The Quest for 200

So, as is customary for me, I have a constantly changing set of goals. Other goals continue to stay the same, but I keep adding little things to my list.

All of my goals, thankfully, lend themselves to similar paths of achievement. It's not like I will have to change my whole style of training in order to achieve any of these goals. My current list of strength related goals all stay the same, with a minor difference. I want to attain and maintain a bodyweight of 200 pounds. Currently, I hold steady at 196-197 and easily fluctuate up to 198. I haven't seen my weight drop below 196 in quite some time. The second half of this goal is that I want to get down to, approximately, 8% body fat for the summer time. This will be tough to do, 8% is pretty low. I'm really interested to see what I look like under 10%, and summertime is the time to do it, right?

I know that in order to get to 200, I just need to eat big and lift big. I've been feeding myself a steady diet of huge amounts of food mixed with lots of heavy lifting. Beef, cheese,  eggs, milk, eggs, potatoes, rice, protein, more milk, peanut butter; these are what my days consist of, and it is beautiful. My training partner, Dan, and I have also been subsisting on lots of heavy compound lifts. We decided that the percentage based 5/3/1 programs we both started just weren't going to cut it. The variability of our schedules and how we felt day to day just wasn't going to be a great mix with the percentages. Instead, we are adopting a very simple auto-regulated style of program. We will stick a particular rep scheme week-by-week but will allow ourselves to us whatever weights feel appropriate for that day (while keeping a constant progression in mind). Squats, deads, bench pressing and push pressing are going to be our main lifts.

The other piece of my puzzle is our new-found interest in metabolic conditioning. In an attempt to learn more and better understand CrossFit, we have started to work met-con's into our weekly routines. Once, twice or three times a week we are performing actual CrossFit workouts or similar, highly metabolic, workouts. I am also going to try and get better at rowing on the erg, since my currently I row like old people screw (it's gross). These metabolic conditioning workouts is going to play a big role in my ability to get down to 8% body fat. In terms of the body composition goal, I'm not so concerned about my diet. There are a few carb sources I'll need to cut out, or figure out a better time to eat them, but all in all my diet is what I need. I will, though, be putting some thought towards doing 6 weeks of the Paleo diet leading up to the summer.

Well, that's my update for now. Have a great day, and please go lift something heavy!

UPDATE: I wrote this post sometime last week. As of today, I weighed in at 201 pounds!! This is a fluctuation, and I certainly will bounce back and forth around 200 before it is a solid weight for me. I also hit two PR's (personal records) this week: a 415 pound deadlift and a 200 pound push press. Thrilled!!