How I'm building muscle without gaining too much fat


Building muscle takes time, a lot more time than gaining fat. And that means that if you're like me, not as young as you used to be, and have been training for years, you need to be realistic about what you can gain in a month, or a year.

My goal this year was to gain twelve pounds of muscle, and allow for three pounds of fat gain, taking me from 160 pounds in January to 175 pounds by December, and this past month (August) I was getting excited because I found myself at 170 pounds, thinking that I was going to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, I found that I gained back my "pooch" around the waist, so I'm trying to calm down a bit, and I may have to reduce my final goal for the year from 175 to 170, which would still be a gain of seven pounds of muscle, not bad for someone like me!

I weighed in at 167 this morning, and I can see that I still have "the pooch" (no, I'm not going to show it to you, it's where a lot of guys who are otherwise lean carry a few extra pounds, around their belly button area). And so at the grocery store this morning I skipped over the more high-calorie stuff, and am going to take it easy on the calories for the rest of September. No, I won't be going on a full-on diet until October, I'd like to continue with my muscle-building program for another month.

I'm back to training heavy since I'm over the shoulder strain that I suffered in April, and so my heavier dumbbells (which have been gathering dust on the floor) have started moving around, even the sixties. I'm not training for strength, I'm training for hypertrophy, and from what I've learned it's good to do both heavy weights and lights weights. Obviously I don't want to go so heavy that I strain my shoulder again, but I'm older and wiser now, and won't make that mistake again. With age comes wisdom!

Now calm down there, I'm not giving advice to you, this is just what I'm doing, and it's working for me. I'm old enough to remember when blogs were meant to be like a diary, and that's how I'm treating this. You can look over my shoulder, but you don't gotta do what I do. I'm not selling anything here, I'm just thinking out loud.

I got advice from the bodybuilding coach at the gym where I used to train, and he told me the best way for me to go was two months of muscle-building followed by a month of dieting, and then back and forth. I was doing great until I strained my shoulder, so I know that I lost at least one month of serious muscular training, which I'm trying to make up for now.

You won't be seeing me walking around on a bodybuilding stage in my underwear, or doing a shirtless scene in an upcoming superhero movie, so don't expect me to do anything extreme. I do this because I like it, I like the feeling, I like projects.

I'll let you know how it goes.

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