So, I overdid it on my knees Saturday (actually, Friday night, but Saturday didn't help), and I took the weekend off from working out.
My weight has been really fluctuating rapidly. My water retention is all over the place, and my weight readings have been varying as much as 16 pounds during a single day.
Plus I'm burning a hell of a lot in excercise, and with the high protein and the supplements... well I've only been working out again for two weeks now, and I can already see strength and endurance gains.
It's six weeks in to my diet and excercise program, and near as I can tell, my baseline weight is between 391 and 396; about 25 lbs below where I started on september 11th; but my weight on a given day may read anything from 391, to as high as 407 the next day (like yesterday and this morning).
As of a few days ago, I'd lost over an inch on my pants, an inch of fat on my arms, and here's the kicker, TWO FULL INCHES of fat on my chest; plus I've upped my muscle tone significantly. I've also put almost half an inch on my neck, probably just in tone.
This probably means I've lost a couple percentage points of bodyfat in the last month, but because of my high mass, and fluctuating water levels I can't get an accurate or consistent reading; and the tape is just a wild ass guess.
I've got pretty odd muscle structure; I tend to bulk up rapidly, but tone slowly past a certain base level of muscle tone. I'm at that tone level now in some muscle groups, and I can see actual mass gains in two weeks.
Anyway, I've decided to up my aerobic workout intensity and duration a bit. I've been doing 20 minutes a day on the excercise bike, at resistance level 1-2, and keeping my heart rate around 125-135. Today, I upped my program to resistance level 3-4, upped my heart rate range to 135-145, and increased my duration to 30 minutes.
That brings me up to about 70-80% of my peak heartrate, which would qualify as fairly vigorous excercise. For a guy my size, that's about 870 calories worth of burn (according to the instant read calorimeter on my bike anyway); and a nice solid aerobic workout.
I'm pretty happy with maintaining 2600 calories average intake level; it seems to be giving me a good balance between energy, total intake, fullness and hunger, and portion size. Actually, most days I'm coming up a bit short, and filling in the gap with a dessert, or some snacks.
My hunger level has reset very rapidly. Most days I'm not at all hungry, and in fact have to overfill myself a little to make my intake. Better, the more I work out, the lower my appetite (I've always been like that, unless I'm in a heavy mass building period in which case I can't eat enough).
I COULD jsut reduce my average intake, but I'm already in famine mode, and I want my body to stabilize at the 2600 calorie intake level. Plus, with the excess burn from excercise, I don't think that's a good idea at all.
I'm doing enough aerobic work, between the bike and circuit training, that I'm going to have some catabolisis if I'm not careful. I don't want to reduce my excercising, in fact I want to increase it; so I'm going to have to go with a heavier supplement regimen (back to the full stack in a few weeks I think), and up my protein intake, because my diet is somewhat heavily carb weighted at the moment.
Also, I'm going to put in some heavier large muscle training in a few weeks, to up my anabolic processes. Heavy leg work once or twice a week, with a complete workout to failure and exhaustion once a month, and some upper body work to balance it out ought to do it... if I supplement myself properly (lots of vitamins, protein, and amino acids), otherwise I'll end up eating my own muscle through catabolisis.
If I have the time, I'm also upping my circuit training routine, to include more balanced upper and lower body work; and increasing the total time to 60 minutes, instead of 45; at least every other day, and if I can manage it, every day.
This will give me up to 90 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic activity every day (and at least 30); with breaks on weekends. I'm going to have to work hard at preventing catabolisis here.
My goal is to burn fat off, rebuild muscle mass, and re-tone; not eat my own muscles, so again it's time for recalibration. Up the protein, up the vitamins and amino acids, cut a lot of the carbs... and then figure out what intake level I need to keep up to avoid muscle loss.
I expect between famine mode, the water retention, and my muscle mass starting to build up; that my weight is going to plateau for a while, but my fitness level is going to increase rather rapidly; at least I hope so.
