Bodybuilding Forums

do you do progressive overload? Lifting heavier or doing more reps each workout?

I wish I had some advice to give, but I come from the other side of the fence. I lost 50 lbs of fat and put on 15 lbs of muscle my first six months on THT and low-carb as a thirty-five-year-old.

I stalled out around 232, and again around 215/220. I know those are weights my body likes to hold on to, so I'm trying some plateau-busting strategies to force past it.

Your body, your science project. Hard-gainers generally end up the leanest, best-looking bodybuilders. You just have to find the strategy that works for you.

--Matt B.

Redgiki are you doing cardio this period?

You know how much I hate cardio and I believe that anyone could lose fat without it, but it could help with a plateau where there is no space for further calorie restriction...

Think some 10km runnings occasionally(once or twice a month) after a good carb-up,as a kind of depletion...

Yeah, I did cardio 7x/week last week. The new version of TSPA is out today, and it modifies the strategy to include tuning for carb-ups... I'm all over it

--Matt B.

Yeah, I did cardio 7x/week last week. The new version of TSPA is out today, and it modifies the strategy to include tuning for carb-ups... I'm all over it

7 times !wow! nice...

undertaker610 wrote:Think some 10km runnings occasionally(once or twice a month) after a good carb-up,as a kind of depletion...

If you can go from a cardio-hater to running over 6 miles at a pop, my hat's off to you. Cripes, it took me 6 weeks to build up to a 5K and that was after several years of moderate cardio conditioning. Oh, to be young again...

Best I've done in one 30-minute session so far is 2.2 miles. Yeah, I am teh suck at cardio. My principal excuse is that my heart rate is over 140, and as a recovering obese man I just have trouble pushing too far, too fast on the running thing.

Once I can jog that 30 minutes straight through without walking, I'm considering upping the regimen a bit more. My next baby step, in addition to HIIT, is just to be able to jog/run for 30-45 minutes without sucking wind, stopping, or walking. Even my HIIT is not as high-intensity as many here, I suspect.

--Matt B.

redgiki wrote:My next baby step, in addition to HIIT, is just to be able to jog/run for 30-45 minutes without sucking wind, stopping, or walking. Even my HIIT is not as high-intensity as many here, I suspect.

Do what you can, where you are, with what you have, my man! Heck, I doubt my heart rate will ever be as low as 140 when I run for anything longer than probably 1 minute! It goes up in the 150s-160s and stays there, maybe into the 170s, depending on how fast I go and for how long. Definitely there when I do Tabata intervals. I try to keep it below 170 during my steady state runs now. When I was running all the time, trying to get faster, I could easily push into the 190s. Now that I've scaled back to 8 minutes of Tabata per week and one steady-state run, I'm not sure if I could get it that high again. Scaling back seems to have improved my conditioning. Go figure. If you needed proof that under-recovery hinders progress, there you go!

Oh, sorry for the thread hijack.

mykim0 wrote:do you do progressive overload? Lifting heavier or doing more reps each workout?

Not completely sure if this is directed at me... but yes, I try to. Some weeks inexplicably strange things happen though; like my strength will give out halfway through a set or I'll do massively more on another set. Overall strength has gone up, so that's good.

marochka_raduga wrote:Oh, sorry for the thread hijack.

Well, your apology would be accepted if it wasn't such an absurd hijack. I mean seriously - we went from drinking oil out of desperation to gain weight, to HIIT 7 days a week? Don't worry, just messing.

Anyway, for an update, I picked up a few cartons of heavy whipping cream a few days ago. Unfortunately, I got strep throat for the 4th time in the past two months yesterday, but once that's out of my system, we'll see how the extra food and carbups impact my system. If only there were mass-gainers for low carbers....

triple wrote:Well, your apology would be accepted if it wasn't such an absurd hijack. I mean seriously - we went from drinking oil out of desperation to gain weight, to HIIT 7 days a week? Don't worry, just messing.

Oh, then you probably don't want to hear about how I gained over 6 pounds of muscle and dropped 9 pounds of fat in 5.5 months, do you?

I'm so sorry you've got strep throat again, poor thing. I used to get it so bad when I was a kid my face would swell and I'd get a nasty oozy rash all over, and once I was even hospitalized for three days (pretty severe considering we had no insurance)! They steadfastly refused to take my tonsils even though I got it over and over and over because they swore that I'd eventually grow out of it. You know what? They were right-- I haven't had it in about 18 or 19 years, and I'm glad I still have an intact immune system.

Be sure to finish your whole course of antibiotics so you don't contribute to the resistant bacteria problem, please. You live in a dorm, right? Methinks you might need to work on building a habit of washing your hands a lot more often, carrying hand sanitizer and being more mindful about touching things in common areas and then touching your face. I'm sure there isn't a person among us who couldn't stand to be a bit more mindful in that arena. Of course, your good exercise and diet habits are boosting your immunity, so just think how much worse it would be if you were a lazy slug like the rest of the Joe Six-packs (not the good kind of six-pack either!). And hopefully once you're out of those cramped living quarters and grow up a couple more years, you will be strep-free like me!