Monday, 7 Jan 2008
As I may have mentioned last week, I am re-starting my 12-week TT challenge today after admitting to myself that trying to cut during the month of December is utterly moronic and a textbook example of “Setting yourself up for guaranteed, ignominious failure.”
Believe me, I will never, EVER attempt a cut between Halloween and New Year’s again. I should have noted that I have never been able to do anything but hold the status quo during these months. It would have made much more sense to set aside hardcore cutting plans and focus on mass gain/retention during those months.
Well, lesson learned. Finally. 
Since I am starting again today, this program will run from January 7, 2008 through March 31, 2008. Progress photos will be taken every two weeks for accountability, and all workouts will be performed with a Polar F6 heartrate monitor present to track calories burned. Food will be logged in Diet & Exercise Assistant on my PDA and daily logs will be edited the following day to reflect actual calories burned and eaten. I will also make a cool graph of all this stuff once I have a few minutes to figure out how the graphing function works in Openoffice’s Calc spreadsheet application.
Here are my starting stats for this challenge. I am up a few pounds due to water retention and delicious, unclean holiday eats, but my body fat is relatively unchanged.
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MEASUREMENTS 1/6/08
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Age 32
Weight 145.8
Neck 13
Shoulder 42
Chest 36.5
Waist 27.25
Abdomen 29.5
Hips 39.25
Thigh 23.5
Knee 13.5
Calf 15
Ankle 7.75
Arm 12 (relaxed)/12.5 (flexed)
Forearm 9.5
Wrist 5.75
W-H Ratio 0.69
BF% (Omron) 20.8%
* WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 2460 *
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TRAINING & Nutrition PLAN (Jan. 7 - Mar. 31, 2008)
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TT for Fat Loss: 2K3 Workout (Weeks 1-4)
- M/W/F: Lifting + Intervals
- T/Th/Sa: Intervals (15 min) + Medium intensity steady state cardio (30 min)
- Nutrition: 40/30/30 c/p/f, 1550-1700 calories daily
- 2 cheat meals per week
TT for Fat Loss: 2K4 Workout (Weeks 5-8)
- M/W/F: Lifting + Intervals
- T/Th/Sa: Intervals (15 min) + Medium intensity steady state cardio (30 min)
- Nutrition: 40/30/30 c/p/f, 1350-1550 calories zigzag
- 2 cheat meals per week
January 2008 TT 2K8 or TT Hardcore Fat Loss (Weeks 9-12)
- M/W/F: Lifting + Intervals
- T/Th/Sa: Intervals (15 min) + Medium intensity steady state cardio (30 min)
- Nutrition: 40/30/30 c/p/f, 1350-1550 calories zigzag
- 1 cheat meal per week
Nutrition will be my own plan, but it is based on the plan by Dr. Mohr for women with some tweaks that have worked for me in the past.
Actually, nutrition will mostly be about pre-cooking most of my meals on Sunday and Wednesday, munching every 3 hours or so, selecting lots of veggies, fruits, nuts, and lean protein sources, drinking plenty of water and green tea, avoiding refined carbs and sugars, and generally not stuffing myself until my seams are popping. Yeah, yeah, there’s nothing new or groundbreaking here. It all boils down to consistency for me.
Luckily, I will have lots of other activities from Project Wonder Woman going on to keep me busy so I won’t have time to obsess over this challenge.