I would repeat this process three or even four times a week.   The result was I wasn't allowing my body to repair itself adequately through maximum amounts of protein ingestion and rest of the central nervous system thus I wasn't making strength gains.

It took me a long time to realize I was over training. I thought it was that I wasn't training hard enough, so I hit the gym even more continuing the spiral of not getting strong and even getting weaker in some of my upper body lifts and my deadlifts.  I thought how can this be?  I'm training more, so I should be getting stronger but I was weaker.

So to fix that I rested more. There. It's pretty simple. I did nothing. I stopped looking at all the meatheads on youtube busting up their bodies with weights and I sat right on my glutes and watched television. Basically I became a couch potato to get stronger.

I think the main problem why people have trouble busting plateaus in their lifts is that they underestimate the damage that occurs to them while heavy lifting.  They are taxing their central nervous system and their muscles to the the limits of their potential.  This places a heavy toll on the body and it requires an abundance of rest to recover from that.  Sure you can still accomplish daily tasks like walking or picking up something after a heavy lifting session, but once you get under that bar it's a different reality.  You're attempting to achieve maximum lifts, and only then does how much you rest factor into the equation of you being able to complete the lift.  The only way you can tell if you've gotten enough rest is recording your lift amounts in a journal and noticing over the course of time which rest periods are best suited to make you strong.


The strength graph represents a solution in an equation.  It's the 4 in a 1+1+1+1= equation.  The addends are significant rest, sufficient training stimuli, maximal protein intake, and stabilized blood sugar levels.  These should equal more strength. If you don't get strong, you're erring in one of the addends.

Mark Bell talks powerlifting