Arvind Ashok: Fitness & Nutrition Simplified

It has been a while since I spoke about what I’ve been doing in my work­out rou­tine. About 6 months ago, I dropped Cross­Fit as my main work­out rou­tine. Met­cons are awe­some fun, but get­ting beat 5 times a week will even­tu­ally cause prob­lems. And while Cross­Fit tries to pro­vide a bal­anced work­out in com­po­nents of phys­i­cal fit­ness, includ­ing strength, speed, sta­mina, and flex­i­bil­ity — it was time to change it up a bit.

While I was at Cross­Fit, I would scale the weights of all the work­outs accord­ing to my lev­els (most of the guys I worked out with have about 50-75lbs on me), and when my strength, rel­a­tive to my body weight, is cal­cu­lated, it is not all that bad. My 5 rep-max for squats and dead­lifts were at about 1.5x my body weight. But I felt a dete­ri­o­ra­tion in form, due to the con­stant use of met­cons, and time-constrained work­outs. And like I already men­tioned, being beat 5 times a week. And hey, I just wanted to lift big!

So, my goal was to increase strength, and in the process, put on some mass. So, with­out any sugar-coating, here’s my report on myself. This is my first attempt at a ‘bulk’ — the idea is to lift big, eat big, and get a lot of rest. Pretty sim­ple huh. I mean, c’mon — los­ing weight is the hard part, right.. not gain­ing weight.

• Wow, was I wrong on that one. Even though every legit site said it was a lot of work, not easy. Even though I had friends who had done this before, and gave me enough of a heads-up. “Oh, but I am unique. Los­ing weight is only hard. Not gain­ing it”. Well — becom­ing a fat ass is pretty darn easy. Gain­ing mass prop­erly — as much of it as mus­cle, as lit­tle of it as fat, and under a time­line — pretty damn hard!
• My first attempt lasted all of three weeks. I was not men­tally pre­pared for the amount of food I would have to eat. I dont count calo­ries — even when am cut­ting (try­ing to lose weight). The idea was to eat about 1.5x my usual amount on a rest day and about 2x on a work­out day. I couldn’t flip the men­tal switch in my head.
• After two weeks of prepar­ing bet­ter — under­stand­ing how much I had to eat, set­ting a goal for min­i­mum amount of food to con­sume per day, a list of foods I would eat every day, I tried it again.
• Attempt #2 went a lot bet­ter than attempt #1. I put on about 13lbs in 7 weeks! And obvi­ously, there was a cor­re­la­tion in my lifts — I set a new PR (per­sonal record) each week, jump­ing in weight all the time.
• After a par­tic­u­larly heavy squat­ting ses­sion, 230lbs for a 5RM (225 was my 1RM 6 months ear­lier), I felt some­thing in my knee a few days later. After rest­ing it, I did quite a bit of mobil­ity work on it. Vis­ited a sports ther­a­pist as well — was advised to rest the knee.
• I could’ve con­tin­ued to eat big, and lift big, but I’ve grown pretty smart about this stuff.I almost always err on the side of cau­tion. I decided to take 2 weeks off. And I lost 4lbs! WTF!
• I wanted to see if 2 weeks of rehab was enough — but 2 years of con­stantly pound­ing work­outs at CF takes a toll appar­ently. More rest would be handy.
• So, I shifted focus to mostly upper body work — presses, weighted dips and pullups, which were 1x a week pre­vi­ously. And con­tin­u­ing to eat big. I am back up to my pre­vi­ous weight of 143lbs now.
• I intend on doing this for 2–3 more weeks, before embark­ing on some­thing pretty big, for me. More on that later

Results

• 13lbs of mass gain. Not bad but I was kinda hop­ing for more — closer to 20. But I wasn’t expect­ing to get injured. It’s okay — I got time. Lots of it.
• 60lbs increase in my deadlifts
• 45lbs increase in back squats
• 15lbs increase in front squats
• 30lbs increase in bench press
• 25lbs increase in over­head press

Note: All of the above are for a 5RM.

a lot more fat on the belly than before, side-effect of a bulk

Update: The video keeps dis­ap­pear­ing. So, am just gonna link to it. Instead, here’s a photo of me on the bulk — big­ger than this but flab­bier around the belly too.

Note: In the video, I don’t lock­out all the way — I was a bit wary about my knee and I have a ten­dency to go over­board on the lock­out nor­mally. Try­ing to be too con­scious about it ended up in a bit of less lock­out than desired. I did fix it in my sec­ond round, by using a sim­ple piece of advice — “dont over­think it”.

The not-so-good-but-sorta-inevitable

• Waist size back up to 30″ from 28″
• A harder-to-find 4-pack
• A layer of fat on the tummy
• Slug­gish­ness! Another thing I was thor­oughly under-prepared for. Eat­ing a lot of food makes me so slug­gish — this is what I hate the most about this bulk­ing process.
• Not all of the 13lbs was mus­cle, obviously.

What’s Next

While the bulk — pro­vid­ing sig­nif­i­cant strength gains, week upon week, feels sim­ply awe­some, has quite a bit of dis­ad­van­tages as well. Being veg­e­tar­ian makes it just a bit harder, I would say. For one, it breaks a big rule of mine — eat real food. But to get a sig­nif­i­cant amount of pro­tein, I had to sup­ple­ment with quite a bit of whey. And a lot of unhealthy food, that’s nor­mally not part of my diet made its way in dur­ing the bulk — just coz I had to get a sig­nif­i­cant amount of calo­ries in. A bur­rito from Chipo­tle has upwards of 1000 calo­ries, for example.

Is this the best way to make gains in strength — not at all. One can still eat clean, eat just above what is main­te­nance, and make slow gains. That is a lot more sus­tain­able. But my pri­mary goal was to gain strength, not to worry about putting on fat (it wasn’t easy let­ting go, let me tell you that!). Quick and dirty — that’s what the idea was. I wanted to see for myself if it was pos­si­ble to make sig­nif­i­cant strength gains, weight gain — on a veg­e­tar­ian diet. Def­i­nitely possible!

In a few weeks, I intend to give the paleo diet a proper shot. I’ve been a veg­e­tar­ian for about 3 years now, around the same time I started tak­ing fit­ness seri­ously. I’ve seen that it is pos­si­ble to be veg­e­tar­ian and lose fat in a healthy way, to make sig­nif­i­cant strength gains, put on a decent amount of mus­cle in the process. But the process of self-improvement, via self-experimentation must con­tinue. I will write a detailed post on this and pub­lish it in a day or two.