Strong lifts was a good experience

After doing strong lifts for 3 months, I was very satified with the results. I did not become huge but I did become strong and I was more confident about myself. During the strong lifts phase I made a small home gym with all the barbells and weights. I always worked out at home after coming back from work. I was very shy to go to gym because I was so skinny. I was worried that everyone will make fun of me if I could not even benchpress the empty bar that weights 45 lbs.

Strong lifts helped me come out of my shell. So I decided to go to gym at my workplace along with my colleagues who have been asking me to join them ever since I told them I wanted to become strong back in december 2008. Since I have gym partners now I wanted to do what they were doing so we can spot each other at one place instead of me running all over the gym with the strong lifts routine. That was the main reason I stopped doing strong lifts.

It was fun while it lasted though. I would definitely recommend any skinny guy to start with strong lifts. Definitely not P90X . In my next blog I will try to upload some before after photos.

Filed under: Uncategorized, muscle gain, strength training, strong lifts

Strong Lifts 5×5 log

I started strongs lifts on Februry 23, 2009 and ended it about 3 months later on May 13, 2009. Here are the logs of my workouts by day and weight lifted.

 

All the weights are in lbs. The cells marked with a blue background indicate that I could not do 5×5 and so I had to repeat those weights. As you can see I had some good progress overall. I never did squats and now I know what those are and how much I can squat. Bench press has always been my weakest workout. I could not go over the 100 lb weight (even today). For push-ups I used a weighing scale below my hands and checked how much weight gets exerted on it when I try to do a push-up. The scales showed 70 lb (I weight 120 lb). So I am not lifting my full body weight when I am doing push-ups. I was able to do 3 sets of 5 reps each. Then for my next push-up day I kept a 5 lb plate on my back and did my push-ups. If I was able to do 3×5 then for the next time I added another 5 lb plate and so on. That is how I got those numbers for my push-ups.

More logs here

For chin-ups and pull-ups it is the same thing again. If I could do 3×5 with my body weight then I would hang a 5 lb to my waist and do them. Did not go too far with my pull-ups before I gave up.

That’s it for now. Fat and weight numbers in my next blog.

Filed under: Uncategorized, muscle, strength gain, strength training, strong lifts

Goodbye P90X, Hello StrongLifts

My love affair with P90X lasted for about 3 months before I gave up. Why? Because I was simply not seeing any more results. I am not saying P90X is flawed. Neither am I endorsing it. It just did not work for me. I think P90X works for people who are very fit at some point in their life, but have since become overweight. Even in the infomercial for P90X, they mostly show people who were rowers or athletes or runners or well trained people who slacked and then took up P90X and saw good results. I am not one of them. I was never fit. Never lifted weights, never ran more than 100 yards never lifted more than 30 lbs using any known muscle nor was in rowing, boxing, tennis or any other physical activity ever.

I just have a weak body. And it has always been that way. So I could not use P90X to get back to my fit state. After discovering that it is not working well for me I started searching for some workouts for skinny folks like me. I came across stronglifts. This workout was different. And not as intense as P90X. I did not need to do my workouts for 1 hr straight with very little rest time in between sets or exercises. This is more like 1 hr of workout with adequate rest. Just 5 reps per set is very encouraging. I started out strong lifts 5×5 on February 23, 2009.

Initially the workouts felt very easy. I was feeling very motivated. I could see my graphs going up every time I workout because strong lifts 5×5 starts with a very low weight initially and every workout day you increase the weights by 5 lb. I felt very confident. I continued this for about 3 months. But then had to stop and move on to another workout plan.

In my next few blogs I will write about

• My workout logs for stronglifts
• Body Fat % and weight changes due to my increased eating habits
• Why I had to quit stronglifts 5×5 and what I did next

Filed under: Uncategorized, p90x, strong lifts, workout