Bodybuilding Forums

Hey folks,

This is my first post here.

I'm looking for a solution to my weight problems. I am currently 238 lbs, male, 32, 5'10, and I think I need to be closer to 185lbs at least.

I've spent the past 3 years yawing between extreme dieting - vlcd/psmf etc. and binging / overeating. And my natural tendency, when wanting to lose weight, is to reach out for one of these methods. In fact, I don't feel i am doing it right unless I am literally starving.

But I've recently come to see the pattern I've been stuck in - of attempting difficult sub 800 cal a day diets, succeeding for a while, then binging. These regimes also pretty much preclude all exercise, except a few heavy reps for each body part on weights to limit LBM loss.

I just want to shed the weight and get lean and healthy, and increase my LBM. If it was possible to shed a stone per month, whilst exercising, I'd be happy.

I know there are two programs on offer with muscle hack. I just wonder if anyone has any advice about what to do, how to start, and the kind of results I could expect.

Cheers,
ggis

Dude, you need an intelligent plan that gives you a reasonable chance to steadily stick with it. Not trying to pimp for Mark here, but you really need to get the Total Six Pack Abs book. It's scientifically based and it's not hard to stick to. It's all about shedding fat. Don't be hung up about weight. Let's say, for instance, you lose 1.5 pounds of fat in a week and gain 0.5 pounds of muscle, you've lost a pound - almost negligible, but you've actually made two pounds of progress. You can actually do more than that, but that's an example.

gottagetinshape wrote:Hey folks,

This is my first post here.

I'm looking for a solution to my weight problems. I am currently 238 lbs, male, 32, 5'10, and I think I need to be closer to 185lbs at least.

I've spent the past 3 years yawing between extreme dieting - vlcd/psmf etc. and binging / overeating. And my natural tendency, when wanting to lose weight, is to reach out for one of these methods. In fact, I don't feel i am doing it right unless I am literally starving.

But I've recently come to see the pattern I've been stuck in - of attempting difficult sub 800 cal a day diets, succeeding for a while, then binging. These regimes also pretty much preclude all exercise, except a few heavy reps for each body part on weights to limit LBM loss.

I just want to shed the weight and get lean and healthy, and increase my LBM. If it was possible to shed a stone per month, whilst exercising, I'd be happy.

I know there are two programs on offer with muscle hack. I just wonder if anyone has any advice about what to do, how to start, and the kind of results I could expect.

Cheers,
ggis

Been there, done that (except I'm 5'8", not 5'10").

First and foremost, your big problem here is psychological, not physiological. You absolutely must break this mindset into tiny little irreparable pieces, and never pick it back up or attempt to put it back together ever ever again for the rest of your life. Go strip and stand in front of a full-length mirror, and give yourself a good look. Go ahead and be critical, look at everything you wish didn't look that way. This is what your attempts thus far have yielded. You have starved and deprived yourself for this body - and it is the starvation phases that caused it, since they both drove the hunger and feelings of deprivation that mentally made you binge, and it's the starvation phases that drove the metabolic crash that caused your body to convert all that excess straight to fat. You do not want to be 238 pounds any more. By body mass index, an admittedly flawed way to measure but it works for our purposes for now, at 5'10", you should be closer to 160 pounds. You are overweight by a fifth-grader. If all that starvation, all that self-abuse, that feeling of starving that you've equated to "doing it right" has amounted to you lugging around that much extra weight, shouldn't that feeling really amount to doing it wrong?

Now lemme give you a new mental picture - Drew Carey. He's 5'10, like you. He's dropped 80 pounds and fits a size 33-34 waist, like you are most likely aiming for. And what does Drew say made it work? A low carb diet, and regular intense exercise. There are millions of people all around the world with similar results from switching to a low-carb lifestyle, and the best part is since you can have your fat you don't feel like you're starving to death. The old low-fat-high-carb foolishness has all been a big fat lie. The evidence is staring you right in the face that it doesn't work, just like it's staring you in the face that somethign else does.

The problem with the "go on a diet" mentality is that it makes your diet something you "go on" - like how you "go on" a vacation. And much like how you also come back from a vacation, as long as this is your mentality, you will come back from your diet, too. The simple fact is you are fat not because you need to go on a diet - you go on a diet because you are fat. The cause of your fatness is poor nutrition and a sedentary lifestyle. If you wish to permanently remedy the obesity, you need to permanently eradicate the cause. If the sink is overflowing, you don't just scoop out some water - you shut off the spigot and open up the drain.

Of course, in 32 years, scooping out water has become a way of life. Your belt-busting bad habits have had a chance to become thoroughly ingrained by now. You may not even be fully aware of some of your worst dietary disasters, nor how to go about exercising in a productive, meaningful way. Of course, this isn't going to be as fast as our analogy. Most folks simply cannot shift from where you are now (and where some of us were not long ago) to where you need to be overnight any more than you can immediately go from 238 and fat to 165 and built. The name of the game here is going to be incremental progress (and MH vets, this is going to go against a LOT of what we usually talk about, but we usually don't talk about these whopping huge changes, either, so trust me).

I know you say you want to do this. I know you say you realize the bad pattern, and your subject would lead me to believe you probably feel like you know this is something that needs to be brought under control. But as trite as the old saying is, you have to want it. You have to be able to literally look at everything short of your job, your home, and your loved ones and be willing to make changes to all of it - and make them without regret or remorse. For example, saying it'll be hard to get used to life without beer is one thing - but not being able to give up beer and conniving clever ways to keep it is self-sabotage waiting for a place to happen. You may even need to change the nature of some of your relationships. If going out to eat is the thing you do with your friends, you will likely have to find new things to do, or at least better places to go. If you have a significant other, actively recruit their support - and make sure they understand that they should absolutely never encourage you to cheat "just that once". Same goes for roomies. Living with other people is a dietary hazard. You must enlist them in your cause, if anything convince them that they should follow your lead and eat healthier.

Step two - start eating healthier. Specifically, start eating whole foods. This is likely going to be a huge huge huge change, so implement it slowly. Start with processed foods. Processed cheese, processed meat and meat byproduct, boxed dinners, instant anything of any kind, those strange foods with expiration dates of 2025 and beyond, and every trace of high-fructose corn syrup (or glucose-fructose syrup as it's called in the UK) - purge it all from your kitchen, and do not bring them back in ever again. These are the foods chiefly responsible for your bad diet. They are easy and convenient and unspeakably awful for you. Remember our overflowing sink? These foods are the spigot going full-blast for all it's worth. Make it stop.

Though, you are going to need to eat something. MANS and GLAD and TSPA are awesome - for their intended purposes. MANS and GLAD will work great when you're ready to focus on building muscle and adding back serious pounds of lean mass. TSPA will get you that last mile - the dread final five pounds or so that's always next to impossible to lose. For right this minute, you just need to get from critically unhealthy weight to healthy weight, so we don't need to be terribly uptight about macronutrients or calculating a precise caloric need. We just need you to think of "meal" as a reasonable amount of food consumed at one time, and not the old meat/starch/veggies formula that made our mothers give us thousand-calorie dinners every night. You can eat anything - ANYTHING - you please that isn't processed. Anything. Want a taco? Have a taco. Hankering for red meat? Have red meat. Like your veggies with butter? Have the butter. And yes, I mean the real honest-to-goodness butter, margarine is processed food which makes it the Devil. But there's a catch. Meals need to be between 500 and 700 calories. Do not consume more than 3 full meals, and limit snacking to once of not more than 100 calories of preferably whole unprocessed foods - if at all. Meals may not contain more than ONE SERVING of carbs. That's 15g give or take (by which I mean a couple grams, not double). Not one large potato, not two slices of bread, fifteen grams of carbohydrate, period, non-negotiable. If you pick one rule to be psycho-strict about from the word go, make it this one. You cannot and you must not eat carb-heavy meals, or your body will burn off muscle instead of fat. Of all the other mistakes you can make along the way, nothing will hamper your success more than over-indulging your carbs. For now, don't even carb cycle like MANS and TSPA recommend. Just go straight-up low carb and don't look back for the next 40-50 pounds (which will be gone in 2-3 months).

Of course, you realize by now you're going to have to pay attention to what goes in your mouth. Gone are the days of gee that looks tasty I'd like to eat that and so I will. You'll reach the point in the fullness of time where you can have a piece of cheesecake or a pint of ice cream on a special occasion and not worry about counting the calories. That day is not today my friend. Today is the day we make good friends with the nutritional information box on the food we buy. Be it at your local Tesco buying the week's groceries, or sitting at your desk trying to figure out what to do on your lunch break, do not put it in your mouth until you know just exactly what you are putting in your mouth. At the moment, it's OK for you to just sit down and figure the next meal and move on. Like let's say on a lunch break you decide you want a burger. You can go on the BK website, look up a whopper with cheese, and if you do the math, all you gotta do is have them hold the bun (which they'll do in the States, dunno about the UK), and POOF! Under 15g carbs, under 700 calories, even with the mayo and the cheese and everything else they load it up with. Eventually, you'll need to take stricter dietary control if you want to do more than just achieve a healthy weight, so starting that habit sooner than later is a good idea. I encourage you to use a site like Livestrong's My Plate[url], or [url=http://www.fitday.com/]FitDay, or my personal favorite FatSecret (which also has a nifty Android and iPhone/iPad app that works with the website profile). These sites take the guess work out of what's in what you eat, and can help you keep track, but if that seems too much work for you, then for right now, let it be too much work, and take it one meal at a time.

Oh, and about booze... NO FERMENTED BOOZE, EVER. No malteds, no beer, no ale, no wine. Nothing with sugars added, either, like the various flavored alcohols. These are insulin-spiking, diet-wrecking, binge-inducing bombs in a bottle that must be gone from your diet for now. They rank up there with high-fructose corn syrup on the list of things you can't have. If you really want a drink, it's hard liquor (rum, whiskey, vodka, gin) with a calorie-free chaser (whiskey & diet, gin & tonic), and it comes out of your "snack" calories we talked about above - basically limiting you to two weak drinks. If you can cut out the booze altogether until you're down to your target weight, all the better. Liquor is really just empty calories anyway.

There's the diet part. If you do as I say, you are consuming between 1500 and 2200 calories a day, and not more than 45g of carbs. You will be, guaranteed, eating less than your maintenance calories, and doing it in such a way that you are not going to trigger starvation responses, nor starve yourself, nor feel particularly famished all the time. It's some extra work. Compared to how you eat today, it's probably a TON of extra work. But this is one half of the equation that I swear to you will get the extra weight off faster than you ever thought possible - and help lay the groundwork for keeping it off. The other half, as you no doubt already expected, is exercise.

Exercise, like your diet, takes planning, commitment, and a life-style change. Right now, your life moves according to a set routine. You get up at a certain time, have breakfast, shower, go to work, have lunch, finish work, go home, have dinner, go to bed, and repeat. You will need to free up about an hour to 90 minutes somewhere in between get up and go to bed. This needs to be somewhere that will always fit, as a permanent addition to your routine, and it needs to be as much of a solid immovable commitment as your start time at work. For your purposes right now, the optimal time is before breakfast. This will eventually change - it'll actually become less important when it happens and more important to just do it daily - but for now if you can do it before breakfast, make it so. If you can't, no big deal. Think about where you will work out as well. Do you have weights at home? If so, do you have all the equipment you need? Will you be joining a gym? If so, how long will it take you to get there? Can you afford the dues? Figure out what's going to work before you dive in - a little planning will go a long way.

As to the routine itself (and again, MH vets don't kill me here, the starting point is way off from what MANS/GLAD/TSPA envisions, so the approach must necessarily be changed), you're looking at 6 days in the gym, and 1 off. Three of your days will be just weights, and three will be just cardio and abs. The weight part is dumb easy for me to explain - cuz I'm gonna rip it off of THT HIT's Mass workout. Go here, download the spreadsheet, and only bother with the MASS tab. There are 3 modifcations I want you to make from what Mark prescribes for THT on that sheet. You are not ready for training to failure the way Mark advocates. You will get there - and you will get there in 3 months, 4 max - but again, that is not now. Modification #1: Do not do 7-10 reps to failure. Do sets of 12. The weight should be enough that the last few reps are a struggle - but possible. If you cannot finish the set, it's too heavy, and if you can finish it and not honestly need your break at the end, it's probably too light. As the weeks go by, you'll increase the weight by the smallest available increment as you reach the point that the entire set is relatively easy. Modification #2: Do 3 sets, not 1. THT HIT envisions you bulking. You aren't bulking. The goal is to get your muscles moving again, to get them used to strength training, and to build up a nice baseline so when you ARE ready to do serious intense training, you can. Modification #3: Delete the "ABS" part. That's gonna go on Cardio day. Otherwise, you're basically going to do the workout exactly as laid out. Take 2 minutes rest between each set - except Shoulders, take your rest after the Overhead Press, and take no rest after Lateral Raises. No biggie if your rests end up being a minute-thirty, or two and a half, but try and stay around the 2-minute mark. Of your 6 days at the gym, this is your routine for days 1, 3, and 5.

And then there's days 2, 4 and 6, which are... drum roll please.... CARDIO!! Cardio is a cutting strategy, nothing more nothing less. Stick around these parts and you'll hear all kinds of guys throw all kinds of tantrums about how bad cardio is for weight lifters - and they're right, it is. For you, however, it's justified in that you have a significant amount of weight that needs to come off like yesterday. Cardio is any activity that greatly increases your heart rate that you can do at a steady pace for 30-45 minutes. That's it. Bike, elliptical, treadmill, swimming, doesn't matter. Intensity wise, go as hard as you can that you can maintain for at minimum 30 minutes. If at the end of that 30 minutes you're reduced to a sweating, panting, immovable mess, that's fine - ok, no, that's freaking awesome and you should aim for that every time - but it's OK if where you're at right now means it's a brisk walk. There's no race, there's no pressure to run a 6-minute-mile, you just want to go reasonably hard (again, significantly raise the pulse, about 160-170 bpm if you have a way to measure), and not stop for 30 minutes. No breaks, either - sip your water as you go, but do not stop. Follow up with three sets of ten each decline crunches[url], [url=http://www.bodybuilding.com/exercises/detail/view/name/leg-pull-in]leg pull-ins, and oblique crunches (which have to be done on each side). For extra credit, tack on stomach vaccums. They don't really build abs so much as strengthen and tighten your transverse muscle, which can help draw your core back in and give the appearance of more rapidly losing weight around the stomach. With weight training, you up the weights. With your abwork, start by upping the reps. When you're banging out sets of 20 and it's not a challenge, we can start talking weighted exercises. For cardio, once it becomes easy, well, it should never become easy. Crank up the intensity. Run faster. Or uphill. Or get ankle weights or a training vest. With any given machine, you can easily increase the intensity - this should never, ever be an issue.

Do this for not less than 10 weeks, and not more than 12. During that time, save your money - you'll be replacing your wardrobe soon.

It's important to note you cannot continue eating and training like I've described indefinitely. You absolutely must take a week off from the training aspect of it at not later than week #13. Must. There's a seriously very good chance that at that point you can think about doing MANS or THT or TSPA to continue to get in better shape. You can use your week off to evaluate what you want to do next and set new goals. Doing what I've described for 10-12 weeks should meet if not exceed your goal of 14 pounds a month.

Supplement wise, you can take creatine, but it's not necessary at this point - we aren't looking for growth. Do take a good multi-vitamin. Take a good omega 3/6/9 complex supplement. Take CLA, about 5g a day. You have the option of doing the EC stack, too. 25mg of ephedra, 200mg of caffeine. If you choose to do this, start during week 2, one dose (both the ephedra and the caffeine) first thing in the morning. You can go to twice a day if you like the next week, and 3 times a day the following week, depending on how you react to it. Do not exceed 3 times a day. Do not take them less than 4 hours apart, or less than 6 hours before bed. At 3 weeks before you're finished this cycle, you'll need to drop to twice daily, and 2 weeks out drop to once daily, and your last week should be free of ephedra and caffeine entirely.

And that, my friend, is that. This will get rid of the weight, and should put you on good footing to continue making strength gains and getting in better shape down the road. Feel free to bombard away with questions.

JoH, that's the most damned impressive answer I've ever seen.

Joh

I SAID IT TO YOU BEFORE ( I LOVE READING YOUR COLUMNS AND ADVICE TO PEOPLE ) YOU'VE JUST GIVE THIS GUY A WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE AND A WORKOUT REGIME THAT ANY UNFIT PERSON ON THIS PLANET WOULD AND PROBABLY HAS PAID IN EXCESS OF $1000 FOR!

( GOTTAGETINSHAPE ) YOU KICK YOUR ASS OF YOUR COUCH RIGHT NOW AND PRINT WHAT JOH HAS GIVEN YOU HERE, MAKE A PROMISE TO YOURSELF AND MORE IMPORTANTLY TO HIM WHERE YOU ARE GONNA BE IN 12 MONTHS FROM NOW AND UPLOAD PICTURES OF YOURSELF TO HIM AT THE END OF THOSE 12 MONTHS FOR WHAT HE HAS DONE FOR YOU HERE, INCLUDING THE TIME AND EFFORT HE HAS SPENT ADVIISING YOU HERE FOR FREE.

DON'T LET YOURSELF DOWN OR JOH HERE, YOU OWE IT TO THIS GUY FOR DOING THIS FOR YOU

JOH YOU ARE A CREDIT AND A FINE EXAMPLE TO THIS WEBSITE!

Weight Watchers did it for me. Taught me how to count what I was eating.
They tailor their daily points to your age too. I wrap Mark's TSPA and GLAD and MANS inside my WW point count.
Mark's stuff is not age specific. Took me a while to realize this. As you get older, you burn less.

JoH...great info!

I am sort of in the same situation. At one time, a looong time ago, I was in very good shape.

I started with weights about five weeks ago, just getting my muscles ready and getting back to a routine. Then found this site and started THT 3 about weeks ago, and then bought TSPA and did that for a week. I had good strength gains in THT and TSPA and I saw my size returning as well.

Then read your response here, and it seems that it would apply to me more than THT or TSPA for now. So this week I started with your recommendations.

My concerns though are doing three sets for the whole body with only 48 hours rest, and the amount of work in each workout. If abs and wrist are removed, that leaves eight exercises. Three set would mean 24 total sets, and if there is two minutes rest and one minute for the set, that’s three minutes per set. The workout would last about 75 minutes.

Is that too long for one workout? And 48 hours enough rest for some growth? I know that this isn't mass building, but keeping or actually adding some while doing this would be a great option.

I was thinking of splitting the workout into two, it would look like this

Monday workout #1
Tuesday Cardio\abs
Wednesday Workout #2
Thursday Cardio\abs
Friday workout #1
Saturday Workout #2 and Cardio\abs (weights in morning, Cardio in evening)
Sunday rest

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

bulldogs wrote:JoH...great info!

I am sort of in the same situation. At one time, a looong time ago, I was in very good shape.

And a long time ago, I was morbidly obese...

And guys - thanks for all the positive comments. I promised myself if I ever met someone who was where I was years ago, I would without question offer them every tip and trick I ever learned along the way to help them avoid my mistakes and pitfalls. Kind of like if you read Mark's bio stuff how he does what he does for free because of his triumph over the hardgainer's curse, for me, it was victory over beached whale status. When you fight and win that big of a battle it feels like you owe it to others to help them realize their dreams and goals, too.

bulldogs wrote:I started with weights about five weeks ago, just getting my muscles ready and getting back to a routine. Then found this site and started THT 3 about weeks ago, and then bought TSPA and did that for a week. I had good strength gains in THT and TSPA and I saw my size returning as well.

Then read your response here, and it seems that it would apply to me more than THT or TSPA for now. So this week I started with your recommendations.

My concerns though are doing three sets for the whole body with only 48 hours rest, and the amount of work in each workout. If abs and wrist are removed, that leaves eight exercises. Three set would mean 24 total sets, and if there is two minutes rest and one minute for the set, that’s three minutes per set. The workout would last about 75 minutes.

Is that too long for one workout? And 48 hours enough rest for some growth? I know that this isn't mass building, but keeping or actually adding some while doing this would be a great option.

There are BIG CRITICAL DIFFERENCES between what I'm talking about versus using TSPA. Both are going to be effective approaches, and depending on where you are on the whole big long continuum from 255 of fat and 255 of muscle, one or the other could be remarkably effective.

If you read TSPA, Mark talks about RMR and BMR for folks who are already training. He is absolutely correct in his application of Katch-McArdle as long as that assumption holds true. If you are already active, if you are looking to shed the last few pounds, basically going from "average" to "very lean", the principles he lays out are absolutely the superior option. Ballpark numbers I'd say if you were in the teens for body fat percentage, or less than ~25lbs total of body fat to lose, you're likely better off with TSPA.

However, if you are sedentary, then a multiplier of 1.55 for Katch-McArdle BMR calculations is inappropriate. Mark is correct, active people burn more calories just sitting around, but that metabolic acceleration does not happen in a week or two. If you are very fat, you are quite likely to also be very sedentary. Our poor victim of pop dieting, GGIS, stated that his previous attempts included very little exercise. Very low calorie and modified fasting diets never include much exercise, because you're eating virtually nothing. You don't have the strength to do them. If you are sedentary, 8-12 weeks of about an hour a day will shove both you and your metabolism out of couch potato mode. As to how fat is very fat, again, no hard and fast numbers, but I'd advise the twenties and up in body fat percentage, or over 50 pounds to drop.

As for the space between teens and twenties on body fat percentages, and the space between 25lbs and 50lbs, that's a judgment call. If you've been a couch potato, TSPA may be less effective; if you're active, TSPA will probably be the better option. Yes, your activity levels and BMR/RMR before you start any program matter that much.

As to timeframes... yes, 75 minutes is a long work out. You can cut it down to closer to 60 minutes by taking a 1:30 break instead of 2 - though lower than that isn't really a break at all. Yes, 48 hours between full body workouts is short. However, at no point are we talking work to failure here, and that makes a heap ton of diference. If we were working to failure, you'd have to be a madman to do that many sets that close together with cardio and abwork in between, and not just regular mad, like stark raving frothing at the mouth insane. Under those circumstances, working to failure will cause loads more fatigue, and that level of exercise for these spans of times is going to cause all sorts of badness and thwart muscle growth and weight loss both. You can overtrain to the point of triggering cortisol overproduction, which means your body will start catabolizing muscle no matter what you do or don't do, as well as start piling fat around the waist. If I told you do this kind of routine to failure, that's what you'd be doing. Since I'm specifically telling you DO NOT work to failure, we don't have to worry about cortisol overproduction. Experience dictates that not working to failure, horrible evil cortisol land is in the 90-120 minute range. We should be ok.

There's no part of anything I advised that is remotely concerned with muscle growth, only preservation. You will not see giant gains from this routine. Your gains will be fairly modest from start to finish, and will be primarily strength not size. No working to failure means primarily working type I and IIA fibers, i.e. strength not size, which should mean once he's finished with this he could pick up, say, a barbell and do deads far easier and with less likelihood of injury than if he did so today - again, the point is to undo the damage of years of sedentary living, to get the guy to the point where he can train the way Mark advocates. But you're still inducing cellular microtrauma, which still triggers the body to repair muscle tissue rather than just catabolize it, so you won't go backwards, and you won't burn off colossal amounts of muscle.

You are going to want that week off at the end of the cycle, and it will absolutely happen not later than week 13, for the simple fact that by that point, you're just not going to be in the sort of condition that would justify it. You'd be considered active and not sedentary, which changes the Katch-McArdle calculation, which in turn changes your calorie deficit from relatively modest to terrifyingly big. Consider a guy of 140lbs worth of lean mass (who would weigh in at about 200lbs if he's got over 50lbs of fat to lose, versus about 170 if he's a better candidate for TSPA). If he sits at his desk all day and isn't active needs about 2000 calories, but if the same guy is engaged in physical activity daily or close to it, his RMR jumps up to 2600-2700 - and I've got you eating 1500-2200 calories a day. At the beginning, inactive, overly fat, you can do the math yourself, it's not a huge huge cut. At the end, now highly active and not overly fat, 1500 a day on a caloric need of 2600 excluding exercise is begging for a metabolic crash. The week off of "normal eating" gives your body a chance to eliminate any systemic fatigue, and ensures any starvation response we've induced gets switched back off. Unless you started at OMG huge, you will not be repeating this cycle after your week off, and you'd hopefully never again in your life need to - you'd swap to TSPA to get down to very lean, then swap to MANS or GLAD to take advantage of homeostasis and very low body fat to pack on muscle.

In a nutshell - I don't think either approach is universally appropriate for every single human being on earth, and the leaner or fatter, and the more or less active you are should be the factor that drives what approach you use. It's like a road trip - you gotta get out of the garage before you get on the freeway, and you don't do freeway speeds in your driveway, or driveway speeds on the freeway!

bulldogs wrote:I was thinking of splitting the workout into two, it would look like this

Monday workout #1
Tuesday Cardio\abs
Wednesday Workout #2
Thursday Cardio\abs
Friday workout #1
Saturday Workout #2 and Cardio\abs (weights in morning, Cardio in evening)
Sunday rest

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

You could split the workout in two if you wanted. I don't recommend it. You've already trained pretty damn hard, and you're going to go pull 30-45 on an elliptical? It's doable, sure, but if the concern is overall systemic fatigue, then address overall systemic fatigue and chip a bit off the workouts rather than go somewhat easy all week and then murder yourself Saturday. Really, for the whole big long explanation I gave, I don't think the long workouts are overdoing it because they're not to failure. If you find them too taxing, or they are too tiring, or you notice symptoms of overtraining or cortisol overproduction (fat accumulation around the waist, and your weight loss will just about stop cold), then I'd rather see you chuck a set off the entire workout than split it, just because of what you have to do to yourself here on Saturday. Anything your body reacts badly to you simply shouldn't do - even for one day.

JoH...all I can say is wow, you are always so thorough and helpful, thank you.

I guess I am trying to get ahead of myself a little too much. The past 4-5 years, through various reasons, I had not been able to workout. Not because of time, but more due to medical reasons. And before that it was on and off, mostly off though. Now, I am feeling much better and wanted to get back in shape and get my size back. In my mind, I am that person I was 16 years ago, in my body, I am not even close

I saw some gains in THT-TSPA and started to feel good about things. But, the reality is....I have about 50-60 lbs to lose. I think that your approach is the right thing to do, drop the fat, get my muscles working again, then pack on the lean mass.

I will be resuming my classes on Monday and Wednesday nights, those classes would be an equivalent to a boxing or kickboxing workout. I think it would be best if I use those classes as my cardio day and then do the normal cardio on Fridays. Or...do you think cardio on those mornings would be OK, or may lead to over-training?

bulldogs wrote:JoH...all I can say is wow, you are always so thorough and helpful, thank you.

I guess I am trying to get ahead of myself a little too much. The past 4-5 years, through various reasons, I had not been able to workout. Not because of time, but more due to medical reasons. And before that it was on and off, mostly off though. Now, I am feeling much better and wanted to get back in shape and get my size back. In my mind, I am that person I was 16 years ago, in my body, I am not even close

Other way around for me... the brain thinks I'm still 19, but thank good God almighty the body isn't that way any more!

bulldogs wrote:I saw some gains in THT-TSPA and started to feel good about things. But, the reality is....I have about 50-60 lbs to lose. I think that your approach is the right thing to do, drop the fat, get my muscles working again, then pack on the lean mass.

You know your body better than anyone else. In my little brain, if you don't get the desired results from your selected approach, you should change it. Considering the amount of weight you're talking about, yeah, my approach might work for you - worst that happens is it doesn't, and nothing says you can't drop it at whatever point you need to.

bulldogs wrote:I will be resuming my classes on Monday and Wednesday nights, those classes would be an equivalent to a boxing or kickboxing workout. I think it would be best if I use those classes as my cardio day and then do the normal cardio on Fridays. Or...do you think cardio on those mornings would be OK, or may lead to over-training?

Yep. Those classes are cardio. There's no such thing as "normal" cardio - I'm calling for 30-45 minutes of continuous activity that keeps your heart rate elevated. You can do cartwheels for a half hour if you wanted to, on this part it doesn't matter what you do, only that you do it.