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Main Goal: Bulk up to 175 pounds with 12% body fat by my 40th birthday Current Status: Measly 156 pounds at 15-20% body fat and just turned 38 How am I going to do it? It may take some divine intervention, but I have a plan: HIT it! Goal 1: Lift! Follow the workouts in The New High Intensity Training by Ellington Darden. Darden has a variety of workouts in the book, and I should probably play it safe and just follow the beginner routine, but I was intrigued by the workouts focused on specific areas of the body. So I'll be focusing on Arms, Shoulders, and Chest (while not neglecting the rest of the body). For the first 3 weeks, I'll do 3 days a week: A-B-C, and then for the last 3 weeks I'll switch to 2 days a week and do A-B, C-A, B-C. Total of 15 possible workouts. Goal 2: Eat! If I'm going to get up to 175 pounds, I need to eat more. Every day. Plenty of carbs, protein, and fat. My weight has been all over the place for the last 2 years and I *think* I'm finally ready to commit to just gaining some dang weight. If I stick with the weight training and don't overdo the calories, I should hopefully build more muscle than fat. I'll worry about losing any excess fat once I get closer to my goal weight. My plan for this challenge is to continue to eat healthy (more meat, fruit, veggies, and water; less candy, donuts, desserts, and soda) but also to make sure I get 300-500 extra calories a day. Goal 3: Mug shots. I've been dutifully taking progress pictures for over 2 years, but I've never really done much with them. My plan is to put together a progress collage (a la Waldo) so that I can actually see when I was making good progress and then correlate that to what kind of diet I was eating and what exercise plan I was on at the time. I've got around 30-40 pictures, so I'm going to shoot for just adding one a day over the challenge. I tried this project once before and lost several hours worth of work when my Photoshop crashed and I hadn't saved any of it... If I stick to one a day, that will be a more manageable time commitment and it will force me to save! Life Goal: Get The Band Back Together! I play bass, guitar, and banjo. Or rather, I own a couple of basses, a guitar, and a banjo. I don't play them nearly enough. So my life goal for this challenge is to play at least one of those instruments for an hour a week. That works out to less than 10 minutes a day! Plus, it aligns nicely with my wife's new year's resolution to learn to play the mandolin. She loves to play/practice and I am terrible at it, so hopefully we can spur each other on and it may even bring us closer together. As everyone knows, you have to keep your woman happy, otherwise...