My Journey - Part 2: Making Changes

Now that I had gained what I thought was a significant amount of knowledge around resistance training, muscle growth, nutrition and other factors that contribute to overall health; I was ready to start making a change.

First, I started designing my own workout program to do at home and invested in some basic gear. More dumbbells, a barbell, weight plates, a couple of benches .etc. I now knew how I should start programming my workouts and how to target my muscles correctly and had learnt the value of compound lifts, as apposed to just very light isolation exercises.

I started working out what my base metabolism was and starting calculating my Macros. Once I had this sorted, I started tracking my daily caloric intake and making sure I hit those Macros, whilst using the "clean" bulk approach. I was cooking my own meals, eating lots of vegetables to ensure I got the micro-nutrients my body needed and made an overall change to the way I was eating.

In this beginning stage, the workouts were tough. My body was not used to this kind of exerted activity, but it quickly adapted and I was able to increase my training volume week after week in the initial months. Understanding how my body was trying to adapt and how to plan my workouts correctly, was definitely a difficult task though.

The nutrition was the hardest part of all! I thought I was eating lots before.... oh my gosh! I was eating nothing compared to now! Not only was I consuming roughly an extra 2000+ calories per day, but I also was so used to eating rubbish that was palatable that I struggled to finish the big home-made meals... not just because of the size and feeling extremely full, but also due to it tasting so bland to me. This was a hard gig!

Quite quickly however, I started noticing changes. The way my body started to respond to the weight lifting and the gains I was getting in the first few weeks was amazing to me!

The way I started feeling with this new diet had given me so much energy, as well as much clearer mental clarity.

Results in the early days we going great! Although I was aware that this progress would start to slow down, I didn't yet realize how fast this actually happened. Very quickly, my progress started to plateau. This is where I knew I had to start changing my workout routine and increasing my volume.