Life of a Student

So with my goal deadline a little less than a month and a half away, I thought I would go over how my progress is going so far.

Goals:
1. Parallel squat 275 pounds for at least 15 repetitions.
Three days ago, I squatted an all-time maximum, doing 230 pounds for 5 sets of 5 reps. To reach 275 for 15 repetitions, however, will be a worthy goal. Most likely, I’ll have to increase the volume to 2 squat workouts per week to hit that metric.

2. Weigh in at 170 pounds.
I currently weigh in at around 163 to 165 lbs, depending on the time of day. My diet is undoubtedly improving (thanks to keeping better tabs on how much and what I eat).

3. Be able to close the Captains of Crush No. 1 Gripper 8 times (I currently am working with the CoC Trainer gripper + CoC Expand Your Hand Bands, which I will review in a post at a later date.)
The Trainer gripper has become far easier to work with. Improved grip strength is actually one of the most functionally useful things I’ve gained from weightlifting. It makes so many tasks easier, something I notice and appreciate almost every day. I believe this goal is within reach if I keep up my grip workouts, and increase the volume to 3x a week (instead of 2x).

4. Weighted chin-ups with 45 lbs, at least 15 repetitions.
Out of all of my goals, this is the one I am closest to achieving. Two days ago, I was able to do weighted pullups with 55 pounds strapped to my waist (5 sets of 5 reps), so it’s not too unreasonable to expect that I could do at least 11-12 reps with 45 lbs. Looking forward to hitting this one.

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The internet has been responsible for teaching me 99% of the knowledge I currently hold about weightlifting. I highly recommend the Bodybuilding.com forums as a great community that houses a wide variety of training experts. Regardless if you’re a seasoned professional or just touched your first weight yesterday, the forums will have something of value to offer you. The Nutrition and Workout Journal sections in particular have some really good information. I’d also like to add that the Teen Bodybuilding section is of a little bit lower quality than the rest of the board.

But I want to move the focus to two online tools that have helped me keep tracking my progress with the iron:

Joe’s Goals - Goal tracking system
Here’s their own description from their website:

Inspired somewhat by Benjamin Franklin’s 13 Virtues, I built Joe’s Goals to make it stupidly simple to create, track, and share your personal goals. It is a productivity application that is actually easy enough to use.

For beginners to weightlifting, a sticking point is building the habit of going to the gym regularly (3 to 4 times a week). I had this problem about 2 years ago - I would go to the gym around 1-2 times a week. Since I never tracked my gym visits, I thought that I was doing a lot more volume than I actually was.

Joe’s Goals helps with this problem by presenting a simple, clean interface for general goal tracking. For each day, you simply click off a check mark if you achieved the goal. The interface keeps track of “chains”, which are how many days in a row you’ve successfully executed your goals. There’s nothing more satisfying then keeping up a solid chain and seeing at the end of the week a nice looking row of 7 straight check marks.

Fitday - Diet Journal

There’s no doubt that nutrition is an essential part of the growth and hypertrophy process. You absolutely have to get at least 1 gram of protein per lb of bodyweight in order to promote muscle growth. Not tracking your diet is like shooting in the dark - you have no idea if you’re getting anywhere.

FitDay offers a database of thousands of foods and their estimated caloric values. Using it over a period of 3 days to log my food intake, I realized that my nutrition is lacking - I’m only averaging around 2700 calories and 110 grams of protein per day. I’m currently working on some goals and guidelines to address these deficiencies.

Hope you find these tools as helpful as I did - leave a comment on what you think about them.

Tags: Goals, Recommendations by admin
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