This month marked the start of my body weight training regimen. That meant halting my current regimen which was bad and good. Bad in the fact that those muscles wouldn’t be trained anymore which would lead to some atrophy. It was good in the fact that I would allow my strength to become proportional to my weight.

In other words, I’d be able to teach my body how to lift all the muscle it had just created. This is vital because most regimens leave the body so drastically different, that people end up feeling weird in their own skin and oftentimes wish to return back to “normal” (which is pre-regimen). This creates a feeling of apathy in regards to their body which then leads to a reversion of all the changes they worked so hard to create.

In an effort to combat this, I decided to drop my regimen for a month and focus solely on isometric workouts (I’ll go more in-depth on this topic in this article). These are workouts that use one’s body weight to work out the muscles and make them leaner as opposed to bulkier. Although my express purpose when doing these workouts wasn’t to become leaner, it was certainly a by-product. I lost some of the muscle I had worked hard for but then again, my regimen was built to help me lose weight. For those who are solely focusing on building muscle, I would recommend incorporating isometric exercises into a normal bodybuilding regimen.

During this time, I also continued to do cardio in an effort to reduce my body fat percentage to my goal of sub 10%. That being said, I increased my calories to 1500 as a type of re-feed (I will go more in-depth on what re-feeds are and how they help in another article) from the 9 months that I had been cutting for (cutting is the process of cutting body fat). Generally speaking, cutting shouldn’t be performed for a period of 9 months unless serious weight loss is needed (I will go more in-depth on what cutting is and why it’s important in another article). This is because, the body can’t always sustain on a low caloric intake for an extended period of time unless it has enough in reserve (fat).

All of this caused my new regimen to look something like this:

A-Day:

100 Sit-Ups.

100 Push-Ups.

200 Squirms.

25 Ceiling Stamps.

25 Leg Raises.

100 Squats.

B-Day:

60 minutes cardio (elliptical).

A-day started on Monday with B-day being Tuesday. This cycle repeated until Sunday which was a rest day. It resumed with the following Monday once again being an A-day. This worked out quite well for me and by the end, I was successfully able to do 75 sit-ups and 50 push-ups without stopping. This was the first fitness goal I missed. It was disheartening but I knew it had to happen at some point. I made a new goal to simply build as much muscle and lose as much fat as possible until September of 2018. 

Right: It was a good idea to switch up my regimen as I was both getting bored and my body was getting good at the other one.

Wrong: The new goal I made wasn’t the best and I should have instead focused on trying to reach the previous one or give my new goal some numbers.