Rob's not really doing a challenge this time.

[Rob__]

But he's much too busy, so he's going to do a non-challenge instead, complete with some non-goals.

 

The rundown

 

School this semester. It's my last. But I"ve got 7 courses again. That's a couple courses more than I'd prefer, but I don't want to deal with the go back to school for one more semester. Also, I'm moving. It's not going to be a far move. It's not going to be a super difficult move, but I'm still moving, and it's still going to interfere with my time. Finally, my sinuses. As I write this, they ache. It's like they're daring me to make challenge goals that'll require me to be perfectly healthy all the time to complete.

 

So I'm going to give all that a big fuck you and do a sorta challenge anyway! This is going to be more of a diary than a challenge. My workout plan is a 5-day a week-er. There's lots and lots and lots of lifting. There's going to be lots of eating. I know what needs to be done, I just need to get in the kitchen and do it. I have a lot of knitting to do. Every day, I knit something off of the list, and every day, I write something back on.

 

The non-challenge

 

Lift. Eat. Knit. It's been said if I had a shirt, this would be it's slogan. Outside of school, that's pretty much going to be the entirety of my life, so let's talk about them a little!

 

The Lifts are going to be plentiful. I've been reading and experimenting and messing around with all things workout. About a month ago I started to think about all the ways I can destroy my body that would effectively build it back up bigger, stronger, and better. Everyone knows I like volume and can handle it reasonably well. Everyone knows I like to lift heavy and want to lift even heavierer. Everyone knows I want to do both all the time, every day. I started to wonder if I could do heavy strength stuff AND high volume every day. Could it be done? Or RIP in peace OP? I found this: (link to be inserted later cause stupid). Basically, that was exactly the lifting plan I'd have eventually come up with when it finished percolating through my thought processes. So I pretty much stole it exactly. Tailor to your favourite rep ranges? My favourite rep ranges are to lift a weight between 0 and 20 times for 1 to 10 sets.

 

If you skipped down to where it gives the workout and percentages, you should go back at some point and read the rest. It actually makes a lot of sense. IF you didn't click the link at all, you probably should. It will make your eyes go like this O.O and be like, "you crazy, is that doable?"

 

It is. I've done it for a few weeks before Christmas/New Years interrupted things.

 

The Eats are also going to have to be as plentiful as the lifts. I haven't come up with a concrete plan, but I know that I'm going to have to add back in first breakfast and midnight snack. Instead of 3 big meals, 5 big meals a day. If I stick to 3, they'll have to be like... 1200 calories each. At a minimum. I can do it, but I'd prefer to throw a smaller amount of food down a larger amount of times. I mean, obviously, I'll do what needs to be done given The Schedule, but eating more times is preferable to eating super big once or twice. As much as I can do it, it's hard to stay awake after a 2500 calorie meal...

 

The Knits are going to take up nearly as much of my time as the schooling will.

 

On the Needles

1. Polar Bear Blanket

2. Socks

 

To Go On Needles

1. Cabled headband - brick colour

2. Cabled scarf - cream

3. Cabled scarf - grey/purple

4. Sweater

 

Everything's listed in priority order. The grey/purple scarf is an idea. I'm going to have to knit out a proof of concept swatch. Make sure it actually works the way I think it will, otherwise I'll have to figure out how to make it do what I want. I'm already mostly done knitting the left sock, I just have the right sock to knit. I've barely started the polar bear. It's not due until the end of February though, and I'll be long done by then, so it's fine.

 

So basically, I'm just going to talk about lifting and food. And y'all can throw gifs and shenanigans at me. It'll be a good time.

[wildross]

A male weight lifter who knits has got to be followed.  What are you studying at school??

[Brometheus]

YES! ALL THE NON CHALLENGES!

[KnitJoy]

Woohoo non-challenge go! You should definitely post pictures of your knitting projects!

[raptron]

Knit during class! 

[CourtnieMarie]

Woohoo non-challenge go! You should definitely post pictures of your knitting projects!

yes! along with foods of course...

[Rob__]

A male weight lifter who knits has got to be followed.  What are you studying at school??

 

It's a basic business college diploma program. Nothing too in depth or difficult. A lot of projects and presentations though. I picked it as a stop gap. I had an opportunity to go back, and didn't know what for. Depending on how employment hunting goes, I'm actually looking at applying into a kinesiology 4-year at my local university.

 

YES! ALL THE NON CHALLENGES!

 

I CHALLENGE YOU TO FOLLOW THEM ALL! Can I challenge people in a non-challenge?

 

Woohoo non-challenge go! You should definitely post pictures of your knitting projects!

 

That's the plan! In fact, here's the swatch I figured out for one of the two scarves I'm knitting:

 

 

I'm going to stick to a reverse stockinette design for the background colour, however. The cable's easier to run when purling right side.

 

Knit during class! 

 

I've thought about it. Lurking in the back corner with yarn and needles poking out of my bag. I almost never take notes anyway and just listen to the teacher talk.

 

yes! along with foods of course...

 

Yes! Foods! I'm probably going to make a midnight snack tonight, so will have food pics to post! To hold you over until then, here's the last food I took a picture of. Instagram says it was Dec. 21st.

 

[MasterOfCows]

Yay!! Lifting, eating, schooling, knitting!  Rob's got it all right here folks.

[weirdquark]

PvP: who can have the most non-challenge non-challenge?

[CourtnieMarie]

Drool. I should follow you on instagram.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Max Power]

PvP: who can have the most non-challenge non-challenge?

 

Sign me up for another seat in the non-challenge, challenge. If I ever get around to making my challenge thread that is.  

[Rob__]

The only way to win that PVP would be to not play, wouldn't it? So I'm out...

 

Yes! Follow me on Instagram! Look at pictures of my pussy and food! Occasionally, I even post a picture of myself that's more than just the crotch/cat-bed. My instagram isn't posted in my signature for some reason, but my username is rmoli082 if you wanna look me up.

 

Speaking of my instagram, this is a link to a pile of ribs I recently posted:

 

http://distilleryimage11.ak.instagram.com/82f150fe743311e3b3ed0e5981f7b917_8.jpg

 

I'll turn the link into an embedded image when I get to a real computer. "For some reason", internet exploder doesn't work well on my tablet.

 

On the knit front, I'm almost done the socks. I'll post the pair when they're completed...

 

Merry Challenge Eve, everyone! I cannot wait to get back to the daily grind of heavy lifting after this vacation. I feel super fat and slothful. Even though I'm neither.

[CourtnieMarie]

subbed to instagram!

 

 

I cannot wait to get back to the daily grind of heavy lifting after this vacation. I feel super fat and slothful. Even though I'm neither.

 

Right there with you. Although I thoroughly enjoyed me some delicious foods over the holidays, it's time to get back to it. At least until MLK day. That counts as a holiday right?

[Rob__]

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING LOVELIES!

 

How's everyone doing this first day of challenge morning? Good? Great! Let's get on with our bad selves. You might be wondering a few things at this point. The first thing you might be wondering is what the fuck is so good about Monday morning? Allow me to enumerate the list:

 

1. 100% Kona Peaberry is inside my TARDIS coffee mug.

2. First squat day in weeks.

3. Did I mention the coffee?

 

The second thing you might be wondering is how this non-challenge thing is going to work. I'm wondering that also! What I think is going to happen is that I'm going to workout, eat food, knit and talk about it. You guys will probably ask me questions about things and I'll probably have answers about them. Sometimes, a gif.

 

Any questions?

 

A few notes on the workout

 

So it looks like I'm probably not going to go back and edit my top post to insert a link to the workout philosophy I borrowed from someone else. If you follow r/weightroom on reddit you might have read the FAQ and seen their list of program writeups. Also, since I've found it and realized the philosophy jibed with mine, a whole bunch of people on r/weightroom followed it also. To stop making this short story super long, it's the GZCL Method for Powerlifting.

 

PLEASE NOTE: This is not a weight lifting program per se. It's a methodology. Exercises and rep ranges are talked about and examples are given, but ultimately, it's up to you to take the information and organize it as you will.  Please take the time to read the whole link if you're interested, this is just a brief summary below. http://swoleateveryheight.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-gzcl-method-for-powerlifting.html

 

This is how I roll

 

You may notice that isn't a link to youtube showing you how I roll. I had that, but I took it down because now youtube puts my full fucking name to everything. Thanks, Google. You also might notice that there's a lot of fucking words and numbers. Deal with it.

 

So over the last year and a half or so, I've been messing around with a bunch of power lifting programs. I've played with SS/SL, drank 5/3/1 in a couple different flavours, I've suffered from Madcow and practiced the Texas Method. I liked them ALL, but none of them were exactly what I wanted. I started to read the philosophies behind the methodologies. I started to read books about programming that weren't Practical Programming. I read blog posts from trainers and listened to podcasts galore. I was comparing their data to the subjective and objective data I've been collecting over my two years.

 

I determined the following things about myself

 

1) I'm pretty tolerant to volume.

2) I like lifting heavy.

3) I need to do more lifting in the top end.

4) My volume base needs some work.

5) I want some fucking variety

 

amongst a whole bunch of other trivial things (if I don't pussy out, I can volume dead lift for days).

 

So this set me thinking, and we ended up with the 5/3/2 at the start of last challenge. It still didn't feel exactly correct. It wasn't quite what I wanted. There are 5 weekdays, and I wanted to use them all. Every day I wanted some heavy volume and every day I wanted strength work. 5/3/2 was close, but the volume didn't feel like it was enough, and the strength work didn't feel like it was heavy enough. And then I found the GCZL Method which was pretty exactly what I was going for.

 

- 5 days a week ( Squat, Bench, Dead, Bench+, Squat+)

- Strength work every day -> 1x3, 2x2, 3x1 (between 85 and 95%)

- Volume work every day -> 7x5, 7x3, 5x3, 10x3 (between 65 and 85%)

- A variety of assistance work as you see fit.

 

Like I said, the rep ranges are just a suggestion, and you pick whatever you see fit, but I *liked* the way he sliced the rep ranges. If you consider things like a pyramid, you have your tiers as follows:

 

Top tier: Strength -> 10-15 reps.

2nd tier: Volume -> 20-30 reps.

3rd tier: Accessory -> 30+ reps.

 

That keeps things at a nice 1:2:3 ratio. For every rep you'd program in the top tier, you'd program 2 in the 2nd tier and 3 in the third. So if you want to lift 10 increasingly heavier singles, or work up to 10 heavy singles at a consistent weight, or 5 doubles, or whatever, you can do that instead of what I'm doing. Whatever works for you personally is what you should be doing.

 

At any rate, I like lifting heavy things and putting them down, so rep ranges aren't super important. I don't have any competition goals, so as long as I get a little stronger and a little bigger, I'm happy. It's not just about the looks. It's about the attitude. Mental toughness as well as physical. While I may not have enjoyed the 10x3, and whined to myself about how I couldn't, I could and I did. If I was competing for anything, I'd probably take a harder look at my notes and see which rep ranges exactly drove the most progress and work from there. But I'm not. So I left them as he outlined.

 

The last thing that bears mentioning about the program as a whole is the + notation on the second Bench and Squat days way back up at the beginning. Those days are exact repeats of the previously scheduled day that week with one small change: your last top tier strength set is an AMRAP set instead of a single, so rep out.

 

I ran 4 weeks last month and my notes are as follows, almost exactly:

 

- Awesome.

- Holy food.

- Recover, bitch.

- SLEEP.

 

So anyways, enough with the wordiness and let's get into some numbers. Today's squat day. Because I've taken 2 weeks off, I'm actually just going to repeat my last 4 weeks of workouts almost exactly. So here's what things look like for today:

 

Top Tier: Squats -> 1x3 @ 260, 2x2 @ 265, 3x1 @ 275

2nd Tier: Squats -> 7x5 @ 245

3rd Tier: Front Squats, whatevs.

 

I never really program tier 3. This is where I'm getting my variety. I'm pretty much going to switch up the exercises all the time, but with some consideration. At a minimum, I'll be doing a variation of the main move which will help through sticking points. I'll also need to get some additional back work in some days because there's no rowing programmed and I like rowing.

 

So that's enough about that. Just reading everything is giving me the hangries and I haven't even started the workout yet. There'll probably be food pics later.

 

On the knit front, I'm out of wool for the socks and need to buy a whole other ball just to shape and close the toe. All cause I ran short on another project that was going to someone and borrowed from my socks. Angry.

 

So that's my day in a lot of words. Any questions?

[Max Power]

 

So all tiers of the same lift are done on the same day? Have you tried alternating tiers? Something like tier1 Squat, T2, press, T3 squat.  Or is T3 also heavy for lots of singles?  I have more questions but we'll start with these.  

[Rob__]

So, the way things are laid out across the week are as follows:

 

Monday - Squat Focus.

Tuesday - Bench Focus.

Wednesday - Dead Lift Focus.

Thursday - Bench+ Focus.

Friday - Squat+ Focus.

 

So I'm already doing all tiers twice a week (except for deads). On Monday/Friday I'll do the exact same Tier 1 and Tier 2 for Squats, and then I'll change my Tier 3 accessory work. The accessory work will be at whatever rep ranges I want. So like my front squats will probably be a 3x10 or a 4x8 at some moderate weight. It'll be the same for bench press on Tuesday/Thursday, so I don't even think I'd have the room to mix up the tiers if I could think of an advantage to doing so.

 

Every day I will be lifting heavy and doing top tier work. Every day I will be lifting for volume and doing second tier work. Every day I'll be throwing around some form of accessory work to work at sticking points. Like for squats, I do front squats for the core support and the verticality. I have some issues getting out of the hole, so on my next squat day (Friday) I'll probably do pause squats instead of front squats.

 

That Squat workout tiers I posted in the "let's talk about my workout" post is TODAY and FRIDAY's workout. Heh.

[MasterOfCows]

So I got this for Christmas.  It's pretty sweet.

[Max Power]

My thoughts on splitting the tiers was to break up the hardest bits over multiple parts.  So some systems break it down into intensity (heavy) speed (high volume) and volume (semi-heavy volume).  My current program is based off of Cube method, this week for me is high volume squats, mid volume presses, and heavy DLs.  This is done to allow more recovery time between lifts. And now I may have just written an entirely new program by combining both of our workouts.  Although I was looking at the 3rd tier as more of a light weight/high rep to help with recovery type set.  

[Max Power]

My thoughts on splitting the tiers was to break up the hardest bits over multiple parts.  So some systems break it down into intensity (heavy) speed (high volume) and volume (semi-heavy volume).  My current program is based off of Cube method, this week for me is high volume squats, mid volume presses, and heavy DLs.  This is done to allow more recovery time between lifts. And now I may have just written an entirely new program by combining both of our workouts.  Although I was looking at the 3rd tier as more of a light weight/high rep to help with recovery type set.  

 

So I got this for Christmas.  It's pretty sweet.

 

And that is F-ing awesome!  

[ORazor]

My wife crochets. Hardcore. For our 3 year anniversary, I crocheted her a big ass orange scarf. It took me months of working on it sporadically. I think I had enough of that for a lifetime. But it is pretty cool when you are done

[weirdquark]

You can tell Google to use not your real for YouTube, I forget where I did that, but I did. It does mean that every time you go to YouTube Google will try to get you to use whatever name is attached your your email, but you can keep telling Google to shove it.

[Rob__]

I haven't read the Cube method in a while, but part of the reason why I didn't select a program like it was cause of the longer periods between lift types. I chose to style it after the GZCL method simply because I was looking to lift heavy every day and to lift a lot every day. I wanted every week to be Intensity Squat, Volume Squat and whatever other Squat I wanted week, as well as Bench and Dead lift. GZCL gives 2 intensity and 2 volume days per week for squat and bench, and 1 for dead lift.

 

I ran two different cycles of 5/3/1 BBB: Option A Squat 3x5, Squat 5x10 and Option B Squat 3x5 and Dead lift 5x10. I liked the flow of the workout better when it was ran like Option A. From a recovery aspect, I seem to do better with the all at once slam than carrying it over longer periods. I have no problem doing the big 3 back to back, but I start to feel really jangly and it breaks my rhythm if I'm intensity squatting and then volume dead lifting. I volume squat better after intensity squatting, and same with bench and deads. I'd be doing my volume deads and thinking about volume squats.

 

I guess what I'm trying to explain poorly is that there's no technical reasons really as to why I structured it this way as opposed to more like the Cube method. It's more the fact that I read Cube and I was "Yeah, I totally agree with everything you said," and that I read GZCL and thought "This is exactly what I'm looking for," so it's more a preference thing I guess. It's like when all your clothes are too tight and you put on a shirt that fits and everything just feels right. I could probably give all sorts of good-ish sounding reasons above, but that's basically what it ultimately came down to.

[Rob__]

FUCK THIS NON-QUOTING BULLSHIT.

 

ORazor - My friends feel that way about knitting. They barely managed to get through the initial "learn to knit" phase and that was more than enough for them. If they never had to look at needles again, they'd be ok with that. Plus, I knit. So they just have to hint. It's easier for them that way. Lol. That was nice of you to crochet a scarf for wifey though.

 

weirdquark - Yeah. I read about that feature of the new youtube format, but decided to just leave it as is and pull the video. It's much easier to avoid getting caught doing somewhat illicit activities if you just don't post them online, even if you've got some smokescreens up. It was part tutorial, and part showing off that I could go from bud to spark in ~60s. It's much more fun to brag about that in person so you can show and tell. Plus, I hate being nagged.

[CourtnieMarie]

its going to take some time for me to absorb your lifting regime. until then, carry on.

 

 

So I got this for Christmas.  It's pretty sweet.

 

 that is awesome.

[Rob__]

That is a freaking awesome TARDIS related gift, MoC. I wantssss it. My precioussss...

 

And carry on I will! And have done! And am here to report that the workout went as follows:

 

Tier 1: Squat: 1x3 @ 260, 2x2 @ 265, 3x1 @ 275

Tier 2: Squat 7x5 @ 245

Tier 3: Front Squat 3x10 @ 115

            Barbell Row  5 @ 95, 115, and 135, 3 @ 155, 165, 175, 1 @ 185, 195, 205

 

The last single of the barbell row was some crazy dead lift row combivariation. It totally does not count as a bar row using even the loosest interpretation of the exercise, so it's scratched out.

 

Looking at the numbers:

 

Tier 1: 10 reps between 85% and 90% of my working weight.

Tier 2: 35 reps at 80% of my working weight (not 85% like I said above).

Tier 3: 30 reps F. Squat + 26 reps Bar Row

 

This puts us above our minimum ratio of 1:2:3 (1:3.5:5.6) for the workout.

 

Total Workout Volume: 18,280 lbs moved.