The Final Pit Stop

Inspired by the Gold Coast Car racing weekend I have decided to frame the past week as the final pit stop before racing towards the podium. This week has involved no training, 2 days of free for all dieting and general inactivity. Struck down initially by a cold and then kept in bed because of the daunting Uni study and assignment load. For four days I was practically bed-ridden only getting up on the Monday for Oztag and then just for food and showering. With the bed came the TV. With the TV came the snacking. With the snacking came the free-for-all feeding.

Sounds bad huh? No, realistically it was what needed to happen. I had been training and dieting hard for months and then the added pressure of massive assignment deadlines resulting in less than 5 hours of sleep a night. Something had to give. Just like the car in the final stages of a race I was running on empty and needed a pit stop to refuel, rethink and re-invigorize.

The thinking time of the soft cage of my bed allowed me to rethink my approach towards the final 6 weeks before my goal date for Stereosonic music festival. I had been enjoying success using the cyclic keto diet however with time ever against me I will for the next two weeks go straight keto except for one hour on each Saturday. After those 2 weeks I will reassess what I need to focus on for the final lap. Training wise I am going to increase both my intensity and volume moving to two sessions a day when I can fit them in. In the weights room I am going to return to split training rather than the more full body sessions I had teamed with the keto-ing. I think this just fits in better with my motivation, that I am at the gym most days and have a specific focus for each session. However I am still going to have one intense full-body session at the end of the week to just add that little extra to my results. Pumping out an intense session of super-setting and drop setting is very satisfying and a good end to the week.

Ok refueled, refocused and ready to take this to another level, LetsGetIt, Alpha and Out!

Lets Go Keto!

And here we are! Time to introduce my plan to take this journey to the next level and begin to reach the pinnacles. To take my muscular but still undefined phyisque and chisel out abs of stone, arms of power, legs like trees and pecs like dinner plates. With that in mind I am not looking for pure size, I never have been. I am looking for defined, proportional and functional muscles. The kind that Zyzz made famous, with a little personal tweak towards triathlons to set me up for my eventual return. To do this I am hitting the diet hard and working my training in around that.

But before I expand on this I'd like to update you all on my stats, where I've come from and where I intend to go. I measured my stats this morning to mark the start of the new phase of the Alpha journey. Currently I am sitting at about 85kg which is about 15-20kgs from my peak a mere 12 months ago. It doesn't feel like that much but when I check out the figures, damn I'm happy with that. Body fat percentage is not quite as amazing at 23-24% down from 30% but still an improvement. The next big gain is a loss of almost 20cm from my stomach from 110 down to 90, happy with that but still a bit to go. My chest has come down to 100 from 110 and the rest of my body has generally decreased by a couple of centimetres at least as I carve away the fat. Overall I am immensely proud of where I am at and exceptionally excited about where I am heading.

Now to my plan of attack. Based on the stats above, the one aspect I want to focus on is my body fat percentage, where I have only made moderate losses. It is time to home in on the excess cutaneous fat I am still carrying. To do that I am utilising a form of the ketogenic style of dieting made famous/infamous by the Atkins diet of the 70-80s. However as you know I am not a fan of desperate housewives dieting so this variant is honed to the athlete or body builder. The ketogenic diet is based on replicating the body's response to starvation by removing essentially all carbohydrates and basing the diet on protein and fat. Now this might go against all the mainstream fears of fat however its research is long and reliable as it is a therapeutic to treat epilepsy in children. Essentially the body changes from utilizing glucose for energy and moves to ketones and free fatty acids, essentially targeting adipose tissue to supply energy to live and train.

Now where my variation, the cyclical ketogenic diet (CKD), comes into play is a day and a half of "carb up" where carbs are consumed to refill muscle glycogen, the stored energy for muscle. This allows for a reduction in muscle loss from the dieting as well as ensuring adequate energy levels throughout the week to train properly. For people interested in trying it out I thoroughly recommend The Ketogenic Diet by Lyle MacDonald. He breaks down each macronutrient (protein, carbs,fat) as well as outlining training required to optimise fat loss while minimising muscle and performance loss. Once my calculations were done my stats came down to 2100 calories, 10g carbohydrate, 150g protein and 160g fat per day. To accommodate this into a diet I have based breakfast around eggs, mid-morning snack around avocado (healthy fats), lunch around tuna, mid-afternoon around almonds and dinner around beef mince. Extras include protein shakes, olive oil, full fat cheese, mayonnaise and some salad to provide the small amount of carbs as well as dietary fibre.

To optimize the diet my training is as follows;

Sunday - Long Cardio, either bike or run (exploiting the "carb-up" days of Friday arvo and Saturday)

Monday - Upper Body Weights

Tuesday - Lower Body Weights

Wednesday - Cardio in the Gym

Thursday - Sprint training

Friday - Full Body Weights

Saturday - OFF (for carb-up)

I will be hitting up twitter a lot with minute-minute experience as I try this diet as well as it will most likely be the focus of my posts for the next month or so as I tweak and refine things to perfect the plan and keep on track to a diced up physique. Ok, Lets Go, Alpha and Out!

Blasting Away The Debris

The road to Stereo is most definitely on track. In keeping with the sculpting metaphor I am burning the fat, or the debris away at a good rate which will allow for a more workable surface to start working on the specific details. So far my plan of the first month focusing on adding muscle mass seems to be paying dividends. I am stripping away 1-2 kilograms a week. This is the generally accepted "safe" weight-loss level and in line with my focus it means that the majority of weight loss is in actual fat and not muscle mass. My idea behind adding muscle first is that I am replacing a non-metabolically active tissue (adipose or fat) with a metabolically active tissue (muscle). This will aid in the next stages of the Sculpting process as I will have a high functioning metabolism and will not have to rely on extra cardio to continue to drop body fat. Funnily enough I am dropping fat at a higher rate doing the heavy workouts than I was doing large sessions of cardio with weights tossed in as an after thought. This could be due to a number of factors - perhaps the calorie consumption of excessive cardio led to increased food intake negating the calorie deficiet. Or maybe the change in activity has sparked my metabolism and fat-burning molecules. Both are possible or maybe simply because my diet and exercise attrition is much more improved now then when I was doing heavy cardio. Probably more likely.

I am tearing the gym up, making large gains on numerous exercises each session. Based on past experience and some guesstimation I think I will start to plateau at roughly the same time I travel to New Zealand, the week I planned to analyse how I am going and make any changes to beat said plateau. This is great news and will play into my hands excellently. Full tilt towards Stereo!

Lets Get Sculptin'

Welcome all to my blog about my journey from a fit but flabby person to a shredded sculpture of human persistence for a summer music festival. I have given myself 14 weeks to prep for the festival and while the timing will be tight I believe it is doable and it will at least get me close to sculpture proportions.

This journey is the final chapter in a longer journey on my main blog, Awkward 2 Alpha charting my pathway from a shy, fat guy to a super-confident, shredded monstAr. It has been a long, hard road filled with trials, tribulations but mostly self-improvement and garnering of mental fortitude and self belief.

Behind and deeper to my motivation to get ripped for this festival is a desire to create a career in the fitness industry and getting such a body simply opens up all kinds of doors to create a group of followers, friends, money. Just look at the inspiration for this whole process, Zyzz. A skinny kid turned God (he claimed to be son of Zeus, haha) he developed a campaign via social media that inspired others and created a stream of income for himself and his mates. Possesing such a body simply puts things in motion for a succesfull and fulfilling life. Lets start pushing that snowball.

Now for the more specifics. I still have a high body fat percentage (~25%) and my aim is to get that down to double digits to really make all my muscles pop. To do this the first 5-6 weeks I am going to focus on laying down some large slabs of fat-burning muscle to really attack the metabolisim and make sure I have some muscle to show off. The middle period of 4-5 weeks I will probably drop the weights back to 3/week, whole body routines while increasing my cardio to start dropping fat fast. I will eventually return to the sport of triathlon so this gives me a great excuse to start smashing out the cardio. The final 3-4 weeks I will focus on cutting and getting everything in proportion so this means I will analysis where I am at and then make up a plan of attack to ensure maximum shreddedness.

Throughout this whole journey diet is still at the end of the day the key. As such it will be my predominant focus for the entire 14 weeks as this is where the most of my gains in muscle and losses in fat will come from. As with the exercise plan I will constantly be analysing it and tinkering with it when I deem it necessary. Here is my current meal plan:

Breakfast: instant oats, skim milk, piece fruit

Mid Morning Snack: piece fruit, protein shake

Lunch: 8 vita wheat crackers, can tuna, serve salad

Mid Afternoon Snack: piece fruit, protein shake

Dinner: Small serve of Grandma's cooking focusing on low serve carbs.

Pre-Workout: Jack3d (excellent supplement, increases your focus and energy while not being overstimulating)

Post-Workout: Protein Shake

Along with this I also will drink green tea (to fire up my metabolism), black coffee (caffeine hit essential for Uni student), "Zero" softdrinks (for a sweetness hit without damaging sugar overload. All up this is about between 1500-2000 calories a pretty good range for my target considering my exercise load. Like I said I will be seeing how this goes and if anything needs to change I will put it up on the blog.

For all this hard work, improve my motivation and also to look killer the final week before the festival will be somewhat of a Transformation week. This means treating my self to tanning, waxing, getting a killer hair cut, grabbing some fresh new clothes (ones that actually fit) and if I am really successful I will get my first tattoo done. However to get the tattoo done I need to be at 10% or less body fat as this was a goal set long ago. Looking forward to that week!

Ok so there it is, my plan, inspiration and my rewards. Now to get down to business. To see my progress day to day check out my Awkward 2 Alpha blog. I will post up as much as I can to this page also obviously to keep everyone in the loop. Now Lets Get Sculptin'