Trailer: Arnold Schwarzenegger's Blueprint Trainer

This guy inspired me to start training at 16 !

Trailer: Arnold Schwarzenegger's Blueprint Trainer

Workout feelings

Sometimes I get a bit nervous when my workout feels easy. Problaly because then I feel like I am not pushing myself enough. I love the feeling of burning musce tissue and my body heating up from metabolic stress.

My last workout (back, chest ad arms) felt pretty easy to me even with added weight on chins and dips.
After training I had energy left and I was was not very hungry. Later that evening while walking with the dog I did started to feel the consequences of training in the form of muscle soreness. Next morning I felt more muscle soreness so it seems like my workout was taxing enough after all...

So why did the workout felt so easy I was wondering ?

The possible causes :

• I eat some more meat then usual
• I added a couple cups of black coffe with coconut oil
• I was a bit lazy form the last leg workout...

So some things to think about and experiment with ...

Great leg workout !

Had a great leg workout on the new squat rack (finally !)  in my gym. After 1 warmup and 1 working set (of 4) my legs where shaking allready from deep squatting...  After that some slow barbell lunges and finally after shoulders and abs my fun part of the training : a circuit of : one leg leg presses, dumbell shoulder press and ab barbell roll out.

Yiha ! Time for my carb back load !

Variate your grip

Variating your grip could he helpfull on exercise where you experience shoulder pain like bench press or military press. These give me shoulder pain sometimes when applying pronated grip all the time ...

See : The benefits of lifting with a neutral grip

Concept for a 'Fitness manifesto'

As a Software Enigneer doing Agile Software Development for a living I was thinking about a 'Fitness manifesto' to get people (including myself) healthy and fit. Here is my concept : 

We are uncovering better ways of getting fit by simply doing it.

Through this we have come to value :
Long term structural motivation over short term motivation to keep training all our lives
Training smarter over training harder and longer to have energy and time to do other things also
Structural changes in our nutrition over short term diets to keep eating healthy
Maintain a steady improvement rhythm over trying to get fast results to stabilize our gains and improve from there

Though there is value in the 'over' items we value the bigger first items more to improve our odds to get and stay fit through reaching our goals as specified in the 'to' items.

Tell me what you think and add something through the comments yourself !

Eating carbs at night for better sleep

Bad sleep

I noticed last night my sleep is dependant on my carb intake at night. Normally I am low carb during the day and eat carbs at 15:00, 18:00 or after training. So last evening after training I decided to have no carbs but stick to proteine and fats (and have lots of them ;-). The reason for this I am eating out tonight with carbs. I was frying in coconut oil and going a little bit crazy on my home made coconut/date candy and the nut butters). This went pretty well. I was full and no carvings what so ever...

But the next morning at 5 o'clock I was wide awake and could not sleep anymore. So here I am with my morning coffee (with fats and proteins again) writng this blog at a ackward time ;-)

Conclusions

My sleep quality is influenced by my carb intake at night. Normally I eat carbs at 15:00 and 18:00. This would be things like home made pancakes, rice. potatos etc... and after a training session I add some more sweet stuff too to refull glycogen and reward myself ;-)

I hoped the fat intake would take care of good sleep but this does not seem to work.

The amount of fat I hade had no influence on my weight or bodyfat, they are stable.  

Possible solution  

I remember a tip from the poliquin website about sleeping well stating the problems with sleep on a low carb diet. The solution described there would be to take a cup of berrys (low gi fruit) to have some non insuline spiking carbs before bed. 

The fundamental building block of your weight training

What would you consider the fundamental building block ? 
What would you answer if I asked you what is the most fundamental building block of your weight training sessions ? A set ? Weights ? Time under tension ? Intensity ?
   

The answer

I (now) would answer a rep (and of course something to perform the rep with ;-) I will explain why in this blog post and tell you how I got there... 

Stumbling upon and thinking about the prefect rep

I am always busy with new training variations and optimizing my nutrion. So while surfing in the "information sea" searching for the latest data about training and nutrition I bumped into the following info about weight training (you don't have to read them completely, I will summarize them later):  

1. The Shockwave protocol
2. The perfect rep

These articles made me think how I performed my reps. While I am always striving for perfect form every rep I did surely was not a max effort as described in these articles. I wouild consider only the last reps on the last sets on a good day as a so called 'max effort'. Wouldn't it be great if You could make every rep that max effort ? This would mean training shorter, less stress on the central nervous system and faster recovery.

My own perfect rep
So, how would my own perfect rep look like ? It would be something like this : 

1. explosive concentric phase to recruit as much muscle fiber as possible 
2. sqeese the muscle as hard as I can at the most contracted position to shape the muscle
3. slow eccentric phase to create muscle fiber micro damage and metabolic stress
4. and explode again...

Trying it out

So I decided to give it a shot and applied this method for about 2 weeks for 8 training sessions. Man that was brutal. I applied it also in my warmups. After 5 minutes I was huffing and puffing allready. 

I noticed the following things : 

1. Slight headache form the explosive concentric phase
2. I started getting leaner
3. I started gettting stronger
4. I broke my plateaus on almost every lift
5. Recovery seemed to go faster

The conclusion

It sure is worth a try to perform your reps this way. I made good progress with it. The headache was annoying. Maybe I did to many reps (6 - 10)  this way. I am gonna cycle it in my workouts again but then I will perform 3 - 5 reps with twice the amount of sets.