The path is drawn. Plan of attack.

I laid out my brief story and goals yesterday. My main goals are to get leaner, improve my mobility, and get stronger. That is the vague goals. Here is what I mean by them to make them more measurable.

Right now I stand at about 5ft 6in tall at 200-205 pounds. Not HUGE but not lean enough for me. I don't like feeling/looking fat. My goal isn't to look a couple weeks away from contest ready to step on stage. I just don't want to feel/look fat and start to see the outline of my abs. Shelby Starnes talks about what healthy body fat levels are especially if the goal is to be healthy and put yourself in a good position to gain quality lean muscle. http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/the_perfect_body_fat_percentage&cr=  "As for the midsection, you should always be able to see at least an outline of your abdominals (no great detail, just a general outline)." So this is my goal. As for body weight I am not sure what this would put me at. I remember when I was in high school I floated around 170-180 and was fairly lean then, so I am shooting for that weight range of 170-180 pounds and use the mirror, pictures, and how my clothes fit as a guide for leanness.

I want to improve my mobility. My main problem right now is I am just overall not flexible. I never been a naturally flexible person. This is something I always had to work at. I been lazy with it for a long time and now I am paying the price. It is a bad loan to try to save time by skipping stretching and taking care of your soft tissue. It did save me time but now its costing me greatly. It has taken away my ability to do heavy squat/deadlift work safely. Which I LOVE heavy squats and deadlifts. I hate it so much that I allowed this to happen to me. So I need to remedy this problem.

Get stronger. My heaviest weight that I allowed myself to get to was 230 pounds. I have dropped down to about 205 since then due to cleaning up my diet and going for long walks. Unfortunately I know some of that weight loss was muscle. I can just feel it. Though my "pound for pound" exercises I haven't lost strength in (by pound for pound I am referring to exercises that are affected heavily on current body weight like pull ups, push ups, dips, etc). My core and glutes I realized are weak as all hell right now.

How will this done? I have thought long and hard about this. I realized that I am way over thinking this process. I have learned much by reading different books, blogs, and articles. In a way I wish I haven't. I let myself start to suffer from "paralysis by analysis" which I believe is a form of procrastination.

So how will this be done for real? Getting back on the road to strength will be a two part phase. The 2nd phase is easy. I will follow the N.O.V. template of 5/3/1 or the Full body 5/3/1 template. I used 5/3/1 in the past and had great success with it. I just need to pass phase 1 before I get there.

How do I get through phase 1? Hit my goals. Get lean, get mobile, get stronger, and be in shape and in health. This is what my workouts and nutrition will focus on.

Getting lean is all about nutrition. I have counted strict calories and macro-nutrients in the past but that just drove me nuts. It did get me lean but it also took up a great deal of time and limited what I could eat. It made me not enjoy food. I also never liked eating 5-7 small meals a day. It just made me carry around Tupperware and made for many dishes. I been playing around with intermittent fasting. I bought and read the book "The Renegade Diet" http://www.renegadedietbook.com/?hop=cktraining and it really makes a hell of a lot of sense with the concepts it talks about. I really like intermittent fasting. I am busy during the day between school and work and I always liked eating before bed. I don't sleep well and the only ways that normally knock me out is a full stomach and/or sex before bed. Ever since I started eating the majority of my calories at night I been sleeping like a baby, I dropped from 210-215 down to my current 200-205 eating this way. I will be using an app to track roughly my calories to keep my calories under control.

Get mobile. I will be doing self massage and static stretching for at LEAST 20 minutes a day. I will post some routines later on this. (This is a research project I am doing for school on how to take care of your body as a massage therapist) I also have a yoga DVD from P90X that I will do 2-3 times a week. The main goal being able to maintain neutral spine in squats/deadlifts so I can do them safely.

For my strength training workouts. I will be doing 3-4 full body days a week of 3-5 exercises for 3 sets each. I will be doing a push, a pull, single leg, reverse hyper, and a core movement on these days. I am keeping the rest interval between 60-90seconds between sets. My goal on the work sets is to get my reps for the 3 sets to add up to 30 or more reps. (DB bench press set one got 14 reps, set two got 10 reps, set 3 got 6 reps= 30 reps.)If I don't get 30 total reps in the 3 sets then the weight stays the same until I am able to get more than 30 reps. I will keep the reps high and rest periods low. My body isn't used to that, for the longest time I used low heavy reps with long rest intervals. I will also add in some body weight exercises to keep as major indicator exercises to see if I am becoming more "pound for pound" stronger or not.

For getting in shape the strength training workouts will help much with the higher reps and short rest periods but I know I need more. I will go for walks and after my strength training workouts do some sort of "hard" cardio work like push the prowler. For me this and keeping up on the diet will be the hardest part. Smashing iron is fun but I always disliked cardio. I will find ways to make cardio suck less.

Quick breakdown of the plan
1) Clean up diet, intermittent fasting style, using a points calculator to monitor calories
2)Full body strength style workouts 3-4 days a week with high reps, short rest periods
3)Stretch and foam roll every single day for at least 20mins
4)Increase work capacity(fancy word for "getting in shape") by doing hard cardio 3 times a week and walk every day for 1-3miles at least.

Current stats will be taken officially Saturday morning. I am going to finish off the week not lifting and just focus on stretching and foam rolling and going for walks.