Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log

Headphone spontaneously snapped before the workout. Working out without a phone or music was actually more productive. I'm gonna put music on and stick phone in backpack and don't look at it during workouts henceforth. Been leaving gains on the table and probably extending workout durations getting distracted the supercomputer in my palm.

Legs
Hip thrust: 2px15, 12, 10
Leg press: 4ppsx21, 17, 14
Leg extensions: 17.5kgx12, 10, 9
Hamstring curls: 42.5kgx16, 12, 10

47 minutes

26k steps gonna be time for another medical pedicure soon, a little bit of callus pain.

**** it I'm hitting another leg day Sunday. I just had poor sleep before but I think I've figured it out.

Here's a pic dump of how I eat these days. I'm basically doing IIFYM but with clean bodybuilding foods rather than toddler MLYTL bullshit foods. High carb moderate protein low fat is the way to go whether bulking or cutting for bodybuilders and powerlifters tbh, natty or enhanced but obviously natties can't push fats as low. I wish I'd a. realized this and b. known how to make low fat foods that I actually enjoy much sooner in my bodybuilding career. I could have saved a lot of headache knowing a lot of things I know now earlier but I could full a ****ing novel with that at this point nobody give a ****.

The last one is air fried gnocci with sum italian herbs and seasoning and tomato paste eating like a toddler with your hands. 4g protein 0g fat 33g carb per 100g. A little bit too delicious for a normal diet food; this is gonna be a high day only kind of meal. I made it just today and had to give away 2/3rds of the 500g box because I knew I was gonna overeat it if I kept it. They sell raw gnocci at a store near me so I'll probably buy 2 ****ing kilos of that on Sunday and go balls to the wall air fried gnocci fest. 450g carbs from gnocci and another 40g from tomato paste. Then probably around 500g from gummies, then about 200g from various fruits, another 200g from cream of rice, then maybe some of our Chinese equivalent of Naked juice, some fat free frozen yogurt, then maybe some more pita pizzas... you can see how i can get to nearly 2000g now right?

I feel like I need to stop taking shots at MLYLT and loco in my log. They don't post anymore and they just living rent free in my head. They rattled my cage/tilted me for totally different reasons. wgaf its just the internet, enjoy the shredded life

I've reached this goal. Not going to ccompete because of changing jobs and new visa setup rules since I'm in a new jurisdiction technically not in mainland anymore. But in terms of the level of physique development, I can check this off the list. I'm there. I'm even a lot closer to my weight cap than I thought I would be at this time. Now it's mostly balance, details, stage presence, posing, and conditioning. I'd absolutely be competitive for a pro card at a USA national show, but probably at least 1st callout level in a Chinese national show where I could *possibly* win depending on who shows up but the probabilitty isn't great. Thailand I'm unsure... I think the level there is probably higher than China or the US.

I guess new medium term goal would be fall 2025 have a physique that would immediately look competitive in a pro show if I were to turn pro in fall 2025. Right now I'm at "could eek out a pro card if the stars align" and I hope fall 2025 it'll be like “higher than 50% probability winning a pro card at any given qualifier and could hop into a pro show the next day if it's a pro/am show and not look out of place".

it's really interesting to me to see how much carbs you eat. I've always assumed that limiting carbs and getting my calories from 'good' fats like nuts, avocado, seeds is the way for me to get leaner and stay that way and tbh, it's always seemed to work...or I felt like it was, but maybe that's just the easiest way for me to consumer less cals than I'm burning?

I know for a fact that you know way way more than me about building muscle and stripping fat, so I'm beginning to think that perhaps I need to go into a hole and reassess my nutrition approach, now that the easy fat losses/body comp gains have been achieved.

I'm curious how much it would change for me as 52yo natty who mainly eats conventional 3x a day vs much younger non natty eating 5x per.

If you want to train hard and fuel performance, you need carbohydrates.

If you are obese and need to lose fat but don't necessarily need to perform at a high level, keto is great. For bodybuilders and strength athletes who need to maintain performance to preserve tissue, carbs are a must. When you are already high bodyfat you don't really lose much performance limiting carbohydrates, but once you reach a certain level of leanness (you may not be there yet), reducing carbohydrates just gets you flat, weak, and stringy.

Keto is probably a better approach if overall health rather than performance and aesthetics is the goal.

The carbs you eat matter a lot; if I were spamming white rice and cream of rice like a lot of the more 'tarded bodybuilders do even while cutting, I'd be feeling horrible. But 300g of carbs from oatmeal, potato/sweet potato, blueberries, raspberries, bananas, and green apples is just tremendously satiating. Even more so than 80/20 ground beef, salmon, steak, bacon, cheeses etc.

Rice products are fine for bulking.

Both of these guys are around your age. Don't let yourself think age is holding you back from anything but turbo-elite levels of fitness.

I've managed to consume enough berries to give me viscous stomach aches on more than one occasion. I would not call them satiating in the least.

I had to stop going to market and spending >$10 on berries lest this happen again and ruin my day.

I don't think there is anything wrong with thinking about random people from the internet years later. I have a mutual friend with kpc and we occasionally wonder if he's alive, what he's doing, etc. So of the other guy's I worked with are occasionally discussed as well. (Some guy named Paul B who wanted to buy 20 CRXs and also used a solver to play online chest.) Always nice to reminisce. Is MLY still doing spreadsheets to show how it is impossible to attain a healthy weight? Does loco hate mayo? Does he spaz at azn fusion places with siracha or wasabi mayo? Will we get another ABP x Loco tale? OTOH if you find yourself dwelling on some internet argument from years ago. Prob stop. Like El D and I will occasionally talk about me getting utterly rekt in the ribeye/filet debate of yore. But this is a fond memory and something we talk about because its funny. (Ironic as well since I did and still do eat a much higher amount of ribeye than he does relative to overall steak consumption.)

tldr: Thinking about stuff ain't bad. Dwelling on weird **** is bad.

thank you for this. Will listen to it on my next walk

I almost dread posting this as I've managed to keep this iteration of my log uncontroversial and bodybuilding focused, but here it goes. If a reader is prone to taking offense, do not open. Fainting couch ready:

There is certainly a segment of therapist that seems to think talk therapy is both necessary and forever, which is worrisome. Honestly if I was gonna be a therapist I'd specialize in childhood trauma esp parental death. And then just have the same conversation every week about how Mommy isn't on vacation for the next 10y. I just need to keep some basic notes and rinse and repeat, then cash them checks. Which is apparently what a reasonable amount of therapists do with people who are just overwhelming lazy.

IMO one of the biggest stumbling blocks for many people in the continual talk therapy loop (much like people on the forever nutrition coaching) is they never stop to consider why they feel this way or have crazy thoughts that consume them. I still have crazy thoughts all the time, but instead of dwelling on them, I just let them go and think about something else. I guess this falls under the broader heading of mindfulness. There was a pretty funny crazy person on 90 Day Fiance who kept talking about the "nothing box" where you just sit and have no thoughts. And while he was insane and his PUA class was batshit, the "nothing box" is essentially the same as meditation or similar activities (fishing is frequently recommended for people who struggle with sitting and doing nothing), where you just kinda do something that requires little to no concentration and not think about weird ****, just let the thoughts float away like leaves in the stream. Some of my friends who have been to therapy have found this to be their biggest problem and simultaneously the thing that therapy helps the least with.

On MLY, she was certainly not nearly as crazy as she claimed. The whole knife in the car by the highway thing was, while disturbing, something I don't even consider real in the faintest stretch of the imagination. She also was notorious for not taking her meds and in her circumstance she'd likely benefit greatly from some chemical enhancement. But her problems were purely based on a worldview where she was continually victimized for being a woman in all walks of life despite showing no signs of competence or even a modicum of common sense. I dunno if epic self-delusion is something happy pills can fix, but obviously if she did some basic stuff for mental health she'd be much better off. Ironically this isn't far off from if you or I were shot and MLY were shot. We would both stand a much better chance of survival since we're in "good" physical health, whereas she is in poor physical health. The pills and everything can help, but at the end of the day you gotta lift the big rocks on your own which is mostly basic stuff about being an adult. But if you think some weird pill is gonna help you get out of bed and take a shower, it likely will help (placebo works!) and maybe that is enough to break the cycle. Hard to say with any certainty given our knowledge of brain chemistry is aidsy at best, and mental health treatment is p lol.

NB: lol not spoilering. Anyone who gets rustled did this to themselves.

Just droppin' by again to say I am currently vetting a therapist. Talking will def be some part of it.

I do have to say about a year ago I did 5 sessions of EMDR (some sessions were just talking, though) and got big gainz from it.

Kind of wish I had continued, though, ever since pandemic my mental health has gone from good to not great to awful to still below fine. Oh well, everyone says kids eventually get older but I'm not sure that solves all the stupid psychological F*kkery I've done to myself over the last 4 years.

Oh, I also am going to try out the RP diet app and lifting app for a month and then either:

a) decide it's too expensive and "I can do it on my own"

b) decide I'm rich AF and just keep using them

c) decide I need some other thing to change my life for the better

can you log it in here with results etc? I'd be interested to see what it looks like

Yeah. Tbh I don't think you needed to spoiler your thoughts - they seemed like maybe a slightly harsh version of fairly reasonable thoughts.

It seems very clear to me that for therapy to be more than that one time a week you try to be introspective, you need to find a therapist who is either:

a) extremely good - these people may not even take insurance tbh
b) extremely good fit for you

There is something to be said for simply having some accountability. I mean, the benefit of most personal trainers is either.

a) there is no benefit (lolol)
b) accountability and you have "skin" (money) in the game.

Hmm, maybe I should. I didn't actually sign up for the app. It really seems expensive to me and there is no free trial afaict - you can just try to get your $ back within 30 days.

Instead I found a copy of RP's simple template and will try that. It's hard for me to believe the app does anything much different except automate things.

I also did not get their diet tracker and instead got one that seems like it has a much better interface and is less expensive (macrofactor iirc).

Anyway, we'll see - maybe if I get sick of spreadsheets I'll just get the hypertrophy app anyway.

There's a youtuber named DBDR (dead by daylight rants) who is a turbo-low status guy from a dysfunctional divorced family in America. He has an audio diary where he's very raw and authentic. I won't post his videos directly as they're long and filled with zoomer slang that took me a while to figure out and you guys would probably be very bored by them, but this guy above gives a good summary of who he is with some clips/highlights.

This is sort of a low status male every-man, although perhaps a more extreme version of one. Predictably, everyone around him is constantly herping about therapy to him. The dude isn't mentally ill; he's a 23 year old physically unattractive middling iq virgin with no prospects in life. It's honestly inhumane gaslighting to try to convince him he has a mental illness and I am not exaggerating when I say that putting him on psychiatric medications is a human rights abuse. At the same time, some tough love and just having him join the military/oil rig would go very far in solving his mental health problems, but literally nobody in his circle is going to tell him this because they too have bought into the "therapy is a panacea" kool-aid and I think its extremely unlikely that the types of therapists he'd go to would have enough insight to realilze "this guy has limitations in terms of looks and intelligence but yet he needs purpose/fullfilment/social status, here are some occuptional choices that could fill this role while still being in his limited capacity. He is not mentallly ill" But people have so little compassion or understanding for the experience of low status males that their perspectives seem inconceivable/insane/delusional to people not in their situation. Instead of accepting some very unflattering truths of human nature, gender, and our simultaneous need for social status/acceptance coupled with our competitive natures, people would rather live in a collective delusion and assign a diagnosis to this kind of kid. I don't mean to imply women can't also end up in this turbo-low status hell hole where they are behaving in a way that seems "crazy" to outsiders but is in fact a completely normal response to the negative feedback they're constantly receiving. But due to sex differences and the exponentially higher value of female sexuality, there are going to be way fewer of these "doomed" women in our modern era.

People like DBDR are not mentally ill; they're a logical conclusion of a large shift in how social and economic status are assigned in society. I'm not going to say that we need to roll back any progress from the past several decades for the sake of the "loser" male class because somehow women are less important as humans or some red pill or tradcon nonsense. God only knows what it was like to be a low status unattractivev woman in 1958 capable of attracting only a disgusting drunk abusive manchild and unable to pursue your own career regardless of what talents you had... we had no internet for them to vocally express what it was like. But rather, just ask people to behave more humanely toward the "loser" class. Even the word "loser" itself implies some fault on the part of the person like DBDR; while sometimes fault can be assigned, a lot of other times its a combination of bad genetics and bad luck. I guess i'd just like to live in a world where we consider them as "unfortunates" and stop kicking them while they're down... They're already struggling and unhappy; everyone calling them crazy or irrational for feeling the way they do or assuming that the way they are treated is solely their own fault is just salting the wound.

When somebody has an authentic uniquely traumatizing experience, bereavement, even a nasty divorce/breakup, addiction, or violent tendencies, then I think it's a completely different story and traditional mental health treatments might be much more applicable. People who have legit bipolar/depression/schizophrenia despite highly optimized physiologies wrt diet, sleep, exercise, etc definitely do exist too, but I think they're probably far less common than the typical normie believes. It's just a lot of people who don't fit into those categories are being shoe-horned in because collectively western society is so delusional about human nature. This post is getting very long, but that's one thing I appreciate so much about Chinese society; they're willing to take a very raw look at human nature and accept how bleak of a picture it is and set a social contract accordingly instead of erecting collective delusions. And I dislike this idea that in mental health we don't use words like "remission" or "recovered" or "cured" the same way we do in physical health and just assume something will need continuous treatment for life. There needs to be objective criteria and the goal of practioners should not be to get people coming back, but to get them to gtfo of my office within x number of years and go on to live a happy life.

Okay back to SRS BODYBUILD

Pull last night
Pullups: bwx18, 13, 10
T-bar rows: 1.5px22, 14, 10, 8
Pulldowns: ???x3 sets fail
EZ curls: 20kgx22, 2 more sets myo rep matching

I was super hungry and overdid it on the fiber again. Ended up with some terrible abdominal pain, gas, bloating, so went home early. But at least I wasn't hungry!11! I ate a huge quantity of airf fried pumpkin and sweet potato mix. Thinking of taking today off as i'm still not yet back to normal.

I was handling this diet well until about 2 weeks ago, then things rapidly escalated in difficulty. When you're hungry you have 2 options, jam up the fiber and risk stomach issues but feel sated or jam up the stims/activity and bury yourself into a fatigue hole which gets hard to get out of and then sleep/recovery starts to get screwed up.

My working theory is still that there's only one way around this to avoid extreme whiteknuckling: start leaner. So I'm going to end the diet some point between 6/16 and 6/21 and then hit a rebound/minibulk for somewhere between 7-9 weeks then straight back into a fatloss phase. That second fat loss phase could be as little as 12 weeks or as many as 16; I'll decide how long in advance based on my conditioning after the rebound. Regardless of diet length, I've also concluded that clen shouldn't be run more than 12 weeks. It's not like its unsafe or anything, just that you need to maintain sensitvity to its stim and appetite suppression effects when you're near the end of the diet or you end up in my current situation. It continues its fat burning action on the beta 3 cells indefinitely; but a lot of the fat loss you're getting from it is not its direct action on beta3 receptors but rather the STIM/NEAT/appetite suppression it promotes. And you definitely lose sensitivity to that right around the 11th or 12th week. So if I think I'm fat enough to need 16 weeks, I'll be doing black coffee+yohimbine only for the first 4 weeks.

I'm also consuming a huge amount of artificial sweetners which is probably high enough to be giving me gastric problems when coupled with the very high fiber intake.

In China, when a kid is diagnosed with a cognitive deficiency their parents go into complete denial and assume everything is totally normal and they often never receive treatment or care. It's really sad for both the kids and the parents. I had several students like this at my previous employer, but my current school requires very high zhongkao scores for admissions and it seems to be impossible to bribe one's way in.

In America, when a kid is just really low status and not living a good social life, their parents go into similar denial and assume there must be some underlying mental illness they can cure with therapy or medication. It's not quite as tragic, but still really sad an just a fundamental misunderstanding of what their adolescent kid's problem is.

This is pretty much entirely self-inflicted tbh, and mostly down to societal expectations. If you were a derp autistic guy before the "modern times" you'd just be shepherd and everyone would think you're really ****ing weird, but you'd always know how many sheep you got and where they all are and sit listening to the stream gurgle and watching little turd machines eat grass. Similarly we're in a society that pushes people into situations where people like this are gonna fail. If he was some sort of weirdo trade, he could easily find himself with nice gainful employment, spends a few years never actually speaking to clients and watching some other guy explain the nuances of wiring or plumbing, maybe finds himself capable of being able to drive a truck and unclog toilets solo, finds a weird autistic girl on a housecall and falls in love (I did go on a date with an electrician's daughter who I called, good kek, def no discount), etc etc. CS facing roles in shitty entry level work is probably the worst possible entry level job. He doesn't seem objectively stupid, but is insanely socially awkward and has infinite self-loathing, etc.

Tho I do find the the looks/height stuff pretty hilarious since it is kinda like these folks never really go outside or look around. Or maybe they just exclude weird segments of people that don't fit their worldview.

In a weird twist, I just learned one of my FB friends is a billionaire.

How do they handle their air travel? What kind of plane do they own?

100%. I can't imagine being this kids high school teacher/counsellor and herping at him to go to university, but predictably this is exactly what happened and predictably it set him up to fail. People also develop at radically different rates and males especially just might need more time to develop from a structural cognitive standpoint; give him something productive and educational to do that requires less pre-frontal cortex development/future time orientation than university from 18-24 like military service, trade school, unclogging toilets, prison guard, oil rig, trucking, etc and he actually might respond very differently to a university environment at 24 than he did at 18. But maybe I'm projecting as I personally was a terrible student until around age 21 and then it was like a switch flipped and here I am at 35 with too many graduate degrees and proficiency in a difficult foreign language. Either way, even if we aren't addressing him specifically, this is going to happen to a lot of males and rushing them into university is sometimes a recipe for them never realizing their full potential. It's even more likely that the same kids who find themselves occupied with something else between 18-24 find some fulfilment/satisfactory income in that and never go to university and waste time, which is also a huge W.

I can't get into his latest videos from the last few months as he's just gotten too damn hopeless/negative, but apparently he's finally starting trade school this month.

There's a similar "everyone must go to university!" chorus here in China, but thank god they don't really have the infrastructure for it to happen and set up a competitive system that doesn't allow such a huge swath of the population to go in the first place. This is exactly why I'm employed, however, as going overseas for a university education is the first choice of the kids who had potential but couldn't make the cut or didn't even want to try the brutally competitive gaokao path and would rather pay a premium to get a degree with far less pressure. And similarly, its caused a huge labour market mismatch. This has happened for 2 reasons: 1. Social status is more important than income in the mating marketplace. Social status is vitally important for women in order to repel suitors they find disgusting and its vitally important for men to not be considered disgusting. I imagine something similar takes place in western culture, but it's probably to a far lesser extent . 2. Massive subsidies for manufacturing sector as the CCP refuses to transition to a consumption lead model and would rather **** over the rest of the developing world by flooding the globe with cheap exports. The west allowed them to do that when they were still a very poor country as it was mutually beneficial at that time, but its becoming far less beneficial in our modern era given the ideological differences that are becoming magnified as well as the fact that China staying in this role crowds out other developing countries from getting rich via the mercantilist path China followed. But its a totalitarian system that can potentially lose a lot of control by moving toward a consumption lead model where public sector spending needs to fall as a % of GDP, and maintaining that system is much more important to the people in power than economic development or a sustainable growth path where living standards can continue rising.

So you end up with a labour market with huge demand for factory workers and far less demand for high skilled service workers. But factory workers don't find wives as easily as higher social status air-conditioned office workers do, despite the fact that their incomes are often lower than factory/manufacturing sector workers... And in a country where having your daughter wed off to an uncivilized uneducated peasant man is a shameful defeat or not finding a wife for your son is a big L, everyone apes into the industries where there isn't actually demand for their labour because ultimately family formation and romantic partnerships are more important to most men than raw income. Add in 40 million surplus men in the marrying age bracket and you've got a disaster brewing... Hopefully the Chinese "passport bro" movement starts taking off or we're looking at a Taiwan invasion to solve this surplus male problem.

I only trained 4 days last week and wasn't great with my steps. I did reach a new low of 90.5 which was sorta cool. But then I frankly probably blew it on my refeed yesterday where I was easily over 2500g carbs when it was supposed to be around 1500-1700. I think i have been overrelying on stimulants, getting poor sleep, missing training because i feel so burned out from poor sleep, and then sunday I take off stims and just have crazy rebound appetite from the appetite suppression of the stims Monday through Saturday. I'm lowering everything down. My recent lack of energy might not have been from losing sensitivity to clen as so much as the stims hurting my sleep quality without me really realizing it. 80mcg clen, 25mcg t3, 20mg yohimbine, coffee with around 120mg caffeine from now on. BEfore I was... a lot higher than that!

Without watching any videos and going straight off what was posted in this thread...

Wouldn't a good therapist help guide him to the type of conclusions you're mentioning? Or is that the realm of "life coach"?

It's hard for me to imagine a good therapist just listening to him week after week and feeding him BS that he can just willpower his way to the upper echelon of human actualization.

Now, if we're talking about a psychiatrist, I have no idea if he should see one - but a good therapist would/should bring up that topic if it seems it would actually help the individual.

Yugo,

I think the process for finding and evaluating whether a therapist is "good" is hard enough for higher functioning individuals, much less the type of hypothetical person Evo is describing. Presupposing that said person can find someone "good", what is the likely ROI over and above some of the other suggested self-improvement strategies? I don't think any of us know, but my suspicion is that, for many of the types of individuals Evo is talking about, the answer is "not high". And all of this is without getting into the question of how appropriate and effective these kinds of therapeutic techniques are at empowering men that have felt directionless and worthless for much of their lives (my suspicion would be "not very").

My own personal experience may be biasing me, though. I do think it's an interesting topic of discussion.

What monte said

and also the incentive structure of a typical therapist is to NOT cure a patient like DBDR. Getting him to get his ass in trades/oil rig/military/prison guard/trucking would mean losing a source of ez bills. IME the types of people who become therapists are also not exactly the cream of the crop. He actually has a "group therapy" arc of like 7 videos which was hilariously entertaining as it was obviously useless as well as recounting of sessions with individual therapists and they've been predictably useless and all to willing to dole out diagnosis and refer him to psychiatrists. These people have so little compassion, empathy, or understanding for the low status male experience that the way he feels seems insane to them instead of a very rational and well grounded respond to how he's treated and how his life is going. Thankfully he has enough insight to understand this himself and not buy into their absurd diagnoses. What if he had less insight and "too much" respect for authority and allowed his life to be destroyed further by dangerous psychiatric meds and making his "depression" part of his identity? Lots of young men have, which is exactly why its not inaccurate to say the mental health system is actually fairly dangerous.

I wish I could sit down with the kid for a few hours a week for free tbh. I feel like I could get him on track within a few months. A lot of his problem is a lack of future time orientation and a general absence of positive male role models. His dad is a ****ing loser alcoholic boomer.

Push
Internal rotation mobs, set sum prs
machine press: 62.5kgx18, 6, 6 rest pause 10 deep breaths
Paused incline db: 30kgx16, 12, 10
DB prone raises ss with incline cable flies: 4 rounds
Pushdowns: 25kgx20, 3 more sets myo rep matching
EZ curls while resting between pushdowns did 6 sets

Okay I gotta break up with this machine press finally. At least as a first lift its just not working for me. Maybe I can do it later in the workout. I suspect what happened is that as I lost weight my leverages changed and the ROM on it became too big to where it puts me in a position too stretched far back to where all the internal rotation (flaring) mobility in the world won't save me.

On the bright side, doing all this internal rotation stuff is making incline dbs feel like a breeze and I never get ANY discomfort in the bicep tendon from it anymore. So I guess the obvious answer is to just start with incline or flat dbs first until I move, change gyms, and find a more suitable machine press.

Melk,

In a twist of irony, the last time I saw the guy was in the public airport. So guess his path to spend generational money doesn't include planes.

All,

I think one of the biggest problems with therapists is many people don't really understand the purpose of talk therapy and lack any desire to be self-aware. While it can certainly help to have someone to bounce ideas off of and help explore areas of self deception, most of the time people just go and chat for a while and expect some sort of grand transformation in their worldview. There is actually a parallel path for young women that includes self-induced mental illness (replicating Tourette's has popped up post TikTok). Not really sure how therapy is gonna help someone who just decided they have a tic and mental illlnessed themselves into manifesting it.

There is all sorts of weird cope people have to justify their decisions and choices, unless you wanna be honest with yourself therapy is gonna be a rough road to self actualization or even just removing learned helplessness.