"Looks like someone's got a case of the Mondays!"

Yes indeedly, and it's every day that's gym day.  It's been hard for me lately to motivate myself to go to the gym every week; once I'm there everything is fine and dandy but actually getting myself there becomes a battle every night.  While I think it's way too early for me to be hitting any sort of burn out I'm definitely far enough past the "newbie" phase that the quick improvements are going by the way side, so now I have to buckle down and really work at it.  I'm pretty impatient in general, so it's hard for me to be motivated without continual visual improvement. While I'm glad I recognize it for what it is, it doesn't make it any easier for things like Dragon Age to not eat up all my time.

Tomorrow is weigh in / measurement day and I'm more than a little happy.  Looks like my weight will be ~165, which means I only have 5 more lbs to my goal of 170.  Granted that translates into another 4 or 5 weeks, but I'm trying really hard not to think about that too much.  After that it's a week to relax the diet a bit, then I start cutting down again. I've had tons of support and advice from my friends (Dorian and my old trainer Dennis at 1 on 1 Personal Training) in regards to diet and exercise and I couldn't have done it without them. I mentioned that it was hard for me to stay motivated, but the easiest way I've found so far is to be open about what I'm working on and my goals are- I find I'm less likely to let myself slide if I know other people "watching" what I'm doing.  Ironically that's also today's topic on the My Daily Wellness Tip blog.  Another good motivation tool is that I have friends coming to ME now for fitness advice.  It's a good confidence booster and it helps me to keep myself on track.   I also follow a few different twitter feeds and forums for fitness motivation; For websites, there's the forums at Bodybuilding.com of course, the forums over at Daily Burn (as well as a small fitness group I'm a member of there), and My Daily Wellness Tip, which is run by a few different folks. I follow many of those sites by Twitter, including jlboissonneault from the Daily Wellness Tip blog, Bodybuildingcom which is pretty self explanatory, and Bodybdercoupons which is a Twitter feed of new forum topics + discount codes.  Dennis my old trainer has a Twitter feed as well as 1on1trainer.

Here's to hoping there's only 4 more weeks to go!

I'm currently in what's known as a "bulking phase" and I hate every minute of it.  That picture is my lunch today: A sandwhich with 3 servings of turkey, fat free cheese, tomato, and lettuce, rice cake chips, carrots, trail mix, a light Muscle Milk, sugar free Jello, and water.  (   o   .   o   )  I feel like a blimp most of the day.  The scary thing is all that food is only 560 calories.  Eating this much food is soooorta expensive.

 It's widely accepted that you can't add muscle without adding fat, so most serious gym rats do what's called a bulk/cut cycle.  You "bulk" for 2-3 months which involves in eating excessive calories, then flip and "cut" for about the same amount of time eating fewer calories.  Everyone has what's called a "maintenance" level of calories- it's the point where your daily calorie intake is exactly equal to what you use in a day.  Granted it's hard to do that on a day to day basis, so most people use a weekly total and average it up.  Since adding 1lb of muscle of fat requires 3500 calories, that easily breaks down to 500 extra calories a day for a week.  If you're trying to cut, you shave an extra 500 a day. Sounds easy right?

The problem comes in determining your maintenance level of calories.  Lots of people use a body mass index formula (BMI) like the one described here.  The problem is that everyone is different; the formula varies by weight, height, and gender. It can take a bit of experimentation and time to figure out what your maintenance level is.  For reference mine is ~2400-2800 calories a day.  I started bulking two weeks ago and weighed 155. As of this Friday's weigh in I'm up to 163.  I've been slowly increasing my calories until I hit ~3200 on gym days and 2900 on non gym days.  I finally seem to be adding mass pretty well and increasing strength-wise, so I don't see a need to mess with the formula much more.  The only downside is I'm starting to reacquire a bit of a spare tire again.  I was originally going to try and hit 170, but I'm not 100% sure that that 15lb increase has a good ratio of muscle to fat.  On average for most people it's 2lbs of fat for every 1lb of muscle, so starting at 170 I'd have to cut back down to ~160.  It's an eternal juggling act as you lose a bit of muscle when cutting too, so I may just go for 175 before starting the cut. I'm adding in a light bit of cardio 2-3 times a week for a few weeks to see if I can't get back to a better ratio without impacting calories much. 

It's a good feeling when small shirts are too small through the shoulders and chest though :)  

Wait, a new beginning? ANOTHER blog?
It feels rather artificial and nonsensical for me to be starting a fitness blog.  I already have a website/blog that I maintain, I already track a lot of my nutrition and gym workouts through a profile on Daily Burn, and I'm definitely not someone who should be giving out advice.  This site is mostly for me, but if you can read it and glean some worth then so be it.  I couldn't help but feel that I needed some separation of my new gym hobby from the rest of my life.  I try to be marginally thought provoking on my main site (or at least tell a good story) and boring updates about gym routines and food doesn't really fit in with that. I suppose I could have just rolled out a separate Wordpress instance or even done some trickier to segregate fitness posts out, but I like the idea of having my fitness blog its own entity.   It still posts an update to Twitter, Facebook, and even LiveJournal if you have it, but I tend to use those social networking sites more to aggregate the content of "me" from across the web.

Ok, so what's going on here?
There will probably be very few (if any) organized, well thought out posts.  Since Posterous is updated via email I'll probably be jotting down quick notes to send off instead of long hours composing and rewriting anything.  A lot of it will probably be thoughts on food and exercise, with the occasional update on my fitness progress.

With sexy pictures?!?!
Uuhhh.. yeah, probably not. Progress pictures? Sure. Very tasteful ones. You dirty people.

Why should I read this then?
Well, you honestly probably shouldn't. See the first paragraph and all.  You lucky people on one of the above social services are just gonna get these posts as an extra free service.  Feel free to ignore it!

Why not just keep all this on Daily Burn? They have a blog you can post to.
Well, yes they do.   The problem is there's no way to get to that content going outside of Daily Burn (rss, embedd, etc) and everything I track there isn't public.  If they ever get better at sharing content, I definitely will.