Leg day again. Already?? Yes, I’m hitting the full body twice a week now, so this was the second time doing squats this week. I changed up my routine to Monday, Thursday doing chest and back, hitting legs Tuesday, Friday, and cardio on Wednesday, Saturday. I’m definitely stepping up the amount of work I’m doing each week, and I can feel the difference on the bod.
I’ve started tracking my diet and workouts using MyFitnessPal instead of posting here daily. You can check out what I’ve been up to by going to my Food Diary or my Exercise Diary. You can toggle days and go back and review what I’ve been eating and lifting. One thing to keep in mind is that the app only tracks breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Since I’m eating about six times a day, I log a lot under snacks or double up on my meals – so lunch might show what I had for lunch and my 2pm meal. Overall, I like the app – especially for tracking diet. They have a ton of listings with nutrient and calorie breakdowns for everything I’ve tried so far, including my supplements and the restaurants I’ve eaten at. Their exercise tracking leaves a bit to be desired, as it is missing some exercises I do and in order to get a rough idea of caloric expenditure during lifting I have to log the time I spent weight training as cardio. Still, it’s a useful tool and I really like the calorie tracking throughout the day to help me see how much more I can eat before going over my goal. In the two weeks that I’ve been using it, I think I’ve only gone over my daily calorie goal once. Cheat day! 🙂
Oh, one other feature it is missing is a mechanism for tracking bodyfat percentages. I’ve discovered that the impedance machine I use at the gym can fluctuate two percent based on how long I’ve soaked in the hot tub. I have really dry soles of my feet, which don’t conduct electricity very well, so it’s really only good to get a relative idea of percentages, rather than absolute value. Tomorrow I shall go in and use it again (forgot to do it today) to see where I sit and what I’ve accomplished these past two weeks. My weight has dropped and is remaining pretty stable around 218, and my pants are getting a little looser, so I’m confident that I’m losing fat and gaining muscle.
The biggest thing I’m wrestling with is the desire to add mass and get cut at the same time. In order to add muscle, you have to eat more than you burn, but in order to lose fat you have to burn more than you eat. My thinking is that by maintaining a strongly anaerobic state as much as possible, through high protein intake and supplementation, I am adding muscle and shedding a little bit of fat at a time. I’ve done some research and it turns out that steady state, low intensity aerobics actually hampers anabolism, and that the best way to do cardio is to do High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). These are shorter sessions, maybe 20-30 minutes, with intense, all-out efforts for 30 seconds to a minute, followed by two to five minutes of low intensity. Think sprint for a minute, walk for five, and repeat. I can tell from how much lactic acid is building up in my muscles during training that I really need to work on my cardio conditioning, so that’s going to be stepped up a notch next week. Depending on how my legs feel tomorrow morning, I may go back to Zumba and see if I can last longer than 20 minutes.
Food intake has been solid. I’m getting close to averaging 200 grams of protein a day – I had 240 yesterday and woke up today a pound heavier. Wouldn’t it be great if that was muscle growth!?! I’ve also cut out the Diet Coke. I used to drink maybe three liters of it a day, as I love the cold carbonation, but I’ve switched to flavored water. The water still has Sucralose, so it’s not perfect, but it’s a good transition and I’m finding I’m drinking more plain water now too.
Six weeks to San Diego, time to ramp up that fat burning and get this bod ready for the beach!
