Following last night’s resistance chest n triceps session I am feeling rather pumped this evening. I also threw in some obliques and abs too and I can really notice the difference (love it).

I am just about to head off for this evening’s cardio session and just wanted to mention that this week ALL my cardio training will be HIIT (High Intensiy Interval Training). As this type of training is so intense I will be only doing 20-25 minutes per session. Again this is just to mix things up a bit. I have been recently mixing both LISS (Low Intensity Steady State) cardio and HIIT each week. By concentrating more on HIIT this week and upping my resistance training it should definitely throw a confusion bone for my metabolism to chase. It’s all about keeping it revved up and fizzing!

I had a bit of a shuffling around last night. I mixed up my leg routine (power rack squats) with some lighter muscle groups. Including my second round of triceps extensions and pull downs for this week, obliques, abs and biceps. This all topped off with 25 mins of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) cardio.

I woke this morning feeling tighter than ever and couldn’t help letting curiosity get the better of me so I jumped on the bathroom scales. I was expecting to be down a couple of pounds but.. no change! However the mirror tells a different story. My obliques are making a return appearance along with my lats (V shape) and the best news has to be that I’m having to use the next notch on my jeans belt. Bye-bye body fat!

As you may or may not be aware, I am currently attempting a low calorie – low carb (1800/100) to high calorie – high carb (2700/250) Zig Zag diet. This pattern can be 2-3 days low, then 2-5 days high. I am in my forth week with this diet and although I have only lost a couple of pounds, visibly my body has changed quite a bit. I have alot more muscle definition (biceps, triceps, inner chest and delts) and reduced belly / lower back fat (my wife pointed this out). I feel that I have successfully lost some body fat while maintaining muscle mass, which is exactly what I intended. Result

The science: This diet is all about keeping your metabolism spinning, revved up and therefore contstantly burning fat during exercise and more importantly when at rest. It’s based around zig zagging starchy carbs, mixing it up regularly, tricking the body so it never knows whats coming next (avoiding starvation / homeostasis mode), but always maintaining enough energy to power through your routines and continue burning fat. The main reason you do 2-3 days low, then 2-5 days high is to maintain these energy levels. Say you were to do more than 3 low days, energy levels would drop and therefore your metabolism would slow down so the answer to this is to carb up with exercise and get it going again. Pretty simple huh?

However… a little disappointing is that I personally feel I could have achieved MORE of a result. By day 3 on the low side I would feel so tired that my momentum and ethuisiasm for training had vanished. I would get in there and find it so difficult to keep going, my strength sufferred too and I would have to give up before my desired reps. Once back on the carbs, my energy levels returned and off I went again. So… 3 low days is obviously too much for me.

My tweak for this is that I am (this week) only going as far as 2 low days at any one time. If my tired day is on third day, then I plan to carb up on this day (today) and see how it goes.

Last nights Chest n Triceps was a classic. One thing that me laugh though was my expression at the end of my triceps workout. As I struggled and pushed the last rep out, I caught myself in the mirror and the look on my face was highly amusing. I can only compare it to that of a Baby or a Toddler who has just fallen off their bike and is just about to go into a full on meltdown.

The cause of this expression is the amount of pain I’m going through as the lactic acid in my muscles hits it’s maximum and my triceps hit an almighty ‘pump’. The feeling afterwards is like no other and for me I find it very pleasurable. Well as they say “no pain – no gain”.

Here is a picture of my back taken last week. As you can see I have put on quite a bit of mass (including fat) over the last couple of months and this has been backed up by friends commenting on my size recently. The funny thing here though is that I decided to weigh myself this morning and incredibly I am half a stone lighter than my last weigh in, back in December 2011 (you know what this means – RESULT!)

Well, the new website is still progressing… I have migrated all the individual blog entries from over the last 4 years and have started on the articles, recipes etc. As before stay tuned…