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 By: Alton Hare
My Training Journal The last 2 weeks of my creatine cycle, and looking back over my journal from where I stand right now (3 weeks later) I'm pretty happy with my progress, though I really wanna put up what I'm doing now, I don't have time to put it all up at once. Though I've made decent progress in the eight weeks that I have written on, after this creatine cycle I take a 2 week break and when I come back my strength shoots up faster than when I was training. My squat increases quite a bit, and my recovery ability and tolerance to heavy loads does not go down. Rest=good. Anyway, these two weeks I have significantly increased volume and/or intensity to really stress my body right before my break, so that the two weeks off will provide more benefit. I'd like to draw the reader's attention to how I started out at a much lower level than I will be in these last two weeks, how I have progressed slowly, building my conditioning and recovery ability. If your not highly gifted, that's the way it has to be done, especially when you have been training consistently for about a year and your muscles have become significantly strong; because strength increases about four times as fast as recovery ability, it is easier to overtrain when you get much stronger. As an example I'll use bench since its so familiar to everybody, for instance, you start out training and you can bench 120 lbs for 8, maximum. Your get sore at first because your body isn't used to the stress, but then it goes away as your muscles quickly acclimate. A year later you bench 200 lbs. for 8, that's an extra eighty pounds on each rep, 640 pounds of extra stress. So, if you take an elongated break, of a month or more, your strength may go down to 185 for 8, but your recovery drops off much faster. You come back and you will try to do near your old weight, and you'll probably get through the workout, but you'll overtrain terribly because your body is deconditioned. Just wanted to explain the reasoning behind that. That's also why people who have been training a VERY long time, 10 years or more, have to train less to see gains, because their recovery ability simply cannot catch up to the fantastic strength they have built. I think maybe (just my thoughts) this is the reason HIT became popular in older trainees who's recovery ability is down. Maybe, who knows, anyway, I'm gonna go ahead and get into the diet and the sets and the numbers and all that good stuff.
Monday- 10/01/01- Day 42- Back I tried as hard as I cold to raise the intensity of this workout, but it just didn't seem hard enough, even with all the bent rows. I think I should take a break from deadlifting so I can concentrate more on isolating and annihilating my lats/rhomboids.
Tuesday- chest/tris- 10/02/01- Day 43
5:00 N-Large, 5 g creatine What a fantastic chest/tris workout, I really annihilated both. Even though I had to decrease my weight on dumbbell presses, I was able to keep my intensity up, plus my chest was already smoked from my 5 sets of benching to failure. Of course this addition of workload to my first exercise decreased almost everything afterwards. That doesn't matter, the demand placed on my chest/tris will surely lead to an adaptation, so that those lifts will go up in the presence of extra bench workload and the muscles will get bigger.
Wednesday- off- 10/03/01- Day 44
Thursday- Day 45- 10/04/01- legs
Saturday- day 47- 10/06/01- off
9:30 6 eggs, 2 serv grits, 1 slice toast, 3 slices
bacon
Monday- day 49- 10/08/01- back
Tuesday- Day 50- 10/09/01- chest/tris
bench: 245x8 (PR), 260x6 (PR), 280x4 (PR), 235x8,
185x12
Wednesday- Day 57- 10/10/01- off
Thursday- Day 52- 10/11/01- legs
4:05 train:
Squat: 315x8, 365x4, 365x2 (took it little easier
on the squat) just to show u how much I increased
from 2 weeks of NOT training, I did 390 for 4 my 1st
leg workout back...
5:05 N Large and 5 g creatine
Friday- Day 53- 10/12/01- biceps
4:20 train
Saturday- off- day 54- 10/13/01 Not sucha good day, but hey, sometimes living is a little more important than eating in a perfectly regimented manner. Do that for too long and you start feeling like a machine or robot, not a human being. Remember, your human, have fun in your life, don't devote every iota of energy to being a perfect bodybuilder. Why? because you CAN'T be a perfect bodybuilder no matter how hard you try. But you can be a damn good one if you enjoy it, so enjoy it and you'll actually do much better than if you do everything perfect and get bored and mechanical.
Sunday- day 55 (off for next 2 weeks) That's that for the last two weeks. Not a lot of gains on my squat, but don't worry I get that in order after I come back from my layoff. Leg training has just been a bit iffy, even though I love squats. Bench has obviously increased, but you ain't seen nothin' yet till I come back from my break, and bent row has increased quite a bit, again it gets even better after my layoff. I hope this is helping a lot of people, and as always feel free to e mail me! Adios. - Alton
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