Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log

Honeycrisps were invented here (MN) in 1960s. I've talked with the guy who invented them. Does anyone believe Red Delicious was once crisp and delicious? Yeah, I didn't know until talking with him.

Not sure how far Sweet Tango has spread but I assume those are/will be the most successful descendent of Honeycrisp.

Outside of apple season most apples are semi-trash. The newer brands/kinds are usually better but after a few years they will start to be quite a bit worse. The issue is random places start breeding those apples and the quality degrades b/c they don't do a great job year-over-year.

It's also why Fuji apples are straight up better in CA than here in MN. Not sure where we get our Fuji apples from but it's from an inferior place.

I don't think this is a good time to try to get contest lean. The job isn't busy but I still need to figure out when I strategically can be doing steps/cardio at work and frankly I don't want to be depleted and moody in my first semester here. And as I look back at old pics, I think I am being too harsh on myself and my conditioning was actually very good/show winning. I am going to continue cutting but don't set it up as a long contest cut; instead have a bigger deficit, add in the clenbuterol, and stop the cut at the end of september and go into a slow controlled surplus. I'll take a 4-8 week reset and minicut hard with clen after each 12-20 week bulk. Finishing up my minicut end of september should be enough time to fix my internal rotation issue fully and figure out sustainable push training finally. The mobility of right shoulder has greatly improved and I haven't been doing my mobs as regularly as before.

I'll get back to upper body training Saturday. Legs heavy on Friday night.

Never had one, but will put it on the to eat list.

Cosmic crisp are also pretty good. That would have been my guess for most successful honeycrisp descendant, but I haven't even heard of Sweet Tango, so will reserve judgement.

fwiw all apples are direct clones (cuttings attached to rootstock). So it is likely just habitat, storage, etc. You aren't going to see people "breeding" an orchard of Honeycrisps. They literally just get a bunch of rootstocks and attach cuttings and now you have your orchard. I don't think it'd be terribly inaccurate to conclude that most new cultivars are bred for their home climate and that growing them in disparate areas with meaningfully different habitats would yield meaningfully different fruit. (We've all had winter produce and it is... sad.)

It is also an incredibly tedious and slow process since apples take forever and a day to yield fruit and there is a huge realm of natural variation from apples. This is also related to why fruit trees are sold as saplings and not as little seeds you can grow yourself. Maybe someone who has spend some time being autistic about stone fruits can educate me on whether those turn out as weird as apples.

Ironically, some of the exotic varieties (white lady) come from a single limb that had a genetic anomaly on a single pink lady tree. The more you learn about food production, the more you realize that everything we eat is a terrifying frankenfood.

i am just that autist who went to an apple talk at a botanical garden 2 years ago

as you stated all apples are clones and what they do is grow a random apple tree, then once the roots and stems are established they cut them and graft on a branch from the intended apple - so the roots and base are of a random apple tree but all the fruiting parts will be a clone of that original (or in this case a clone of a clone of a clone)

so for fuji apples, there's the single original tree (which is likely dead by now) and then millions of clones

the very reason for doing this is because apples breed like animals where you get a random genetic mix and thus the fruit of their offspring, even if it's pollen and seeds from different fuji clones, will not yield a sapling which produces fruit which is anything like a fuji

and, as you can guess, for every honey crisp or fuji or whatever, there's a million terrible and disgusting outcomes - and it's very time exhausting to develop new strains because if you plant 100 saplings you'll need to wait for years to know what kind of fruit they'll produce and it'll be disgusting 99/100 times

this is precisely why america is covered with crab apples, it came from a generation of randos inspired by the myth of johnny appleseed and just planting apple seeds everywhere and what emerged was so disgusting that most people today aren't even aware that's not a different species but the same exact tree

Well, that was actually interesting. Especially since I now have a pretty big garden.

This is still the best apple I've ever tasted:
Aakero apple wiki.

Perfect balance of tartness and sweetness imo. I tend to preferring tart in general. I'll try planting a tree (or 2, depending) this fall and see how it shakes out.

Which reminds me, cotton candy grapes are just the absolute nut low. Holy **** they're terrible!

best grapes i ever had were in china

they're directly translated to horse milk grapes (but in practicality it reads as horse titties/nips grapes) for obvious reasons, no idea what they're called in english or if they even exist outside of china

great fruit talk itt tbh

upper body training still on hold. Deciding whether or not to do rfess+ham curl+sldl20 tomorrow but I think my bicep is going to take longer to heal. Maybe I should get in and do a very light upper sesh at least just to lose less coordination.

I think rotating exercises and having 1 day where I do free weight pressing as 2nd lift might be the solution. This approach is working great for legs and resulting in prs every sesh. Perhaps I'll do something like this:

Push 1
Incline machine press neutral grip
flat machine press normal grip
Machine OHP

Push 2
Smith incline 30 degrees
incline machine normal grip
pushup

Push 3
Neutral grip flat machine
15 degree incline db
machine fly or cable xover

With my normal protocol for delts and tris. I'm just theorycrafting based on the equipment I have at the really good AC but very expensive gym. Over 100 usd/mo and $10 in transportation fees getting there and back each training day.

A closer 24 hour one is about to open but way less variety of equipment and no idea how the AC is. If the AC is good I'm almost certainly going to sign up, but they may not have the variety of equipment required to set up 3 distinct push days with different exercises unless I end up using the smith twice on some workouts and doing just generally a lot of smith work.

I def want to have at least one psuh day which is machine flat press, incline db press, and then a machine fly motion. That's the best overall I think but obviously I can't do that every workout without running into pain at some point.

So this myth probably relates to weird teetotalers, but JA wasn't really interested in eating apples. As you correctly point out, seeds result in some very weird types of apples which range from mildly disgusting (my MiL has a tree that produces monster fruit that is obscenely floury, great for baking tho) to completely useless. What he was focused on was growing more apples to make cider, since cider is great and apples can all be turned into booze. Now if you're speaking about people doing this 100s of years later (or even today) these people are just idiots who lack any basic understanding how how botany works or gardening or really anything.

He's closer to Dionysus than someone providing kids a mid-morning snack item.

Oorrrrr drop ppl entirely, lower pressing volume overalll since chest+front delts are already very good, and do the Back+Chest, Arms+Delts, Legs repeat 6 day split. Lower volume of pressing might be good for protecting the bicep tendon problems

Back+Chest 1
Incline smith 3 stes
Machine fly 3 sets
Chins: 3 sets
BB rows: 3 sets
Any machine lat exercise of choice: 3 sets
Do the chins in between incline smith sets, same with flies and rows

Back+Chest 2
Machine flat press: 3 sets (smith if we don't have a good one)
incline db press: 3 sets
Chins: 3 sets
BB rows: 3 sets
Any different lat exercise of choice

Arms same every day
EZ curl myo rep matching 4 sets
SS with tricep pushdowns myo rep matching 4 sets
facing away dual cable curls but without the big stretch: 4 sets
SS with single arm pushdowns: 4 sets
DB leaning away curl: 4 sets
SS with db skullcrushers: 4 sets
Any 2 delt raise exercises, they basically all work well for me

Same 3 leg days I've been doing; one where I do leg press+glute exercise, one where I do ffess+sldl, one where I just do hamstring curls and squats with nothing else. That low volume of pressing and pulling will be basically fine for bis and tris the next day

oh wow, that's super interesting and makes a lot of sense

indeed, a lot of the talk focused on that early on there were "dessert apples" which were good enough to be eaten on its own and then the rest were subdivided into baking/cooking and for cider as those uses were far more forgiving on the flavor/texture/size of the apples

it's only in modern times are basically all apples are of the dessert apple variety (although i'm sure some large pie/cider manufacturers still use non-dessert apples)

Yep, we are applying modern classifications to prior instances. The whole concept of sweet corn is an entirely modern invention. I'm sure that 200y ago people ate apples off a tree that anyone today would find mildly disgusting. (IE the apple I ate previously that I baked with and then realized was super gross to eat!)

While I'm not an expert on historical apple consumption, I would feel safe in assuming that many of the varieties that we consider "baking" or "trash" were considered dessert apples at their time. Historical food consumption is a minor interest of mine (dark age folks just eating rye bread for like... most of their diet is the wildest thing). But I do think understanding historical context is important, and what we consider a gross and disgusting apple was likely a supremely delicious and well textured apple 100-200+ years prior. (Was the Red Delicious ever actually delicious or just... the best of what we got?)

These sort of questions are super interesting and I find them fascinating. And somehow Sam Adams... which wanted to pioneer English ales in America (bleh) magically made cider a thing. While this is not directly "health and fatness", nutrition and the food that provides the fuel is a deeply weird and intriguing concept.

Cider.... **** I haven't drank in forever but I could go for a dry hard cider rn. Maybe first week of october during my holiday I will indulge.

Being unable to train fully makes me obsess over training. Been looking a lot at Jordan Hutchinson and Chris Tuttle's approaches to training. I think I don't really need 2x/wk leg days anymore. Maybe a hamstring touch-up on another day. Chest training can be relegated to only once a week for around 30-40 minutes I think as well because it's always been a strong bodypart despite (or perhaps because of) weak lifting numbers. Huge wingspan so my ROM mogs people who lift a lot more than me and the muscle itself does way more work than people with normal limb lengths.

Monday
Back+hams
Chins: 3-4 sets
BB rows: 3 sets
any isolation move: 4 sets
ham curls: 4 sets

Tuesday Arms+delts
Arm day as posted above,
ez curls, cable facing away curls, leaning db supinated curls or high cable single arm curls
pushdowns, skullcrushers, unilateral cable triceps anything. maybe overhead extensions Order of exercises not important for bis and tris
Prone DB raises
cable side raises hopefully with a cuff attachment both sides at a time.

Wednesday Legs 1
Ham curls: 5 sets failure
HBBS: 2 sets of 10-12, dropping weight between sets, something like 140x10-12, 120x12 for now would be perfect. Very submaximal
Leg press: 2 sets of 15-30
Adductors or some sort of glute thing: ??
Leg extensions if I still have energy, but can skip

Legs 2 my other leg day I do with FFESS, ham curl, SLDL set of 20, optional leg extensions. Rotate leg days each week to preserve connective tissue.

Thursday Chest+Back
Machine press: 3 sets failure
Incline DB press: 3 sets
Machine flies: 3 sets
Chins: 3 sets (hit these while resting between machine press sets)
Tik-tok rows or other stabilized horizontal pull with lat focus: 3 sets (do separately from incline db presses)
Pulldowns: 4 sets (hit these while resting between machine flies)

Friday Arms+delts
Arm+delt day as posted above
4 sets hamstring curls

Macro level stuff: I'm not at a level where I can have super lean offseasons yet. It hurts to admit this to myself but again after talking with Jordan directly (nice guy, despite getting top 3 in a pro show recently, having won Mr. USA overall in 2021, and sponsored athlete/full time online coach, he still takes the time to answer all of my stupid ass questions on instagram and basically provide free coaching) I realize this is just not the right approach right now.

Basically my genetics for adding muscle are pretty bad by competitive bodybuilding standards. I have very good genetics for skeletal structure and for getting lean quickly and without needing to do drastic caloric restrictions and I compete in a division with weight caps, so it's not like this means I will always fail and need to quit. By general pop standards I'm probably still above average in the adding muscle component, but probably not better than top 40% or so. Guys like us need to get a little fat to actually add tissue. Going up around 20kg from your previous stage weight over the course of 8 months post show is considered sorta standard/normal. It's already been three months and I still have about 9 months of offseason before I need to start another contest prep cut, assuming 5.5 months is enough time. Even if I assumed I still had 3kg to lose to get the kind of conditioning I really wanted in back in June, that'd still put me at 107. I feel like with my appetite as it was reaching 107-110kg peak offseason would be very very easy even eating super clean. My weight cap is 95kg and given that we are 14 months and change out, it's not at all an unreasonable goal to be coming in around 93-95 on stage at that time. But doing so is going to require eating and getting to something only slightly below my previous highest offseason bodyfat. It is what it is. Don't panic because it comes off fairly fast and I still looked great in clothes at that time.

Once I fill out that cap it'll just be a matter of reaching that previous offseason bodyweight leaner and leaner each time, assuming I don't win on my first try. That's when I can worry about having a leaner offseason. For now I need to just focus on adding tissue to arms, lats, and hamstrings and don't be afraid to get BIG. Plus there's the whole "enjoy life" part and yeah it'd be nice to be having 1-3 off plan fun meals per week like burgers, pizza, sushi, ice cream, pasta, and just "normal people food".

https://www.instagram.com/jordanhutchins...

He's shredded AF rn because he just got 3rd at a very difficult texas pro show, but if you scroll down a bunch you'll see he gets fairly fat offseason. When he first turned pro, he went down from a bodyweight high of 272 looking like a DYEL fatty to 221 on stage peeled to win the overall. 24 week prep and his carbs never got below 200g. His bodyfat was way higher than mine was at my peak offseason last year. I'll use a facking GLP1 agonist if I have to during the contest prep. DNP is off the menu because I am prepping during summer, but if I cut during winter I'd be fine with trying it out.

There was one time when I was doing that deadlift program working where I did the 200kgx5x5 @ 102 bw (that's a ****ing crazy volume PR and I can't believe I even managed to do this ever) when I was in the elevator and a personal trainer asked me if I'd been taking time off recently because my belly was so big. He was not entirely DYEL, squatted 140x1 weighin in the high 60s or low 70s atg full rom and trains his clients reasonably well. But obviously despite a decade in the profession, 0 notable lifts and never been close to stage lean. I didn't rage at him or anything, but I did rage at myself and that singular moment along with the enormous amount of positive feedback I got while cutting really turned me off the idea of gaining substantial bodyfat. I do lift partially for the validation of normies and DYELs, I am flawed. Unfortunately even on AAS, bodyfat getting a bit high is part of the game for those of us who are less genetically gifted. But as Jordan proves, you can go far as a less genetically gifted dude if you're just brutally consistent.

On the consistency note, I am inconsistent not for a lack of desire to be so or discipline, but because up until now I've found it incredibly hard to figure out a way to sustainably train my upper body that doesn't end up with pain/injuries. Hopefully having addressed a lot of that internal rotation immobility and changing around my training for the 324908th time will finally address this and I can train like this indefinitely without chronic or acute pains popping up. I guess we'll see whenever I'm able to finally start...

My lower body training has been incredibly consistent for the past several months since I started greatly reducing session volume and being more intelligent with exercise selection and load management. And it's shown with constant PRs and great visual improvements whether I was in a deficit or surplus. I had knee pain chronically for nearly a decade and making some changes to lower body training did finally fix the problem; I'm hoping making similar changes to upper body training will have the same effect and I can finally get on a more sustainable path that addresses my weak points and doesn't end up overtraining the things that are already strong points.

So with all that in mind, minicut ends basically as soon as I'm back to full 5x/wk training without pain.

I'm stuck at home teaching online b/c of typhoon today, sucks.

I am disappoint

Wine in the before times was also pretty disgusting. A case of 19th century Veuve Clicquot discovered on the bottom of the Baltic had 140 g/l of sugar, compared to around 10 today. Yuckety yuck. The highest level today tops out at around 50 g.

(Dessert wines with significantly higher levels are still awesome of course)

I also find this subject wild as ****. I have some old cocktail recipe books and nowadays we ridicule people for liking sugar water booze. Don Draper would be absolutely eviscerated for having the palate of a child. The recommendations for alcohol consumption for events was absolutely grotesque as well. I certainly enjoy more than a handful of beverages, but a 1970s party guide stipulated 1L of hard spirits per attendee along with wine/beer. Perhaps I was reading a guide for a rugby team or aspiring rock stars, but no it was simply a booklet with some generic cocktails and guidelines for normal people to have appropriate alcohol for a dinner party. Then again most people don't immediately come home, have two cocktails before dinner, beer/wine with dinner, and a digestive every single day of their adult life. Like the stories of Winston winning the war on 4 bottles of champagne everyday is probably exaggerated, and simultaneously not a whole lot more alcohol than the average aristocrat would be expected to consume at the time... every single day. Don't even get me started on weird beers that have been brewed the same way since the 1600-1700s and are now disgustingly sweet, but somehow people think they taste great.

If I'm not mistaken, Moet moved down their entire sugar content in the early 2000s to account for the modern palate since Extra Extra Dry didn't seem like a viable product addition.

The great generation drinking literally whiskey and 7-Up as a preferred everyday beverage. smh. Great my ass.

I made a bet with myself about how old Jordan would be versus how old he would look and I was not disappointed. Impressive physique for sure, though, though my capacity for critical evaluation is minimal.

I heard an anecdote on a random podcast that he had the manufacturer of whatever champagne he favored make a special quasi-three quarters bottle because a half bottle was too little to have with a meal while a full bottle was too much. No idea if it's true or not, but could slightly mitigate the "four bottles a day" claim if real.

1 liter a day??!!?!? That is pretty wild indeed!

And yeah, I'd venture to say that even in the 2000s, champagne producers continued to lower alcohol content. Like moving from the upper range of brut dosages to the lower range for their bruts, moving into brut nature etc. Some variation among producers but the general trend is clear.

I assume Evo is incredibly interested in this topic.

5.5/10

Chest+Back+hamstring
Ham curls: 3 sets, don't feel this machine
Incline chest press machine: 3 sets failure
NG chins: bwx14, 10, 8 ouch lol
low incline db: 24kgx12x3
barbell rows underhand paused: 60kgx10, 8, 7 yikes
tiktok rows and flies supersets: 3 rounds

I lose more strength from brief periods of time off than anyone in the world dead srs.

Everyone thinks this of themselves.

Arms
EZ curls: 20kgx30, 3 more sets myo rep matching but was talking to the 43 year old woman from before getting distracted
Pushdowns: 80kgx25, 3 more sets myo rep match
Cable facing away curls: 4 sets failure
DB skullcrushers: 10kgx20, 15, 12, 9
One arm overhead cable tricep extensions: 4 sets failure
Leaning away db curls: 4 sets failure felt pressure on bicep tendon right side. Either do right side as hammers or try either concentration curls or high cable curls. Leaning toward doing hammer on rght side normal on left.
db prone raises: 4 sets
cable side raises: 4 sets

I did tons of volume yet left the gym feeling like I didn't do much. Basically my work capacity hugely increased last diet and really hasn't gone down much. My lifestyle at new job is way more sedentary so I expect this may change unfortuantely. Appetite drastically increased just from yesterday's total pussy-boi workout

M1
100g oats
frozen raspberries, 350ml skim, 14g almond butter, 2 scoops whey

Meal1 through 5
250g rice 230g flank steak + 1 apple with meals 2 and 3, cherries with meal 4, blueberries with meal 5

meal 6
400g greek yogurt with honey.

Store was out of stock for green beans but I picked up about 2.5kg today.

Legs

FFESS: 20kgx15x3 training at a different gym, more front foot elevation. Still felt easier than last time
Ham curls: 100x23, 2 more sets failure
leg extensions: 5 sets failure while resting on ham curls
paused toes elevated sldl: 115kgx20 felt easier too...

I'm gonna sign up for this gym and pay $140/mo just in transportation then $110/mo just in membership fees because it has AC and a consistent temperature. #yolo. I feel like my RPE falls and performance rises greatly just from humane temperature control during hot months (nearly always in China). If I did this same workout in the other gym I'd be feeling exhausted and have a belly full of fluid from sweating more and therefore drinking more and then I'd have sleep difficulties from excessive peeing.

Sleep difficulties from excessive fluids and advanced age - definitely one of the joys of life. I now actively try to avoid drinking too much in the last 2 hours before I go to bed, in the vain hope that I won't have to get up at night to pee. Either that, or drink enough that I wake up in the middle of the night rather than at the tail end (for hopefully obvious reasons).

It's fine unless I'm on clen/stims and dropping weight or if I trained legs and sweat a lot. Most other days its not a problem, typically urinate 1-2 times per night.

I would consider 2 times a night bad, but then again I sometimes have trouble falling asleep again (depending on life/work stress).

How many times are you talking under less beneficial circumstances? 3-4 times a night?

5-7. I took mirabegron to get it down to 2-3 during that time. Mirabegron acts as a mild fat burner as well.

These days I usually sleep at 9:30, get up once at 2am and then again around 5:20 and then wake up around 6:10