October update
Numbers
I started the month at 171lbs, planning to gain, hoping not to go higher than 181 this month; this was a rough guess, based on my estimation of how much weight I’d gain from glycogen and water and gut contents, plus how much I figured creatine would add to my weight, plus how much I was hoping to gain in terms of actual tissue (muscle preferably and probably a bit of fat too). So I’d have been okay with ending up a bit higher or a bit lower for this month.
I ended up at 179. I’m very happy with that. I don’t know how much was incidental weight and how much was actual tissue (muscle or fat) gained, but it was close enough to my target that I’m happy with it. What makes me even happier is that it appears that in the second half of the month, I put on one pound, which is exactly the pace I am hoping for during this surplus.
I did all my planned weekly resistance training schedules (with one of them being a planned deload week, where I did exercise but a fair bit less than normal).
I did all my weekly BJJ classes. One week I even did two classes back to back (a wrestling class followed by a BJJ class) which was great and which I was able to complete without trouble, but over the following days my body felt pretty banged up, so I don’t think I’ll be too eager to repeat that for a while. Still, the fact that I was able to do it as I did shows me that I’m making good progress in terms of endurance and strength, adapting to the demands of BJJ.
I ended up at 179. I’m very happy with that. I don’t know how much was incidental weight and how much was actual tissue (muscle or fat) gained, but it was close enough to my target that I’m happy with it. What makes me even happier is that it appears that in the second half of the month, I put on one pound, which is exactly the pace I am hoping for during this surplus.
I did all my planned weekly resistance training schedules (with one of them being a planned deload week, where I did exercise but a fair bit less than normal).
I did all my weekly BJJ classes. One week I even did two classes back to back (a wrestling class followed by a BJJ class) which was great and which I was able to complete without trouble, but over the following days my body felt pretty banged up, so I don’t think I’ll be too eager to repeat that for a while. Still, the fact that I was able to do it as I did shows me that I’m making good progress in terms of endurance and strength, adapting to the demands of BJJ.
Reflections
I should clarify something about the numbers I’m using when I am on a calorie surplus. (This is something I’ve just figured out for myself this month.) When I’m losing weight, I tend to treat the lowest number I’ve seen as the truest, so that even if the scale says something higher today than it reported yesterday, I will report the lower of the two as my weight on this blog. I’ve decided that I will treat gaining weight in much the same way. When I say that my goal for the month is to be at 181lbs, what I mean is just that I want to see 181 on the scale within the last week before the end of the month, and when I say what my actual weight was at the end of the month, I’m referring to the lowest weight I saw in the final week of the month. I feel like that’s a fair way to do it, and meaningful so long as I’m consistent with doing it that way. Everyone always talks about using weekly averages but that way annoys me. For some reason I just don’t like it. This approach makes way more sense to me, somehow.
I think that in order to be in a moderate surplus, as I’d like to be, I probably basically just need to shoot for maintenance calories. If someone were eating ad libitum and maintaining, then an effort to eat a bit more would be the right approach of course, but for me, if I were to eat ad libitum, I would put on a lot of weight - I’d end up somewhere above 210, as my first calorie surplus experiment in March showed; probably at 260 or higher, given a couple months to get there. So being in a small surplus will feel very restrictive, just like being on a diet, in terms of hunger and satiety, since it’s so much less than my body wants. So then trying to be intuitively eating less than I want to but not so much less that I lose weight will be pretty tricky. I’ve gotten better, but I’m just not that precise. So I think that if I try to stay at maintenance overall and try not to lose weight, that’s my best bet for gaining nice and slowly. I’ll keep saying in my “predictions” part of the blog that I’m aiming to gain between one and three pounds per month, but really, I think mentally I need to try to have the serious goal of staying at the same weight, and insofar as I miss that goal I will succeed, perhaps, at the real goal.
I’m planning not to go into a deficit deliberately before January; depending how things go over the next couple months, I might decide to lose some weight in January, or I might keep the surplus going and not try to lose any weight until closer to the summer. But either way, I’m really looking forward to putting on weight on purpose over the next couple months as the weather gets chillier.
I’ve been doing my best to do everything I can to put my body in a position to gain muscle. Volume, exercise selection, protein, calorie surplus. There’s some evidence that higher volumes, twenty or thirty or more hard sets per muscle group, can increase the rate of muscle growth pretty substantially, so for the muscles I’m most interested in growing, I’ve been aiming to do at least twenty sets a week, often more. I’ve tried to choose exercises emphasizing long muscle lengths, including, as I think I mentioned last month, lengthened isometrics. This seems to be the best bet for maximizing muscle growth through exercise selection, so I’ve been fastidious about that with all my exercises. And the isometrics, now that I’ve invented a bunch that I like, are incredibly convenient and I find them much more enjoyable, much less fatiguing, than normal sets. There’s also some evidence that although there are diminishing returns as you go higher, eating a protein intake that’s on the higher side can also set you up for your best gains, so I’ve been looking for cheap protein sources and trying to eat a fair bit every day. And, of course, calorie surplus. That by itself can make resistance training build more muscle; hopefully all the other stuff I’m doing combines with that to send as many of the extra calories as possible to building muscle rather than storing as fat! I can’t control what ends up happening, but what I can control to influence the outcome I have tried to do as well as I could this month.
I’m surprised how much I am enjoying this moderate surplus. I thought it would be a lot less fun than my yolo surplus back in March, and it is indeed a bit more work to be more deliberate about my eating rather than just following my appetite, but I’ve been feeling pretty great so far. I look forward to a lot more months like this, hopefully, over the next few years. I just feel really strong. My muscles feel big. I feel like I could conquer the planet. It’s a very enjoyable way of being in the world, I have to say.
Since beginning the calorie surplus, the way I’ve been structuring my week is first, BJJ class (whether I go Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday), and then next I try to do all my resistance training in the next two or three days after the BJJ day, and then I give myself three or four days to let my body recover as fully as possible before going back to BJJ. I would’ve expected to enjoy those days off, but I guess I’m changing a bit; I find I’m restless and looking for something to do physically that I’ll feel good about but which won’t interfere overly with my recovery. The idea I’m developing just now toward the end of the month is that maybe I should start experimenting a bit with some shadow boxing. That might be a good way to start putting pieces of boxing together, having something physical to occupy me, and giving my imagination room to have fun imagining that day in the future when I’ll really be ready to start training striking as well. I don’t know for sure that that’s what I’ll decide to do as a regular part of my weekly rotation, but currently I’m pretty excited by the thought of it.
I think that in order to be in a moderate surplus, as I’d like to be, I probably basically just need to shoot for maintenance calories. If someone were eating ad libitum and maintaining, then an effort to eat a bit more would be the right approach of course, but for me, if I were to eat ad libitum, I would put on a lot of weight - I’d end up somewhere above 210, as my first calorie surplus experiment in March showed; probably at 260 or higher, given a couple months to get there. So being in a small surplus will feel very restrictive, just like being on a diet, in terms of hunger and satiety, since it’s so much less than my body wants. So then trying to be intuitively eating less than I want to but not so much less that I lose weight will be pretty tricky. I’ve gotten better, but I’m just not that precise. So I think that if I try to stay at maintenance overall and try not to lose weight, that’s my best bet for gaining nice and slowly. I’ll keep saying in my “predictions” part of the blog that I’m aiming to gain between one and three pounds per month, but really, I think mentally I need to try to have the serious goal of staying at the same weight, and insofar as I miss that goal I will succeed, perhaps, at the real goal.
I’m planning not to go into a deficit deliberately before January; depending how things go over the next couple months, I might decide to lose some weight in January, or I might keep the surplus going and not try to lose any weight until closer to the summer. But either way, I’m really looking forward to putting on weight on purpose over the next couple months as the weather gets chillier.
I’ve been doing my best to do everything I can to put my body in a position to gain muscle. Volume, exercise selection, protein, calorie surplus. There’s some evidence that higher volumes, twenty or thirty or more hard sets per muscle group, can increase the rate of muscle growth pretty substantially, so for the muscles I’m most interested in growing, I’ve been aiming to do at least twenty sets a week, often more. I’ve tried to choose exercises emphasizing long muscle lengths, including, as I think I mentioned last month, lengthened isometrics. This seems to be the best bet for maximizing muscle growth through exercise selection, so I’ve been fastidious about that with all my exercises. And the isometrics, now that I’ve invented a bunch that I like, are incredibly convenient and I find them much more enjoyable, much less fatiguing, than normal sets. There’s also some evidence that although there are diminishing returns as you go higher, eating a protein intake that’s on the higher side can also set you up for your best gains, so I’ve been looking for cheap protein sources and trying to eat a fair bit every day. And, of course, calorie surplus. That by itself can make resistance training build more muscle; hopefully all the other stuff I’m doing combines with that to send as many of the extra calories as possible to building muscle rather than storing as fat! I can’t control what ends up happening, but what I can control to influence the outcome I have tried to do as well as I could this month.
I’m surprised how much I am enjoying this moderate surplus. I thought it would be a lot less fun than my yolo surplus back in March, and it is indeed a bit more work to be more deliberate about my eating rather than just following my appetite, but I’ve been feeling pretty great so far. I look forward to a lot more months like this, hopefully, over the next few years. I just feel really strong. My muscles feel big. I feel like I could conquer the planet. It’s a very enjoyable way of being in the world, I have to say.
Since beginning the calorie surplus, the way I’ve been structuring my week is first, BJJ class (whether I go Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday), and then next I try to do all my resistance training in the next two or three days after the BJJ day, and then I give myself three or four days to let my body recover as fully as possible before going back to BJJ. I would’ve expected to enjoy those days off, but I guess I’m changing a bit; I find I’m restless and looking for something to do physically that I’ll feel good about but which won’t interfere overly with my recovery. The idea I’m developing just now toward the end of the month is that maybe I should start experimenting a bit with some shadow boxing. That might be a good way to start putting pieces of boxing together, having something physical to occupy me, and giving my imagination room to have fun imagining that day in the future when I’ll really be ready to start training striking as well. I don’t know for sure that that’s what I’ll decide to do as a regular part of my weekly rotation, but currently I’m pretty excited by the thought of it.
Predictions
This month I’m going to try to put on one or two pounds (180 or 181), but if I put on three pounds (or zero!) that will be okay too. I’m really hoping not to lose any weight (I don’t think I’ll need to worry about that) or to gain more than three pounds (a very real possibility if I’m not careful), though if I do, that’s a good learning experience and I’ll just try to do better the month after.
For resistance exercise, I want to keep doing my weekly schedule (probably with a deload week again this month) and perhaps continuing to refine my collection of exercises. For BJJ, I just want to aim to keep going every week and having fun, hopefully getting better as the months pass but not worrying too much about that at this point. And I think that’s about it. See you again next month!
For resistance exercise, I want to keep doing my weekly schedule (probably with a deload week again this month) and perhaps continuing to refine my collection of exercises. For BJJ, I just want to aim to keep going every week and having fun, hopefully getting better as the months pass but not worrying too much about that at this point. And I think that’s about it. See you again next month!
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