Back in the Saddle

My first week back at it is almost over.  It's nice to feel that good muscle soreness again.  It is really motivating me to get to work on my goal for this year - mass gain.  I'm not a big, muscular guy right now, but I am six feet tall and I feel like I could probably use another 15 to 25 pounds of lean mass and corresponding functional strength.  If I have my post-P90X body fat percentage of around 8.5%, and I can reasonably pick up .5 pounds of lean muscle a week, that will put me at around 180 or so by the beginning of November.  Just in time for my buddy's wedding (I'm the best man, too, sweet!).  Of course, that's not the reason I am doing this, but it makes for a very handy goal to shoot for.  No excuses!

My first phase here is going to be regaining muscle endurance so I am doing sets of 8-15 reps of mostly single muscle exercises, but with some notable compound exercises like squats, pullups, and pushups.  There is some extra cardio, but the workouts themselves are done as supersets so there is already a cardio component built in.  This phase will last two more weeks.  After that I am going to take a nice P90X-style Recovery Week. 

Then it's off to the races.  I don't think I will be doing many Olympic-style lifts after all because I checked around at several gyms in my area and nobody seemed to know much about them, at least as far as the trainers go.  I could try to imitate what I am seeing on youtube, but I really feel like the risk of injury is too high to try these without a live coach.  I will start off with more traditional powerlifting stuff and maybe I will run into somebody doing clean and jerks at the gym and get them to show me some stuff.  

I haven't put together my phase two workout yet, but when I do I will post it up here.  I am still going to include elements of P90X in my workouts and I will be changing things up every 3 weeks, with probably three separate periodization phases that I repeat over the next few months.  But again, the focus will be less on supreme athletic conditioning and getting cut and more on building functional strength and some size.  After learning how to do it, getting really cut is actually pretty easy and takes less time than people think.  

Again as far as diet goes, it will be clean and based on the P90X Nutrition Guide, but tweaked for more energy.

Comments

[Brad]

Thats a big goal of putting on 15-25 pounds. Good luck.

Are you a Beachbody Coach by chance? From looking at your site it looks like you would be ideal for helping others hit their fitness goals.

http://www.milliondollarbody.com/signup/coach/index.htm?type=coach&MDB_SKU=MDINSCKK2&username=wrkoutjorney

[Prophet]

It is a big goal, but considering that I'm not trying to do it in 3 months, I think it's attainable. I'm a P90X grad. I can do anything, man. Lol!!

[Prophet]

And I hate to say this, but all this about making hundreds of thousands of dollars via beachbody sounds a little MLM to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm content to give you guys free advertising links and share my journey through this blog. Besides, my fitness regime is going to take a fairly significant departure from the Power90 in-home boot camp paradigm anyway, as my goals have changed. P90/X are great tools, but they aren't the only ones.