Raise your hand if you make yearly New Year’s Resolutions? How often does your resolutions involve being fit? How often do you make it past January? When you are a consistent gym rat like myself, it’s amazing to see the amount of new faces at the gym during that first week of January.
What’s even more amazing is just how many of those folks give up on their exercise plan three weeks later. Now I would be lying if I said I didn’t have my own yearly goals. But you see, I don’t make New Years Resolutions. For the past five years, I’ve created year- long plans to make myself better than the year prior. Each year will lead up to my eventual dream body. This article is all about my 2015 goal.
I’M TOO FAT?
From 2007 until about summer of 2008, I put on the most weight in my life. I gained over fifty pounds in that short time span.
Singapore 2008
When I finally realized my gain was all fat not muscle, I quickly altered my nutrition and exercise programs. I even joined an online course that opened my eyes. That period of dedicated weight loss kept going until the days leading up to my wedding in 2010.
September 2010
I’M TOO WEAK?
A couple of months after getting married I realized that despite how thin I was, I could use some more muscle on my frame. Once lifting for muscle, I noticed how awful my squat, deadlift, bench press and overhead press numbers were. For someone that worked out on a regular basis, I should have been much stronger!
That’s when another hard truth kicked in. I had been lifting to lose weight for so long, that I never truly attempted to get stronger. I had a nice physique, but what’s the use if I can’t lift heavy things. If I became stronger then I could lift more weight, which would mean I my muscles would get bigger.
GET STRONGER
So with that new mentality, I became obsessed with getting stronger. The main strength-training plan I used was Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 program. I read Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength to perfect my techniques. As expected, my strength severely increased! My back (especially upper back!), arms and legs got thicker. As everything got bigger, my waist got wider.
STRONGER BUT GETTING WIDER
I expected to gain weight while getting stronger. As the months and years went by, I stopped being as consistent with my eating habits as I should have been. I’m an individual that easily gains weight. People still don’t believe that I can gain a half-inch on my waist just by eating two slices of bread. I’m not making that up, it’s true.
Due to my ability to gain weight rapidly, I have to be extremely careful when it comes to carbohydrate plus fat combinations. I have to follow my nutrition plan 90% of the time to be successful. The moment I go under 90%, my waist starts to inflate.
EATING TOO MUCH
Guess what happened during the years I was eating to get stronger? In my efforts to eat more calories, I stop being 90% compliant. I was closer towards 75%.
For those that don’t understand, it means that if I ate four meals a day, three of them were perfect for my diet. One of those four meals did not fit my nutrition plan. That fourth meal could have consisted of junk food, the wrong food type or too many calories. Whatever it was, it was not what I should have been eating at that time.
As anyone that has ever tried to put on muscle will tell you, it is unquestionably easy to go overboard with eating. It’s not as strict as losing weight, but you still have to be careful. After all those years of restrictive eating, it’s no wonder I loved to gorge myself while getting stronger!
CHANGE IT UP!
Around the middle of 2014 I came to the realization that I needed to change my plan up. Despite how badly I wanted to keep getting stronger, I needed to get my waist back in check. I needed to start getting my eating discipline back as well as make sure my workouts reflected this new lifestyle. 75% compliant might be good enough for others, but my eating habits have to be stricter to get the body I want. Unlike when I made my dramatic weight loss from before, this time around I wanted to have more muscle definition.
It’s an interesting sensation to have so much knowledge about lifting weights and yet never attained the final body you envision in your head. Throughout all these years I have helped train others get to their goals but never fully gotten to mine. I was very very close to it back in 2010. Based on all the knowledge I have, I was determined at the end of 2014 to make 2015 the year my dream body would start to show up.
I’ll get into 2015 next time!
