Random health and exercise thoughts - Page 5

I forgot how satisfying a self-prepared meal could be. I used to cook all the time, but had strayed to just making turkey burgers or chicken breasts for a while. I whipped up a stir fry tonight with some curry sauce I picked up at the grocery store. Stuff turned dull diced chicken into a fucking treat. Also remembered how much I like snap peas.

Being skinny and having a good immune system is a bit of a cursed blessing, no motivation to exercise except for vanity.

^yeah, no GH. roids don;t bloat

A question more than a thought but today is the last of ten days off from the gym after what had been 3-4x/week lifting for about three months or so. I had been adding a pound per week to many of my lifts (or half a pound per workout-- I'm n00b enough that microweights are great and I never fail). So, if I was hypothetically doing 5x5 at 200lbs 10 days ago, do I go back to trying 5x5 at 200.5 lbs as if I never took a break, or should I deload a bit?

That's so miniscule it won't matter. Take a day to get re-acquainted with the poundages. Ten days completely away from an activity is pretty sufficient deloading and your nervous system is probably detrained a bit as well (will only take a day or two to get back to the same 'feel').

So I got one of these for Christmas:



And I was looking on bodybuilding.com and came across this article. If you don't want to read it, it basically says a good way to build biceps size is to hang in pull-up position as long as you can and fight it the whole way down.

Is this worth adding on to the end of my biceps workout?

A focus on eccentric work will lead to more hypertrophy than concentric work, so it may be worth adding. But if you have a decent amount of volume already on your "biceps workouts" then you might be better suited to replace one exercise with these negative chinups to avoid overdoing it.

i have realized this year that everything works but nothing works forever.

am doing one extended set per bodypart these days.

just did:

curls:

60 x 15
75 x 12
90 x 12
105 x 10
115 x 9
135 x 8
150 x 7
175 x 6
190 x 3
160 x 4
135 x 6
105 x 5
90 x 5
60 x 5

close grip bench:

100 x 25
135 x 25
165 x 20
190 x 17
205 x 15
225 x 12
250 x 10
275 x 8
305 x 6
315 x 5
335 x 5
365 x 4
315 x 5
275 x 6
225 x 5
190 x 5
135 x 7

I should probably ask some of you guys for workout advice. I just do 5 sets of 5 for my compound exercises, (bench, squats, deadlift) and 3 sets of 10 for all auxiluries. No one really taught me, I've just been copying what seems to work for others. I've also been trying to put on mass, haven't gained a pound in like 2 years.

What man wants to be skinny? I don't want to look like the Hulk, but I don't want to be skinny and weak either.

My exercise thought: don't workout to look like you're in shape, workout to actually be in shape.

That's pretty unacceptable if gaining weight is a goal of yours. Do you mind if I ask if your lifts have improved much in the past two years? I'm assuming they haven't.

You might do well to put in some consistent reading of tmuscle.com articles (esp nutrition / gaining). You should be able to recognize pretty easily that 2 yrs with no gains isn't right and it's your diet that is holding you back.

Hypocritically, I'm struggling with the same issue right now. When I first got going with this early last summer, I took the protein + veggie mantra too far. Right now I'm working on adding 500 kcals a day of whole milk and rolled oats to my diet. All my lifts are stagnant and I'm more likely to lose than gain weight. It's bad.

It still freaks me out that your DL and bench are the same.