With the first month completed and all lifts successfully hit I am finally making progress and can feel my body developing strength once again. It’s exciting to be back strength training, especially testing out the HOG Program. I’m confident that I will be able to continue hitting my lifts over the next month and that’s when things will start to get interesting. Restarting the program and learning about the strength training basics has been useful to determine how I can help people like yourself on how to progress.
Firstly, if you haven’t checked out the first post in the progress series, you can check it out here. It will help you start the program and show you how to determine your starting lifts.
Post Contents
Current Body Composition and Progress Photos
Body Composition
As is probably evident from the photos and measurements below, I have gone overboard with eating this month. My appetite for food has been sky high and unfortunately not all of this has been converted into muscle. I can feel that my legs are getting slightly larger as well as stronger, however, my waist has grown a lot.
As I will discuss in the nutrition section, for the month of February, I will be more disciplined with my eating and general recovery.
| Body Measurements | 04/01/2021 cm | 04/01/2021 Inches | 01/02/2021 cm | 01/02/2021 Inches |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Height | 190.5 | 75 | 190.5 | 75 |
| Shoulders | 132.5 | 52.5 | 133.5 | 52.6 |
| Chest | 113 | 44.5 | 115 | 45.3 |
| Waist (Widest Part) | 98 | 38.6 | 101 | 39.8 |
| Hips | 95 | 37.4 | 100 | 39.4 |
| Upper Arm | 42.5 | 16.7 | 44 | 17.3 |
| Forearms | 37 | 14.6 | 37 | 14.6 |
| Upper Thigh | 63 | 24.8 | 68 | 26.8 |
| Calves | 44 | 17.3 | 45 | 17.7 |
| Body Composition | 04/01/2021 Kg | 04/01/2021 lbs | 01/02/2021 Kg | 01/02/2021 lbs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bodyweight | 104.4 | 230.2 | 107.2 | 236.4 |
| Calculated Muscle Mass | 81.4 | 179.4 | 83.1 | 183.2 |
| Calculated Body Fat % | 17.9% | 17.9% | 18.4% | 18.4% |
Progress Photos
Not Very Flattering…
My Current Training Lifts
With week 5 beginning today, these are my lifts scheduled for this week:
| Monday | Wednesday | Friday |
|---|---|---|
| Squats 8×2 80kg | Squats 8×2 82.5kg | Squats 8×2 85kg |
| Stiff Leg Deadlifts 8×2 80kg | Stiff Leg Deadlifts 8×2 82.5kg | Stiff Leg Deadlifts 8×2 85kg |
| Bench 8×2 60kg | Overhead Press 8×2 40kg | Bench 8×2 62.5kg |
| Pullups 4×3 | Bent Over Rows 8×2 45kg | Pullups 4×3 |
How To Warm Up
When approaching each working set, obviously don’t just go straight into it. It should be obvious that you need to build up to it, preparing your body to be able to successfully lift your target weight.
It may not seem so important when you first start strength training but it is an incredibly useful habit and will help you down the road. Don’t be tempted just to go straight into your working lifts in the early sessions, try and prepare yourself the same way you would approach a 200kg squat.
If you build the habit, the benefits will follow.
Why Warming Up is Important:
Warming up not only acclimatises your body to the weight, but it helps activate the muscles critical for that movement in preparation for your working sets. From activating the quads, glutes and core (important for bracing in the squat), warming up can reduce the injury risk and help you complete your working sets.
It can be useful to determine your warmup lifts based upon %’s of your working lifts and this is often how people approach it, but it can be just as beneficial to build up in 20kg increments.
Warm Up Example
An Example of warming up for a 100kg working set:
20kg (Just the bar) 10Reps
60kg – 8 reps
80kg – 6 reps
90kg – 4 reps
100kg – Working Sets (8 reps x 2 Sets)
My Nutrition
As you have seen in the progress photos and the changes in body composition, I have increased in weight quite quickly and this has primarily been because of laziness and a lack of discipline when it comes to sticking to a plan. I believe I was probably eating anywhere from around 4000-4500 calories a day, which explains the rapid increase in bodyfat and weight.
I have been hitting my target of 200g+ of protein a day which has been good, but for February I will track my calories and upload the averages at the end of the month.
If you have not tried to track your calories, the best way of doing it is using myfitnesspal. The available tools are great, by simply scanning a barcode, you are able to find the food you eat and then enter in the quantity and your calories and macro’s are determined. In a future post I will showcase how to use myfitnesspal accurately and set your own macro targets.
A rough guideline:
- Aim for a calorific surplus
- Aim for 2g of protein per kg of bodyweight (100kg man would need to eat 200g of protein)
- Carbohydrates before and after training.
- 37.5*bodyweight (kg) for calories
I am not a qualified nutritionist, however there are hundreds of thousands of articles on the internet about designing a nutrition plan for weight training. I will try to create a HOG STRENGTH guide which will be no-nonsense and try and help avoid the confusion.
HOG Program Improvements
As I mentioned in the first post, I was wary that the upper body volume may mean that people question whether they are maximising the potential progress when it comes to improving the Bench and Overhead Press, as well as developing overall back strength. And while the weights slowly build up I have definitely felt this frustration.
I have toyed with the idea of having two different program variations, an upper-body focused version and then a lower-body version. I have also thought about how to introduce extra upper body lifts and how to balance that with ensuring recovery is optimised.
Throughout February I am going to try and add in an extra Push and an extra Pull movement twice a week but ensure that I am primarily focusing on the main lifts and the necessary recovery. In next month’s update, I will delve into how this has impacted or benefited my progression.
As well as thinking about how to increase upper body volume, I have been exploring ways to help improve mobility and believe that trying to stretch for 20-30 mins on every rest day has been beneficial to improving my mobility. I have previously mentioned ROMWOD as a good option to help make sure you complete some sort of stretching and I stand by that, the unique daily programs are great and I would definitely recommend their trial period. The app is available on both IOS and Android.