Rest Day

I realized that I had been over-eating significantly the last few months.
I was inspired by Mike Mentzer and started doing a mass building program around Nov and Dec. I ate everything in site with no discretion about the calories or the macro-nutrients. In Jan I decided I was going to do CrossFit for 1 year and zone/paleo and see where I end up in terms of my competency in the 10 general physical skills and my bio-energy efficiency.

I made significant gains doing HIT training as prescribed by Mike, I went from about 180 #'s to about 225. My body fat went from about 10-12 to over 20 so my net muscle mass gain was about 12#. That's significant gains in such short time. I think that my genetics lends itself to mass and strength pretty well.

However, I don't want to be big. I prefer to be relative to my context. I think often about something that I read on Gym Jones.com in the knowledge section about relative strength. Here is a link to it if you want to read it

http://www.gymjones.com/knowledge.php?id=6

Something that he says in there towards the end about being strong relative to 1, your own body. I think that there is a maximization that each person needs to find in terms of their strength and body weight. For me I think it might be around 178-180#. I seem to be able to move better at that weight. Mass for the sake of mass is only useful if that is your goal/job. It's harmful in terms of efficiency. 2. Relative to your context, your group or relationship with others around you. Mark gives the example of a SEAL team and the guy that's 6'3" and 225 plus gear, my numbers are different for the sake of example. If that guy goes down, who is going to carry him? So contextually, If I go down can my wife cary me out of a burning house? Biblically I wonder if I have a responsibility to keep my body mass in check for sake of her safety. Interesting thought. I have a stewardship, a responsibility that doesn't go away if I am unconscious.

So in interest of growing in work capacity, something that CrossFit seems to excel at, and reducing my mass, and that's muscle mass too, something that CrossFit is actually criticized for, down to a relative maximization for my context. Which is I think about 178-180. The trick is going to be keeping strength up as I shrink in size.

Friday I re-ran the numbers of how many blocks I should be eating. A great site to do that is

http://www.dbhonline.com/zoneful/p_calculator.htm (I got this one from CrossFitEndurance.com Brian and Melissa Mackenzie's project).

To my surprise I was eating WAY too many. I had been dissapointed in my progress until that point and now I think it's as simple as cutting down from 26 blocks to 17! WOW 26?! really?

I am excited to see how March goes at 17 blocks and 1 cheat day per week.

Anyway, feel free to post your thoughts, comments on here or email me.