The Twelve Week Challenge is over, so have I reverted back to my old bad habits?  Actually, I've stepped it up a notch.  During those twelve weeks, I wanted to show with a sensible diet, weight training, and some sprinting you can both lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, and most importantly, without killing yourself.  I believe that my progress shows that it is possible to make a lot of good progress through moderation, in terms of both diet and exercise.

The thing is, I still have not reached all my goals.  I am not as lean as I would like to be, but at the same time I also want to build more muscle.  Quite the conundrum.  Is it possible to get to single digit body-fat (visible abs) while also gaining muscle?  I don't know either, but I'm working on it now. I've changed my approach slightly, and from what I've accomplished over the past two weeks, I now believe that it is possible.  The missing ingredient is, hard work.  If I look honestly at the premise of the Twelve Week Challenge it was basically to get as much as possible with the least amount of work.  This breaks the universal law of reaping and sowing.  If you put in moderate efforts you get moderate results, not extraordinary results.

Like I said, I'm stepping it up a notch.  Everyone these days talks about how if you exercise too much, or have too much volume in your training program you will become "over-trained".  Tell this to an Olympic lifter who is doing two squat training sessions every day of the week. Or to Ironman participants, who spend upwards of twelve hours training everyday in preparation for that event.  The bottom line is that you get out only what you put in.  

As a side note  I spoke with my father the other day about my new training plan.  When he was younger he was a big strong dude.  He got there by doing pullups, pushups, and situps everyday.  No fear of over-training  no scientific programming. He just did those three exercises everyday, and put full effort into it each day.  This is not to say that there aren't more efficient ways to train, but it illustrates the point that the attitude with which you train is more important than the actual program.  People who push themselves will succeed.

After two weeks of really working hard.  I'm happy
 with the results so far
I have gone back to a powerlifting based program, called Beyond 531.  It is an awesome program for increasing strength in the four main lifts: squat, deadlift, bench press, and overhead press.  This is the foundation of what I'm doing now.  Everyday I follow this program for one main lift.  After that I choose an exercise that is related to the main lift, and work up to a heavy set of three to five reps.  Then I immediately work my way back down in a huge drop set to get a lot of volume, and also get the "pump".  This is basically a combination of powerlifting and bodybuilding approaches. This style of training is really fun, but also super challenging.  After lifting really heavy weight, the last thing you want to do is push yourself to absolute fatigue with lighter weights.

For my condition work, after upper body workouts I do a high intensity "finisher" to burn fat and get my metabolism firing. This could be as simple as doing 100 burpees as fast as possible, or it could be a series of barbell exercises done back to back without ever putting the bar down.  Finishers are a great way to work on conditioning, burn fat, and develop some mental toughness.  They are challenging, but are also fun way to end a workout. On squat and deadlift days, I do a sprint workout 8 hours later in the evening.  On rest days, I do another high intensity finisher, and go for a long walk.  I'm really pushing myself hard now.  I'm choosing to work incredibly hard in order to get incredible results.  I'm choosing not to buy into the fear of "over-training".  It's just another experiment, and you will find all the results here and on facebook.