Weight and Muscle Goals: January – March 2010

It is already 3 weeks into the new quarter and I did not yet write my goals. I have it in my mind. it is just that I did not put it down on paper yet. So for the next 3 months my goal is to gain 3 lbs of fat while maintaining the same weight. It simply means I will have to convert 3 lbs of fat into muscle! Here are the raw numbers

January 1, 2010: Baseline
Weight: 125.6 lbs
Fat %: 12.5%
Fat: 15.7 lbs
Lean Mass: 109.9 lbs

Note that I am using the caliper measurement for fat. I don’t think I can rely on the omron body fat monitor. I will still keep track of the fat numbers from omron fat monitor daily but I probably will not use them in any calculations. Since I cannot take the caliper measurement everyday I will use the fat % number that is closest to a particular date I am refering to.

March 31, 2010: Goal
Weight: 125.6 lbs
Fat %: 10.11%
Fat: 12.7 lbs
Lean Mass: 112.9 lbs

Change in 3 months
Weight: 0
Fat %: 2.39 %
Fat: -3 lbs
Muscle: 3 lbs

I will try and not lose more fat at the expense of muscle. So it will be ok if I don’t lose the 3 lbs of fat, but I definitely do want to gain the 3 lbs of muscle. We will see how that goes…

Filed under: body fat, goals, muscle gain, weight gain

Changes in diet and exercise

For the past couple of weeks I noticed a few things and have decided to change my diet and exercise as a response. First I am not gaining any more weight with my 1800 calorie diet. So I increased that to 2000 calories and now the weight is going up again slowly. I lost a week or more by just eating 1800 calories and not gaining weight. I have to keep this in mind for my next gaining phase. Every day counts for an ectomorph.

The second thing I noticed is that while my weight remained constant I started to see an increase in body fat percentage. Again not good. In addition I was also feeling tired more often too. That is when I decided to give myself a recovery week. After coming back I did perform well in the lifts but still my weight would not increase and the body fat percentage was increasing. Moreover my left arm started to hurt whenever I did any dumb bell shoulder press. I had to skip the dumb bell press for 2 weeks now. This probably is an indication that my body is not recovering enough and I may be over training.

To fix that I am switching over to 4 day workouts instead of 5 days. So my workout days are monday, wednesday, thursday and saturday. Here is my new schedule

• Monday: Chest, Triceps and Back
• Decline bench press
• Deadlifts
• Dips
• Wednesday: Shoulders / Back, Traps, Biceps
• Dumbbell shoulder press / Pull-ups
• Barbell shrugs
• EZ bar bicep curls
• Thursday: Chest, Legs, Triceps
• Bench press
• Squats
• Seated dumbbell tricep press
• Saturday: Shoulders, Traps, Biceps
• Overhead press
• Behind the back barbell shrugs
• Dumbbell bicep curls

So there you have it. Hopefully these changes will let me continue to gain weight and be able to recover properly. Only time will tell.

Filed under: exercise, recovery, rest, weight gain, workout