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!