FT Questions....

[nordan]

Hey Bud!

Firstly, congrats on your progress!

I'll keep the brief so we can stay focused.

1.) The Cruise isn't supposed to be a period of no weight training again. IT's an Intensive Cruise, which for many folks is VERY helpful in making gain. So, while of course, you're free to do things as you will, I suspect it's possible that you've still far from optimized your gains b/c of how you've been doing deloads.

2.) I can't tell if you're doing 14,000kcal / day of cardio NOW (as in yesterday or day) or you've dropped down from that to 50% as much... (I'm hoping you weren't doing 28,000 kcal / day of cardio at some point.

3.) Your response to "why so much cardio" doesn't, as far as I can tell, really justify blasting away with a massive amount of cardio at the start. It might make sense to ease your way in with cardio only (and not change your diet) or simply change your diet and not add cardio (as it seems the issue was the combination of the two?...), but this approach doesn't seem justified and I think you're now seeing the issue....

4.) When (time of day, relative to wt. training) and what cardio - specifically what activity - are you doing?

-S

Scott, thanks for the input. Ill touch up on some of your responses.

In response to Q1:

I have been doing the intensive cruise's in the past as so..

2 weeks total (as a blast has been 6 weeks in the past) so 1/3 of the blast cruising as the book. This has consisted of dropping down a tier so down to tier 1 as I have found turbo tier II just right for me in terms of volume and maintaining intensity.

Cruise Setup.

Tuesday - Day 3
Friday - Day 4
Monday - Day 3
Thursday - Day 4.

then the rest of the time off completely (4 days) until I restart the next blast which would be Tuesday again (this typically is the final 1/3 of the cruise, away from weights).


Essentially this means i'm doubling up on rest days before each session as I normally do a
Tuesday - Day 1
Thursday - Day 2
Saturday - Day 3
Sunday - Day 4 split.

Again, comment if you believe I have set this up wrong so I can change and make EVEN FURTHER PROGRESS!

Q2 / Q3 / Q4.

So when I started my cut, initially it was a diet change as throughout my off season I was sitting at 4500 kcals on a training day @ 170lbs. This gave me an instant relief from all the eating and my g.i. tract a break from all the food.

From there I added cardio as wanted to do something differently to the previous years rather than just dropping food and see what the results were as I mentioned in the past, I would just drop food and do minimal cardio but that resulted in me losing all my hard earned off season gains. So a different approach has been to maintain calories as high as possible and create a deficit and facilitate fat loss via cardio only (after initial diet change).

Cardio wise this time around started on 20 mins LISS Daily, a walk or whatever it may be, no monitoring HR or anything.
This worked for a while and as things progressed or should I say stagnated.

I increased this further so this went up to 30 mins LISS upon wake.

Then from there 2 sessions of 20 mins a day due to time constraints
(40 mins total).

I wont carry on but eventually I have worked up to 1 hour sessions twice a day @ 135bpm. LISS upon wake, and a further session at Lunchtime, both of these via eliptical machine or spin bike due to busting my ankle (I posted about that a few pages back) my weight session being in the evening and as far away from cardio as possible. Now I know its not completely accurate by all means and just a guide but my HR Monitor (Not the one's on the machines) say I have achieved 1400 Kcal deficit by cardio approx.

1400 kcal a day x 7 = 9,800 a week from LISS.
I would say approx 800-1000 kcals further on training days obtained from my weight sessions too. So Approx 13-14k kcals a week burnt in total.

Calorie wise I am now on approx 2800 training day and 2000 rest day @ 153lb.
I started the cut at around 168ish so 15lb drop in 9 weeks.. I would say 1-2lb of that has been muscle at a MAXIMUM (again not accurate as haven't had a DEXA scan) but this is looking and judging by the mirror, and I tell you something I have made some significant improvements).

So as mentioned as of last week I started to suffer symptoms of overtraining (as listed in the book) so niggles, increased recovery times, soreness, regression on lifts etc etc. Now like I said I didn't and still don't want the blast to end prematurely due to the holiday being so imminent and what would in turn result in nearly a month off a starting a new blast. E.g. Start the cruise now, approx 2 weeks of IC, then holiday starts.. 2 weeks off sailing (no gym obviously) that equates to nearly 30 days. 30 days until I start a new blast? No thanks .

As of this week, to try prolong this phase / blast until I go on holiday I have reduced cardio by 50% so I am now down to 1 hour a day in an effort to maintain training intensity and progressively beating the log book.

How do you suggest I prolong this blast or at the very least maintain training of some sort up until I go on holiday. I understand regardless that the blast will be coming to an end as of Sunday (that's if I can make it) and from there I will be 8 days away from my vacation. 8 days to perform an IC and hit some tier 1 MR's as you normally would either like I have done before (listed above) or as you advise, before I then take a further prolonged period amount of time off (14 days complete rest).

This is a pretty long winded post but hopefully understand my position and can advise accordingly. As always.. thanks a bunch!