Overworking and changing to Diet/Workout v3.0

Around May of 2012 I started to feel a bit off. I noticed that I had a lack of energy. I also was getting hunger cravings all the time that were astonishingly hard to resist. Along with these problems I also noticed that I was having troubles during my workouts as well. During many exercises I was having trouble completing the same number of reps that I had normally been doing, as well as maintaining the same amount of weight with those exercises. At this time I was very perplexed as to what was going on and went back to researching things to try and figure out why I was having these difficulties with my diet and exercise. After much reading I realized I was having trouble because I was overworking myself due to a combination of an inadequate diet and too much exercise for my current fitness level.

At the time I was doing a 1500 calorie per day diet and working out 5 days a week. In my diet I wasn't bothering to track my carbs, protein, or fat intake. After all the reading I did I realized I was being too aggressive with my diet. With my BMR being around 2100 I realized that cutting 600 calories a day along with working out was too much. By cutting this many calories while on a routine workout schedule I was over a long period of time causing myself to be malnourished, thus causing my hunger cravings and muscle fatigue. I was also working out 5 days a week doing 1 muscle groups and 40-60 minutes of cardio. This workout routine was a bit excessive for my diet and fitness level as it aided in causing myself to be overworked and malnourished. When you have too aggressive of a diet and workout like this, eventually the glycogen in your muscles is constantly depleted. Glycogen is the energy our bodies burn first before it pulls from other sources like fat for energy. When you are constantly working out in a state like this it will burn fat but after extended periods of time the fat stores aren't enough to keep up and you start to burn muscle for energy as well. This is what happens when you are slowly starving yourself, which with my combination of diet and workout routine I was doing.

To combat the cause of this fatigue and hunger I decided to change up my diet to v3.0. After much reading about eating correctly I decided to make several changes this go around on my diet. To help make sure I am getting most of the vitamins and minerals I need I decided to start taking a mens multi vitamin and an omega 3 fish oil pill. Since on most diets you are eating less it is an easy way to help make sure you are getting all your vitamins and minerals. Along with adding the vitamins I lowered my caloric deficit from 600 calories to 300 calories. So from my 2100 calorie BMR I was aiming for my daily intake to be at right around 1800 calories instead of the previous 1500. Eating just these 300 more calories made a big difference so that I was not slowly starving myself. I also took a closer look at how many grams of protein, carbs, and fat were important for helping to balance your diet with working out. The biggest thing I noticed was that with all of the working out I was doing I needed to be eating lots more protein. I wanted to lose fat weight, but not muscle. So I used  a pretty generic, but popular, method to estimate how much protein a person should eat to help build muscle which is 1 gram of protein for every 1lb you weigh. This would put me needing around 200 grams to help aide in maintaining and building muscle, previously I had only been getting maybe 100 - 150 grams a day. As an easy way to get my additional protein I started buying whey protein. All that whey protein is is a byproduct from the process of making cheese.

This is not my workout but it is actually pretty close to my schedule.

Along with changing my diet I decided to change my workout to v3.0 also. To help combat my overworking and fatigue I decided to cut back my cardio time. Previously I had been doing cardio on all 5 of my workout days, anywhere from 40-60 minutes. I decided to lower my cardio times by half which put it at 20-30 minutes. In all my reading I learned that too long of cardio sessions can cause loss of muscle, which is why professional distance runners look so skinny. I also decided to consolidate my workouts into 4 days a week rather than 5. I wound up doing 3 days with 2 muscle groups and a short cardio session and 1 day with core and a long cardio session. This wound up being roughly the same amount of weight lifting each week but provided me with much shorter cardio sessions and 1 more rest day.

A couple weeks after I made these changes I was getting very positive results. I no longer was getting uncontrollable hunger cravings, since I had stopped slowly starving myself with my diet. In beefing up my diet and cutting back on my workout a little I also began to see a decrease in my muscle fatigue. I was able to slowly get back to my previous amount of weight and reps and start progressing again. Make sure if you are dieting and working out that you plan your diet and workout to work together rather than against each other like mine were.

Plateau 2 and Workout v2.0

In February of 2012 I had run into another of the dreaded plateaus that happens during weight loss. I had been sitting at the same weight of 230 lbs for quite some time with this particular plateau. If you have read my previous post about my first plateau you would know that the cause of that plateau was because my diet was quite lacking in direction and discipline. To overcome that plateau I did get my diet in line and set specific caloric goals that got me back to losing weight. This plateau however had a different culprit that eluded me for a while. I knew my diet was good and that I was at a sufficient caloric deficit, so I was fairly certain that my diet wasn't the cause and went back to researching other possible causes. After reading several articles about how to get over weight loss plateaus I realized that my workouts had become stagnant. I had been using the same amount of weight with the same amount of reps for quite some time and my workouts were not pushing me enough to induce weight loss.

My workout had been the same routine now for several months. I would go to the gym and use the same exercises on the same days (which isn't necessarily bad) with the same amount of weights and the same number of reps. I was in a set routine and my body was too used to that particular workload. When you don't push yourself your body isn't forced to react to overcome the situation and if your body isn't reacting to overcome the situation it means you won't lose fat or build additional muscle.

I started to figure out what I needed to change to swap my workout to v2.0 so that I could overcome this plateau. There are several ways you can change up your workout to make your body work harder. One of the ways you can accomplish increasing your workout intensity is by changing which exercises you are doing. Even if the exercises are ones that workout the same muscle groups, sometimes the slight variation is enough to cause your body to react and start the process of fat loss or muscle growth again. The second way, instead of changing exercises, is to add additional exercises or increase the number of repetitions in your exercises. If you have been using 30 lbs for curls and doing four sets of ten start trying to do four sets of twelve or more if you can handle it. Or if you have been only doing one bicep exercises try doing two or three types of bicep exercises. Obviously this will be more total work and help increase your workout intensity. The third way is to lift heavier weights. Again in the example of the curls if you are currently doing 30 lbs for four sets of 10 instead try doing it with 35 lbs. The last and fourth way to increase your workout intensity is to decrease your rest time between exercises. This will help keep your heart rate up and will cause your cardio vascular system to work harder.

What I decided to do with my workout was to implement a couple of these options to bring up the intensity of my workouts. For starters I changed the types of exercises I was doing. I had predominantly been doing most of my exercises on the weight machines and changed over to doing stuff with free weights. This helped to vary how my muscles were being used. I also added a couple additional exercises to each of my muscle groups. This was a big help in increasing my intensity in my workouts. Lastly I also decided to try to keep my rest periods between workouts shorter. I also decided on a system that I would start for all my new exercises to ensure my intensity would keep increasing in the future as well. On pretty much all of my exercises I would do four sets of eight reps and continue to increase my number of reps until at that specific weight I could do four sets of ten to twelve reps. Once I could achieve this I would use a heavier weight and start back at 4 sets of eight and work my way up again.

All of these small changes added up to big results because I wound up overcoming this plateau and continuing down the path to weight loss and muscle growth. So if you find yourself hitting a plateau either in your weight loss or your muscle growth, remember that your workout might be suffering from stagnation. If your workout is stagnant you will need to revise it to ensure you are keeping the intensity of your workouts high to keep you on track.

Injuring My Back

Sometime around April of 2012 I had a sudden and devastating injury take place. I was doing my super set routine that I use for my shoulder exercises. I don't use max weight but I do five exercises in a row to complete one set and do a total of 4 sets. On this particular day I was on my fourth and last set and the second from the last exercise I felt a little bit of discomfort and ignored it. I thought to myself "Ehh, I just have one last set then I will be done", and proceeded with my last shoulder exercise. Almost at the end of the set is when it happened I got a sharp pain in what felt like the muscle between my shoulder blade and spine. At first I thought I might have partially torn the muscle the pain was so bad, I came to find out later that it was a pinched a nerve in between some vertebrae in my spine.

This injury was severe enough that I couldn't do anything for the next two weeks because any movement would cause me a great deal of  irritation and pain. After two weeks I finally was well enough that I did cardio for a couple weeks until I finished recuperating enough to go back to doing light weights. Grand total it was 4 weeks before I was able to get back to weight lifting with light amounts and 6 weeks before I was able to  go back to lifting as heavy as I was before the injury. And this all occurred because I ignored my body's signals saying something wasn't quite right.

In retrospect this really was a minor injury in comparison to what other dangerous things could potentially happen and it also turned out to be a valuable learning experience. Now if anything at all is feeling weird or I don't feel 100%  I skip the exercise or even stop my workout completely and wait for the next workout. It is important to make sure and continue to push yourself and try for new personal bests all the time by upping your weights, however not so important to warrant injuring yourself. Injuries are never fun and if you do wind up injuring yourself you will only be setting yourself back from all the progress you have made. So don't be like me and ignore the signals your body gives you, listen to them and take it easy or even stop your workout so you don't injure yourself.

After injuring myself and having to deal with the recovery and setting myself back in my progress I became interested in ways to help myself avoid injuring myself again. At this point I took a good look into how I lift weights to make sure I was using correct form. Having correct form in weight lifting is very important. Good form is important for two reason. The first is that it will help you avoid injury and the second is that with correct form you better exercise the target muscle you are trying to build.

There are many good ways to learn correct form for lifting weights. In particular I went to YouTube and started watching numerous short videos about correct form when doing different weight lifting exercises. Another good way is to get a personal trainer for a couple sessions to help show you the exercises and the correct ways to do them. If you can't afford a trainer you can also ask some of the people at your gym for advice. I know I picked up a few pointers from some of the guys that went to my gym that turned out to be very useful. Once you have learned correct form for weight lifting that also serves as a good indication if the weight you are trying to lift is too much or not. If you can't do the exercise with correct form you are using too much weight for that particular muscle group and you will be increasing your risk of injury. If this is the case make sure to lower your weight until you can do these exercises with correct form. Remember guys pushing yourself to new limits and continuously progressing is important but not at the expense of injuring yourself. So if you are hesitant about your condition for that exercise or workout take it easy or stop for the day.

If you do wind up with the unfortunate injury and it seems fairly serious don't try to tough it out for a long time before you get help. Get yourself in to see a Dr., chiropractor, physical therapist or some other form of a medical professional to get it checked out(depending on the injury). More often than not they can give you some easy to follow directions on how to help yourself heal faster and more completely from an injury, however let's hope that you don't ever get injured in the first place.

Plateau 1 and Diet v2.0

When you have a lot of extra weight like I did that you can lose you will more than likely run into a plateau for losing weight. When this happens you will get stuck at a particular weight for a while and it will seem like the results aren't as good if you are strictly going by the weight on the scale. For lots of people this can wind up being very frustrating and sometimes they might even give up on their workouts and diet, this FYI is the wrong move.

In November of 2011 I had hit such a plateau. I got down to 245 lbs, from 270 lbs since I had started, and then the weight just seemed to stop coming off. When you hit a plateau  (which you most likely will unless you have super genes for losing weight and building muscle) make sure to not let it get you down. When you reach a plateau make sure to realize there are many reasons for it and also several things you can do to get back on track. Hitting a plateau is one of the biggest reasons you need to track your success via multiple styles, when the number on the scale stops dropping you often still notice a difference in pictures and how your clothes fit better.

First off I will go over a few of the reasons why we have plateaus in our weight loss as we get in shape. If you were like me and pretty badly out of shape your lean muscle mass will have been pretty low. Shortly before this I had finally started lifting heavy to promote building muscle since I had gotten healthy enough to do so by building my base strength. Right off the bat when you start doing heavy lifting you will build up quite a bit of muscle in a short amount of time before it tapers off. This muscle you are building weighs more than fat per volume of space, which will make it seem like you are not losing weight. On the contrary, you will still be losing weight in fat loss which you will notice in pictures but not on the scale. Another reason you might run into a plateau is because your workout has become stagnant. What I mean by this that you get into a set routine and just go to the gym and lift the same amount of weight for the same amount of reps with the same types of exercises. If this happens your body will become too accustomed to the amount of work you are doing and it will wind up being too easy of a work out.  The last thing that will make us plateau is not being careful with your diet (this is what caused my plateau). If you are badly out of shape like I was when you first start working out you can have a pretty wimpy diet and still see lots of weight loss right off the bat. The reason for this is because you haven't worked out in so long your body will react highly and you will burn a lot of fat. After this initial fat burn your weight loss will slow down as your body grows more accustomed to working out, which is where your diet will come into play to make the big difference. My beginning diet was pretty lackluster and it was causing me to slow way down in my weight loss.

To help me get back on track after seeing how my weight loss had been stuck for about a month I decided I better have a second look at my diet and wound up starting Diet v2.0. If you recall, I had been shooting for around 2250 calories per day, eating 3 meals, and cutting out junk food and that was the extent of my diet. After doing some looking I figured I should find an actual number of calories that would apply to me and my weight loss efforts. First off I didn't know how many calories I should have daily just to operate normally so I went about figuring that out. In doing this I found out about your BMR (Base Metabolic Rate) or also sometimes called RMR (Rested Metabolic Rate). Your BMR is how many calories you burn just to stay alive, even if you were to lie around all day you would burn these calories. This is caused by all the functions your body performs naturally like breathing, blood circulation, thinking, digestion and all of your other vital bodily functions. Just check out a BMR calculator and plug in a couple numbers and you can find this out very quickly. My BMR turned out to be 2100 calories. To successfully facilitate weight loss you need to be in a caloric deficit from your BMR (eating less calories than you burn normally throughout the day). Most dietitians recommend to subtract 3-500 calories from your BMR to steadily and healthily lose weight. I changed my diet and decided to do 1500 calories per day, so 3 meals at 500 calories each (this was a bit too aggressive of a caloric reduction as you will see in a later article - don't be stupid like me listen to the safe amount). After I changed my diet and was making sure to be at a caloric deficit my weight loss got back into action.

Other than tightening up on your diet to get back on track after hitting a plateau you can also change up your workout.  Like I had mentioned earlier if you think you might be hitting a plateau because you have let your workout become stagnant step it up a notch. Start making sure to up your weight to push yourself harder with heavier weights or if you want to stay at the same weight for a bit longer add more reps to all of your exercises. If you get on the treadmill and typically run at 5 miles an hour for 20 minutes bump it up to 5.5 miles an hour for 20 minutes. This will help you spur your body into having to react to overcome these new challenges and it in turn will respond by building more muscle and burning more fat. If we don't push our bodies they won't react, but when we do push our bodies we get great results.

So, make sure to mix it up with either your diet or your workout if you wind up hitting a plateau and you will soon start seeing positive results again. Remember if you give up once you hit a weight loss plateau you will never get results, so instead continue on and it will be a bit tougher but you will wind up reaching even greater heights in your fitness success.

Starting my Heavy Lifting v1.0

After a couple months of just working on increasing my base strength at home I went and signed up for a gym! The gym we had available that was affordable was Planet fitness so that was where we went. Planet Fitness isn't the most killer of gyms but they did have all the equipment you could need to do all of the different exercises. It fit our needs just fine. After I started at Planet Fitness I continued to do lower weights with higher reps on the machines for a while to continue to build my strength up to be ready for some hard workouts. In August of 2011 I decided to finally start doing free weights and go to a workout routine that was heavy weight lower reps to start working towards building muscle.

When I started to go about changing my routine I looked up a few pointers online to try and get started in the right direction. After doing a little research I decided to go for a routine where the amount of weight was just enough that I could barely finish 4 sets of 8 reps. Now that I look back on it most of the weights I was doing were probably somewhere around 70% of what I could do for a 1 rep max (as much weight as you can possibly do only being able to complete 1 rep). My goals were to continue with that weight until I could do 4 sets of 10. Once I could do 4 sets of 10 then I would up my weight a little bit so that it was hard to do 4 sets of 8 again and work my way back up. Make sure that once you can do 4 sets of 10 to do it 2 or 3 times in a row to make sure you can get repeat results. This will help make sure you don't go upping your weight too fast. I had to learn this the hard way as you will learn later on in another post about how I wound up injuring my back. If you are unsure about starting heavy lifting by yourself ask pointers from people in your gym, do some research on the internet or take a class or two to get tips from a personal trainer.

When you go about doing weight training like this to build muscle make sure you try to exercise all the different muscle groups. It is important to exercise all your muscles and build total body strength because it will make you more healthy and you also want to avoid causing imbalances in your physique. Some problems can occur if you cause imbalances in your physique. For instance if you do lots of shoulder exercises but never work your rear shoulder it can cause problems in the way your shoulder joint moves since there is an imbalance in the muscle strength in the front and back of the joint. To avoid problems like this make sure to do plenty of research to get a good complete workout for all your muscle groups. Getting a complete workout will ensure that your muscles build up equally and you will build a better overall complete strength. Also the more muscles you work out means the more lean muscle you will be building throughout your body, this will assist in raising your BMR (Base Metabollic Rate) and helping you to lose weight faster.

Also for the girls out there don't be afraid of lifting weights. I can assure you that you will not look like the crazy bulky body builder chicks that everyone so dreads. First of all it is impossible for women to look like that naturally. To do that they train 5-7 days a week on a pro body builder schedule (3-4 hours a day or more) and secondly and most important they take hormones such as testosterone (male hormones) and supplements to force their muscles to grow like that. If you are a typical fitness girl that goes to the gym 3-4 times a week and lifts some weights you will become toned and curvy, develop a nice booty, and feel more energetic. You will wind up looking like the girl below. So guys and girls make sure to get out there and after you have rebuilt your base strength start pushing yourself and lift some heavier weights to build muscle!!