[corksil]

Yeah perhaps my humor was overlooked. I was just pulling your dong. Not that I'm a dong puller or anything. I was just trying to get a rise out of ya... get it? Rising? Dong? Funny?




*crickets in the audience*

Okay moving right along...




Everything you stated is indeed true. I'm not too sure about the diet part, or the sleep part. I generally stick to a diet consisting primarily of beerand cigarettes after the sun goes down, Usually a midnight snack consisting of ramen noodles... During the day, coq10 in the morning, 2 fish oil, 2 glucosamine, b-complex, daily multi-V, and then usually a few sips of water later in the morning if my stomach complains about the boiling froth of supplements consisting largely of heavy metals and fish-burps. Lunch usually doesn't happen till around 3, usually a light snack (today was a bag of corn nuts, but that's not the norm and eating those things feels like chewing on pebbles..)

Oh, and cigarettes. An average of 10.9 over the course of the day, usually mostly consumed after 8pm. I've been logging my cigarette consumption over the past few years and I'm pretty stabilized in the upper ten-per-day quadrant. I've spiked as high as 12.1 during stressful months, and hit a lower-threshold of 7ish when I keep an eye on consumption.

As for sleep, I average about 6 hrs per night -- give or take.

Here's to being [redacted] and having a body that will do whatever you ask of it and train it to exist on. It's amazing what stomach and intestinal bacteria will adapt to and thrive off of. I've always been a light eater -- the average portion size of a typical restaurant meal is generally 3 meals for me. However I am a notoriously slow eater -- and lots of chewing and eating slowly results in a feeling of satiety that arrives sooner (before you finish the plate) -- and increased absorption of nutrients due to the expanded surface area of over-chewed food.

Occasionally I have a sip of balsamic vinegar in the morning with the supplements -- as it seems to prime the stomach and alleviate that boiling gut feeling of "Take-supplements-with-food-next-time."

Apart from that my routine is generally 1hr every other day of heavy lifting. The routine doesn't change much, but I vary the reps on the final set so I fatigue different muscles on different days. Mostly compound lifts with free-weights, pull ups, push ups, reverse grip pull ups, wide grip pull ups, curls, hammer curls, overhead tricep press, dips on the second stair of my porch with feet stretched out ahead of me, that kind of stuff. Currently my free weights are 32lb apiece I believe, and I'll have to add a few more plates soon because I feel a plateau coming on (usually happens every few months) -- the plateau becomes evident when it takes 30+ reps to failure on certain exercises.

I'd give an honest estimate of 7-8% bodyfat. I used to like swimming, but I haven't for the past few years because after putting on considerable (lean) muscle mass, I no longer float. Frustrating actually, I went swimming with a colleague the other day and she's just chilling there in the water... not flailing her arms, not breathing heavily -- and she looks over at me thrashing about to keep my head above water and says "relax, don't panic or you could drown."

At which point I held my breath, stopped moving, and in several seconds sank to a depth of ~25 feet.

On the days I don't lift (every other day) -- I try to get to the beach and run ten miles schedule permitting, but realistically that only happens half the time. Sometimes I do pullups to fatigue in the mornings that I don't lift and don't have time (EXCUSE) for running.




So what would you recommend I do to maximize my gains? Diet would be the first area to improve I would suppose, particularly eating food of some type, preferably carbs. And lean protein such as chicken breast.

I don't pay much attention to diet. I used to dabble with creatine but I didn't like the always thirsty, bloated water weight feeling of "size" without "effectiveness."

Sometimes I have a protein shake after lifting heavy... Once in a blue moon.

One last thing to note -- If I don't keep on with my lifting heavy, I drop weight like no one else. I took one week off of lifting a few months back due to minor surgery and being bed-ridden and I lost 12lb in one week. Surely the diet of beer, bong, and vicodin did not help, but hey -- it's what the doc prescribed. A friend I hadn't seen in a few weeks told me I was looking "bigger than ever" but I could see the 12lb weight loss clearly in the mirror -- so perhaps it was largely psychological. Body disomorphia or something to that effect. Then again, the scale doesn't lie. And 32lbs will always 32lbs. The human lifting the weight is the only one who decides what feels heavy and what feels very heavy.

/rant
/dear diary

Thanks dude!