Everybody Cut, Everybody Cut
To recap a bit: so far on my journey t’ward fitness, I’ve done a low carb diet while doing various dumbbell and bodyweight exercises; an extremely ill-advised hypertrophy routine while eating like a pig; and Starting Strength, while alternately dieting and eating. From a weightlifting perspective, I had the most success doing SS, getting my back squat up to 265 for 5 reps, my deadlift to 335 for 5 reps, and my bench press up to 190 for 5 reps. The progression may have been too fast, unfortunately, since my right hip started acting up, to the point at which it felt like a muscle was trying to tear away from the bone when I squatted. Finally I had to stop doing leg exercises altogether, substituting a rather intense upper body program while eating to lose fat, eventually making it possible for me to do a single chin-up, which made me feel like a bad-ass. (I can do 4 in one set now. Pimp, right?)
While waiting for my hip to heal up so I could back to working the lower body, I started reading again about hypertrophy programs, and discovered something called 20-rep squats. The workout consists of warming up and then pounding out one long 20 rep squat set, as you’d probably imagine, but with a weight that you would normally consider your 10-rep maximum. The idea is that you do a bunch of reps, then stop for a bit and catch your breath without racking the weight, and then doing another rep, until you finish all 20. It’s incredibly taxing, but supposedly many of the pre-steroid body-builders got huge with it (and also drinking a gallon of whole milk every day). I said hell, I can do that, and it gives me a chance to get my hip back into shape with low weights, instead of trying to pound 225 on it again.
So I launched into it, and was having success. I was gaining weight as expected, although I realized that a gallon of whole milk contains about 2400 calories, probably a bit more than I really needed, so I switched to half a gallon of skim. I was building strength, and appeared to be building muscle, until an incident with a ceiling fan, a ladder, and an awkward fall resulted in my right knee being wrenched so hard that I cursed rather eloquently…while on a training conference call. Unmuted, of course. It’s probably worth noting that if I hadn’t been on the phone while trying to install a ceiling fan I probably would not have fallen off a ladder, but I never pretended to be smart.
Obviously, the knee injury put me out of the weightlifting for some time. I got back into gentle upper body work, but could neither squat nor deadlift, and also came to a rather obvious realization: my body fat was like 25%. Why was I attempting to GAIN weight? What, exactly, was the point in gaining 5 or even 10 pounds of muscle, if it was encased by 50-70 pounds of succulent meat jelly? It’s not like I intend to get into powerlifting. I just wanna be jacked like a stock car in a pit stop, shredded like a credit card statement, yoked like an ox. If I want that, I need to get my body fat down into the low teens, and THEN worry about developing the gun show.
This has brought me to the current situation, which is very simple: Cutting. No, not the thing creepy emo girls do to their inner thighs with razors. I’m cutting FAT. I have figured out a level of caloric intake that will (theoretically) lose me about a pound and a half a week, although I’m less careful on the weekends, so my loss may only be about a pound a week. I do a bunch of cardio (normally something I dislike) to improve my conditioning and also allow me to eat more than I otherwise would. And now that my knee is mostly healed, I’m back to squatting and deadlifting, with very moderate progression, in the SS framework.
The downside of cutting is that it limits your lifting; your body really doesn’t build muscle and cut fat at the same time. So, my bench press has been stuck at 175×5 for about 2 months, and I suspect my squat and deadlift won’t get anywhere near my maxes from February. I have recently been able to add a slight amount to my lifts by adding creatine to my diet (more on that later), but it’s not going to do all that much. I’ve also started doing a bodyweight program called “PLP”, which stands for pushups, lunges, and pullups (although I’m doing chinups; the difference is a chinup is done with the palms facing you, and seems to be easier for me). The gist is that you start on the first day with one chin, one pushup, and one step-back lunge with each leg. The next day, you do two. Third day, three, etc. After a while you have to break up the sets; I’ve discovered I can do 17 pushups (yesterday, in fact), but I can’t do more than 3 or 4 chins in a row, so I sort of spread them throughout the day. I have to knock out 18 today, so I did a set of 4 and a set of 3 while getting dressed this morning. The program specifies you go to 60, but I don’t think I’ll be able to quite manage that; I may reset at 30 and go back to 1. It’s gotten my chinup sets from 2 to 4 in just a couple weeks, though, and that ain’t nothin’.
So, that’s where I am. I feel like I’ve made remarkable progress (eventually I plan to post some pictures), but I’ve got quite a long way to go; I’m at about 245 pounds and maybe 20% body fat now, and I’m hoping to get down to around 225 and 15% BF by the holidays, and then probably be a bad boy over the holiday season and pack on a little bit of muscle before going back to the cutting after the new year, with the goal of getting down to maybe 10% BF and bulking through the spring.
Next time: I summarize the things I’ve learned so far, and bust a couple of remarkably still-common myths about fat loss and muscle growth.
