Intermission

My first workout didn't go exactly as planned.

My recurring, debilitating Trapezius cramps stopped me from reaching my set minimum on any exercise. I'm going to take a week off from any upper-body training and get a massage or two this weekend.

Words can't describe my frustration with this setback, so to compensate I'm replacing Occam's Protocol with the Geek to Freak plan. Geek to Freak uses only full-body, untargeted exercises to create a larger hormonal response and hopefully work a bit faster than Occam's does.

Square One

I'm about an hour away from my first gym session. I spent the weekend figuring out my starting weights for each exercise and preparing for Occam's Protocol. The beginning is upon us.

Starting Body Weight: 147.8 lbs
A little more than expected. Hmm.

Starting weights per exercise:

• Overhead Shoulder Press: 60 lbs.
• Supinated Pulldown: 95 lbs.
• Slight-incline Chest Press: 130 lbs.
• Leg Press: 100 lbs.

Now comes the part all you ladies have been waiting for.

BEFORE

Such unbridled masculinity! O, rue the day this image had been taken, for surely none after it could so uplift the aggregate sexiness of the Internet

Tonight I'll post about my workout, and introduce the ignorant among you to the best thing on the internet.

Dr. Foodlove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fat

"The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook." -Julia Child 

Haven't weighed yet, but estimate: 145 lbs.
Minimum daily Calorie target: (145+10)*20 = 3100 Calories


My housemate, Danny, has been laughing at me for a few days now. He can't wrap his head around how I can get by on fewer than 2000 Cal per day. Danny seems to be in the majority, but frankly 3100 seems like a damn huge number to me -- and that's my bare minimum.

Hopefully, by the end of this I'll be a blast furnace and 4000/day will only be inconvenient in a financial sense. If that happens, then Tim was right about everything, and I can just fall back on the book's plans for not getting fat while eating that much every day.

In any case, here are my guidelines:

• Eat like it's my job (I've made one bet so far, so this isn't just a figure of speech)
• Eat as much protein as possible, no less than 200g per day
• Much, but not all, of carbs should be slow (low glycemic index, see below)
• Eat within 30 minutes of waking up
• Eat no less than every 4 hours, but more often is better

None of these are optional. None of these can be suspended temporarily because of a lack of planning or time management on my part. It's this level of necessary self-discipline that I've always sucked at in the past, and it's partly that reason that resulted in this blog: private failure might be depressing, but public failure will make me look like a complete dumbass.

(That's right, spellcheck. "Dumbass" is a word. Don't look at me like that.)

Glycemic Index:

It turns out that not all carbohydrates are digested the same way. Some carbs take longer to make their way into your bloodstream, resulting in lower spikes in blood sugar and insulin. Evidently, these spikes are more or less what cause fat gain. Eliminate the peaks, smooth the curves out, and fat loss happens in nearly everyone.

I'm not worried about fat loss, but I am worried about fat gain, so I'll be eating a significant portion of my carbs as beans, lentils and quinoa -- all have low Glycemic Index. 

The only problem with these foods is that their calorie density is very low. One cup of pinto beans has 30% fewer calories than 1 cup of white rice. That's why I'll be adding ordinary starches to my meals. 

The Shake:

When I hit the snooze button every 10 minutes for an hour straight and finally get out of bed with 10 minutes until class, an omelet is not a practical or realistic meal expectation. I'll rely on this shake recipe:

• 2 cups Vitamin D Whole Milk
• 30 grams whey protein shake mix, vanilla (soy-free)
• 3 heaping tablespoons of almond butter (no additives, salt only)
• 1 whole banana
• 1/4-1/2 cup Egg Beaters

Composition: 820 Calories, 60g protein.

Soy-free everything because, as we all know, compounds in soy get metabolized into estrogen. When you're trying to push your hormone balance toward testosterone, eating foods that turn into estrogen is a little bit like eating your own finger to alleviate thirst.

I've never tried eggs in a shake, and I'm expecting to have the eggs result in a mucusy, gelatinous, undrinkable shake. But as the saying goes, no gross shakes, no sports movie training montage.

On another note entirely, here's a fun fact (fact?): Aerobic system load is highest when recovering from lactic acidosis. Lemme say that again: when you're recovering from muscle burn caused by lactic acid, your cardiovascular system is working harder than it did when you were pedaling on the exercise bike. That's why (hopefully, and skepticism aside) this plan should increase cardio performance in addition to lifting strength.

Next post will have my starting weight, strength, and body fat percentage. I'll also talk about metrics to track progress on a daily basis, and about the information management messiah that is Wolfram|Alpha.

Here's the Plan

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

-Edward Abbey

Let's get malignant.


The plan I'm going to adhere to for the forseeable future is outlined in Tim Ferriss's book The 4-Hour Body. It's somewhat pretentiously named "Occam's Protocol", after Occam's Razor. The plan tries to use what we know about the physiology of muscle gain to ensure that whatever effort I put into this will have a measurable effect, and to also ensure that I don't waste time and effort doing things that are only slightly effective. 

At some point, you're gonna start beating a dead horse. A really buff, dead horse.

The key to getting into the high-slope region at all is triggering a hormonal balance that favors muscle growth. Every part of the plan will either contribute to a favorable hormone balance, or leverage it to direct resources to muscle tissue. In general, I want to use exercise and supplements to increase levels of testosterone and GLUT-4. Once those levels are higher than the average person's, overfeeding should just result in muscle growth and very minimal, if any, fat gain.


Supplements
I'll be taking five supplements over the course of this experiment:

• Vitamin D: 3000 I.U. per day. 
• Several studies have shown a dramatic increase in free testosterone levels in individuals given between 3000 I.U. and  7000 I.U. Vitamin D per day. The current RDA (recommended daily allowance) is 400 I.U., but many now think this is underestimated. More research needs to be done for the RDA, but the testosterone increasing evidence is pretty solid at this point. I've been taking this amount of D for a few months now, and that will be kept constant.
• Glutamine: 80 grams per day for the first five days.
• Glutamine is an amino acid that's required in large quantities for rebuilding muscle, but enough glutamine for that should be present in a high-protein diet. Tim suggests this much glutamine for a different reason, though: most people with my build won't be able to absorb as much food as is required by the plan, because all that food causes stress on the intestinal walls. Some research has shown that eating free glutamine in huge amounts helps the intestinal walls repair themselves. I'm a little skeptical of this part, but glutamine is cheap so I'll give it a shot.
• Alpha-lipoic acid: 100-300mg, after each whole food meal
• Abbreviated ALA, is an amino acid and potent antioxidant that regenerates vitamins C and E, and has a few other all-around health benefits supported by studies, including reversing liver disease. I'll be using it to recruit GLUT-4 to the surface of muscle cells, which is supposed to trigger the muscle cells to start intake of nutrients. Testosterone and GLUT-4 together seem to open the nutrient absorption channels on muscle cells and close them on fat cells, which is perfect.
• Creatine: 10 grams per day
• Creatine is a high-density energy reserve for muscle cells. It improves endurance for nearly anything, but can also increase the volume of each muscle cell. At first, this is just water volume, but over some time the cell manufactures more mitochondria and ribosomes and stores more glucose to fill the volume, resulting in a much more useful muscle cell.
• BSN N.O.-XPLODE: One scoop before each gym session or recreational sport
• This stuff is freaking wonderful. My cardiovascular system is shit because of years of nicotine abuse. I thought that once I quit I would need to do cardio often for years before I resembled a normal person, and at first I was right. Then I had half a scoop of N.O.-XPLODE. It has 50 or so ingredients: some cause systemic increases in nitric oxide (dilates ALL the blood vessels) and some are more targeted (Lesser Periwinkle increases blood flow to the brain and spinal cord). One scoop makes me feel like superman for about an hour or so, but it seems to be causing a lasting improvement in my cardio performance even when I don't take it. In any case, this stuff is totally worth the obnoxious price tag.

Tim suggests taking one more supplement: Cissus Quadrangularis. This stuff actually shows promise in the clinical studies I've read, but it's fucking expensive. If I have difficulty repairing my muscle tissue after workouts, I'll drop some cash on a few-day supply and see if it works for me.


Exercise:
Tim's analysis of workout patterns suggests that the guys who spend every day or 5-6 hours a week at the gym aren't just wasting they're time; they're actually actively stopping their muscles from repairing themselves, stopping growth in its tracks. 


Whether this is true or not would take an immense amount of science to determine, so I'm going to just follow Tim's plan in Occam's Protocol and record the results. If I find a similar collection of data from somebody doing a more traditional routine, I'd love to compare the two, but there are simply too many variables at play here.


I'll be alternating two different workouts: A and B. Each workout should take less than 30 minutes of total time at the gym to complete, and the frequency of gym sessions will start at 3 per week and decrease down to less than two per week.


Workout A: Arms and Back

• Close-grip supinated pulldown (Palms facing you)
• At least 7 reps, (5/5) cadence
• Seated machine shoulder press
• At least 7 reps, (5/5)

Workout B: Legs and Chest

• Slight-incline machine bench press
• at least 7 reps, (5/5)
• Leg press
• At least 10 reps, (5/5)
• stationary bike
• 3 minutes at 85+ rpm, just to prevent soreness

The trick is to do only one set of each and fail completely before stopping. (5/5) cadence means 5 counts up, 5 counts down. This means my muscles should be contracted constantly for at least one minute, and after that minute I shouldn't be able to perform a another single rep for at least an hour or so. 

5/5 cadence is important because it maximizes the Time Under Tension. The idea is that the more time under tension your body sees, the bigger the hormonal response is. Absolute failure is important because it physically damages the muscle tissue; when the muscles start repairing themselves, they'll rebuild to handle more stress than what broke them. Also, overfeeding will result in less fat gain if the body sees it needs to repair something instead.

Here's my schedule: 

2-day rest periods between exercises at first (the exception being halloween... no repair will happen that weekend). Once two of each workout are done, start resting 3 days. Once progress stalls (can't plan for that until it happens), increase to 4 days.

Next post will cover the fun part: Diet.

It Begins

Over the next couple months, I'm going to gain as much lean muscle as possible, as quickly as possible. I won't stop working until I've gained at least 15 pounds of muscle, and I'm going to document my adventures in calories and weights here.


This blog is the product of two things:

• I'm tired of being a skinny nerd.
• I realize that if I don't bite off more than I can chew, I won't end up getting anything done at all.

I've always been underweight, and I've always had trouble eating enough. On a normal day, I'll eat about 1400 calories, not many of them particularly nutritious. That's resulted in an incredibly low energy level, constant fatigue and laziness, and the inability to run a mile without stopping for air. Granted, nicotine over the past 4 years made my cardiovascular system what it is today, but that's behind me. I'm moving on.

I have terrible grades. I'm completely capable of getting decent grades, but I don't because school bores the shit out of me. None of it is new, exciting, or surprising, so it doesn't hold my attention and I end up learning nothing. Being able to focus intensely on boring shit is maybe the most valuable skill, but until I develop that skill, I'm stuck; nothing mundane gets accomplished. So I'm gonna try a different approach: Every goal I set from now on will be grand, unrealistic, and awesome.

The idea that the most unrealistic goals are the ones most likely to be accomplished was brewing in my subconscious for a while, but I never would have put it like that if I hadn't read it spelled out in The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss.

I know what you're thinking. "lolz ethan read a self-help book and believed it lulz." Self-help books are generally complete drivel. I could write one, and you don't see me talking about how great my writing is. Tim, on the other hand, seems to really have his shit together. His writing sounds a little like marketing-speak at times, but I trust his claims enough to test them.

I'm going to test and independently verify the claim made in The Four Hour Body, also by Tim Ferriss, that his simple exercise and diet regimen will let me gain about 10 pounds of lean muscle in 4 weeks. Since my test period will overlap with Halloween weekend (and the binge drinking it entails), I'll record as much data as I can before, during and after to see how well Tim's method works, and how much alcohol messes it up.

Every time I eat something, I'll tweet the meal (@feedthenerd) along with a calorie and nutrient estimate. I've started doing this before starting the exercise regimen to stagger the learning curves and hopefully streamline the whole process of vastly increasing my caloric intake. More on the specific regimen I'm using later.