Week two is in the books!
It’s been great so far. I feel great and I’m getting stronger and putting on size. I love the mental and physical challenge of training to failure on the big lifts. If you’ve never front squatted or deadlifted to failure at 10+ reps, count yourself lucky. It’s great preparation for competition because I’m competing against myself and my training partner. It’s as much a mental game as it is physical.
The intensity of the competition has paid off so far as I’ve added 10lbs to my 10RM front squat, 10lbs to my 10RM deadlift, and 25lbs to my 10RM swiss bar bench press. But I have to admit that a fair amount of the bench press increase is just technique improvement since I hadn’t used anything but dumbbells to bench press for a long time.
With intense training such as this, nutrition is extremely important. I don’t think I’ve consistently eaten this much and been this conscious of my diet before. One of the most difficult changes has been eating all of my meals in a 12-hour window. There’s some research that has shown solid improvements in body composition and overall health when eating in a 12-hour or less time period. More research is needed but for me it’s forced me to only eat nutrient dense food because I can only fit a certain amount of calories in that time period.
Thanks for following me on this journey! I’ll have the sidebar tracker up and running this weekend so you can follow along with my measurable improvements throughout this process.
Time to get on my recovery so I can be ready to get after it on Monday. Enjoy your weekend!