AndiMorris

Try a strength building program, something like stronglifts or starting strength. They'll help you through the initial strength gains.

This is very interesting. I've just started adding a teaspoon of chlorella and maca powder to my morning smoothie. I've not noticed any ill effect yet, but it has only been around a week.

Workout 18/06/13 Warm Up: 3 rounds: 200m run 5 kipping pull ups 5 air squats 5 push ups Strength: 5x2 hang power clean & jerk (45kg) WOD: Level 1: 18 power clean & jerk (40kg) 600m run 12 power clean & jerk 400m run 6 power clean & jerk 200m run Extras: 3 sets of max effort strict pull ups (6,5,5) My first workout in over a week as I’ve been on tour with the band, and have also been in the recording studio a few evenings, meaning I simply haven’t had time. This will also be my only session until next week as I’m off to France for a festival on Thursday morning. Annoying, but life outside the gym does take a preference. Strength felt fine in this. I still don’t think I’m getting enough of the shrug and pull out on my olympic lifts, but I can feel it getting better. It was pointed out to me that I am maintaining the hook grip even when the bar is in rack position and then into the jerk. I need to work on keeping the hook for below the rack, and then opening it up for the above the head movement. I found this WOD a real struggle. Rx was 60kg 21-15-9, which is too heavy at that amount of reps for me, so I scaled to the level 1 workout at 40kg. It still felt brutal though, with the runs being taken as a rest in between the lifts as I was completely drained of energy during them. The weight itself didn’t seem too heavy, more the amount of reps. Still I was going to go lighter, and now I’m glad I didn’t. Before the class started I had a bit of time so I decided to do 3 max effort sets of pull ups. Previously this is always around the 4 reps mark, so I was pretty pleased when I easily did 6 reps on the first set, and 5 for the remainders too. I could potentially have got another rep or two out aswell I think, but I didn’t want to completely blow myself out before the class started.

Alcohol.

Yep

Hi all, over the last few years I've been trying to get bigger, but each time I do I end up gaining too much fat. The last two bulks I've ended up approaching 20% body fat and thought enough is enough and dropped back down to around 15%. Now previous bulks I haven't really paid too much attention to what I've been eating, just made a conscious effort to hit my calorie count for the day (usually around 3000 cals). However, since turning vegan a couple of months ago, and eating much cleaner, I've noticed that my body fat is dropping slowly without any need to count calories, which is great as I'm not losing too much lean muscle mass with it. However, I'm not sure how to turn this around when I've finally reached a body fat % I'm happy with (probably about 12-13%). Ideally I'd like to continue to eat cleanly, and keep my body fat down, but I'd like to put on weight too. I'm currently around 70kg at 14.5% body fat, and my goal is to get to 80kg at around 12%. Any tips for a clean vegan bulk? For reference my training schedule is crossfit 3-4 times per week. This means that I usually do strength training 3 times per week and then have a HIT session afterwards.

Impressive strength gains! has your body fat gone up much with the bulk? Edit: Accidental thread hijack.

I would agree that you're more somewhere between 12-15%. How are you measuring this?

Personally I learned when I started Crossfit. That was the first time I'd ever had an actual coach which obviously helped a huge amount. I still struggle with getting my chest up when squatting, but that's something I'm working on.

Metalheads! Amazing. Check out my bands Desecration - http://desecration.bandcamp.com Extreme Noise Terror -

Hi Fay, welcome. I'm new here myself but everyone seems great so far.

Workout 07/06/13 Warm Up: 2 rounds of: 200m run 5 air squats 5 burpees 10 second wall handstand hold Skills: HSPU practise 3 sets of max effort handstand push ups WOD: Rx: “Omar” 10 thrusters (42.5/30kg) 15 bar-facing burpees 20 thrusters 25 bf burpees 30 thrusters 35 bf burpees Level 1: 18 min AMRAP 5 thrusters 7 bf burpees 10 thrusters 14 bf burpees 15 thrusters 21 bf burpees I enjoyed the skills section again today. I am making progress with my kipping hand stand push ups, and can now do a few in a row with one abmat, I think I’d probably be able to do a few at rx too (15kg plate each side of abmat). For the max-effort sets I did 6,4 and 2, which obviously isn’t great, but it’s better than I’ve done before, and each time the only reason I broke was because I kipped away from the wall, meaning I came back down to my feet. The WOD was a different story, I was in a quandary. When I first saw the workout on the board I wanted to do the Rx version, but with a scaled weight, probably 30kg, maybe even 25kg, but Coach Reeves said that there was no more mix and matching, we either do Rx, or level 1, which was fair enough. He was trying to get me to go for Rx weight (rightly) saying that above all else I need to work on my strength and the best way to get stronger woudl be to lift heavier, but I was insistent that 42.5kg thrusters at that amount would be too heavy for me to get anywhere with the workout. I chose to scale to Level 1, at 35kg. It was killer, I managed to complete 1 round and 25 reps and it was hard going. I had to break the thrusters up in to sets of 3s apart from the very first set of 5. This just showed again how much I really need to do some serious strength training. In hindsight, Reeves was right (coaches usually are!!!), and I probably should have just gone at 42.5kg, and just did as much as I could, and I fully deserved being called “Andrea” for going lighter. I was on tour over the weekend, so there was no training since Friday night, and I’m at the studio most evenings this week, so I don’t imagine I’ll be able to get more than one session in, which is highly annoying, but that’s life.

Hi C.O. The death metal band can be found here: http://desecration.bandcamp.com. The hardcore punk band can be found here:

No probs, I found it very handy when I was calorie counting.

You might find that the pasta and bread is bloating you and stopping you from being able to eat more, I certainly found this myself. You could maybe try replacing it with other calorie-dense but non-wheat based products like quinoa.

Seems good to me Have you seen the Brendan Brazier recipes for making your own vegan energy bars? They look pretty easy to make and keep for a while in the freezer once made so could be handy to make a batch that will last a month or so. I haven't made any myself yet as I haven't quite got all the ingredients to hand, but I certainly plan to very soon to replace my afternoon spoonful of peanut butter.

Not a recipe I know, but you could use the myfitnesspal.com website/app to find out exactly what is in the food you're making. It's a bit of a PITA weighing everything and logging it, but if you create recipes using the ingredients then you only need to do it once per meal type, as long as the ingredients are the same each time. It's a fantastic tool.

I did stronglifts 5x5 as my first ever attempt at a proper training program. I enjoyed it, but when I reached plateaus on squats, deads and press I found it very difficult to motivate myself to continue. Thankfully not long after I joined a Crossfit gym, which helped in this way mainly because of the near one to one coaching. It turns out my form was bad on both squats and deads, so I was quite lucky that I did lack the strength to go very heavy before I injured myself. Having a coach there really helps with motivation to push through plateaus.

I'm not sure that's normal. It would be normal to be more tired on days that you have trained, but I don't think you should be having any trouble sleeping on rest days. Are you tired when you go to bed? Do you keep a regular sleeping pattern? Do you drink caffeinated drinks during the day? If so, how late is your last one of the day? I've found since forcing myself to sleep 7-8 hours a night (I used to be a late night xbox player) I feel much better all day, and definitely recover from exercise better than I used to. Even on rest days I'm still ready for bed around 10pm, which is about right as my alarm goes off at 6am most days.

Agreed, squats and deadlifts are the core of everything.

WORKOUT 05/06/13 Warm Up: (I arrived a few minutes late, so only did half of the warm up). 100m run 10 push ups 20 sec wall handstand 50 double unders WOD: 3 rounds of: 5 clean & jerk 80/55kg 75 double unders 9 min time cap Skills: 7 minute OTMEM 20 sit ups then 7 minute OTMEM 12 push ups (scaled from 10 handstand pushups) If at any point you don’t complete the round you replace the movement with 7 burpees on the minute for the remaining rounds. ———————————————————————————- It was an odd session last night, I arrived late and so didn’t do the complete warm up, which sent me off kilter for everything, mentally more than physically I think. Then we did the main WOD before doing the skills session which felt very backwards. The WOD I went for 50kg on the clean and jerk, and defaulted to power cleans, when really I should have gone for full squat cleans. I honestly didn’t even think about this at the time though. 50kg felt heavy, and my grip was slipping a fair amount, however I managed to complete the 3 rounds of this so it was the right choice to go heavier than I though I could have, I know I can do it in the future now. For some reason my double unders have gone backwards in recent weeks. I went for them in the first round and only managed to chain around 30, then it was all 10s and 5s until I reached 75. For the second two rounds I went for 150 fast singles instead to keep the intensity up. I was halfway through the last set of single unders when I reached the time cap. For the skills session (if you can really call it that for this particular workout) I completed all the sit ups for each round without fail. I was close to the minute on the last two rounds, but I finished at least. The push ups was a different story. My shoulders were shot from the clean and jerks, and I always quickly blow out on push ups as it is. I finished the first two rounds, then failed the third getting only 10 reps in the minute, meaning the remaining 4 sets were of 7 burpees. I’ve been eating very well since going vegan, and it’s showing by the loss in body fat. I’m down to 15.1% this morning, from 18% about 6 weeks ago, with not much muscle mass lost this I’m very pleased with how this is going. Breakfast: smoothie Morning snack: 25g nuts Lunch: broccoli soup Afternoon snack: peanut butter and some fruit Dinner: Butternut squash and bean stew type thing Evening snack: granola with almond milk

I've been doing crossfit for coming up to a year, and believe me when I say I started at rock bottom for all the strength and skills involved. I'm still not great at it, but I improve each time I go there. I plan to log this here (as well as on my tumblr http://themudsweatandbeers.tumblr.com) and hopefully will start to log my food intake too. To begin here are my last two days worth of training: WORKOUT 04/06/13 - SUUUMMMMOOOOO Warm Up: 3 rounds: 200m run 5 SLOW deadlift @ 20kg 10 kettlebell swings @ 24kg Lift: 15 mins to find 5RM Sumo Deadlift WOD: 4 rounds 12 KB SHDP (sumo deadlift high pull) @ 16kg (unbroken) 12 KB Swings @ 16 kg (unbroken) 400m run 13 min time cap OK, partnered up with Justin again tonight, and I have to say he’s really good at egging me on to up my weights. My previous 5RM on sumo deadlift was 90kg, and I got to this easily, upped it to 100kg, and I still think there was more there. I did a bonus 1 rep at 105kg and 110kg as I was running out of time but I was excited that I was lifting more than I expected. My previous 1RM of standard deadlift was 110kg, and I know I can now add some weight on to that next time it comes up. I scaled the kettlebell weight for the WOD down to 16kg from the Rx 24kg, but I was quite surprised at just how light this felt during the workout. The run was the real killer in this. 24kg would have been doable, but I would have been much slower, and the WOD itself was a real lung blower so I probably made the right choice. I finished in 11:37 and prompted collapsed into a pile on the floor. It was nice to train outside again though. Last night was the first time I tried out the home made pre-workout snack, and post-workout recovery drink, taken from Brendan Brazier’s Thrive recipe book. It was nice to make the final step into veganism knowing that I’m fuelling my broken muscles appropriately, and it was completely tasty and very thirst quenching to boot. The home made nature means I know exactly what’s going into it, and it’s pretty cheap too. Very pleased.

Yes I did, significantly less bloating and much better skin. I've always suffered with spots, and I don't think I've had one since I cut the dairy out. My recovery whey powder finished last night, so it's Brendan Brazier's recovery drink recipes from now on. I'm pretty excited to try them out and see if I can notice the difference.

I'm in two bands, a hardcore punk band called Extreme Noise Terror and a death metal band called Desecration. It's good fun! I keep a training journal on tumblr at the moment, but once I get a bit of a post count up on here I'll happily copy this into a journal on this forum too. Thanks for the welcome.

Hi guys, new here so I thought I'd do the usual thing and post an intro. Age: 35 Weight: 70kg Height: 5' 11" Squat: 95kg Press: 40kg Deadlift: 110kg Nutrition: I've been vegetarian for about 15 years, I eliminated dairy at the start of the year and have been vegan for the last month or so and feel great for it. I still have a couple of days worth left of my recovery whey shake powder, but once that's gone I'll be using Brendan Brazier's recipes to create my own pre and post workout snacks and drinks. I do a lot of touring with two bands, and sometimes will struggle to eat clean when on tour, and also sometimes will likely struggle to eat vegan, but where possible I'll do both. Fitness: After doing literally no sport or exercise since leaving school in 1996 I decided to get to the gym and waste a ton of time on the machines there doing the usual 3 comfortable sets of 10 on everything. This lasted about a year until somebody told me about the Stronglifts program, which I followed for around a year, hit a plateau and stayed there, training on and off. Then just under a year ago I joined my local Crossfit box and haven't looked back. Love it or hate it, the almost one to one coaching, and community spirit has really spurred me on with my training and I usually go 3 to 4 times a week. Goals: Looking to drop body fat further to around 12~13% (dropped from 18% to 15% over the last couple of months) without losing too much strength, then follow a clean diet (mainly Brendan Brazier's Thrive diet) to try and get a clean bulk going on. I'd like to gain a lot of extra strength on all my lifts plus generally improve on all the other Crossfit gymnastic movements.