TLDR: Return to Form

Too Long Dad Recap

I’ve embarked on this weekly posting schedule (TLDR) where I recap my fitness content consumption, training progress and nutrition progress with full awareness that it is of little interest to the general public or even the fitness community.

It’s like someone talking about their fantasy football team: it really only matters to me. But I plan to keep doing it for a few reasons:

First, it creates a weekly practice of writing about fitness topics that can eventually to topics to write better posts about. In that way, its a form of procrastination and brainstorming.
Second, it adds to the number of web pages my blog has, building a nice base of original fitness-related content.
Third, I like to share my journey and findings in this format such that someday my children can review it or I can refer them to posts I’ve written on subjects they eventually might have interest in.
Fourth, I like to pretend I am a part in the online fitness community. I don’t have crazy powerlifting numbers, I don’t have the best physique, and I don’t even have a product to sell, but I can still be a part of the community and maybe help inspire some people.

With that pre-amble, on to this week’s information that only I care about!

Things I watched this week

Jonnie Candito is a great follow on Instagram. He is a wealth of information on powerlifting as a sport and programming.
- In his stories this week, he discussed the topic of doing singles all year for your main lifts.
- He laid out a plan for how it can be done without too much risk.
- Basically, he said if you did singles in 6 week waves of RPE (starting at 6, ramping to 9) and if you don’t overshoot, then singles all year are great.
- I’m going to try this for deadlifts.
More meal prep videos with Remington James Fitness
- Since I bought pumpkin and applesauce, I have been trying to use them up by doing a few of these recipes.
- The brownie and doughnut recipes use pumpkin, the doughnut and birthday cake bites use applesauce.
- Today I tried the cinnamon swirl cake he did a video about this week, and it was pretty good.

Finally, I watched a video on the topic of “reverse dieting” by Greg Doucette that I found so thought provoking that I wrote a post about it, which can be found here.

Things I Lifted this Week:

17 days ago, I had surgery to remove a piece of meniscus that was causing me pain in my left knee. 10 days post surgery, I had my follow-up with the surgeon.
- The knee was not swollen, and it looked so good that the doctor said I can just do physical therapy on my own rather than schedule PT in-person somewhere.
- Also, I was cleared for jogging (which I don’t plan to do) and lunges and squats in a week or so, which is nice.
- I started with walking lunges after the appointment, but I may try out a few lighter squats this week, maybe with my new SBD knee sleeves.
- The only residual pain comes if I were to kneel and put pressure directly on the front of the knee, which is a sign that healing from the incisions themselves is not yet complete.
As far as the training plan, I think I’ll just keep kind of messing around here and there without a focused plan for another few weeks.
- We have a vacation planned in a few weeks, so after that I will get back to a focused plan with some clear goals.
- Those goals will likely be hypertrophy focused for 8 weeks or so, before jumping back into a strength focused plan in the Fall in hopes of peaking for some fresh PRs.
- I plan to continue to do year-round singles, but at lower RPEs per recommendation by Jonnie Candito
- I will also make every effort to avoid overshooting on weights, which probably contributed to the knee injury.
This week was fun though, getting lots of rowing and pull-up work in, plus a few push-up challenges.
- Lighter bench volume appears to have helped the shoulder from flaring up too much too.

Fooling around in the garage…

Things I Ate this Week

The plan this week was to strictly adhere to 2,000 calories per day and get back on track in week 11 of the weight loss phase I am in.
I did better with adherence, but still not perfect. That discipline paid off on the scale, with body weight continuing to trend lower, with my low for the week at 175.2 lbs and the weekly average at 176.4 lbs.
11 weeks into the cut and my weight has dropped on average 0.9lbs per week, a very manageable rate, and I’m down around 15 pounds from the peak in February.
It hasn’t been a crash diet, with calories this week just 500 calories below what I was eating before the cut began.
I’ll keep going with the cut, because it hasn’t been that stressful so far. I’ll keep dropping calories until things get unbearable (for those around me mostly, because I’ll be bitchy).
That will probably be around 1,800 or 1,700 and after incorporating intermittent fasting.

On July 4th, I tried out another Remington James Fitness recipe. Now that I have the staples of most of his recipes (pumpkin, applesauce, splenda), I find its pretty easy to whip up a batter in a mixing bowl and bake some kind of protein muffin from his long list of “anabolic” baked goods.

This week, I tried the Birthday Cake Bites recipe. This one used mostly egg whites, protein powder and applesauce. They came out pretty tasty. The texture and taste was like the Mexican dessert flan, probably because of the egg white base.

I really enjoy having a plate of muffins that are less than 400 calories. It makes eating in a deficit pretty great. I think highlighting and reviewing anabolic recipes in separate posts may be a thing I do in the future.

Dad Report: “I like the roller coaster”

I watched the film Parenthood with my family this weekend. The sexual content wasn’t too bad (I just kind of yada yada’ed the vibrator scene).

It was pretty cathardic for my wife and I to see Steve Martin struggling to keep it together as a dad. I especially related to the line: “My whole life is have to!”. I do feel that way sometimes, but I try to stay focused on how great it is to have people who rely on me and that I get to mold into full fledged humans.

Plus, like Steve Martin in that one scene where he’s Cowboy Gil, I’m a pretty fun dad.

We also watched Hamilton on Disney Plus, which I hadn’t seen live like my wife and older two kids have. It was pretty great, and it’s an amazing story how these men who were younger than me did such great things to establish systems we still use today in this country.

Also, we got a couple of batting practice sessions in as they return to form after a long layoff from sports. Overall, a nice holiday weekend that was pretty similar to what we’ve been doing the last 4 months…