Year In Review

To sum it up, I am disappointed at my progress. Along the way, i fucked up quite a few times...

First 6 months, I was making good progress.  I didn't make any changes in my diet and I was losing fat and gaining muscle, awesome!  In retrospective, mistakes made were that I relied too heavily on supplements and did not work the legs (with the exception of doing cardio).

After that I decided to take it a step further.  I started looking into changing up my diet and switching up the routine by switching to a 3 day split.  This phase was 3 months and where I messed up the most.  I was still unhappy with my phsyique due to the fat still on my cheeks and stomach region.  So I decided to go on a calorie deficient diet and lose the remaining fat.  This worked wonders!! But now I was skinny as fuck and that wasn't the goal.  Also during the 3 months, almost all my lifts I couldn't add any weight and I even lost reps on quite a few of them.  This shit set me back soooo much.  I was actually losing strength and...

Then I decided to bulk....which pretty much killed all the fat loss because I went from 1800-2000 calories a day straight up to 3000-3500 and gained a majority of the fat back.  At this point, I didn't give a care about my physique, I just wanted to get stronger.  It was very de-motaviting when you put in all this work lifting weights and you not getting any stronger.  Bulking helped significantly (well, getting enough food did) because 90% of my lifts, I was able to add reps or add weight.  Started to integrate more leg work during this time and things were coming together.  I was still baffled though,  doing all these exercises and I'd only add 5lbs or something to my bench press in a month or so and I wasn't even lifting heavy weights.  I was reading forums and all that, and ppl similiar to me in size and what not, they were jacked and they were similiar in experience, about a year.

Now the good.  Which is pretty short.  gained about 6-7lbs of muscle, lose 6-7lbs of fat..gotten stronger and pshyique looked better though....I thought I'd be further along.  Shoulda been able to bench atleast 1x bodyweight, woulda liked to have gained 10lbs of muscle instead.  I should have been further than I was cuz I was putting in the work. 3 days a week no matter what, in the beginning it was like 3 hours per day, and when i switched to a 4 day split, it was 4 days guaranteed.

Now to look forward to the future.  I have new goals for training year....to join the 1000lbs club.  Which combines squats, bench and deadlift weights to reach 1000lbs.  With the new routine I'm doing I am confident I will be able to reach this goal (won't just be doing stronglifts, but when the time comes, I'll switch routines).  Now 1000lbs will most likely be using 1RM, but I'll just use my current lifts  for now cause there's no way I'm going to attempt 1RM without a powercage.  Currently at 475lbs (using a 1RM calculator, 534lbs)