If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Firstly sorry for the lack of blog posts, it has been a very crazy time recently in my personal life, but hopefully I can change that soon. In the meantime, I have created a new, separate blog to detail my bodybuilding/working out/training progress.

The new blog can be found here, www.project-30.com, and it has been designed as a target in time to aim for. I will be 30 in just over a years time and by the time I hit that age I hope my body will be in the best condition it has ever been in. So be sure to check out the blog and by all means come and get involved.

Sadly laying here in bed, I was googling myself, just for laughs I guess, and found a great little article about designers understanding the basic fundamentals of SEO - http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/roundup-newsletter-12 - I noticed that my name was dropped in the piece, so thought it worth sharing

Well these will have to be my pre-christmas shots! I happened to notice I was looking quite pumped last night, and thought it would be a great kodak moment hehe.

So here are some updated pics:

This is just a relaxed pose, not trying to accentuate anything. The chest is now starting to gain additional shape and even the slight look of some abs appearing too (woohoo).

My biceps have always been weak and small, the majority of my arm size comes from Triceps. However there finally seems to be some sort of peak appearing on the arms. Good seperation is happening between biceps and shoulders too, which will help improve biceps peak.

Just to illustrate that Triceps are accountable for most of my arm size. My shoulders are also staging a comeback now which is good. Some seperation between them and the upper chest area is becoming evident. My traps are also helping the shot, as they are becoming more pronounced.

A direct comparison between weeks 4 and week 7/8. It is clear that my chest and shoulders are becoming more shapely, and more muscular. I guess I must have been losing a little weight as well, based on the fact that both my face and stomach are looking a bit slimmer (praise the lord). I may even be showing the first signs of some abdominal muscles - however additional fat loss will be required to really show that part of me. My biceps and forearms are looking a little more fuller, but still need some work.

Considering I have been out of action for nearly 3.5 years, I am impressed by the progress I have made in less than 2 months. I will try and dig out a picture from when I was looking really bad before I got back into training, just as a real comparison! Amazingly my muscles have grown back pretty well, and my strength on the whole is back to about 85-90% of my peak strength from my previous training.

I had read about Muscle Memory before, but never realized it existed quite like this. Anyone who has been out of the gym for a few years and looking rather worse for wear should really consider just how quick your body can get back in shape!

That will be it until next year guys, will post some more pics end of Jan time, and then again when I hit the grand old age of 29 by the end of feb. Will also try and include additional body parts for those updates.

Sadly my gym partner Gary has had to return to the UK. We were both making some great strength and visual gains, but hopefully he will pick up training in the New Year. In the meantime I am re-evaluating my schedule and will be forced to tweak some of my exercises. This mostly effects Chest and Shoulder training as I tend to train heavy with the aid of a spot. I generally haven’t needed a spotter for the exercises themselves, but its a great confidence booster, and it helps to have someone pass the dumbbells when you get over 30kg each.

Anyway, overall training has been going well. I have been putting extra work into my arm training which I hope will boost my back workouts, which will then improve my upper body balance, helping stablize my shoulders better. My shoulders have been better than in the past, however they are far from 100% and I need to continue to stretch my chest and work on my rear delts to support those larger weights. Last shoulder session with Gary saw me pressing 30kg dumbbells for about 7-9 reps. The strength is coming back really well and for the first time I am starting to notice some rear delt growth.

With a background in Olympic weightlifting, my legs have always been significantly bigger than my upper body. So I have tended not to train my legs all that much over the years, quite simply they looked ok, and being short having big legs makes it a bitch trying to find good fitting trousers! However since starting back I made sure legs were included in our workouts to ensure Gary got a full body workout each work.

Considering my legs have always been strong I have been very frustrated with the actual strength of my workouts so far. Squats have felt very hard work, not so much heavy, just taxing. I have squatted upto 110kg for a few reps but just felt as if it was sucking the life out of me. This week I decided to go a little bit old school, I am hoping changing leg sessions and isolating them from other body parts will give me more energy for legs, and hopefully burn a bit more fat in the process.

The clean and jerk was a staple move during my weightlifting days, so I thought I would borrow a similar move from that period, the power clean. I began with only 60kg and worked on 3 sets of 5 reps. Not so much for size, but more for strength and power. I followed this up with some deadlifts, an exercise I have done less than 4 times in my life.

I started with 100kg for a set of 4, then pushed up to 120kg for 3 sets of 2 reps. Man that was hard work, and amazingly it hit about 3-4 other body parts that I wasn’t expecting (more on that soon). I then followed this up with squats, started with 60 for a set of 8, 80 for a set of 8, 90 for a set of 6 and 100 for a set of 5. Again at this stage I am trying to get strength and power back into my legs, rather than focusing on bodybuilding workouts. I then ended the session with some hamstring curls, and leg extensions, seperating each leg over each exercise.

The next day (today) all I can say is wow, how much hurt am I in. My lower back was always strong, but at this moment in time the muscles are sore, and yes it is muscular pain people. In addition to my lower back, both my traps, lats and mid back muscles are sore too. My hips are a little tender and my hamstrings are a little bit sore to match. I know each week will get easier, and my god it was a hard workout, but I know the benefits of combining those exercises do so much more than just working your legs. It looks as though squatting anything upwards of 150kg is some way off yet, which is a shame, but perhaps by incorporating these other exercises there will be additional overall benefit to my physique!

Shockingly I have managed to keep this gym work up for over 4 weeks now! I never realized how much I enjoyed the challenge of the gym, and find myself getting competitive each session. Looking back at my mistakes over the years I am now trying to put good pratice into my workouts and also ensure I consistently hit all muscles in my body…not just the ones that are shown when wearing a vest!

My first session back saw me bench pressing 65kg, I knew I could do more, but wanted to give myself a base to start with. Saturday gone (4 weeks training) I bench pressed 110kg. It was only for 2 reps, I probably could have done more, but had an illness a few days previous which severly sapped my energy levels. Previous to that week I was benching 90kg comfortably for reps of about 8-10.

I also squated 110kg recently, and will be looking to increase that today. I have been lucky in that my legs have never decreased in size during the 3.5 years off training. I put this down to my olympic weightlifting background which focused more on strength training as opposed to pure muscle building.

We are training 3 days a week, and hitting 2 bodyparts per session. Our training is probably not ideal but it goes as follows:

• Mon or Tues: Shoulders & Triceps
• Wed or Thu: Back & Biceps
• Fri or Sat: Chest & Legs

The image below shows where we are after 4 weeks training. My young apprentice Gary is on the left and I am on the right. Already Gary is starting to show signs of chest development, his arms have tremendous shape and if he can add a couple of inches to them they will look awesome!

As for me, well the illness has probably helped to shift a little bit of fat. My chest is becoming more toned and my shoulders are beginning to reform. My arms look skinny in comparison to the rest of my upper body, and so I am putting real effort into growing that part of me to balance out my physique. Sorry this photo doesn’t show all bodyparts correctly, but it was the best I could do, and proves that as of right now, I am not quite a beach bum!

Because I am being more thorough in my training overall I have started to pick out my weaknesses. My forearms and biceps are very weak in comparison to my triceps. For years I have been benching heavy weights and as a result my chest has been much stronger than my back. This poor form has resulted in my shoulders curving slightly forward and slightly out of joint. As a result shoulder workouts have been painful and too often I have to stop doing them.

My shoulder development has suffered as a result, more often than not it is joint pain as opposed to muscle pain which forces me to stop. To counter the problems in my shoulder I am actually putting more emphasis on my arm and back workouts. My biceps never really feel as though they have been trained and only when recently doing preacher curls did I identify the problem, my forearms!

My forearms are quite weak, and it seems they have been giving out before my biceps. When training back, both my forearms and biceps give out before my back does, so my back doesn’t get stronger. My chest has continually increased in strength and thus has created a major imbalance which has actually started to pull my shoulders forward as the chest is stronger than the back, and you need both muscles to balance in order to stablize the shoulder joint.

My theory is that by hitting back, biceps and forearms harder, I will increase the strength to allow me to balance out my upper body. I am also trying to stretch the chest more to help give my shoulders more flexibility. This tactic seems to be working so far, but only time will tell.

I will leave it at that for now, and will try and get some more details of our workouts online soon. For those interested in my design & seo work, I will also work hard to get some more information online. Cheers!