Day 6 and a hard day from start to finish. You expect days like this but it doesn’t make them any easier.

Day: 6
Date: 17/05/2013
Workout Day: 8
Weight (lb): 168.6 (3.2 lb loss)
Body Fat %: 15.9 (0.7% loss)
Health: Fine

The morning weigh-in brought more disappointment, with the numbers up on yesterday. However, as mentioned peviously, the body’s many variables cause metrics to fluctuate on a daily basis, so I don’t read anything negative into this. I expect things to get back on track tomorrow……hopefully.

My Fridays always start early with work commitments, and for the first time ever this Friday commenced with a ham and rocket salad. Whilst enjoyable it did feel like I was eating for the sake of it. I miss eating what I want to when I want to. Despite being focused on my work I set aside an hour for a lunchtime training session, which I hoped would provide a bit of stress relief. It did, for about five minutes. The rest of the hour brought shear hard work, with every set pushing me to the limits. If you select the correct weight then each exercise should be a real test and leave you completely certain that no more work is possible. But then the next set comes and somehow you just know that you can make it through. By the end I was both elated and barely able to stand.

Due to a lack of equipment I had to change a few exercises, with lying hamstring curls being changed to standing ones, and incline back extensions being changed to Romanian deadlifts. In a weird way I actually enjoy the squats, less so with a 4 second eccentric, but I still get a buzz from the whole body movement of lifting a big old weight. In this session I increased the weight across the board but was surprised that the stomach exercises at the end brought the most hardship. I suppose it doesn’t help to do compound movements earlier on in the session, but I still expected to find the leg raises and crunches much easier than I did. They almost killed me! But again I knew I would get through them, and so I did. Today I switched back to BCAA tablets (39 of them) and didn’t feel any adverse affects. So I’m fairly certain it was the BCAA Berry Blast powder that caused the nausea the other day. I’ll be giving that an indefinite miss in the future.

Back to a long afternoon of work, with a truck load of turkey and spinach either side, and my day was complete. The food was fairly unappetising and I am now very much suffering from a dose of Atkins flu. My fat intake has been very low today and as a result feel very tired, dizzy at times and lacking appetite. As I write it is improving and am sure it will be gone very soon. I find low carb diets enjoyable but not when eating low calorie, which limits my options massively and stops me sailing through like I normally do. If I had to choose between low-carb Paleo and Carb Back-loading I would always take for the former. I just prefer the feeling of having stable insulin.

It’s a rest day tomorrow, followed by the start of the second microcycle, and I’m sure that will only bring a whole new level of hard work to my gym.