This Sunday will be 6 weeks until the competition, so i am at the half way stage.Training is going well, leg days are brutal and often leave me physically and somewhat mentally drained. The upper body workouts aren't much kinder, pushing and pulling through every rep trying to maintain the tempo with the heaviest weight i can manage.
My progress has been steady and i believe i am on track for July....but as is always the way with diets and training regimes like this, i have days where i feel i am no where near where i need to be, that i'm not muscular enough, not lean enough and so on. The mind games have truly set in. As with many people that train with weights i feel awesome when pumped - my muscles look full, shredded and i feel big...30 minutes after the session, not so much, i begin feeling like i've shrunk and have no muscular definition to speak of. They key thing now is to keep my head on straight and not think too much.
I am making a few changes and additions to my supplements.
I have firstly bought some Thermo-Extreme from MyProtein, the idea with these being that they should help me burn more energy and more fat and hopefully get that little bit leaner - the way i see it, they can't do me any harm even if they only have a placebo effect.
A few weeks before the competition i will be adding in CLA - CLA stands for Conjugated Linoleic Acid.. CLA is found in red meat, but to get the dosage in capsules from meat would mean eating a lot of meat - which would counteract the idea of eating strict calories to reduce bodyfat. So we can buy it in tablet form and supplement with it that way. i opted for capsules over powder as the powder had a lower % CLA and was bulk out with carbs which i don't need in my diet. they are also easier to take and make far less of a mess.
I've not used CLA before - but i have seen people that have gotten good results from it, and even if they help me with losing an extra 0.5% bodyfat i will be happy.
The change i will be making to my diet is with my protein powder. I m opting to go for a Whey Isolate (92%) from a company called Pulsin - the reason being - it's whey from grass fed, 100% hormone free cows. This means it will be a higher quality whey and means that every gram of protein is more bio-available and better for my body. Yes it is a little more expensive than conventional whey, but id say you can't put a price on your health and i certainly don't want to be filling my body with needless additive and hormones from grain fed cows.
I also found grass fed, hormone free, raw whey from a company called pinksun. I may look at buying some of this at some point as a non training day protein as it's high in fat and protein - and isn't processed in the way many proteins are.
http://www.pulsin.co.uk/
http://www.pinksun.co.uk/
And that's it for now. I'll try and not leave such a long gap in between this and my next blog. Thanks for reading.
Trav.
