Vegan Bodybuilding & Fitness

hi everyone, sorry to keep clogging this board up with new posts, but I figured it would be better create one comprehensive post than add stuff on to my other posts.

Basically I want your advice on where I should go from where I am to get where i want to be.

I'm 30 years old
male
about 65k / 10 st (this hasn't changed at all over the last 3 months since I have started working out)
5'10"ish
In, I believe, generally good state of health.
Never played any athletic sports
used to do manual labor but now work as a school teacher
cycle to work everyday (around 3.7 miles each way)

Veggie since 19, Vegan 3 years as of tomorrow
don't drink, take drugs etc

I'd prepared a 'before' pic but I'm a bit too self conscious to post it. basically as you can figure from those stats I'm very lean but have fat sitting around my gut and before i started working out I would say that I had never seen real definition in my muscles, even when I was humping chicken shit around for a living.


at the moment I'm doing:

the 5x5 with a friend, training 2 days a week, we recently switched the deadlift for 5x5 assisted pull ups as my mate was worried about his knee. We also do 30 mins hard cardio after the 5x5 workout.

just started 2 extra days of weights, sometimes one of these is with my partner so we move our routie forward one session, sometimes I'm on my own as he is busy (this is one of my main issues)

1 session of hard cardio (ran 7k for the first time yesterday, 48 mins)

Diet tries to follow:

breakfast - large bowl of 50% oats, 50% mixed nuts, pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, sunflower seeds (basically a home made muesli) + unsweetened soy milk + piece of fruit + 2 spoons hemp protein

lunch - either some kind of salad with a protein item 9culd include sprouted beans, hummus, beans, nuts, tofu, etc) or rye bread with hummus or peanut butter

dinner - some kind of carb plus veg and protein item, cooked (this can sometimes be part of lunch the next day etc)

snack - 4 pieces of fruit through the day.

drinks - coffee with soy milk (sometimes 4 cups per day), water (usually 2 liters when i work out plus I aim for another 2 through the day , fruit juice.


However I really crave chips (fries) and crisps (chips) and often find myself eating them when I'm stressed, forgotten my lunch, etc


So my big questions are:

I want to get muscular but not big, lean and mean, is 5x5 the one for me?
What could I do the other 2 days which will compliment the 5x5 exercises and allow me to stay in sync with my training partner?
Which exercises can i focus on to work on my abs?

Is my diet in general correct for what i want to achieve?
Should I drop the rice/pasta element of the dinner ( I've been taking quinoa last few weeks but don't wanna eat only that everyday!)
should I be eating 4 meals?
Should I be taking some kind of protein smoothie after working out?


my biggest concern is sorting the routines so they are fixed and I can record my progress, my life is pretty hectic but I reckon if the fixed 'program' is there then it should be easier to make sure i dont fall behind/look for an easy way out, and fall short of my goals.


lemmie know what you all think!

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www.x4298x.blogspot.com

I think you are on the right track. I would post your questions directly to people's threads, you will get much better responses that way. A good section to post on is in peoples training journals. Choose people that have been actively posting.
Good luck!

-Dylan

I'm a noob but some other people already answered some of your questions for me so I will try to help.


5x5 is good, but you should stick to a good 5x5 program and record your progress always(a notebook and a pen would work great for that).
In order to build some muscles you have to make sure your are progressivelly increasing your work load.
Abs are just another muscle group, you should do some classic ab exercises, but focus on doing something like 12 to 15 repetitions and when that get easy using only your bodyweight use some weight to exercise your abs.


As a rule of thumb people use 1g protein per lbs of body weight ( or something like 2g per kilo ). As long as you are achieving that you should have no problem if you don't want to take a protein smoothie. But it surely gets easier to achieve that mark with one.
4 meals are fine.

You don't have to drop anything of your dinner if your caloric intake is ok for your needs. To figure out the number of calories you need you could search for some formula on google to have a number to start with(all the formulas are just good guesses). Lets say you find out you need 2400 calories for your goal, you should consume around that number of calories and start noticing the changes on your body. If you are gaining too much unwanted weight you should decrease that number, if you are losing too much weight you should increase it.

That's about it =)

Hope I helped, if anyone could improve my answer it would be great.

Good luck and work hard.

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my noob log =)