Lessons Of The Week

I'm finishing up my first week of Body Beast and I've learned a couple things this week.

1) I never knew how to lift weights.

I mean, yes, I know how to physically pick things up.But with as much weight training as I've done in my life, this week I realized that the reason I never got the results I was looking for was that I wasn't putting a good program together. Body Beast uses Dynamic Set Training, which means every workout is full of a mix of single sets, drop sets, super sets, multi sets, giant sets, etc. I like to refer to the giant sets as holy shit sets. I've never trained like this before but so far I'm loving it. The workouts are tough as hell and by the end you're pretty much at muscle failure. I'm already starting to see results and now I think I might be becoming addicted.

2) Eating a lot of food is hard work.

That sounds weird to say. I guess if you're just eating whatever you want without a care in the world, you can really throw some food down. But with this program the nutrition plan calls for a serious increase in the amount of calories you eat. But in order to help the muscle growth, it can't just be more calories, it has to be the right kind of calories. They've got me with a calorie goal of 2,884 per day. That's a lot of food. But let's face it, there is a difference between 2,884 calories of fast food and potato chips and 2,884 calories of healthy food. So I've been logging all of my food in the MyFitnessPal app. It's really pretty awesome. If you haven't checked it out, you should.

As I mentioned, this extra food needs to be the right kinds of food. For the first two phases (Build and Bulk) the macro-nutrient breakdown goal is 50% Carbs, 25% Protein and 25% Fat.This can also be tracked in MyFitnessPal. I actually did pretty good with keeping this balance this week. My weekly breakdown ended up being 44% Carbs, 28% Protein and 28% Fat. I guess that's not bad for still trying to figure this thing out.

I'm officially on vacation and heading to the beach with the family in the morning. Really looking forward to getting away for a couple days. We need it. Going to try to keep up with the eating plan, but I know we'll be eating out a lot so we'll see how this goes.