Ben Wills: A Fitness Log

Whoops. I apparently put 1.14 as the date when I first wrote this. I am not a fortune teller.

I’m still tweaking the workouts a bit. I feel like by the time I figure it out, I’ll be done with this mass gaining cycle. Which is fine, I expect I’ll be doing this again next year. And who knows, maybe it helps you, too.

What I’m noticing is that lifting like this - with little rest between sets and lifting heavy weight - is flat exhausting. Usually, after about 20-25 minutes, about 1/2-2/3 through, I’m wiped. Today after deadlifts (the last five, I couldn’t even keep my eyes open for them), I was panting like a dog for a solid five minutes. The good thing is that it’s forcing me to draw on reserves of energy that I’ve never pulled from before. I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I would imagine that pushing through exhaustion is one of the things that will help most with the mass gain….

Because this is starting to make sense on some level. These workouts kick the shit out of me. I’m completely zonked and can barely think straight for at least an hour after, sometimes more. I basically make myself eat a bunch of food and zone out to mindless things on the internet. Then, the food ends up being so much that I’m pretty worthless for most of the rest of the day. It’s a cycle of: Beat the hell out of yourself until it requires large amounts of nutrition to repair itself, then overeat as much food as you can.

One thing that I think is helping is splitting the two workouts into upper-body and lower-body. Both days are whole-body workouts, but my Monday workout absolutely should have resulted in more reps on bench than it did. But it didn’t because I was wiped form the squats. So, I’m having Mondays with squats as the focus and Thursdays as bench. On those days, I’ll be trying to push new records for those lifts.

Morning Mass: 175.0 lbs

Workout Start Time: 7:10 pm

Workout Length: 40m

*Note: I tried bench lifts after the 10 reps at 135 of 212 and 201. 212 would have been a new record, 201 would have tied my all time 1RM. I feel like I should be able to at least match my record next week. And, on that note, I’m curious about the phenomenon of “seeing stars” and how that even works. That kicked in on both of those attempts. After those attempts, I was surprised to get 11 reps up of 157.