Ross AC, Manson JE, Abrams SA, et al. The 2011 Report on Dietary Reference Intakes for Calcium and Vitamin D from the Institute of Medicine: What Clinicians Need to Know. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2011;96(1):53-58. doi:10.1210/jc.2010-2704; Heaney RP, Holick MF. Why the IOM recommendations for vitamin D are deficient. J Bone Miner Res. 2011;26(3):455-457. doi:10.1002/jbmr.328.
Holick MF, Binkley NC, Bischoff-Ferrari HA, et al. Evaluation, Treatment, and Prevention of Vitamin D Deficiency: an Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2011;96(7):1911-1930. doi:10.1210/jc.2011-0385.
Weber F. Absorption of fat-soluble vitamins. Int J Vitam Nutr Res Suppl. 1983;25:55-65; Iqbal J, Hussain MM. Intestinal lipid absorption. Am J Physiol Metab. 2009;296(6):E1183-E1194. doi:10.1152/ajpendo.90899.2008.
McCarty MF. Pre-exercise administration of yohimbine may enhance the efficacy of exercise training as a fat loss strategy by boosting lipolysis. Med Hypotheses. 2002;58(6):491-495.
Goldberg MR, Hollister AS, Robertson D. Influence of yohimbine on blood pressure, autonomic reflexes, and plasma catecholamines in humans. Hypertension. 1983;5(5):772-778. doi:10.1161/01.HYP.5.5.772.
Seifert JG, Nelson A, Devonish J, Burke ER, Stohs SJ. Effect of acute administration of an herbal preparation on blood pressure and heart rate in humans. Int J Med Sci. 2011;8(3):192-197.
Bemben MG, Lamont HS. Creatine supplementation and exercise performance: recent findings. Sports Med. 2005;35(2):107-125.
Ibid.
Steenge GR, Simpson EJ, Greenhaff PL. Protein- and carbohydrate-induced augmentation of whole body creatine retention in humans. J Appl Physiol. 2000;89(3):1165-1171. doi:10.1152/jappl.2000.89.3.1165.
Antonio J, Ciccone V. The effects of pre versus post workout supplementation of creatine monohydrate on body composition and strength. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2013;10(1):36. doi:10.1186/1550-2783-10-36; Candow DG, Vogt E, Johannsmeyer S, Forbes SC, Farthing JP. Strategic creatine supplementation and resistance training in healthy older adults. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. 2015;40(7):689-694. doi:10.1139/apnm-2014-0498.
Glenn JM, Gray M, Jensen A, Stone MS, Vincenzo JL. Acute citrulline-malate supplementation improves maximal strength and anaerobic power in female, masters athletes tennis players. Eur J Sport Sci. 2016;16(8):1095-1103. doi:10.1080/17461391.2016.1158321.
31
The Right and Wrong Ways to Track Your Progress
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
—OSCAR WILDE
The brilliant 19th century physicist and engineer Sir William Thomson said when you can measure something and express it in numbers, you know something about it, and when you can’t, your knowledge is lacking.
This insight is applicable to many things in life, including exercise and diet.
Only when you can measure your progress (or lack thereof) and express it in real numbers can you know whether you’re headed in the right direction. If you don’t have any consistent, objective way to measure it, however, then you’re going blind, hoping for the best.
This is one of the major reasons why so many people fail to achieve their fitness goals. If you don’t track your progress correctly, it doesn’t matter how well you understand everything in this book—you will end up in a rut, and probably sooner rather than later.
There are three elements to tracking progress:
Body composition
Diet
Exercise
In my Bigger Leaner Stronger program, however, you’re only going to need to track your body composition and exercise. By following structured meal plans, you don’t have to track anything in your diet—you just have to eat according to the plan.
Calorie and macro tracking only become necessary when you’re making food decisions on the fly, which can work but is best suited to more experienced dieters.
So, let’s learn how to track your body composition and exercise correctly.
How to Track Your Body Composition
Tracking your body composition is a vital part of your fitness journey.
Even when you do everything right, it can take longer than you might realize to see marked changes in your appearance. And when the squishy parts don’t transform as quickly as you’d like, it’s easy to lose heart. It can feel like all that work in the kitchen and gym is more or less for naught.
If you learn to track your body composition properly, you can avoid this problem because you’ll always know exactly what is or isn’t happening with your physique, and you’ll be able to adjust your diet and exercise accordingly.
It’s pretty easy, too. There are just three steps:
Weigh yourself daily and calculate weekly averages.
Take weekly body measurements.
Take weekly progress pictures.
If that sounds like a lot of work, don’t worry, it’s not. It doesn’t take more than five minutes a week, and you’ll probably come to enjoy it. Games are more fun when you keep score, and quantifying your progress is how you keep score in the “building a better body” game.
Furthermore, if your numbers aren’t moving in the right direction, you want to know as soon as possible so you can take corrective actions.
Let’s review each of the steps.
1. Weigh yourself daily and calculate weekly averages.
Your weight can fluctuate on a daily basis due to fluid retention, glycogen levels, and bowel movements (or the lack thereof), so you can expect regular ups and downs.
That’s why I recommend weighing yourself every day and then calculating averages every seven days.
Here’s an example of how this might look:
Monday: 193 pounds
Tuesday: 192 pounds
Wednesday: 194 pounds
Thursday: 194 pounds
Friday: 191 pounds
Saturday: 192 pounds
Sunday: 191 pounds
Total weekly weigh-ins: 1,347 pounds
Average daily weight: 1,347 (pounds) / 7 (days) = 192.4 pounds
This method of tracking your weight keeps you focused on the bigger picture instead of fussing over meaningless day-to-day variances, which can cause unnecessary frustration and confusion.
If your average weight is going up, you’re gaining weight. If it’s going down, you’re losing weight. Simple and clean.
The procedure here is easy:
Weigh yourself first thing in the morning, naked and after the bathroom and before eating or drinking anything.
Then, every seven days, add up your last seven weigh-ins and divide by seven to get your average daily weight for the last week.
Record your averages somewhere easily accessible, like an Excel or Google Sheet or the notepad app in your phone.If you want to take your weight-tracking game a step further, you can graph the numbers in Excel or Google Sheets.
2. Take weekly body measurements.
Even when tracked properly, your weight alone doesn’t always tell you how your body composition is changing. That is, it doesn’t tell if you’re gaining or losing muscle or fat—just that you’re gaining or losing something.
“Newbie gains” also render body weight less important. If you’re new to weightlifting and have fat to lose, you can expect to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time.
That means your weight may not change as much as you’d expect. I’ve seen some pretty dramatic one- and even two-year transformations where body weight only changed by 10 to 15 pounds.
All this is why you should record at least one body measurement every week in addition to your weight: your waist circumference.
The size of your waist is a reliable indicator of fat loss or gain, so by keeping an eye on it, you can quickly
assess whether you’re gaining or losing fat.
So take this measurement once per week, when you calculate your average body weight, and watch it over time.
To take this measurement, wrap a tape measure around your bare stomach, right at your navel. Make sure the tape measure is parallel to the floor (not slanted) and snug to your body, but not so tight that it compresses the skin. Exhale while taking the measurement, and don’t flex or suck your stomach in.
Make sure you measure in the same spot every time so your readings stay consistent.
And if you’re the type of person who loves tracking data and quantifying things, here are a few more measurements you can take:
Your chest circumferenceTo take this measurement, stand upright with your arms comfortably at your sides (no flaring your elbows or spreading your lats).
Then, have a friend place a measuring tape at the fullest part of one of your pecs and wrap it around you, under your arms (in your armpits), across your shoulder blades, and back to the starting point.
Take this measurement every week with your other weekly measurements, and make sure you measure in the same spots every time.
Your shoulder circumferenceTo take this measurement, stand upright with your arms comfortably at your sides (no flaring your elbows or spreading your lats).
Then, have a friend wrap a measuring tape around your shoulders and chest at their widest point. This is usually right around the top of your armpits.
Take this measurement every week with your other weekly measurements, and make sure you measure in the same spots every time.
Your upper-leg circumferenceTo take this measurement, wrap a tape measure around the widest part of one of your leg’s thigh and hamstrings. Then do the same for your other leg.
Take these measurements every week with your other weekly measurements, and make sure you measure in the same spots every time.
Your flexed armsTo take this measurement, flex one of your arms and wrap a tape measure around the largest part (the peak of your biceps and middle of your triceps). Then do the same for your other arm.
Take these measurements every week with your other weekly measurements, and make sure you measure in the same spots every time.
Your flexed calvesTo take this measurement, flex one of your calves (raise your heel off the ground), and wrap a measuring tape around the largest part. Then do the same for your other calf.
Make sure you take the measurements in the same spots every time, and take these measurements every week with your other weekly measurements.
3. Take weekly progress pictures.
For some people, taking pictures is even better than taking measurements because numbers are great and all, but ultimately what we care about most is what we see in the mirror.
So even if you don’t like what you see right now, do take your “before” pictures because you’re going to love watching how your body is going to change over the next weeks and months.
And some time from now, you’re going to be downright shocked at how much your physique has improved!
To watch your transformation unfold, take progress pictures every week when you take your weekly measurements.
Here’s how to do it right:
Take pictures from the front, side, and back.
Show as much skin as you feel comfortable with. The more the better because it gives you the best idea of how your body is changing.
Use the same camera, lighting, and background for each picture. If you aren’t able to do this, make sure the pictures are clear.
Take the pictures at the same time every day, preferably in the morning, after using the bathroom and before breakfast.
Take both flexed and unflexed pictures, as this lets you see how your muscles are developing.
I also recommend saving all your progress photos in an individual album on your phone or computer so as time goes on, you can easily scroll through them.
How to Track Your Exercise
Tracking your workouts—and your resistance training workouts in particular—is just as important as tracking your body composition. It’s the only way to ensure you’re progressively overloading your muscles over time.
At first, your strength will shoot up by leaps and bounds, but in time, it’ll slow to a crawl. From that point forward, you’ll have to work harder and harder to continue gaining reps and adding weight to the bar.
Keeping tabs on your progress gets hazy if you don’t have a training journal. Unless you’re a memory athlete, you won’t remember exactly what you did in your previous workouts and thus won’t know what to aim for each week.
Remember that once your “newbie gains” are spent, a successful workout is one where you beat your last performance of it by even a little—a rep or two with the same weight on just one exercise, for instance.
This is how you build muscle and strength—one rep at a time.
That’s why every time you step up to a barbell or dumbbell, you want to know exactly what you’re going for, not wondering what you did the last time.
For instance, if you know your first hard set of squats in your previous lower-body workout was 185 pounds for four reps, all you should have on your mind in this next workout is hitting five or six reps with that weight.
Remember, studies even show that visualizing yourself doing this before stepping under the bar can boost your strength and increase your chances of getting it done (mind over matter for the win!).1
If you don’t keep a training journal, your workouts get sloppy and eventually turn into lifting random amounts of weight for random numbers of reps each week.
This may produce satisfactory results when you first start out, but it won’t cut it in the long run. You need to work off of real data to achieve impressive long-term results.
So to track your Bigger Leaner Stronger workouts, you have several options:
Pen and paper
App
Excel or Google Sheet
Workout journal
Let’s look at each.
Pen and Paper
This is the simplest way to plan and track your workouts. All you need is a notebook and pen, and in it, you write out the workouts you’ll be doing and then record what you actually do in each as you go.
For Bigger Leaner Stronger, this means writing out the exercises and number of hard sets for each workout you’ll be doing each week of your upcoming training phase, and then recording the weight and reps used for those exercises as you do the workouts.
Here’s a simple way to lay this out:
Week 1
Workout 1
Monday 7/23/2018
Push
Barbell Bench Press
Warm-up sets:
Hard set 1:
Hard set 2:
Hard set 3:
Incline Barbell Bench Press
Hard set 1:
Hard set 2:
Hard set 3:
Dumbbell Bench Press
Hard set 1:
Hard set 2:
Hard set 3:
Triceps Pushdown
Hard set 1:
Hard set 2:
Hard set 3:
And then, when you do this workout, you’d fill it out, like this:
Barbell Bench Press
Warm-up sets: 75 x 10, 75 x 10, 110 x 4
Hard set 1: 155 x 6
Hard set 2: 165 x 4
Hard set 3: 165 x 4
Incline Barbell Bench Press
Hard set 1: 135 x 6
Hard set 2: 145 x 4
Hard set 3: 145 x 4
Dumbbell Bench Press
Hard set 1: 55 x 5
Hard set 2: 55 x 5
Hard set 3: 55 x 4
Triceps Pushdown
Har
d set 1: 40 x 6
Hard set 2: 50 x 4
Hard set 3: 50 x 4
You can also make notes if you feel particularly strong or weak on a given set or exercise, if you experienced an ache or pain, if you didn’t sleep well the night before, etc.
These notes can help you better understand your workout numbers when you’re looking back to review your progress.
Then, when you go to do your workouts again the following week, you can look back at what you did the previous times around to see what you’d like to achieve in this week’s performance.
For instance, in the workout example just listed, you moved up to 165 pounds on your bench press and got two sets of four reps. Therefore, the next time you do this workout, you could strive to do three sets of four reps (or more) with 165 pounds, which would be an improvement.
Many people like to record their daily and weekly body measurements in their notebooks as well for an extra boost of motivation.
App
There are literally hundreds of apps for tracking your workouts. I never quite liked any of the ones I’ve used in the past, so I made my own and use it to plan and track all my training.
It’s called Stacked, it’s 100 percent free, and whether you’re a beginner or an experienced weightlifter, it’ll help you better plan and do your workouts, accurately measure and monitor your body composition, and see and analyze your training progress.
Go to www.getstackedapp.com now to check it out.
Excel or Google Sheet
For me, this is a close second to an app and even preferable for more advanced programming that requires a bit more planning and math.
As far as formatting goes, I’ve always created a new spreadsheet (workbook, technically) for each training phase and then listed each week’s workouts in individual worksheets (named accordingly, Week 1, 2, 3, etc.) in the same basic manner as I would with a pen-and-paper notebook.
For Bigger Leaner Stronger, this would mean creating one spreadsheet (workbook) per phase with nine worksheets containing the workouts for each week (ending with the ninth deload week).
Bigger Leaner Stronger Page 50
