WEEK 5 PROGRESS:

Weekly thoughts:

Well, after last week's little side-trip, I went back to my original plan and things went much much better. Lift to build, cardio and calories to burn. This week's fat loss numbers were pretty much paint-by-numbers, with a 7300 calorie deficit and just over a 2 pound fat loss. It's a bit scary how accurate those numbers have been, but I love consistency, so it's all good.

Workouts went amazingly well. There's just something about a big heavy chunk of iron in my hands, a loud drumbeat, and some blistering guitar solos that gets me going!

Changes this week: Getting back to basics, pure and simple. Bumped up the number of sets and exercises, dropped the reps to mostly in the 8 range, and changed up the bodypart pairings to work only 2 bodyparts a day spread over 4-5 days. Seems to help really hit on the parts I'm doing that day and offers better recovery in between.

Cardio changes this week were to cut my steady-state cardio down to once a day most days and add in 20 or so minutes of HIIT cardio on my off-days. I also moved my steady-state from cruising the neighborhood to my treadmill for most of it. There's something to be said for changing scenery and getting out in the sun, but there's also something about being able to maintain a constant incline and pace without worrying about a minute or two lag at every stoplight, hehe...

Diet-wise, calories were very similar to previous weeks, but I focussed a bit more on bracketing my carbs around my weight workouts. Around 70% of my daily carbs came in the hours following my workout, with most of the rest coming a few hours before. This approach seems to be helping me with the LBM gains while still losing some fat.

All that said, I was feeling pretty tired the last two days, probably from 3 days of pretty steep deficits, so I'm looking to adjust my eating to more of a 2:3 ratio of high/low days rather than the current 1:3. I believe I can make similar results this way, and it should hopefully pay some dividends down the road to keep my body from adapting too much to the high deficits I've been doing. I thinks I also relied a bit too much on the protein powder to keep my counts up at the expense of real food. I really don't like the full, bloated feeling I have sometimes after eating a good-sized meal, but I get the feeling that that's my mind going into "protect your fat-loss" mode more than anything else, as it rarely bothered me before and my progress has gone just fine with those occasional big meals. One trap I intend to avoid is doing less because I'm eating less and having it get stale. Since my body seems to like fairly frequent change, I'll do what I need to do to keep the engines roaring.