Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log

I'd really kinda consider the beginning of serious bodybuilding around the beginning of this log. That's when I really started trying to optimize this whole thing. That's about when i started actually meal prepping at least 70% of my meals year round, even when not cutting. Then once I quit training conventional deadlifting as a mostly year-round lift the level of seriousness increased further and has just continued to increase. No emo but overall the further I get into this the happier and more focused I become overall. I look back to the first page of this log and it'll be around 3 years in July and we'll have some very good 3 year before and afters to showcase. Even just from those pics to the previous prep last academic year the progress has been incredibly dramatic.

I've come far in 3 years, and of those 3 years of gains, I'd say upward of 70-75% actually came in the last half of that 3 year period. But it's less about the gains in muscle as it is about the gains in habits. The habits that result in me getting more jacked also tend to make me a happier more well adjusted person, independent of their capacity to build more muscle. That's an amazingly blessed coincidence and tells me I'm doing what I was put on this earth to do.

And it's only going to keep getting better from here, boyos.

For me cooking shrimp in bulk is such a pain in the ass. I normally use my big electric pan because it’s the best bag for the buck it cooks the most shrimp at once. The pans using the gas stove the sides of the pan has no juice.. no heat. I bought another big electric pan to double it up and maybe I’ll try ur method of the air fryer too. I never use my air fryer lol. Also I use no seasoning but that combo sounds lit.

your front side is absolutely incredible bro, like hands off eternal respect.

however, i don't know if its due to injuries or something but your back lacks - and I have to be honest because otherwise you will hear it from the judges.

i am not going to pretend to be an expert because im not, but my back has been my strong side since beginning and I could maybe help you out somehow by giving tips and tricks.

Amen

Chan,

So I am not an expert on nearly nude male posing. But the biggest issue for Guy is that his erectors are absurd. I have the same development to a lesser degree (see any Olytard). Tho late stage Lu bucks this trend. But he's literally a freak and competed well into Masters age.

Guy,

I can understand the complaints about the foreigners. But it makes me super happy that you doing it. Tho that doesn't stop me from making ghey jopkes.

Monte,

I think you vastly overstate my past history or desire to run through a bunch of models. I likely won't hit three figs barring a few rapes. (Tho I'm open to someone teleporting me back to 2k8 and chaining me to a chair and force feeding me Viagra for the temporal slate of VS angels. I'm cool being eskimo bros with Tom Brady and Orlando Bloom.) However, my main goal wasn't to just run them out and see how many 5'10-6'0 skinny white girls with angular features could s my d. Granted had that been my goal, I'd score quite nicely against many of my short king (or tall king) competitors. To be Emo DeeplyUnhappy, relationships are mostly about finding someone that shares your goals, wants and lifestyle. And beyond that, someone that you can spend your time with effortlessly. I don't wake up and stress about my relationship. I don't talk to anyone about my relationship for "advice" or any weird nonsense. I just kinda do my own thing and am very content with friends being like "wow she's hot" or long term friends saying "I don't know how you managed it". It fills that need for approval from others. But moreso, I know I can come home and have someone who cares about me. I'm sure you have a similar level of contentment in your own relationship which is why I know basically nothing other than there is a Mrs Monte and Montelets.

However, I do have an overt brag. Mrs Thremp watches UK Big Brother. She was online looking for a forum of like minded folks to share thoughts on the show. (Currently there is celebrity Big Bro with Mickey Rourke and some cancer lady.) She independently stumbled across 4chan and is now a poster there. "Our ******" (last season) and "our guy" (current season, shouts Mickey) are her jam. This is what true love looks like. When your wife can share a greentext about an undiagnosed autist eating chips till she pukes or a making jokes about a Stage 4 cancer thot.

Sorry Guy. This may cloud your future judgment. Find your own autist. GLHF.

congrats, you seem a lot happier than usual and i know i always gave you grief over your "look at me it's awful" stuff so i'm really glad you're enjoying yourself now

good points on the girl stuff, i tend to share stuff with friends as well as some basic stuff here but it's never under the guise of soliciting advice, the stuff here is more so that i'm coming from the "i used to be clueless but figured this out" because like you mentioned, a lot of people here weren't giving good advice

sadly, what is good advice for an attractive male is going to get an unattractive male metoo'd - when a lot of those things came out it was stuff like "so he invited me up to his hotel room and we started kissing but i made it clear that's all i wanted to do but a few minutes later while making out he then pulled his dick out and grabbed the back of my head to push it down there"

i think for the guys in the world that look like louis ck that goes down as a negative experience for the woman who just wanted to fool around without going much further and felt obligated to give an unenthusiastic bj and then leave only to complain about it later as sexual assault 3 years later once someone else mentions an unpleasant bj with him

whereas for guys who don't look like louis ck the woman then not only is into it but then removes the rest of her clothes to straddle you and then spends the night and later in the week texts "i was only planning on kissing you that night but it was so hot when you took charge, i can't wait to see you again"

so i think sometimes neckbeards are better off getting advice from other neckbeards and so on because it's a different set of tools they have at their disposal

and i don't think people understand how much expats generally suck - i think if you went to beijing or shanghai you wouldn't experience that as often because they are the highest in demand places so can kind of filter out the riffraff so they go to other places like where you've been

there's good reason why i stuck to beijing and shanghai without ever living anywhere else long term because once you leave the quality of the expats plummets - you go from hanging out with fun loving ambitious people who went to top universities and happy to play kickball with a keg at each base whereas you go to some place like ningbo and it's people who were janitors with double digit iqs who went there for an easy life

Completely agree regarding RDLs. Switched from two sets to 1 a couple weeks ago and it’s so much better. No 5 min rest just to do a 2nd shitty set where it’s going to fatigue me the rest of the workout.

Regarding hack squat: I have had issues with bothering my quad tendon so I don’t go with too low a foot stance and use a higher rep range than most lifts (15-20) but I think it also depends a lot on how it’s built. Most leg presses are fairly similar but some hack squats just aren’t built very well

Regarding online training: you should start charging clients soon and do it on the side before committing to switching to it full time. To see if you really like it for one and to see if it is possible to get enough clients to do it full time. It is a pretty saturated space

Do you list this on your CV? Is it verifiable in any way? Does anyone actually try to do that?

Can you describe? This is relevant to my interests.

1. cv no, during interview. Yes easy to verify because any student I prepped for an interview/wrote them an LOR I definitely have their wechat contacts and can just ask for their email to verify.
2. The weight tree... the thing holding the plates. Stick a bar pad over that. We have one that's the perfect height for me. Can also put the pad on the smith and it'll rotate a bit better, but smith is very popular and less accessible.

That's not a bad idea. I'm all home gym and my weight tree is not in a great spot. Don't have a smith, but I could just put a bar on my rack and put the pins at a lower height. Might give it a shot. Don't have a pad, but I'm sure I can figure out a substitute.

Thremp,

I was just mostly busting balls, but it sounds like we've come to essentially the same place in marital life and agree pretty completely on the point of the institution, so mazel tov to us I suppose. My wife is far from a greentext aficionado, but somewhat analogously, regarding a few hot button social issues, she has gone from "you're a lunatic, why are you bothering to read/care about this, this isn't actually happening" to "you were right". Husband achievement unlocked.

Re: the minis, it is hard to believe that (as I recall) I started posting here shortly before they were born and they're now a few months from officially being teenagers. One of them is missing their soccer game today for an academic bee that the other one "forgot" to sign up for, so this is one of the few times that the wife and I will be doing separate kid things.

I've told them I'm going to bring them to the gym with me this summer; nothing super involved, just a few times a week, mostly machines at first to develop some kinesthetic awareness. They're also doing track, so I'm going to see if they'll run with me a few times a week over the summer so they can build on the soccer/track fitness this spring. They've always eaten a ton, but it's noticeably increased to the point that I think I'll only have a few years until I see how successful my elephant and the rope dadding strategy ends up being.

monte, what would you thoughts be if the minis knew of your account here and could read all your posts?

what if they liked it and decided to make their own accounts and start their own threads?

I doubt they'd care to read any of them, though they'd (rightly) think it was lame. I don't think there's much chance of forum style posting in their future; Discord-type stuff seems much more likely to hit in the next few years. Nothing like that yet; we regulate electronics usage pretty closely still.

oh yeah they obviously wouldn't - just more a question of what would you think about if they did

while i don't personally feel like i've posted anything that would reflect poorly upon me and have met with many 2p2ers irl, the idea of sharing my online persona with someone from the real world would feel like a massive violation to me where they could have an asymmetric glance into my inner thoughts

so whenever people irl learn that i post a lot on a poker forum or quora (used to post a lot on quora before they turned it into meme doomscrolling), i never volunteer what my username is on either (post on quora under a different name as well)

so while i wouldn't be ashamed if my kids read all my posts 20 years from now, i still don't know how comfortable i'd be with it happening

This is by far the most impressive of your many documented H&F accomplishments.

Be prepared for them to outrun you without even facking trying before long. Obviously that's a good thing, but certainly makes you feel the olds.

It's impressive you've kept it going this long, imo. But not as impressive as that first thing.

been out living away from electronics for a day.

Regarding back:

Glutes and hams are just a straight up muscular weak point from years of not training any direct ham work in the old days when most gyms in china literally didn't have hamstring curl machines. They were super rare so my leg days were just squats and hyperextensions, which work hams somewhat but not in the time under tension bodybuilder way very well. Then my particular style of squatting was very quad+erector dominant with poor glute recruitment, probably mostly tehnique/feel fault. I think I've been training glutes+hams as first lift on most leg days for like 18 months now only so it's gonna take some time to correct many years of imbalanced training. My other pulling muscles involved in things like ham curls and sldls are just so strong (erectors mostly) that it's hard to consciously disengage them and focus tension on where it's supposed to be, but I've made big improvements on this front the past ~6 months or so.

Lats however are a bit more complicated. From the front they're fairly wide and when I'm contest lean it's suddenly less of a weak point. Some of this is just muscular control/posing which you naturally regain as you pose more and more frequently. Also when the love handle fat is gone your lats visibly look better. That said, they're still a weak point and I'm proposing a few changes to upper day.

Let's start each upper day with pullovers, then either rows or pulldowns. Then after that go into my first pressing move. It's a bit silly to be pressing first when you have strong triceps/delt/chest and weaker lats; start with the weak point. I like the idea of starting with the plate loaded machine hammer row to really get that scapular retraction which will allow me to possibly also skip my lock 3 going into my chest pressing for that day. I should also probably start doing these unilaterally with a lat emphasis. I'll experiment with that and if I don't like it I'll start with pullover then pulldowns. i just like having disproportionately big arms and it sucks that I won't be able to train broceps first all 4 training days, but I still can on the leg days so not a huge deal. Swapping to all cables for biceps was a big game changer that I couldn't do earlier because in Chengdu there was only one cable machine and I hadn't figured out my internal rotation issues so this gave me pain too. I seem to be g2g and visually biceps have come up very drastically just in the past few months since i started being able to consistently focus on cable curls variations.

I'm getting weirdly addicted to a Chinese shrimp dumpling breakfast food and eating it 5x/wk. 虾仁烧麦. Prob okay for now but I may need to drop this if weight loss stalls. It's also surprisingly expensive, but that's partially because everything on this Island is expensive and basically Macau prices with barely over mainland salaries.

94.7kg weight been consistent the past 5 or 6 days. I'm ready to drop the hammer a bit going into next week. Caffeine it's time to raise to 450 as I'm finally not really feeling it as much on 300mg. Black Coffee+2 monsters in the morning starting tomorrow.

Chany,

I'm gonna experiment with a few different movements and orders and maybe end up doing the same ones on both upper days. Back training requires a lot of figuring out what movements work best for each individual and finding the right angles and machines and seat heights and minutae for each person's bodily dimensions. I'm open to suggestions. One thing I really want to do but can't is a chest-supported t-bar row; the gym doesn't have this machine.

I've been well out of the "just get as strong as possible on big movements" phase for a while without really realizing it and need to figure out all the specialization/feel/nuance to get my physique more balanced. I kina find this part of bbing tedious but ultimately it's very important if you want to succeed on stage. And the part about getting huge arms I don't find tedious at all!

虾仁烧麦 is elite

i really liked getting 肠粉 for breakfast whenever i was in the south

I'm kinda counting myself out early on doing it full time anytime soon. For the niche I'm targeting, I need more first hand experience and to show up "notably conditioned, even by bodybuilding standards". Last time in June I got to around 90% of that and had some crazy veiny/grainy hardness, but still didn't know how to pose glutes/hams well yet so they looked a bit shitty. I need to at the very least win a card and possibly even first compete as a pro before I think about trying to make real money from serious clients online coaching and I just refuse to coach that sort of "this is my second to fourth year lifting and I think I know everything and you're going to need to persuade me I need to prep my own meals to make better progress" type of client which I am sure I could be recruiting.

I know someone who is opening a gym in Shenzhen and I may have an opportunity to be in person training on the side and could likely charge very high over 100usd/hr prices to monolingual normies who are mostly just curious to interact with a bilingual western foreigner as we're still incredibly rare here. Might also have an opportunity to be prepping and selling meals at this and various other more serious gyms. It's obviously ******ed to not be monetizing my physique, even more so as a foreign guy in China.

Powerbuilding is very dumb. It's sort of the default for gym rats who have maybe started PEDs (literally almost nobody starts meal prepping before they start PEDs, I didn't either. Pretty much only natural bbers who compete are doing this) but aren't yet sure about competing in either sport and just kind of half-ass both. That said, I think most bb depending on anthropometry could still successfully include 1 or 2 of the three comp lifts in their program and not be any worse off. If I could reoptimize my deadlift technique to be more glute and ham dominant and less erectors I would probably go back to DLing. The training would be radically different than before and much less volume overall. Prob just top set backoff set, set of 6 then a set of 10 done both around RPE 5 and each week increase the RPE until it's about 9 then drop back down to something like RPE 5.

idk if that'll ever happen and probably it would just result in erectors continuing to overdevelop. I do still plan to take 6-12 weeks to ego-lift my deadlift next offseason and hit that 272.5kg 600lb milestone. With 135x15 paused RDLs I'm probably not far off and it'd mostly be re-learning the movement pattern at this point.

My son is the same age as Monte's. My online persona isn't too far off my regular persona, so I kind of feel he would treat my online musing with the same complete disinterest as when he is exposed to them in person.

how and how old are they?

No one was more surprised than me.

Believe me, I'm aware; it's certainly better than the alternative. I get a hit in the dad feels when I imagine them lifting more than me (certainly much less of an achievement these days) or blowing me away in a 5k when barely training; it's hard to understand before you have them, but I genuinely want them to surpass me.

I'm certainly less effective at it than my dad was with me.

Pretty much what jdock said, though I agree with you I don't really broadcast this part of my life to people I know IRL. The most I'll say is that I read/posted on a poker forum back when I played and not elaborate. As an aside, I've met a number of 2p2ers IRL and getting used to using their real name is surprisingly awkward.

They're 12, a few months away from being 13; I'll preface all of this with the fact that much of what we were able to do was greatly helped by the fact that we had a nanny until the boys went to kindergarten.

TV was heavily regulated before they went to real school; it was not allowed when the nanny was there and limited to half an hour per day during the week and an hour per day on the weekend. After going to real school, the rule has been no TV during the week except sports (they can watch the NFL with me on Sunday, Monday, and Thursday nights during the season).

Regarding other electronics, we've never owned a tablet and never gave them our phones to play with/shut them up when they were babies/toddlers. I think we first got them Chromebooks for school around third grade or so, but the same rules applied - only used for schoolwork during the week. They managed to figure out a few web-based games, but those computers were insufficient for Fortnite and other such things.

We broke down and got them a Switch a few years ago, which they still play every now and then; they bought an introductory gaming laptop with their own money around 18 months ago, and then bought the parts to build a desktop a few months ago. They play mostly Fortnite with their friends on it, but the rules are the same - they can only play on the weekend. Now that they're older, we allow them to stay up until 11 on non-school nights (the Internet access on their stuff cuts off at 11 to make sure that's adhered to).

They have a phone that only calls and texts, with no Internet access and minimal apps; they can text their friends and call us if practice ends early and that's about it. We're trying to hold off on smartphones until high school at the earliest; their school doesn't allow phones or smartwatches in class and will confiscate them if seen, so it makes things slightly easier. Anecdotally speaking, most of their friends don't have them either, though a decent number of the girls in their class do.

One last thing I'll say is that all of this is a fair bit easier to handle the busier we keep them. This spring they have track 4 to 5 times a week and soccer 4 to 6 times a week, so there's very little time during the week for them to do much of anything and they're always pretty tired and ready to eat/sleep/finish homework when they get home. Summer is more of a challenge, but we schedule various activities to try to keep them decently busy, with varying degrees of success.

Yeah, I definitely get the feeling. In the athletic realm, it's a bit different for me, as I have one girl who doesn't really like sports despite our best efforts (maybe we should have tried less) and I've never really been fast or strong, so being proud of my son surpassing me is a very low bar. I'll be legit depressed if he doesn't. Where I really want them to surpass me and Mme Melkerson is mentally and not because I'm just a lol old in cognitive decline. I want that more than just about anything.

Sick brag. Mazel tov to us both I guess?

Agree with this. Have no solutions. They are big and thick and have lots of veiny stuff. Like most people imagine BBC weenus.

Future Jason Luv imminent.

This seems like just cope. Unsure what this is. k.

Didn't you have like 12 years of post-secondary education and still don't know what the **** disinterested means?

If there is any higher indictment of higher ed, please let me ****in know.

So I have a few thoughts on your various choices. 1) Mostly they don't matter. 2) You seem like a very involved and interested parent and that does super matter. 3) Best of luck!

But really, I have frens all over the age spectrum wrt chilren (sic). Giving a kid a screen is the modern day latch key kid, but giving a kid a pad on a 12 hour flight is simply not being a sociopath. Everything is contextual and there is a time and place for everything. You seem to be a fully formed adult who is capable of making their own judgments and having an adult conversation with another adult. That is pretty much beyond most people. You're well within in the "normal" realm of parenting.

Although, as you age one thing that you mentioned, but perhaps you have not internalized, you want your kids to be "better" or "excel" or whatever.. what exactly does that entail and how does it benefit your life (and theirs?)... I know a couple folks with generational wealth (One from the mid 1700s). But one issue I encounter with my own fatherly relationship is that he expresses this idea (k good for you), but never actually was ever interested in hands on teaching or my help. Why would you never trust your son with a CPA to do your taxes type of deal? Then again, if you're just griming the upper middle class slog, w/e. But this is a genuine and fairly difficult question for anyone who wants to establish generational wealth.