How I gained more muscle with 1/2 the effort!

It was not only but a couple of years ago when I began my understanding of the importance of dietary fat.

For the most part, I have weighed between 180 and 195 pounds all my life. There was a time when I was training for triathlons where my body weight would dip down into the 150-pound range. There was also a time when I decided to see how much weight I could gain. I wanted to see how much weight I could gain--I gained over 210 pounds. I wanted to see how my 6-foot 1-inch body would feel if I was the size of a heavyweight boxer.

For most of my life, white rice (or actually, a particular Portuguese rice recipe made with white rice, onions, and paprika) was a dietary staple.

At home, we typically had it for dinner. By the time I reached high school, I was relatively lean; I swam and played football in high school. My daily macros were relatively low. On a typical day during swim season, I would eat cereal for breakfast, yogurt and M&M's for lunch, a snicker bar, and Coca-Cola for the post-swim workout meal and then rice, collard greens and braised chicken leg quarters for dinner. That could not have been that many daily calories.

So, for at least two decades after high school, I always had issues gaining weight. I was suited for endurance and sprinting. I found it extremely difficult to gain weight. I really surprised myself when I got over 210 pounds. The interesting thing though, after that experience, it was relatively easy for me to gain weight. Perhaps that means, the weight gain also improved my ability to gain muscle.

So, more recently, I got down to 177 pounds. The interesting thing was that I was able to get down to my Olympic distance triathlon race weight. The only thing was that I was not training as I would usually prepare for a triathlon; I was typically fasting and doing cardio sports (basketball, tennis). I was not able to maintain a significant muscle mass, and my abs were covered up with a (relatively) massive layer of body fat. I had so much body fat around my mid-section that my dress shirts would fit across the chest area, but I would have significant difficulty buttoning the shirt across my midsection.

After I started lifting weights more regularly, I was able to solve the problem (in a way). Those shirts would eventually fit well across the mid-section--I would actually have an inch or two to spare across my stomach, but my chest muscles grew so much that I could not button-up my dress shirts across my pecs; my pectoral muscles grew a lot. I would have never imagined that I would ever run into this problem (of sorts). The only downside to this is that I probably had more muscle mass--instead of being about 177 pounds, I was a consistent 185 pounds.

So, how did I do it? Before getting down to 177 pounds, I typically weighed between 200 and 208 pounds, exercising every Saturday for about 1 hour and 30 minutes. From there, I got down to a nice 177 pounds through casual sports cardio and fasting. While this helped me lose weight, I felt I probably needed more muscle mass, so I decided to do a deeper dive into strength training.

Getting Muscle Gains!
Well, I began this part of my fitness journey by exercising twice a week--no more than twenty minutes each time. It fit well into my schedule and was easy to commit to completing. I typically started by doing farmer carries and goblet squats: 2 x 60 steps of farmer carries (40-45 pounds) and 2 x 15 goblet squats (20-30 pounds). Then I would follow the warmup by doing three sets of any of four of the following: lateral raises, incline bench press, decline bench press, chin-ups, bench press, rack pulls, lat pull-downs, leg press, leg extensions, leg curls, seated rows, bicep curls, tricep push-downs.

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