Otherwise your extra fat inhibits your gains and you just end up with a beer gut and barely any extra muscle. The main reason why I decided to cut at all (which sucked by the way, as you can tell from the graph) was because a lot of the guidance I read recommended that most skinny-fat guys should cut down to a relatively lean weight before trying to add muscle. So this time around I wanted to add my diet changes more gradually once I had a good program going. I stopped that because my weight crept up to about 193 without any muscle or strength gains, that and I was sick of forcefeeding myself. Before I tried SL I had tried going all out with eating 3000 calories a day and working out 4 days a week.
So either I am making progress, but it's so slow it's practically unnoticeable, or I haven't improved at all outside of my squats.Īs far as diet goes, I didn't want to change too many things at one time when I started, so I decided to hold off on any big diet changes until I got past my rookie gains and started to hit plateaus. I've been in a continuous cycle of ramping up, plateau, deload, repeat on all three of those.
My biggest area of concern is the zero or glacially slow gains in my OH press, bench, and row. I'd say that right now my grip strength is my limiting factor on my deadlift. I wouldn't focus too much on my dl, my gains there took a serious hit when I lost weight and again when I decided to deload to focus on my form and use a normal grip instead of using a hook grip on all reps. I wish I had the dedication to create a year's worth of bullshit workout logs for the sake of taking the piss, but I can promise that's not the case. At this point I had hoped to have my squats in the 280 range, bench around 185, and deadlift over 300 lbs. Long term I want to reach a 315 squat, 225 bench, 400 deadlift. In October I upped it by about 300-400 calories to a bulking level of 2500-2600 calories daily, but it hasn't affected my weight or gains.Īt this point I'm not sure if what I need is to stick with the program for longer, eat even more, or if my expectations have just been unrealistic.
I've been using myfitnesspal and eatthismuch to dial in my nutrition, and for the majority of the time I wasn't cutting I kept my caloric intake at a maintenance level. But I feel that even with a good 6 months of regular workouts and 100% nutrition, I should see more gains than this. I kept up with the program for the most part but still had a few missed workouts here and there. Granted, I had a few major interruptions in my routine, such as being sent on a month-long trip for work with no gym access, and deciding to do a 10 lb cut from 185 to my current 175 midway through while still continuing the program. All I do is fail to reach 5x5 at the same weight 3 times in a row, drop weight as recommended by the app, and then work my way back up before failing again. My deadlift gains dropped down after I stopped using a hook grip, since my grip strength didn't allow me to lift as much overhand. My bench press, barbell row, and overhead press gains have been virtually non-existent, even with adding extra arm work. The only area of progress has been my squats, and those went from failing to reach 5x5 at 230 lbs to failing at 260 lbs. Here are links to my spreadsheet of my workout logs from the SL app, and a year of progress graphed.Īs the title said, I've been doing Stronglifts for over a year now, and my results from the program have been less than satisfactory. I started at 185 lbs, skinnyfat, and wanted to max out my strength before bulking up a bit. I'm a 25M, currently sitting at 6' 1" and 175 lbs, bodyfat somewhere around 15-20% last time I took a caliper to myself.