For my 40th birthday, I wanted to look good as well as get my haircut like Hawkeye (aka Ronin) from Avengers Endgame. I timed it so I’d do a 6 day a week bodybuilding workout for 3 months, then 1 week of a stage diet, and then take pictures 1 day after my birthday. The next week I’d be ready for Avengers.

What Is Body Beast?

Body Beast is a bodybuilding workout by Beachbody, the cats behind P90X, 21 Day Fix, Insanity, etc. There is a lean version if you’re more interested in losing weight than making gains. The stage diet is where you spend a week slowly reducing your calories, changing your macros to more and more protein, excluding 1 carb day where you do cardio. You start with high sodium and water intake, and slowly reduce it the day before you go on stage. This is supposed to ensure your muscle is retaining water, but the outside is not and you look defined (can easily see muscles) and striated (veins are popping out).

Diet Now vs 5 Years Ago

I have done Body Beast 5 years ago and strictly followed the calories and macro portion of the diet, including no soy, nor alcohol. This time around, I wasn’t too strict with tracking calories, although I was a bit more strict on macros. I did strict intermittent fasting for the last month. I was extremely strict the stage week diet, though. Anyway, my lack of discipline and not abstaining from alcohol this go around is why I had 6 abs in those pictures from 5 years ago vs. the 2 in this one, heh!

Injuries

I’ve been into Powerlifting for about 5 years; focusing on compound lifts vs. isolation like Bodybuilding. Specifically the Squat, Bench, and Deadlift. However, I suffered a knee injury doing a PR that just never got better. Despite modifying form, and trying various things, my knee just kept hurting once I got up to my heavier squats. I took 3 months off for a break, started again, and pulled my shoulder while too excited doing overhead Press. Basically I can’t hang from a pull up bar, which subsequently hampered my Parkour fun. My knee hurting really depressed me, and the shoulder was super frustrating. I basically just stopped working out, and focused briefly on Parkour, although both hurt there too and I basically just stopped exercising altogether.

What typically happens with me is I’ll get angry and that gets me my motivation back. I remembered with bodybuilding that I could do exercises on parts that didn’t hurt. For example, in the Squat, if my calves hurt from running, or my back was sore, or my wrists ached… my Squat suffered. It’s a compound movement requiring everyone to work as a team. Bodybuilding, however, I can do curls and really don’t care about the rest of the body.

I found both my shoulder and knee pains could be worked around. In fact, both continued to feel better despite the 6 days a week of increasingly heavy workouts which further emboldened me to keep going.

Gains

Despite being focused on weight loss, I was still eating a ton of calories month 1 and 2. The dumbbells I had used 5 years ago I supplemented by buying many smaller ones as well as some larger ones. Last time I had to make due, and my gains suffered because it was either too heavy resulting in bad form or low reps, or too light and thus not progressing. Also nice that dumbbells basically last forever.

I’m happy that FINALLY my curl related exercises finally started increasing in weight and chest slightly so. While I didn’t take many strict measurements, my biceps, tri’s, lats, and even my never-growing pecs actually made slight gains. The weights told an even more positive story and went way up this time. It’s nice to know at my age I can still make n00b gains, and that is inspiring.

Conclusions

I miss Powerlifting. I miss lifting super heavy things and slowly but surely getting stronger. I miss the see food diet: see food, eat it. I miss the 3 days a week 1 hour workouts. I miss doing Parkour at the local parkour gym. However, it’s nice to know I have an option with bodybuilding to look good even on a not-so-awesome diet, and still make gains despite injuries. I’m debating if I just say heck with it, and do another not-so-strict round this summer, and only focus on the calories and ignore macros to get better. I was so happy to see the weights kept getting heavier and that was motivating. Since taking a break to do Powerlifting and slowly I stopped focusing on diet, I was pretty out of practice tracking calories, macros, meal prepping and cooking. I don’t really have the passion for it anymore beyond just ensuring I’m getting enough calories (or limiting them), and occasionally tracking macros. That said, it was nice to try again and get acquainted with all of it again. As usual, the workouts are hard but I managed to show up everyday, including with the flu. The diet part is nigh impossible, lol!

As you can see from the charts I lost a ton of fat and weight through P90X, but P90X2 really pushed me to the lowest body fat and weight I’ve ever been since in my teen years (I’m 34).

Sadly, the caloric deficit, which consists of eating 500 to 300 calories less per day then you need was devastating to my muscle growth. The math isn’t perfect, since measuring body fat by averaging what the body fat scale and the fat calipers isn’t an exact science. That said, you can see on the spreadsheet I basically lost all the muscle in 3 months that took me 10 months to build by basically starving myself. So while the chart makes it look like a victory, 60% of the 15 lb weight loss was muscle vs. fat. It took me 6 hard months to slowly earn it back.

So, while I like the way a vegetarian diet made me feel, I don’t think I want to go back to a caloric deficit as my body is quite sensitive to get into a catabolic state (burning muscle vs. fat).

Halfway through P90X2, during a 4 hour Minecraft session I damaged a nerve in my foot by sitting on it on a wooden chair. I got drop foot; basically I could press my right foot down on the ground, but not lift it up. This means I walked like a zombie by either dragging my foot or throwing my knee, but at least I could jump in PAP Lower… just landing became insanely dangerous. I head to wear a leg brace so I could walk. This lasted for 4 months and just magically got better one day. This forced me to do P90X2 using 1 foot. Erik Stolhanske of P90X1 Plyometrics and Broken Lizard fame, who completed P90X with 1 leg, gave me inspiration to go on.

Now that I saw how low I could go, I decided to go the other way and see how big I could get through body building.

Body Beast just wore me out. I couldn’t do my own cardio or yoga on the side; my entire energy was devoted to just doing my best the entire 30 to 50 minutes. They have many high rep progressive sets, and even her majesty could see the physical change in just my face on the 1 week I rested. It clearly exhausted me, but I DID manage to gain almost 6 pounds of muscle so that was awesome. I also learned better form for a lot of moves I sucked at.

However, everything I read said lower reps, compound movements, and more rest. So I built a custom routine, borrowing some moves from Body Beast, some from P90X1 and 2, some from pictures/blogs/YouTube videos I found online, and some in the books I read. I did my own build, bulk, and cut phases over the course of 90 days. I ate till I was about to puke during the bulk phase. The 2 weeks I tracked it on myfitnesspal.com I was getting nearly 3,700 calories a day.

Doing my own cut phase was rough. I didn’t really plan for a reduced routine with increased cardio so basically just worked out for 1 hour and 30 minutes 3 days of the week, and then 1 hour for the rest of the shorter routines. I managed to shed some fat while maintaining my weight which was awesome, but challenging. I failed to do the 50% protein diet merely because I just don’t know enough recipes and got bored eating chicken, beans, brown rice, quinoa, salmon, and yogurt all the time.

Muscle wise, though, I came out on top, undoing the damage my caloric deficit created. I hope to try intermittent fasting and a heavy protein diet this year to see what they do.

Exercise and diet are just like programming: Tons to learn, tons to try and experiment with, and the more I do it the easier it gets to learn more. I’m happy with my results. Breaking my chest plateau this year proved I can break my bicep plateau as well if I just work hard.

I’m happy with the results of my hard work. I hope you reach your diet and fitness goals for 2014. Happy New Year, y’all!