A Weightlifter Goes to the Beach, Part 1

Can a weightlifter train for the beach?

In five weeks I leave for a Spring Break bachelor party in Costa Rica. The past couple of months have been spent gaining mass, working on the lifts, and preparing for competition. After completing my first meet, and with no upcoming local meet, I have a little free time in my training. It’s time for a hypertrophy cycle, combined with a strict fat-loss diet, to get my butt in shape for the beach.

My goal is to get lean while retaining or gaining lean muscle mass and losing little to no strength on the classic lifts. I’m trying to answer the question: does a short-term focus on aesthetics have to come at the expense of your weightlifting training?

For reference, my current stats are 5’9″, 184#, with maybe 15-18% body fat. In other words I look fine in winter sweaters and jeans, but I need some work before I hit the sand. I took ‘before’ photos for comparison, but I want my ugly mug on this site as little as possible, so I’ll save those for the final post in the series when I have the ‘after’ pictures to compare them to.

Diet

Since 85% of fat loss is diet, I’ll tackle my plans there first. On the recommendation of Nate from NexxtLevelUp and the two posts he did on the subject, I’m going to be following Chaos and Pain author Jamie Lewis’s Apex Predator Diet. In short, it’s a ketogenic diet; high fat, high protein, and few to no carbs (<30g a day). I’m consuming 2x my bodyweight in grams of protein, primarily through protein shakes and red meat. I’ll let Jamie explain it better [emphasis mine]:

An Overview of the Apex Predator Diet
The Apex Predator Diet is a at its core a cyclical ketogenic diet, not unlike those I’ve supported in the past.  On this diet, you’ll be keto dieting on 30 grams of carbohydrates or less per day for 5-6 days a week (or more, depending on your bodyfat levels).  During the non-carb days, you’ll be consuming 1-2 meals of fatty, preferably bone-in meat per day, supplemented by 5-7 low carbohydrate protein shakes.  The other day or two are referred to as “Rampage” days, during which time you’ll replenish your glycogen stores and satisfy your desire to wreck pizza and cookies.

The reasoning behind this methodology of dieting is that I found protein-sparing modified fasts like the Velocity Diet gave me just enough energy to put in a workout that would embarrass an undergraduate girl trying to drop her freshman 15 before going to the beach for cock over the summer- I was truncating my workouts horribly and thinking about nothing more than fucking killing myself out of shame.  Thus, I did some research and discovered those diets are really only suited to the morbidly obese and people who suck at lifting weights, rather than people trying to be so fucking superhuman they make Superman seem like a shiftless, limp-dicked, weaksauce layabout by comparison.  As such, I experimented with a variety of evening meals and finally settled upon beef ribs and bone in steaks, which are eminently satisfying, calorically dense, and restorative in ways you cannot possibly imagine.

Read his entire series of articles for the full details [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4]. Protein shakes form the baseline sustenance, such as it is. Breakfast, mid-morning, and late-afternoon always include protein shakes. Lunch cycles 50/50 between protein shakes and meat. Dinner is always 1-1.5 pounds of red meat (steak, ground beef, etc), except for one day a week where even dinner is a protein shake. One day a week is ‘Rampage Day’, which includes two light-to-moderate carb meals, and ends with a carb bonaza of 400g or more (4 side orders of rice from the Indian restaurant last Friday, for instance). This diet tests your will and fortitude. It is not for the weak-hearted or the undisciplined.

Note, I do NOT think this is a healthy, long-term diet to follow. So far it’s a pain in the ass, and I miss vegetables. It’s a short-term solution to reach a short-term goal.

Training

Though my initial plan was to take a month off from weightlifting and just do CrossFit-style conditioning, that plan runs counter to the Apex Predator Diet. According to Jamie: “Avoid doing cardio…. aerobic exercise taxes your anaerobic substrates too heavily. Since this could lead to muscle loss, I’d avoid it.” Furthermore, after the rush of my first weightlifting competition, and getting my USAW Level 1 certification this weekend (review coming soon), I don’t want to take time off from weightlifting anymore.

Solution? I’m going to start a weightlifting hypertrophy period. This cycle, lasting four to five weeks, is going to focus on high rep work at low intensity, include plenty of assistance exercises, and should help fix some technique issues in addition to the primary goal of gaining muscle mass. Not only is this the standard opening phase of a weightlifting macro cycle, but it fits perfectly with my aesthetic goals.

As an example, tomorrow morning’s workout will include:

• Snatch High Pulls from Below the Knee 4 sets of 3 to 5 reps – The high pulls will help strengthen my back. I’ll include an isometric hold at the top – a tip that Klokov passed onto CrossFit Stamford owner Andy Parker who in turn showed me after I missed Klokov’s seminar at CFS in December. I’m starting from the hang to reinforce and focus on finishing my second pull and getting my hips to the bar – something I never do normally. Finally, I’ll lower each rep slowly, prolonging the eccentric phase of the lift to further promote hypertrophy.
• Pause Front Squats 4 sets of 6 reps – I’m choosing front squats over back squats for their greater development of core strength (read: abs). I’ll probably take a slow tempo down, in addition to the pause, again to prolong that eccentric phase and grow muscle mass.
•  DB Incline Bench Press 3 sets of 20 reps –  A more classic bodybuilding exercise, I’m keeping the reps very high to force me to keep the weight light and focus more on technique, posture and control. Once again, this rep range will almost promote hypertrophy.

I’ve got a pulling, a squatting and a pressing movement (the three power assistance exercises). All my rep ranges are high and intensities low, so I can focus on hypertrophy and control. The snatch high pulls and pause front squats mean that despite my primary focus on aesthetic goals, I’ll be drilling weightlifting technique in this session in addition to getting stronger.

I plan to follow a three to four day a week cycle along this general pattern, with active recovery days in between in the form of Bikram yoga, rowing, plyometrics, etc.

A Thought on Self-Experimentation

So that’s my plan. I’ll give it three weeks and then check in. If it’s working, I’ll keep going until the end. If not, I should have enough time to switch back to my more traditional method of paleo diet + CrossFit-style conditioning to drop weight. I have no idea if this will work. It’s at odds with the nutrition advice I give my clients, and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else yet. Even then, it probably wouldn’t be for most people. Nonetheless, I believe in the importance of self-experimentation and trying new methods, programs and plans. While I do have the bad habit of ‘program ADD’ – jumping from program to program and goal to goal too quickly – there are benefits to that approach in moderation. People so often get stuck in their little bubble – CrossFit, weightlifting, bodybuilding, runners, tri-athletes, paleo, low-fat low-cal, vegetarian, vegan. All of these have their benefits, and by dipping into many wells, over time I think you can start to create something that takes the best of them all.