| GOMAD - a loving memorial retrospective, with charts
09/04/10, 23:17 13 Comment
So, my two month GOMAD cycle is coming to an end. My schedule is crazy-busy for a couple of weeks so I won't really be seeing much time in the gym anyways.
For any of you who don't follow my every word (i.e. fictional people who don't exist) GOMAD is Gallon Of Milk A Day, an advanced body-building technique in which one drinks a gallon of milk a day.
This is gross, obviously.
Why?
Because bodybuilding requires a surplus of calories, as well as a lot of protein. Whole milk provides both, in a cheap and easy to ingest way. (You think drinking a gallon of milk in addition to four meals a day is hard, try eating an additional 2400 calories.)
How did you do it?
32 oz. at breakfast, 32 oz. an hour after lunch, 32 oz. shortly after dinner, 32.oz after the gym (along with protein powder mixed into the first 16 oz.)
It was surprisingly not hard. Except when it was. Sometimes my body didn't want to have 32 oz of milk in it, so I felt sloshy and bloated. Sometimes, after a workout, I would feel temporarily nauseous after chugging it all down. But I never once puked or even really felt like I would actually puke.
Also, it was way easier to stay on schedule on weekdays, when my work schedule kind of forced me to. On weekends things were often a crapshoot.
Please describe your bowel movements in excruciating detail.
Well, that's kind of a weird request, but ok.
I did not have diarrhea. I did not have cramps. I did not even have much gas - I have much worse gas when I'm leaning down and eating a lot of leafy greens.
Let it be known that these results are apparently atypical - I am some sort of milk-digesting genius, the Mozart of lactase.
For more detailed facts about color and composition of my shit, you can read this post. HTML codes for the color of my bowel movements are helpfully provided.
I am really glad you told me about your poop. But what was your workout routine?
I used a four day template from EXRX.net. This template divides things between torso push/torso pull/limb push/limb pull. I like this workout for a couple reasons: First off, I felt that I had neglected my arms in favor of my torso, last time. This split separates arm work from torso work. So, in the past, I would do pecs/triceps on the same day and biceps/back on the same day. Now I have more time to focus on both. Another great part is that the legs are split between two days, with the limb push being the front of the leg (and the calf) and the limb pull being the back of the leg.
So used this four-day routine, five days a week.
So,
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S | | - | torso pull | torso push | limb pull | limb push | - | torso pull |
- | torso push | limb pull | limb push | torso pull | - | torso push |
Etc.
Sundays were always days off. Friday nights became days off as well because I wanted to actually be somewhere other than the gym on a Friday night: alone in the dark at home out having fun with friends. I was missing out on a lot of social stuff. I was initially worried that five days weren't enough, but they were.
This workout was based around the goal of preventing over-training via Low Volume training. Long story short, no matter how you lift weights, you're trying to cause muscle growth via muscle trauma. But too much lifting can prevent the body from repairing that trauma, resulting in all sorts of reduced gains / bad sleeping / fatigue, etc.
Basically, the idea is that there's an optimal amount of working out you should be doing, and too much of a good thing is actually a bad thing. Low volume training also cites studies that indicate your first set of lifts is the most "important" - further lifts only contribute minor benefits, until you start overtraining, at which point they actively hurt your progress.
Now, not everyone agrees with all these points, but I think it's fairly sound.
I did 3x8 (three sets, eight reps) for each exercise. If I could actually do 3x8 at a given weight, I would up the weight. If I couldn't do at least 5 reps for any set, I'd go down.
Here's the routines:
| Torso Pull | | Chin Up | | dumbbell upright row | | barbell bent-over row | | dumbbell shrugs | | dumbbell rear lateral raise |
Fitness nerds will notice this includes a lot of shoulders work. This is because I had, until now, neglected my shoulders. Also, the barbell row, chin-ups, and the lat pull-down are all pretty intense full-back exercises.
| Torso Push | | barbell bench press | | dumbbell incline fly | | dumbbell decline bench | | dumbbell front raise | | barbell shoulder press |
I should point out that getting in position to do the decline bench with dumbbells is a pretty serious challenge in and of itself. I wouldn't recommend you try unless someone has taught you how - otherwise you're likely to hurt your back or shoulders just trying to get in position. But man, it feels cool to push up big ol' weights.
I was also doing weighted neck extentions and neck flexions for a while - I stopped when my neck started getting a little too muscular. Also, even though I never hurt myself doing them, I always felt like I was about to.
| Limb Push | | barbell straight-legged deadlift | | standing dumbbell curls | hip abductor (squeeze) | | dumbbell preacher curl | | weighted hanging leg raise | | barbell reverse preacher curl | | weighted sit-ups on exercise ball | | dumbbell wrist curl | | dumbbell side bend | weighted neck flexion | weighted neck curl | | dumbbell reverse wrist curl | | cable biceps curl+ |
I think the straight-legged deadlift wasn't enough work for my hamstrings. I started using the hip abductor machine because my hips were weak - I stopped using them once I realized I had maxed out on the machine. Go me! Also, weighted leg raises stop working once you get past 25lbs, if only because the dumbbells are too wide to grip between your feet. This workout was a little too time-consuming, I was often cutting sit-ups (didn't want my stomach to get too big) and/or wrist curls (since so many exercises use the wrist anyways.)
I also added a cable biceps curl when I realized my brachialis were getting much stronger and larger than my biceps, which has the strange result of making an almost square-shaped arm.
| Limb Pull | | barbell squat |
| triceps dip | | barbell lunge | | dumbbell lying triceps extention | barbell deadlift |
| level standing calf raises | hip abductor (push) | | seated lever calf raise | | reverse calf raise | | cable triceps pulldown+ |
Again, I stopped doing hip abduction when I maxed out on the hip abductor. I stopped doing deadlifts because, after squats AND lunges, I was pretty fucking beat, and the deadlifts seemed to be putting a lot of unhealthy stress on the muscles of my lower back. Later, I added the cable triceps pull-down when it became clear that my triceps were lagging behind.
On multiple occasions, when I was pressed for time due to work running late and the gym closing soon, I would actually only do 2x8, pushing myself to do as much as I could.
I know what you are saying: "What? That's ridiculous, no one gets big from only doing two sets."
...Or do they???
So, did it work?
Yes. Shockingly well. I saw very visible gains in both mass and strength. I also saw a modest increase in body fat, which was to be expected.
Tables? You want tables? Ok!
| Starting Weight | Ending Weight | Net Change | 186.2 | 219.2 | +33 |
So, over a period of 8 weeks, I gained 33 pounds. Pretty fantastic, if you ask me. It took me twice as long to gain 20 lbs, the last time I bulked up.
Here's my final body composition expressed as a pie chart!
So let's look at things on a week-by-week basis:
| week # | net change | muscle increase | fat increase | body fat percentage | | 1 | - | - | - | 11.51 | | 2 | 7 | 5.88 | 1.12 | 11.67 | | 3 | 1 | 0.47 | 0.53 | 11.88 | | 4 | 10.4 | 5.01 | 5.39 | 13.91 | | 5 | 3.6 | 3.0 | 0.60 | 13.96 | | 6 | 1.2 | -1.34 | 2.54 | 15.09 | | 7 | 4 | 3.35 | 0.65 | 15.11 | | 8 | 5.8 | 4.45 | 1.35 | 15.33 |
(Note that these measurements cannot account for retained water, un-expelled waste [that means piss and shit], or things like that. I have attempted to at least be consistent by measuring myself at the same time every saturday morning, immediately after waking.)
Weight and bodyfat expressed as a multi-axis bar/line graph:
Whoosh!
So how did you measure this stuff?
Excel's Fitness Chart template includes a body fat % estimator that is based on the ratio of your chest to your waist. I also measure using single-site fat calipers. All I've done is taken the two measurements together and averaged them.
...Which has actually led to some interesting problems. If you will notice, the actual changes in muscle and fat seem a little twitchy. Consider week 6. Did I really lose over a pound of muscle while simultaneously developing over two and a half pounds of fat? All while lifting weights five times a week?
Possibly not!
See, both methods of measuring body fat have some problems. The excel spreadsheet is naive in that it cannot account for muscle mass gained anywhere but on the chest.
Consider, if you will, the fact that I weighed the same at week 6 as I did some time back in April. Week 6 Xiphias, however, had arms over an inch larger and was lifting significantly heavier across all exercises. So, it stands to reason that I should have a higher amount of muscle mass than I did in April!
However, Excel's BFP method reported the same BFP, and thusly the same muscle mass. What?
Well, the answer may shock you, if you are a boring person shocked by boring things: Excel's method actually only uses the waist measurement. Here's the formula: =((weight in lbs*1.082)+ 94.42)-(waist in inches*4.15). That is how they calculate your lean body mass.
This is clearly insufficient, as it neglects mass distribution basically everywhere. So, booo.
But...the calipers have a problem as well. To use the calipers, I pinch one of my big, blubbery fat rolls and the calipers tell me the thickness in millimeters. I then refer to this chart:
And look up the corresponding body-fat percentage, based on my age and gender.
HOWEVER!
The major problem is that an entire range of data (two whole millimeters!) yields a single point of data.
So, consider if I had measured as following over a period of four weeks:
10 10 10.5 11
This clearly shows a fat-gaining trend, but when translated into table-values, we get
12.7 12.7 12.7 12.7
Which shows no change whatsoever. This will mess up further calculations of lean mass and fat mass, since they are based on this percentage. If the precentage doesn't vary, the estimations will both be off. This can be especially vexing when losing weight, because the calipers will indicate I have lost more muscle mass than I actually have.
This issue is best demonstrated by a graph:
Note that the caliper measurements, in red, have a stair-step effect. While the Excel spreadsheet method is probably not very accurate, it DOES detect trends that are missed by the calipers until the trend becomes large enough to register.
This can result in weird trends where I suddenly break from one caliper value to the next, causing a sudden drop in muscle mass as my body fat percentage shifts. The muscle mass hasn't actually dropped, but the previous measurements were inaccurately high.
So what can I do about this? Well, I could extrapolate the function used by the calipers so I can project measurements onto a curve and find more accurate measurements (being able to tell the difference between 10 and 11, basically.) This, however, sounds suspiciously like work.
Another alternative would be to have my body fat measured in a more accurate measure over a period of weeks, either by submersion tank or vivisection, so I can then compare the "real" values to the calipers and excel, and create some sort of weighted average that more closely represents ground truth. This also reeks of actual work, and also runs the risk of being expensive and/or medically unsound.
So what do I do? Shrug my massive, muscular shoulders and say "good enough." They're not perfect, but they do detect trends, and it's trends that are important. Does my bodyfat seem to be spiraling out of control, or does it seem to be increasing at a level that lags behind my muscle mass gains?
So what was the final reckoning, exactly?
In terms of total muscle and total fat gained, it was this!
| Total muscle gains (lbs) | Total fat (lbs) | | 20.83 | 12.17 |
Or, as percentages:
So, how does that make me feel? I think this is a pretty reasonable amount of progress for a guy whose job consists of sitting and staring at a screen and whose hobbies largely consist of sitting and staring at a screen (aside from the gym stuff, obviously, where I stare at my reflection while moving heavy things around.)
Some other points:
-Milk has a lot of carbs and fat in it. This is its blessing and also its curse. Yeah, it will get you big, but it will also get you big.
-In addition to drinking a gallon of milk every day, my diet was...not
spectacularly great. Ideally everything that wasn't milk should have been lean meat and vegetables, along with healthy complex carbs such as whole-wheat bread and the like, as well as some protein supplements, possibly.
Instead my diet included milk, lean meats that had been deep-fried, so many fucking potato chips, and frequent deserts. Why? Well, having just leaned down for four months, I was really, really, fucking sick of watching what I eat. That is my only excuse. While you can bulk up while eating junk food you cannot really lean down while eating junk food. I would rather enjoy myself a bit while bulking up.
After all, I'm not a competitive bodybuilder (I find the idea to be completely unappealing) and even at my morbidly obese and self-depreciating 15.33%, I am still in the very middle of what is considered "fit", having started this magical journey at 11.5%, which is the upper echelons of what is considered "athletic." (These values based on the American Council on Exercise's recommendations, so caveat emptor I guess.) So I really don't have any reason to complain.
(A large part of the bloated feeling comes from the fact that my gut is usually full of food and milk. )
Ok, I get that you're insecure about it, but what about the actual muscles?
The muscles! Exactly!
So, muscles were measured using a tailor's tape measure, generally while moaning in videos uploaded to bodytube.com. (Does that actual exist? I am afraid to check.) I also took comparison photographs now and then but frankly that feels really embarrassing.
So, no, I am not going to post pictures of my flexing, nude, oiled body, lest some nefarious poster troll my muscles. Instead, you will have to jack off to my measurements directly, like they did in the days before cameras or drawings.
Here are the net changes over the entire two-month period:
| chest | waist | hips | upper arm | forearm | thigh | calf | neck | 3.0 | 3.6 | 2.25 | 1.2 | 0.75 | 4.25 | 0.5 | 1.0 |
A few points of interest: my mighty thews (that means thighs) got the biggest. This makes sense given the intensity of my leg days. I've also seen the biggest change in squats, going from squatting about 135 to squatting about 225 (I can probably go up beyond even that.) So I can now squat an exact replicate of me that just ate 24 quarter pounders. Then we have sex with each other.
Also of interest: my goddamn belly! It gets so big! A few reasons for that. 1) It's always full of milk. 2) I'm also doing ab and oblique work 3) I am a dude of dudely ways, and dudes store their fat on their bellies.
So, I have extra muscles (I've got a little vertical cleft in the top of my abs for the first time in my life) and plenty of extra padding (the cleft disappears pretty quick.) Once I lean down I am sure it will look pretty neat.
An extra inch-and-change in the arms may or may not sound impressive - but we're talking about circumference, here, not length. My arms are visibly larger, by a large margin. One of my shirts is too snug in the sleeves (stupid hipster sizing.)
And my back? Oh, my back looks like a DaVinci drawing. Great work on that.
As I complained elsewhere, my calves have not grown very well because I should have been training them with higher reps.
So what now?
Now I lean down. I quit the milk (all getting the shakes, seeing a cow crawling across my ceiling) and cut out simple carbs, sugars, and most fats. I do workouts that alternate between low-weight, high-volume and high-weight, low-volume, in order to both tone and prevent muscle loss. (I'll lose some no matter what, of course.)
I recently ran in the Spartan Race, which is a cross-country 5K+obstacle course. Hey, turns out gaining 33 pounds may hurt your running ability! I was able to compete, and I excelled at the obstacles which required upper body strength, but I also got lapped by the heat after mine, and ranked pretty low overall. I don't mind - I mean, I was training for weight-lifting, not running. The two are kind of at-odds.
But I think I may want to move towards some more versatile: add general fitness training, add some cardio, all that fun stuff. Martial arts remain tempting but the gym I was considering attending is a pretty hostile environment for homosexuals, it turns out: I was advised that if I joined, I would have to be careful to stay in the closet, otherwise things would get...bad for me. Being a minority can be really inconvenient sometimes. I'm sure I'll work out something, though. On the scale of Homoproblems, this is pretty low.
I may also do another two-month bulk up after I lean down, just for kicks. Now that I have ridiculous amounts of data I can try and beat my previous high score. |
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