Long new year update.
With the start of the year I am ending my first bulk. The goal was to handle holiday food intake better than last year by priming my body to build muscle and utilize all of those delicious calories . It was somewhat successful.
I ended the cutting portion of my diet in the beginning of October 2015. I was bored and felt like eating more / training more. I began by ramping up my calorie intake (100 - 200 kcal / day / week), adding more carbs (was < 75g before), and starting to take creatine.
Start Weight: 10/2015 ~164
After Carbs / Creatine: 11/2015 170 ~15% BF
After Bulk: 1/2016 177 ~17% BF
All body fat measurements are with a BIA scale. Assuming it can at least track change somewhat well, I added ~2.5 lbs. of muscle and 4.5 lbs. of fat. I would have preferred hitting 50 / 50 split, but this is alright. Still better than last year and it was a great learning experience.
Diet
It was mentally difficult to eat enough food. I am still working on breaking the fat man mental barriers. This was largely helpful because it made me realize how much food I would have to eat to get fat again. I aimed for ~.75g protein / lb. body weight with the rest mostly coming from carbs. Ended up being approximately 50/30/20 split carb / protein / fat.
For the first month or so I averaged around 2300 kcal / day and didn't really put on weight that well. The internet calculators were putting me at needing over 2600 kcal / day to gain. As the holidays starting coming around my intake got really spikey and I averaged around 2600 kcal / day with an estimated Christmas week spike of 5500 kcal/day. In the future, I think if I smooth the calories more than just losing it on a given day it would help the muscle gain a bit more.
Christmas week was expected / planned for, which had the added benefit of not feeling bad about it at all.
Workout
I did my usual BJJ, DDP Yoga, and added the reddit bodyweight routine (/r/bodyweightfitness) as the weight lifting component. Program is basically 3xY sets, increasing one set by one rep when possible, generally every workout (3x3x3, 4x3x3, 4x4x3, etc). When you hit 3x8 stepping to the next progression happens. I took progressions from everywhere.
Pull Ups - 3x4 5s Negatives > 3x3 Pull Ups
Dips - 3x7 Bar Dips > 3x6 Ring Dips
Squat - 3x8 Squat > 3x8 Deep Step Up
LSit - 3x20s One Foot Supported > 3x10s Tuck LSit
Push ups - 3x8 Diamon Pushups > 3x4 Archer Push Ups
Row - 3x4 Inverted Row > 3x8 Inverted Row
The most difficult thing for progressing these was form. I am still working through some form issues. I just recently started being able to feel my back muscles and really gain an appreciation for engaging them properly. This is most likely going to set back my pull up / row numbers as I go back to the drawing board and stop compensating with my arms.
Schedule was more or less BJJ / Body Weight Tue / Thur / Sat as the primary workout days. Lifting was in the am, BJJ was my pm activity. The rest of the days I did what I felt like / schedule allowed. Generally this meant Yoga Sun / Mon / Sat and another BJJ day on Friday.
Next Steps
I am going to cut back down to 160 - 165 lbs. over the next 3-4 months and see if I keep the muscle. Sometime in May I will get another DEXA scan to compare to last years numbers. This may be the year of abs, at least the top 4.
When that is done I am going to start some sort of Recomp / Slow Bulk program. Eating more food is fun. I think with a few more cycles of this I may actually be able to get through a majority of the mental side effects of being fat. There were several times during the bulk process I was nearly happy with how I looked, which was a big change.
Also, in case anyone has OCD issues as well, the Withings scale I purchased Cyber Monday was a huge boon. It automatically uploads your weight / body fat to myfitnesspal. I can't break my weigh every day habit yet, but it is easier.
My current long term goal is to get to 165 lbs. 10 - 12% BF and then start slowing increasing to a final weight of 180 lbs. ~12% BF some years down the line.
