I have absolutely no complaints at this point in my off season phase. My progress has been better than I anticipated and I have remained injury free while training very hard, but very smart, as well.
The only real hang up I have is that I feel that my condition is holding back my gains just a tad. I am not ripped to shreds but I am pretty fucking lean and now that scale weight has stabilized, I feel that I need to push the calories up again.
Now, that does not mean that I won't stay lean. I believe that when I pushed calories up the first week of January I have not gained any appreciable amount of body fat but that is in pictures and the mirror so I will need to wait to see what the DEXA scan says about that in another 4 weeks. Right now, I am up roughly 8 pounds in the last 8 weeks and feel that if I don't make a diet change by adding calories, I will plateau at this weight and I don't want that to happen.
Strength gains are up but have slowed considerably in the last 4-6 weeks. This is yet another reason that I feel a bump in calories is needed. I already cut one workout so that I am now training only 4 days per week instead of 5 so all things considered, I am convinced that the diet change is necessary.
I am not going to add calories to my daily diet, though. I have thought long and hard about this and I have decided that I want the last part of my workout week to feel like the first part of my workout week. What I mean is I want that fullness and scale weight that I have early in the week, to remain or even come back for the last half of my workout week which includes legs. To accomplish this, I am going to Skipload on Wednesday nights, as well as keeping my Skipload the same right now for Sundays (starting at bedtime on Saturday night).
I will only load on Wednesday nights for 2 meals vs. the all-day approach on Sundays. For this reason, I do not expect to get anywhere near as full from this load BUT ... I am also not flat by mid-week, either, so I anticipate (and hope) that this smaller, mid-week Skipload will simply accentuate the normal Skipload and keep me full for the latter part of the week.
For reference here are some numbers:
The day after my Sunday Skipload I am usually 234-235 pretty consistently.
By Wednesday morning I am almost always around 229.
Thursday morning it falls off considerably to 226 and will either hold there or even drop to 225 before coming back up to 226 by Saturday morning.
What I hope to accomplish is to load on Wednesday night and basically push back up to 234-235 for Thursday leg sessions. From there, I anticipate my weight finishing the week around 228-229 before I load again. Obviously, this wouldn't be week in and week out, but at least I would like to see this happen THIS week.
I am also considering using the SCGS compound on Wed and Sun load, as well, because I will be starting a 4-week run with the SCGS compound the day after I get back from the Arnold and running it for the 4 weeks in March before this current 12-week phase of my off season ends with me cruising on TRT for 8-10 weeks.
If it matters, I will be loading on sweet potato pancakes and/or sweet potato biscuits with honey and syrup and candied pralines. Eggs with chicken sausage and cheese along with organic tater tots. I do have some cheddar/jalapeno cornbread that I might have to throw in there, too.
I have to do pictures this weekend so I was going to wait to start the loading next week but I don't want to wait another week. Plus, if I am fuller from the Wednesday Skipload then that needs to be seen, visually, in the pics, too.
I am not pushing more scale weight because I am not at my goal of 230. That goal weight was arbitrary in that I chose a number that I felt would best represent the look I wanted to achieve if my body fat were to remain the same. So, if I have great gains and don't weight 230, that's fine. If I have great gains and I weight 236, fine. I am more concerned that I have been stable or a bit plateaued, lately, combined with the fact that I think my condition might be better than it needs to be for optimum progress right now. Of course, there's always the chance that my body fat will remain exactly as it is right now and not increase, at all. That would be the ideal scenario. However, if it does increase some, but I get gains moving again then I am good with that.
Only 5 weeks left to the DEXA scan and I anticipate being 10% at approximately 230. That would put me in a pretty good spot to cruise for 8-10 weeks before coming back to destroy the rest of 2019 with another brutal phase to my off season. 235? 240 by the end of 2019? I have no idea and will ride it as long as my body wants to grow and if I can stay at 10%, I will consider this year a HUGE success - probably one of the most productive years I have had in decades.