1) Give your brain the information it needs to guide you through the race

Your brain knows everything that you do. It may seem like a silly statement but many people will ignore what they spontaneously think in favor of something they consciously think. Don’t look at rocks and think “there is a rock”, scan along the trail ignoring what you see. Come back to the rocks only if your eyes come back to them, but it is most likely that your brain will determine a better line and look at something other than the rocks. To do prime your brain with sensory input, deliberately move your eye fixations back and forth along the upcoming trail allowing the sensory input to flood into your brain. Doing this will give your brain the best chance of creating an accurate mental image of the trail that it will then work with to determine the best line and effort level.

Doing this requires a lot of focus and it is pretty draining. The good news is that you’ll only need it when you are going very quickly or riding on pretty technical terrain.

2) Do not pay attention to things that you cannot impact

When you are riding fairly quickly, there is little point in looking at what you are about to ride over because there is very little you can do about it - if you cannot react to what you see, you are not looking far enough ahead and you shouldn’t be aware of it.The same applies to other riders. Do not count on them to make a mistake or call you round because that takes the out come of the race out of your control. Your goal is to get to the finish line injury free and as fast as you possibly can. Anything that takes away from that goal should be eliminated from your race behavior. Flawless riding will get you to your goal and that will only come to be if you focus on the riding.

3) Start your nutritional recovery as soon as you cross the finish line

You should consider consuming dextrose / maltodextrin during the ride. This will allow you to take advantage of the window of opportunity for increased cellular transport.If you have no idea what dextrose and maltodextrin are you should read my post on Post Workout Nutrition. It represents the most up to date science available for body building nutrition and deals with getting the most amount of recovery sugar and protein to the muscles to promote the fastest recovery. Studies have shown that there is a finite absorption rate for each macro nutrient and my recommendations are based on these values - bring in ONLY what your body can use per unit of time. If you bring in more than your body can use you are increasing the likelihood of fat storage. While still unlikely after intense racing, it is possible when you are dealing with high GI carbs like dextrose.

4) Follow an adequate training tapper before your races

If you have no idea what I’m talking about here, just make sure you are well enough rested on race day to perform will as much intensity as you need. Athletes and their coaches tend to come up with complete ways of describing their simple behavior and for they’ve come up with the term tapper to mean a reduction in training before a competition to ensure complete recovery.

Depending upon the event you are participating in, you will need to vary the amount of rest you get. Cross country racers will need to about 2-4 days of dramatically reduced work load before a race because this event does not rely heavily on coordinated muscular strength or power; you are basically holding your top maintainable pace for the duration of the ride. Downhill racers may need to reduce work volume in the week leading up to the event to make sure the nervous system is completely recovered allowing for improved muscle coordination and synchronous firing that can be needed for aggressive down hill racing.At the very least an athlete should not ride with full intensity in the 3 days leading up to an event and they should focus on nutritional recovery after any training or pre-lap rides they take.

You are going to need to experiment with the volume and duration of your tapper for find the perfect balance between rest, recovery and performance. When you find that sweet spot, I’ve found that most of the nervousness about racing goes away because you know you are as well prepared as you can be.

5) Train all year round

This will have more impact on your racing results than anything else you can do. While less important for younger riders, the over 27 crowd doesn’t have a choice in the matter. If you are close to your 30’s, you are going to lose cardiovascular functioning during the off season UNLESS you train with high intensity for 30 minutes 3 times a week. Note, this is just the maintenance level. Improvements are very unlikely with 90 minutes of training per week - think about the gains you make during the season, they are based on riding almost every day. The rule of thumb is the more you train the more you will improve, both in skill and in your body’s ability to adapt to the work.The training needs to be varied and you will benefit from cycling through different phases - strength building, cardio building, maintenance phases, and race tappers.

During the race season you should continue to perform some resistance training to maintain muscle and connective tissue strength. This will help you stay strong throughout the season and avoid injury. It has the added benefit of helping to burn up any extra calories that you may consume after your rides. 4 or 6 sets per body part per week should be sufficient to allow you to hold on to your strength and size.

Sometimes when I’m trail riding a tough rocky section I notice nothing at all. I see but I do not narrate, my mp3 player is wailing but I hear silence, there’s a shaking in my body but I feel nothing. It doesn’t last very long. In fact, it only lasts as long as my fear, so until the tough part is over. I’ve noticed the same thing with snow boarding, at some speed it stops being snow boarding and it starts being a state of pure awareness. Csikszentmihalyi referred to this as the flow state and outlined the benefits of functioning in this state.

What I like the most about this state is that there seems to be no separation between what I see and how I interact with it. I can’t use the word react to it because the actions have a mindful quality in that they do not cause a fight or flight reaction that one would expect from sustained fear. My brain is processing the sensory information and directing my body to perform the correct action, or at least one that doesn’t see me falling. The key part is that my consciousness does not have to control the seeking of information part, looking at the trail, and it doesn’t need to be involved in the processing and syntheses of a solution, assessing the obstacles and determining the best available path. My brain will do this automatically whenever it has to.

Over time I’ve experimented with this state and have tried to deliberately engage my conscious mind with very poor results. It dramatically disrupts the flow of the experience. On the bike I hit things, my peddles will crash off of rocks, my back tire will find grooves and I clip out or fall when the front tire runs into something that I should have avoided. The bike awareness I have seems to disappear almost completely. It seems that I am aware of ONLY what I am deliberately looking at and commenting on. The creation of the mental map that my brain uses to determine the best route is severely impaired. My involvement in this process is definitely not needed. I’m better off if I let my unconscious brain solve these types of problems.

So, how do I increase the likelihood that my brain will come to the right conclusion and direct my body to perform that correct action? Step one is practice so you teach your body how to move on the bike / snow board / your legs. This step takes a long time depending upon the complexity of the task. Once you are well versed in the movements needed to perform that task effectively you move on to the next phase. Step two deals with providing your brain with the sensory information it needs to create an accurate mental map of the environment on which to base solutions. Think about it this way, if you know 10% about something, what are the chances that you will be able to answer a question on that topic? About 10%. As you increase your knowledge, you increase the chances that you know the answer to the question. This is pretty much the same thing, with one big difference, this information only needs to exist as information in your brain for a very short time therefore a verbal representation is not need because you do not need to repeat it in to memory. That means you simply need to bring the information in and your brain will filter for relevance and encode meaning.

To ensure that you give your brain enough information to come up with the best solution you need to deliberately scan the environment in a mindless fashion. Normally we look at the world in terms of patterns or things we recognize as meaningful somethings. For example, you don’t need to know that the car that is approach is a Ford to know that if you get hit by it you will get injured, you just need to know that something big that is moving can be dangerous so you take appropriate action to avoid the collision. With flow sensory priming you just need to keep scanning the approaching area of the trail or somewhere were you MAY end up going. Very often your brain will find a tight line that is fairly straight, but occasionally you’ll find yourself darting to the other side of the trail and following a better line. You won’t know that you have seen it until you start to change direction and then as you begin to ride the better line you’ll notice it. The key is to continually scan the terrain bringing in as much information as you possible can.

Initially it is very draining to do this but once you find yourself in the flow state it becomes effortless because it is what you do when you are in that state.

It is worth directing you to Steve Pavlina article 7 Rules for Maximizing Your Creative Output because it’s an effective way to help you achieve a creative state of flow. Sports participants take notice that by virtue of the fact that you are participating in a sports activity (e.g. snow boarding or mountain biking) you have already taken the 7 steps. With a little bit of increased intensity (speed) and deliberate sensory priming you should be well on your way to finding that state of being one with the bike, hill, board.

Every now and then someone will say something that makes me laugh out loud, ask them if they actually said it, and then laugh at how profoundly important yet completely obvious the comment is.

“Discipline high” was one of those comments.

I had been talking to a friend and discussing the merits of the body building bulk that I was on. It was late winter and he was getting ready to start back to the gym to shed the extra winter weight he had gained. He does this almost every year and has become pretty good at it.

When the topic of diet came up, he mentioned that one year he ate nothing but organic food. He enjoyed the taste of the food a lot more and felt that meats were more dense. He said that he figured dollar for dollar it worked out to be close to the same price, maybe a little more for the organically grown food. But he said that during this particular year, he got more of a discipline high from eating good quality food.

I laughed, asked him if he said discipline high and then laughed again. It had never crossed my mind that someone could get a high feeling from NOT doing something. This is, of course, how it works with me. Whenever I exercise I am rewarded with a chemical high (the release of neuro transmitters and endorphins) that promote the feelings of well being along with a cerebral high that is accompanied by feelings of accomplishment. Whenever I’m eating better, there is a rapid elimination of the negative physical feelings associated with a poor diet and a similar cerebral high that comes from making better food choices. The discipline high comes from this cerebral feeling and it reflects the sense of accomplishment that following through on your desire to make a positive change in your life creates. Given my tendency to seek pleasure or avoid pain, I must be getting something out of the strict diet if I’m to follow it. I believe that the discipline high is the pleasure that allows me to continue the pain (not eating whatever I like).

I have thought a lot about the discipline high since we spoke about it and when I read JoLynn’s daily Motivation: Creating Healthy Eating Habits post it hit on me that not everyone will experience it from following a strict diet. Maybe it is a learned behavior and the lucky one’s learned how to experience it when they were younger.

It isn’t clear to me if I am gaining more than I am giving up when I will myself to eat appropriately. What is clear is that I get enough out of it to keep doing it and the longer I do it, the easier it is to find that reward in the experience.

I was getting caught up with Suzanne last week and one of the topics that came up with the whole “fake it till you make it” approach to life - just do the things that someone who is what you want to be does and eventually you’ll find yourself being one of those people.

From a practical point of view, I like this approach because I tend to just jump right into things once I decide to do them. I won’t spend much time learning the back ground and theory until I can see the value of knowing them because knowing these things before I start doing something has rarely helped me in the past. I need to be immersed in the experience and work hands on prime my brain for working with experience. This is the only way to decide it you like something enough to try it again. Often it will turn out that we didn’t really want to be something we thought we did.

When you’re doing something, even just pretending to be something you may not be, you will most likely be surrounded by other people who are doing the same thing. This is a great opportunity for you to learn how to be more like something. Take bike racing as an example. Good racers do a bunch of things differently than most riders because they’ve learned how to get more out of their bodies on race day. Surrounding yourself with these people is going to teach you a lot of what you have to do to be successful “bike racer”.

Faking it does actually allow you to tap into your intention. If you really want to be something, why not just be it? It is the doing that makes the difference. Knowing a lot about a bike is very different from racing a bike. If you want to be a bike mechanic, learn about bikes. If you want to be a bike racer, race bikes. When you get right down to it, the only thing you need to do to be a bike racer is to race a bike. This approach answers the philosophical question “what does it mean to be something?”

The catchall is that even if you don’t become one of them you get to do the things you wanted to do and that isn’t so bad.

I love to race. It was tough at the beginning because I tried to beat other people. Once I realized that I couldn’t go any faster than I was able, it began to make a little more sense. If you are new to racing, you may find this “10 Things That Will Make You A Better Mountain Bike Racer” helpful.

Training:

• 1) Practice fixing a flat - You won’t need to do it very often, but when you do, you’ll be glad you know how. The best practice is to switch your tires - move your front tire to the back wheel and you’re back tire to the front wheel or buy a different set of tires and switch them on. Make sure you have plastic tire irons and new tubes. When you practice be sure you run your fingers along the inside of the tire to check for protrusions that would have caused a real flat. Try to make it an automatic process because when it happens during a race, don’t assume that you’ll be able to think clearly because your heart rate will be elevated. Considering hydrating during this time.
• 2) Train all types of terrain - hills, rocks, single / double track, if you’ll be riding it race day, make sure you know how to ride it.
• 3) Dedicate training time to hill climbing - probably the biggest bang for your training buck right here. If your races are 60 minutes, train hill climbing for 60 minutes once a week. Find a hill and just ride up and down focusing on seated spinning and standing climb. Mix it up because you’ll be using both during any race. Hills end 50 meters AFTER they level off so continue climbing effort until you find your top speed and then recover.
• 4) Learn how to identify when your thinking abilities are being impaired by the intensity of your work. Racing effectively and safely demands that you keep your wits about you. There are countless studies demonstrating the relationship between elevated heart rate and cognitive impairments. Rates of between 160-170 are associated with tunnel vision, impaired judgment, and an inability to think logically and rationally. You need to learn how to avoid this, or at least, gain the ability to remain aware that your thinking is impaired. What seems like a good pass at 165 may actually have been a concussions.

For race day:

• 5) Make sure your cables will make it through the race. Losing rear derailer function or rear breaks makes for a tough race. Cables wear out, change them before they break. Change damaged cable housing while your at it.
• 6) Make sure your gears are tuned up. “Grind it till your find it” is what happens race day. I know this because I only see broken chains on race day. Bring it to the shop if you don’t know how to do it yourself. You want crisp and precise gear changes. You need it to stay in gear until you change it.
• 7) Race with an empty stomach or one containing liquid only. Until you find what works for you, try not to over eat. I need to avoid fat as much as possible because it takes me longer to digest it. I eat mostly low GI carbs and whey protein powder before races. These things clear my stomach quickly and if I need to get sick, they come up pretty effortlessly and without that burning acid.
• 8) Be well hydrated but freshly peed right before the race begins.

During the race:

• 9) Try to keep your heart rate in an effective range. Everyone has a sweet spot, a level of exertion that is their best. Try to find this as early in the race as you can and hold it. Your goal is to be close to spend at the end. A heart rate monitor will be very helpful to you here.
• 10) Assume that all of the other racers have tunnel vision from an elevated heart rate. State your intentions of other riders and, if they won’t call you round to pass, don’t yell back at them when they call you on your aggressive riding. They are tired and not thinking clearly so if you scared them, they are going to call you an a-hole. Most people will do what you tell them because they don’t want you behind them. If you hear a rider approaching you and you want them to pass, tell them when and point to the opening you are giving them. If someone lets you by, say thank you.

Bodybuilding.com asks the question what Is The Best Workout For People Over 40? and their members reply.

Blink41 wins a $75 store credit with is workout and nutritional recommendations, but it’s conciseness is worth more than that.

The older you get, the weaker your body becomes. An adult over age 40 should start to experience a decrease in muscle size, strength and recovery time. Bones becomes increasingly more fragile and more prone for injury.

Testosterone levels begin to decrease and the ability to build quality muscle decreases greatly. Joints begin to ache after a hard days work. However, there is an easy way to slow this aging process down. Simply follow a good diet with a good routine and you can slow down this decay on your body.

The Workout:

* Monday: Chest / Triceps
* Tuesday: Rest
* Wednesday: Back / Biceps
* Thursday: Rest
* Friday: Shoulder / Traps
* Saturday: Rest
* Sunday: Thigh / Calves / Abs

Do 5 minutes of light cardio before workouts to get the blood flowing through the body. Do 30 minute of moderate intensity cardio after workouts. Be sure to stretch before and after workouts. Allow 2 to 3 minute rest periods between each set.

In How to Make Easy Exercises More Difficult and More Effective by TC from T-nation he gives us a few ways to save time by making some exercises more difficult. I really liked:

Real-World Squats

Let me ask you a question: how often in your life do you walk up to an object hanging from a tree, carefully place it on your shoulders, and lower it to the ground?

Hunters typically don’t find dead deer hanging in trees. Generally, the thing’s lying on the ground and they have to pick it up.

What I’m trying to get at is the conventional squat is screwed up. It’s not a real-world movement. Our entire motor program, from childhood on, was developed to pick things up from the ground instead of the opposite.

That’s probably why a lot of people have trouble learning how to do the squat.

Well, I’ve adjusted the movement. I’ve made it more “real world,” but in doing so, I’ve also made it harder — and consequently, more effective.

I rarely start my squat from a standing position. Instead, I place the loaded bar onto the safety bars of the power rack and start from the ass-down position.

Guess what I’ll be doing next leg day?

In this first post from new T-Nation author Jen Heath 10 Keys to the Lean & Sexy Look, Part I we get keys 1 to 5. The article is geared towards women.

What most people call “toning” is actually a muscle getting a little big bigger (yes, that does mean it increases in “bulk”) and the fat cells covering a muscle getting smaller. You put those two things together and you get “tone.”

Most women I talk to would like more muscle in their arms yet don’t necessarily want behemoth guns. Whenever a woman tells me she just wants to “tone” her body with light weights, I usually end up having a conversation similar to this:

Jen: “Okay, so if I understand you right, your arms now measure 9 inches, but you wouldn’t mind getting them up to a firm and solid 12 inches. At the same time, you don’t want to get 16 inch monster arms, right?”

Client: “Yes, that’s exactly right!”

Jen: “Well, let me ask you this: Would you rather take a month or two to build that 12-inch arm or would you rather it take you forever?”

Client: “I want it now!”

Jen: “The reason I ask is because the same thing that builds the 16 inch arm the fastest will also build the 12 inch arm the fastest — lifting intensely with progressively heavier weights. Once you achieve the amount of muscle you desire you can always reduce the volume to maintain.”

Client: “Ah, I see!”

I think most trainers have a similar conversation with 90% of their new female clients. Jen’s approach just nails it.

Great article, check out the original and part two.

Tony Gentilcore’s article 4 Things Your Girlfriend Should Know on T-nation.com has ruffled a few feathers. He makes the statement that “Yoga Mostly Sucks” at improving the body composition. He trashes steady state cardio (low intensity long distance) in favor of high intensity interval style training for fat loss. He suggests that women train more like men and that they should be using low reps and heavy weights. He’s even got his girlfriend deadlifting.

“But I don’t want to get big and bulky.”

Newsflash, ladies: You will not get “big and bulky” just because you’re doing squats and deadlifts. That statement is akin to me saying, “Eh, I don’t want to do any sprints today because I don’t want to win the 100m gold medal next week.” Getting big and bulky isn’t easy, just like winning the 100m gold medal isn’t easy.

If anything, it’s an insult to all those people who’ve spent years in the gym to look the way they do. It didn’t happen overnight, which is what you’re assuming by saying something so absurd.

And let’s be honest, most people (men and women) won’t work hard enough to get “big and bulky” in the first place. It’s hard enough for a man to put on any significant amount of muscle, let alone a woman. Women are physiologically at a disadvantage for putting on muscle due to the fact that they have ten times less free Testosterone in their bodies compared to men.

That being said, you still need to get the most bang out of your training buck, and that includes ditching the glute-buster machine and focusing more on the compound movements. Joe Dowdell, owner of Peak Performance in NYC, trains many of the top female models in the city and their programming includes squats, deadlifts, chin-ups, bench variations, sled dragging, and tons of energy system work.

Yes, Victoria’s Secret models are doing squats and deadlifts. And yes, that’s completely hot. Guess what they’re not doing? Watching Oprah every day while walking on the treadmill for 60 minutes.

It isn’t a rant on the evils of yoga, just on the lies that some yoga teachers attempt to pass off as fact and the impact that these notions have on how women work towards their fitness goals.

What I take out of it is that people will believe anything an “expert” tells them without so much as thinking about it. Anyone who suggests that deadlifting is not as good at building back strength as yoga has NEVER performed a single deadlift with their body weight.

If you want to look a particular way, do what people who look that way do. If you desire to be lean and have toned muscles, you’re going to need to work out intensely and lift a lot of weight.

I got pretty sick at the beginning of November 2006 and when I went to the doctor, their preliminary test indicated that there was protein in my urine – a bad sign and an indication of kidney dysfunction. I got a second test a week later. I went to Toronto to see my doctor and when I left his office with the “all clear”, I sort of floated along College Street to Union station in a blurry happy fog. I was going to have the time to do all the things I thought I would be going without. It was a fantastic feeling.

That night I started planning my first bulk. For those who are not familiar with a bulk, it’s a body building term use to describe a period of deliberate over eating to force the body into a more anabolic state allowing it to create more muscle. It’s an approach with a long history and it is generally accepted that you need to hold your body in a caloric surplus state to facilitate growth.

At the beginning:
Before I started, my weight was 168 pounds and my body fat level was 10.4. My weight has been around 168 for the last 3 years, basically since I started mountain bike riding. There is a seasonal fluctuation in body fat, with it bottoming out at around 9% at the end of the summer. My goal was bulk for 3 or 4 months to try and get to 190 pounds with little consideration being given to my level of leanness.

It was going to be a clean bulk, which meant that I wasn’t going to be eating everything that I wanted. A lot of lifters will treat their bulk as a period of non-stop gorging and will eat foods that are very high in calories but not very high in nutrients. The goal of a clean bulk is to limit the amount of body fat that you gain while providing enough nutrients and energy to build dry lean body mass (actual muscle vs. water and glycogen stores).
I needed to create and maintain a caloric surplus. That meant that I had to drastically limit the amount of cardiovascular exercise that I did. This turned out to be the toughest part of it because I LOVE cardio - I race a mountain bike and love indoor cycling classes and find my bliss state when my heart rate hits 150. Unfortunately for me, I had to limit both the volume and intensity of my cardiovascular work. I did one or two sessions a week trying to keep my heart rate below 140 and my usual high intensity warm-up was scaled back to the same level.

The diet and food management:
I followed all of the rules that I have outline in the Newstasis.com weight management program with very few deviations. I would occasionally eat when I wasn’t hungry because I needed to ingest the calories. My daily calorie count went from about 2000 per day to about 3000 per day and my daily meal count went from 4 to 7 or 8, a meal every 2 to 3 hours usually right after my stomach emptied into my intestines.

My breakfast was always the same, 150 grams of oatmeal, 50 grams of whey protein powder, 50 grams of dextrose and 5 grams of creatine, all mixed with water and eaten within 15 minutes of waking up.

My post workout shake was always the same, 80 grams of sugar (dextrose and maltodextrin combination), 50 grams of whey protein and 5 grams of creatine, all mixed with water and I would start to drink it within 10 minutes of finishing my workout. It was the same regardless of the number of workouts I did in a day.

My first whole food meal after the gym was usually the same for my first workout of the day, whole-wheat toast with a smear of margarine, and scrambled eggs with sliced turkey. I would use 250 ml of egg whites and 1 whole egg. I would drink water with this meal.

The rest of the meals would contain either lots of carbohydrates or lots of essential fats, but NEVER both because the body will use carbohydrates for energy if they are available and, when fats are also present, the body will just store the fat. Fats consumed in the absence of carbohydrates will be utilized for immediate energy.

I drank 2-4 liters of water a day.

I consumed no alcohol for most of the bulk because alcohol suppresses growth hormone release. I was sacrificing so much that it didn’t seem to make any sense to me to slow my progress because of a couple of beers.

I would eat 150 grams of cottage cheese before bed to make sure my body had a long acting protein available throughout the night and I made Venom’s Protein bars to make sure I didn’t go to sleep hungry. I’m one of the few people I know who admits to eating in bed before falling asleep. Venom’s recipe offered a low GI carb option that tasted fairly good.

The workouts:
This was an over reaching program, one that had me doing way more volume than my normal routine. In hindsight this was too much work. It burned a lot of calories that could have gone to repair and muscle building but at the time, I didn’t feel like sacrificing workout time and enjoyment. I just replaced my cardio with resistance training. Some days have me working out three times and I was more than happy to do it most of the time although there were a couple of times when I got to the gym and knew I needed to skip the workout.

The workouts were shorter than usual, each about 45 minutes, and I did a lot of high intensity training methods to completely fatigue the muscles, like retraining a muscle group later on in the day and it was during this time that I discovered the concept of training movements and not body parts. All I all, it was an amazing program and I felt stronger and bigger with each workout – I bench pressed over 200 pounds for the first time in my life and finally broken the 20 rep mark with wide grip pull-ups (something I haven’t done since university). I learned a lot of biomechanics and how my body responds to exercise stress and movements. I also introduced plyometrics training and added skipping as a warm-up exercise.

The results:

They were fantastic! I broke the 180-pound mark on January 21^st with a body fat level of 11.4%; 50 days after starting the bulk. I gained about 9.5 pounds of lean body mass and a little over 2 pounds of body fat. I was very pleased with the results.

When I weighed myself today (March 6, 2007) I was 176 @ 10.6% body fat. That means that I have lost just less than 3 pounds of lean mass and almost 2 pounds of body fat.

Here are the numbers:

Nov 3, 06 Jan 21, 07 March 6, 07

Weight: 168.6 181 176

Body Fat: 10.5 11.4 10.6

Lean Mass: 150.9 160.3 157.3

Body Fat: 17.7 20.6 18.7

The toughest parts were not being able to do as much cardiovascular exercise as I wanted and all the extra eating I had to do. Human beings are state dependent creatures, so my body had adjusted to function effectively on ~2000 calories a day with 4 or 5 intense cardio sessions per week. When I started cramming in an extra 1000 calories of nutritionally sound foods, the body wasn’t used to them and it didn’t need them as it had found stasis with 2000 a day and some cardio, now it had to adjust to find stasis on 3000 with almost no cardio. I was forcing a caloric surplus of ~1500 calories through increased eating and decreased exercise. There were some digestive consequences to it and elimination frequency increased.

The best part of it was the feeling of gaining weight – I actually felt like there was more of me and that I was taking up more space on the planet. The workouts were awesome as well. They were both fun and all the volume I was doing meant that I needed to come up with some creative exercises to find new ways to attack the muscles. My favorite exercises to do were ISO leg press shrugs and wide grip platform dead lifts, two movements I had never done before.

I don’t think I’ll go on another bulk again because I don’t see the need for it. As a learning experience goes, I would recommend it, providing you are in good health and have your doctor’s approval. As a lifestyle, and that is what you have to make it to get the most out of it, I’d have a very hard time keeping up with it. There were times when I didn’t feel like eating and I have to force myself to eat. Plus, I missed working out the way I like, with intensity and my heart rate soaring.