Oh Happy Monday

Well I now know that my 4 hour reefed was not enough on Saturday. I base-lined this morning – 2 days early! To summarise; my reefed as outlined in my last blog post (see below) equated to a water weight gain of 2lb. In 24 hours I have shed that water weight and as of this morning I weighed the same as Saturday. In a nut shell this means that my 4 hour reefed was not enough to completely replenish glycogen stores or to fill me back out.

I could have guessed without standing on the scales to be honest as I had what I refer to as “that Wednesday look”, and what I mean by this is that typically refeeding/skiploading on a Saturday makes you look large but watery on a Sunday and through Monday and Tuesday definition and size start to find a nice balanced look as they start to off-set each other to the point that on Wendesday the balance reaches its optimal point and you essentially look big, hard, full, lean and vascular. Another post for another day – but its through these weekly refeeds and my ability to track water weight reduction that I will know how many days before my show to “carb up” and how long for. This approach also removes the need for diuretics, sodium manipulation or dehydration techniques (another reason why its slightly controversial!)

What will now happen throughout the course of this week is that I will start to go flat and will end the week more delepeted than usual. Although I will bump the reefed window to six hours for next Saturday the knock on effect of under-eating this weekend just gone is that I may have to go straight up to 8 hours in 2 weeks time as I’ll essentially be working from a negative starting position when I start this weeks load. To try and manage this situation I may need to manipulate my cardio schedule this week. IF I am already 2lb down in weight or more before Friday I will drop Friday’s cardio session and take an extra 2 hours in bed. The added benefit of this approach is that moving the cardio session out and then back in the following week will elicit a better response next week.

Was supposed to be back and abs with 20 mins steady state cardio this morning, but dropped abs as I am doing tomorrow after cardio and was pretty tired after back. I had that nice dull achey feel in my lats all morning long. A sure fire sign that I hit the intended muscle group nice and hard this morning.

Workout consisted of:

• Bent Over BB Rows (reverse grip) – 3 working sets of 10 @ 100kg 
• Rack Pulls - 4 working sets of 8-12 reps working up to 230kg 
• Wide Grip Lat Pull Downs – 4 working sets of 10-16 reps working up to 195lb 
• V-Bar Twisted Pull Downs – 3 working sets of 9 reps at 130lb 
• Squat V-Bar Cable Rows – 3 working sets of 15 reps at 172lb 
• Single Arm Cross Body Cable Lat Levers – 3 working sets of 8-12 reps at 60lb 
• One Arm DB Rows – 3 working sets of 8 reps using 48kg dumbells

30-40 mins cardio in the morning followed by abs. 2.5 hours fasting too. Carb free day - note the complete sarcasm is my voice when I say I can't fucking wait!