Reasons for working out...

I usually workout 4 days a week... Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. And atleast once every week I think of 'retiring' from Weightlifting (If only I can understand what that means). I'm bad at managing my time and every time I have some assignment or some report I start thinking of the 3 hours that go into Weightlifting on four evenings and the time I spend on doing some research, or the pain and injuries due to Weightlifting. The last two days have been really bad. I got some problem with my lower back and every now and then it gives me too much pain when I sit in class. I was thinking too many times to quit Weightlifting and focus totally on acads.

What I said was only one part of the story. The other side is what matters. The lower back pain I got right now is bcoz of what I did on Sunday - 160kg Sumo Deadlift for 4 reps, after doing 107.5kg squat for 3 reps. After squat and deadlift, I did a bench press of 74.8kg for 3 reps and then military press of 60kg for 3 reps. I go to our institute fitness centre only once a week, the other three days we practice in our Weightlifting Hall. The one day I go to the fitness centre, I start with something that really feels like a weight- 160kg deadlift and 100+kg squat isn't a small weight. There would be loads of guys who wouldn't even think of 160kg deadlift. And today was a good day too.. Last thursday I attempted 80kg power clean and couldn't do even one satisfactory rep. Today, I did 80kg power clean for 3 sets of 3 reps each, all of them quite good. And then I did 70kg snatch from the hang. After that, I did 90kg push jerk for 2 reps. These numbers are too good at the IIT level (considering the kind of lifts that happen in inter IIT). And by the way, my maximum deadlift is right now 170kg. And in the olympics, kids younger than me, of the same weight as I am, would peacefully clean and jerk that weight. That is what a body of my size is capable of. So I know I still have a long long long way to go before I can call it a day and retire.

And after the lifting, we (me, Vikrant, Asif, BalaG) went and had a nice chicken biryani. And now I'll peacefully crash. THIS IS LIFE....... Wake up early in the morning. Attend classes. Have a nice lunch. Go to classes again. Then a proper workout session. Then chicken biryani to eat. Come back to room and crash.

Now I think of a lot of guys I see in the gym.... They go there every day. Lift the same weight for months. Take the same 5kg dumbbell or 10kg dumbbell every time they go. Keep working out for 1 hour.. 2 hours.. Barbell curls, leg press, dumbbell press, lateral raises, arbit machines- 5 sets of each exercise, 10-12 reps of each. And they never make any improvement. Coz I've been seeing guys in that gym for an year or more and they still never seem to think of any real exercise or any heavy weight. The big guys lift bigger weights, small guys lift smaller weights. But whatever weight they lift doesn't really change. The first few weeks, they can lift more than what they could earlier (this improvement is what we call the "Noob gains"). And what drives them to waste 2 hours of their time every day? There seems to be no pride or any kind of gain in what they're doing.

We go into the gym. Load a hundred kg on the bar. Squat it like we're going to die if we can't do that one rep. Keep puffing each breath. Shout our lungs out. Totally exhaust after each heavy set. That's some real intensity. It's not like lifting a 5kg dumbbell 10 times. And the pride and the feel that comes after squatting a 100kg is not something you can get easily. Beating your previous max after building up for that one heavy rep for 2 weeks is something that these people miss.

Every time I see people do dumbbell curls or calf raises or some other stuff, I'd want to go to them and say "Stop this shit. Put 70kg on the bar and squat."  These dudes workout for months and years and have great biceps and they cannot deadlift 110kg (Which some of us, weighing less than 60kg, did in our first year). They are too damn scared to squat. But who's to blame? Everyone around is doing the same old dumbbell curls and the lats pull downs. 200 guys go to the gym and less than 10 guys ever squat or deadlift. Only for one hour in the entire week can they get to see the bar loaded above 100kg. And people say all kinds of crap- squat is bad for your kness, deadlift is bad for your back, bench press is bad for your shoulders, you should sit down and do military press, you should not do squat and deadlift on the same day..... That's what people say when they cannot face those exercises because they're too damn weak to do them properly and look for ways to escape the exercise.

Whatever "the dudes" do in the gym is their personal choice. But ask any guy who does some heavy squat or some heavy deadlift what they feel after beating their personal max. It's the pride. It's that feeling that you have conquered something and that feeling of being rewarded after a lot of fight. People watch movies and think about all kinds of adventures, about how the hero would get up after being dangerously injured and all. For me, my adventure is right there in the gym. Getting up with 110kg on my shoulders is a challenge and every time I live to that challenge I feel that my character has been testified by the iron that I lifted.. And IRON NEVER LIES.

Arbit

This is just a short note. A small message.
I see a lot of people take pride in everything except themselves. People who take pride in Sachin Tendulkar, taking his century to be their own, taking a hit movie of some actor to be their own, taking some singer's success to be their own. People boast of the greatness of their country and proudly say that they are great because they're citizens of some great country. What I think is, people start doing this when the have no reason to think good of themselves. Sachin doesn't have to boast to his friends that he opens the innings with Sehwag. He has enough reason to believe that he deserves everything.
It will make a huge difference when people start taking pride in themselves rather than in their idols. When they think that their own work commands even the smallest respect rather than the whole country bowing to their idols. For instance, one guy might live his entire life saying he's a fan of Sachin Tendulkar and just paining some Dhoni fan or a Yuvi fan. These guys think a Yuvi fan is an inferior creature and just being a fan of Sachin makes a person great. But when this guy starts thinking that his batting or his bowling is what makes him superior to the other guy and not being a fan of Sachin, it'd be an entirely different thing.

Atheism

I'm an atheist, but I believe in God. You rarely hear that statement. Atheism is something that is very often misunderstood. These days you see a lot of people claiming they're atheists and they comment on theists being superstitious and all.

What the 'so-called' atheists say is, no one has ever proved the existence of God. They take superstitions, traditional faiths, mythical stories and folk tales as examples and say that people have been made to believe in things such as worship and spirituality and that logic and reasoning will say that most of that is not true. If we consider whatever is part of most religion, we can straight away say that a lot of it cannot be true. I'll take several cases and talk for and against religious ideals.

For instance, the sun is worshiped in a lot of religions. He's called the 'Sun God'. Now we "explain" that the sun is just a lot of hydrogen and helium, undergoing nuclear fusion and held together by gravitational forces. The notion of Sun being a God is out of question. But then, no scientist can ever say that life on earth is possible without sun. The sun powers the earth. Then it becomes our obvious duty to worship the Sun. Just like they say you must respect your parents, elders and teachers, you must worship the sun that made our life possible. In one way, worshiping the sun, or similarly worshiping the moon is justified, as long as it only means to have a little appreciation of their importance. But you often see things blown out of proportion- pujas and sacrifices and a lot of things being done to 'please' the sun. This is where religions go wrong. Then, we can also argue that that's not religion- it's just superstitions or a group of people faking religion to deceive others and get benefited. But forgetting these superstitions that are not really an integral part of a religion, most traditions are driven by good reason, like respecting the sun for powering the earth, the moon for giving light during the night, parents and teachers for looking after you and for making you what you are, friends for their company and all, nature for everything it presents. Most things seem justified. The idea of God, I presume, came up because people knew that something was very important and beyond their control but they could not explain why it happens. Now, we know how it rains and what causes rain, and we can even 'make it rain'. Yet people pray for rain because it's too important.

Second, the question of fate. Atheists firmly say that man controls his fate and there's no divine intervention and all, and theists firmly say that's not true. Consider this- Say there was a very small speck of dust that fell in Sachin Tendulkar's eye when he was a small kid and was playing a very important match. He might have got out that ball and he might have been disappointed and frustrated or whatever. There is every chance that his life could have completely changed if a series of such small events happened. I'm just making an extreme case. But things like this 'can' happen. Or consider a small piece of paper that's carried along with the wind and a guy finds that that paper is some love letter or something that someone he knew wrote to him or someone else and then a lot of things may happen after that small thing. What I'm trying to say here is, very small things can have a major influence in life. There are a lot of things beyond a man's control.

Then about our consciousness itself. Atheists say science explains everything and all (that's because they know nothing about science. I don't remember any great scientist who did not believe in God. There are just too many things science as we know now cannot explain). From what we know right now, the brain is a network of neurons. When there is a certain electrical signal at the end of a neuron, it responds in a certain way. The brain is just a very complicated network of these. Now, the response of a neuron depends only on its structure. How it should respond is already 'programmed' in it. For a given signal, at some certain conditions, its response would be unique, or that is what the whole of science says. Cause precedes effect. The brain is a huge network of these cells. Now, one can easily deduce that the response of the brain depends only on two things- on its state, and on the input signal or whatever you feel. Essentially, what we think as 'control' or 'consciousness' turns out to be just a function mapping our response to our current state and the input. The state of your mind changes when your brain responds to something. To me, it feels like I'm only a very sophisticated robot with an algorithm that decides how I should react to something and I have turned into what I am because of everything that happened to me till now. Ultimately, there's no control. I cannot put this thing clearly in here, but you should reflect on this- think about how your brain may react to something.

Then the pride 'atheists' take in talking about all the stuff science explains and all. That's all wrong. First, a lot of phenomena still remain unexplained, that is, they do not have governing equations. A lot of governing equations do not have general solutions (for instance, the Navier stokes equation). And even if we can write equations for everything and also find general solutions for each of those equations, the uncertainty principle straight away proves that infinite accuracy is not possible, that is, you can never supply perfect boundary conditions to the equations, and hence can never predict anything with infinite accuracy.

Now turning to religions. As I've already said, worshiping to 'please' god makes no sense, atleast when people worship the sun and the moon or the rain. Second, we can make a lot of arguments to say that most religions preach false stuff. Let's take Hinduism for example. In all our myths, there was only one country, India and everything that even the so-called gods knew was in India. How could the gods not know about the rest of the world? Even Christianity has this problem, how can the entire world be just Europe? Why would god not know about the rest of the world? And then, these religions say that the earth is the most important place in the universe and the Sun and the moon and the stars exist only to light the earth. Why would there be millions of huge stars so far away, some some thousand times bigger than the earth, to just give some little lighting to the earth?
And then there is this idea of heaven, hell and all... If the so called god knows everything and is everywhere, he obviously knows about what any guy is doing, and he is controlling that guy. If you are playing 'mario' game and say you don't play well, it's totally your mistake because you screwed up. You can't say it's mario's mistake for not playing properly. And if everything else in the game is also under your control, then there seems to be no obvious reason for anything to possibly go wrong. They say god tests you.. what's he testing if he knew everything already and is controlling you? And man is the best thing god ever created- and yet birds fly and man does not. Just a look at the multitude of life and you can draw conclusions. Physically, man is far inferior to a lot of other creatures. The best part of religions and of belief in god is, people tend to act 'morally' out of fear for god or hell or whatever. Then there are also rules that govern social behavior. There are a lot of positives that can be drawn from religious knowledge. But blindly following them is definitely not a good thing.

There are a lot of incompatibilities in religions and any atheist forum will point these out. But the fact remains that a lot of things are still not properly known. The most science has done till now is to relate things. The whole of science and math is based on certain axioms that you must accept if you are to proceed. You cannot question those axioms. There can only be a 'what has happened' question, but not the 'why has it happened that way' question at the fundamental level. If you can know 'what has happened' at the fundamental level, you can explain 'why has it happened' at higher levels. The idea of a God is merely our lack of knowledge and incompetence. And I would accept the idea of a supernatural force, one that made nature be the way it is, made the big bang happen if it ever did, and yet I would reject most things that religions say. I call myself an atheist because I do not approve any religion. But I must believe in God because a lot of things are yet unanswered. Noticed how I used 'God' in all paras except the previous and the one before where I used 'god'? It's because I don't believe in religious gods.

Any comments are welcome and I'd love to have a healthy debate on the topic.

Build up to the 'Best Physique' competition

Tomorrow, 5th February, Saturday, we have the "Best Physique" competition at IIT Madras. I competed in the competition in the last two years too, without winning it. Probably because I'm not bulky or because I still have a lot of fat on me. But this time, being the Powerlifting captain, I'm responsible for organizing the competition and this makes the competition a little more special. This time I put a little more fight for the competition that I did the last two years and I'll briefly tell what I think did right and what I did wrong.

The conventional training style for pro-bodybuilders has two phases- a bulking phase when they grow muscle and mass, and a cutting phase when they lose most of the fat( and a little muscle too). Typically these phases last for some months. I tried to follow the same, though in a different way- I scaled down the months into weeks. I had to do this because I had only a month before the competition. Till December 16 I was busy doing Olympic Weightlifting, and then a 2 weeks off from Weightlifting, and all the time I had left was January. So, any pro would just laugh it off if someone say's he's going on a 3-week bulking phase. Hopefully, no serious bodybuilders are reading this, so I'll just go on.

Bulking: From Jan 2nd to Jan 23rd.

The routine: 20-rep squat program.
The routine is kind of self explanatory, I do 20 reps of squat with a weight and each session I add 2.5kg. I started at 75kg for 20 reps on Jan 2nd. 2 weeks into the program, I started giving up on reps. I managed 20 reps of 82.5kg. Then I did 17 reps of 85kg, 14 reps of 87.5kg and 17 reps of 90kg, the last one on Jan 23rd. I did a total of 7 sessions in 22 days, so almost 1 session in 3 days (And I also did 6 sessions of Olympic Weightlifting in the 22 days). Other than the squat 'my' routine had 10 reps deadlift, weighted pushups, military press and barbell rows, all high reps.

The diet:
Probably the most I ever ate.Breakfast had 8-10 bread slices, 1 glass of tea and 1 glass of milk (I usually eat only 5 bread slices and drink 1 cup of tea). Lunch had 8-9 rotis, with curry , and 2 cups of curd (Usually, it's only 4-5 rotis and 2 cups of curd). Dinner remained almost the same- dosa or puri or whatever was available in mess. In the evening, I drank 2 glasses of milk (earlier only 1 glass of tea). After workout, a glass of fruit juice, and before sleeping, another half litre of milk. Other than this, I was eating some 3 eggs a day. And this was all the food I ate, no chips, no biscuits, no pizzas and stuff.

The result:
Probably the most important part is this. Apart from the strength gains, I gained a little more than 2.5kg. I started at 62.8kg and ended at 65.5kg. And the fat I gained wasn't all that much, atleast 20% of the weight I gained could have been muscle.


Cutting: Jan 26th to Feb 4th

The routine isn't any special. I got back to doing Olympic Weightlifting 3 days a week. The fourth day, I did some heavy squat for low reps, military press, etc... The last 4 days I have been pumping up- Doing a full body routine with 3 exercises for each muscle group except the biceps (I'm not allowed to grow my biceps coz it'll later pain in Weightlifting), 3 sets of each exercise to 10-12 reps. I usually am a big fan of jogging, but a minor ankle injury prevents me from doing it. I hate to do cardio on those cycling machines and stuff in the gym, so haven't been doing any cardio except for the high-rep workout.

The diet:
This is the major part of the cutting phase. I drastically cut down on food. 
For 3 days, I was at home (during Saarang). Those three days my diet was too awful- breakfast was 150g of boiled chicken, lunch was 3 omelets, 2 more in the evening, and another 150g of chicken in the night. Other than this, 1-2 laddoos a day (couldn't resist, was just craving for anything sweet I could find. This part screwed up my entire diet).
Then, after coming back to insti,
Breakfast: 4 slices of bread and 1 glass of tea
Lunch: 3-4 rotis with curry, 1-2 cups of curd
Evening: 1 glass tea. No fruit juice after workout. No milk after dinner.
Dinner: 1 plate of chilly chicken or chilly beef.
Before sleeping- 2 or 3 eggs.
I cut down on my diet, but the volume of my workout remained the same.

The result:
Cut down weight from 65.5kg to 63.5kg. Not sure about the strength losses, hopefully I haven't lost much.

Today and tomorrow:
Today, I started to dehydrate. Today, I had 2 glasses of tea in breakfast and in the evening, and 3 slices of bread in the morning and 2 rotis in lunch, and 4 egg whites in the evening. And till the evening, I drank not more than a 100ml of water. And I'm going to dehydrate a lot when I go to pump now. My dinner will stay as usual, 1 plate of chilly beef. Tomorrow morning, I'll probably go jogging. In the afternoon, I'll thulp at lunch, will load up on carbs. And just before competition, I'll eat a full pack of glucose. I won't be drinking more than may be 200 ml of water till tomorrow evening. Just for comparison, I usually drink 3-4 litres of water a day.

Just to mention, this time we have two body weight classes- under 65kg and above 65kg. The first guys in both classes compete for the 'Mr. IITM 2011' title. I am quite optimistic of putting first in the under weight category. And if I can get very lucky, maybe I'll win the title too....
The workout was pretty much fine, but the diet part was too painful. No rice, eating less than half of what I ate last month, no extra stuff like chocolates or chips or biscuits or anything else. Now pro-bodybuilders do this thing for months during their cutting their phase. And they almost totally stop drinking water for atleast 3-4 days before competition.

Bodybuilding isn't as easy as people think it is. It isn't just about going into the gym and lifting a couple of dumbbells. It's about control and character. People say those big guys like Arnold and Ronnie did drugs to build that body, but they forget about all the pain they go through when they workout and when they stop eating all the junk and eat very specific food.

Secrets to mass gain

"Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but don't nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weights"
- Ronnie Coleman

Before I proceed further, I'd make two points-
1. I came from 62.8kg on Jan 2nd to 65.5kg on Jan 25th.
2. I started my 20-rep squat program at 75kg for 20 reps on Jan 2nd and ended at 90kg for 17 reps (Gave up on the 18th rep) on Jan 23rd. (Fortunately, I thulped that night at Daawat... Nothing better than loads of chicken after a heavy squat session).

The two things happening together was NOT a coincidence. If you think gaining 2.5kg in 3 weeks is very easy, this post is not for you. I am a Weightlifter ( actually, the sport is called Olympic Weightlifting) and I do Olympic lifting atleast 2 days a week. The Olympic lifting routine doesn't help much in mass gain. The effective mass gain workout I did was only for 2 days a week. And I gained mass at the rate of about 100g a day. And I can still see my abs so a significant amount of the 2.7kg I gained was muscle.

Disclaimer:

I'm no professional bodybuilder. I'm still a beginner and that too an Olympic lifter. All the bodybuilding I do is only for our insti competition. Most stuff I talk about is from the research I do on the net, from what I see from others, what makes sense to me and what I learnt from my experience. I do all this out of my passion for the sport and not for money, so you can trust what I say.

This post isn't about what I did, a lot of info on my routine is in my previous post. This is for junta who go to the gym everyday and want to gain a lot of muscle and mass. That my routine worked for me is too obvious from the numbers I put. I see a lot of junta working out in the gym, with a couple of dumbbells, lifting them in every arbitrary angle they want to and looking into the mirror after every set, expecting their arms to grow by a couple of inches. Junta do a lot of crunches and look back in the mirror expecting a 6-pack. Fortunately, it doesn't work that way. When I started this blog I put in a lot of posts about how to workout, but I'm doing this again.

First, I'll write about 2 things that everyone should know about getting a ripped body, especially the abs. 

1. The abs
The abs, or abdominals, is a muscle group that every one has. There are two layers of fat above and under the muscle, called the subcutaneous and visceral fat. The abs can be seen only if the subcutaneous fat is reduced. When the body stores fat, it first start storing it over your abs. When you try to cut fat, first the fat deposited in all other parts of the body is last and finally fat over your abs starts decreasing. So, the only way to visible abs is fat loss. If you try doing a lot of crunches or leg raise, you only build the abs, which is the muscle inside. The size of the muscle grows, but the fat over it still remains. Your tummy gets bigger because of increased abs, but it doesn't get ripped because of the fat.

2. Fat loss
There are only 2 healthy ways to do this- 1. Diet control and 2. Cardio.
Diet control: Carbs and fat are used mostly as energy. When you don't use the calories you eat, the extra carbs and fat get stored as adipose tissue (which we call fat). Protein is mostly used for building muscle, though it is also used for producing energy. When you have higher protein content and lower carb content in your diet, the amount of unused carbs and fat will be lesser, hence less adipose tissue. The amount of protein consumed by the body as energy will be lesser than your protein intake and hence your muscle size either remains the same or grows. Fats found in oils, cheese,etc.. are useful for the body. Taking them is totally important, but you shouldn't take too much of them.
Cardio: When I say cardio, it means any endurance workout, anything that lasts continuously for more than 20 minutes or so. When the blood glucose in your body is used up, it turns to stored fat (the adipose tissue) and the stored protein (the muscle) for energy production. Blood glucose is exhausted only after you do cardio for a significant time, say 10 minutes. The rate at which fat is converted to glycogen is slow, hence you cannot keep jogging at a high speed. The body consumes a higher percentage of fat and a lower percentage of protein. If your only aim is to lose fat, like that over the abs, cardio is the best thing to do. But the side effect- muscle loss because of burning protein is always there, so it's not a good idea to do cardio if you're trying to build muscle. But this can be negated by eating protein (such as egg whites, meat, etc.. ) before and after workout.
You cannot lose fat and build muscle at the same time.


Now getting into the actually secrets of mass gain. To put it simply in a single line, it's the first line in this post. You've grown into what you are depending on your genetics, your diet and the lifestyle. The first thing is something you cannot help. The diet and lifestyle can be changed. If you want your muscles to grow, the only thing you can do is to make them grow. They should have no other option. This can be done in only one way, load them up to a point where the muscles know they cannot take that load unless they get bigger and stronger. So, everytime you go into the gym, you must lift more than what you lifted the last time. Even an increase of 1kg or 1 rep is sufficient, but the increase must be there, or else you're going no where. For mass gains, you need to do these 4 things:

1. Compound exercises: The almighty squat, the deadlift, bench press, military press, pushups, pullups, bar dips and barbell rows, all in proper form. No half squatting, no cheating in presses, no dancing in pullups. If you do it, you do it properly. Compounds involve more muscles at the same time since the weight has to be stabilized and pushed, and this induces a higher hormonal response which results in greater gains. Also, the entire system, joints and the bones also feel the weight. The movements are more natural as opposed to the stuff you do on the useless machines you find in the gym.

2. Rest and recovery: Just remember this. Workout for only 3-4 days a week, only 1 hour a day, only 4-6 exercises per session, 2-4 sets per exercise and only 5-12 reps per set. Sleep for atleast 8 hours a day.

3. Diet: The only way to gain mass is to eat a lot more. Eat a lot of 'healthy' food. No chips and pizzas and burgers. Eat healthy food, maintaining a high protein content. Never miss breakfast or lunch or dinner.

4. Intensity and progression: Don't work at your maximum intensity. You must go through a progression. If your max is 60kg bench press, start at around 50kg for 3 reps. The next session, go for 52kg of 3 reps, after that 54kg for 3 reps, keep going like this till you stall. Say you stall at 58kg, you could do only 2 reps. Then start again at 54kg or 55kg for 3 reps. Go for 2 kg or 2.5 kg more in the next session. Only when you keep progressing in each session, you can expect a regular gain.

My Weightlifting - New routines

I guess the graph speaks for itself... Being an engineering student, I really like to plot stuff on graphs. And this graph is about my increasing bodyweight this month (till 20th the weight is what I measured, after that I put on the expected trend, used some function in MS Excel for that). As you can see, I'm putting on more weight. For the first time after 6 months, I'm actually trying to gain weight. We have our institute bodybuilding competition happening on February 5th, so this little fight is for that. Other than the actual weight increase, the routine is what appeals more to me. This routine called the "20 rep squat" routine, or the "Milk and Squats" routine is an old school approach to monstrous muscle gains and I tried to go through it.

Note: The two routines I'm going to describe is not for beginners. I consider myself an advanced beginner. I can squat 1.5 times my body weight with very good form.


To put this routine in simple words, it's just that everytime I go to the gym, I put some weight on the bar and do one set of 20 reps of squat. After the squat, I do 2 sets each of stiff leg deadlift, pullups (or barbell rows), bar dips (or weighted pushups) and military press. SLDL, barbell rows and military press, I go for 10 reps. Weighted pushups I go for 15 reps. Pullups and bar dips are till failure. The more important part of the routine is not in the sets or the reps, but in the progression. Every session I'm supposed to add 2.5kg to the squat and barbell rows, 1.25kg to military press, weighted pushups and 5kg to the SLDL. So, in 2 and a half weeks, I find myself going from 75kg squat for 20 reps to 87.5kg squat for 20 reps (I had to do 20 reps of 87.5kg last Sunday, but gave up on the 15th rep), and from 100kg SLDL for 10 reps to 120kg SLDL for 10 reps (I do squat more often than I do deadlift). The result is very obvious- weight gain at almost 1kg/week.

The obvious fact that I have to eat a lot more than I usually eat need not be stated- after the body can only grow from food I eat. I'm currently eating 8-10 slices of bread in breakfast (previously only 6 slices), 8 rotis in lunch (previously only 4-5) and dinner is pretty much the same. In addition to this, I drink 1 'glass' each of tea and milk in the morning, 2 glasses of milk in the evening and half litre more milk in the night before sleeping, and a fruit juice after workout. I'm supposed to be eating about 5-6 eggs a day, but it hasn't been happening lately.

Other than the 20 rep squat routine, which I go through only once or twice a week, I'm about to start a different custom made routine, based loosely on the Wendler's 5/3/1 routine. To outline the routine, it's like this:
The actual program says I should workout 4 days a week, 1 day for each core exercise: squat, deadlift, military press, bench press. But I'm taking only squat (for 2 days in the week), military press and deadlift (for 1 day each in the week).

First week of the cycle, on all core exercises I do, I do 3 sets of 5 reps each. The first set at 60% of my 1 rep max, second set at 70%, 3rd at 80% of my 1 rep max. First and second sets, I stop at 5 reps. But the third set, I do as many as I can after the 5th rep.
Second week of the cycle, I do 3 sets of 3 reps each. The first set at 65% of my 1 rep max, second at 75% of my 1 RM, third at 85% of my 1 RM. Again, I don't stop at the third rep for the third set.
Third week of the cycle, I do first set at 70% of my max for 5 reps. Second set at 80% of my 1RM for 3 reps. The third set, I do at 90% of my 1 RM for as many reps as I can do.
Fourth week of the cycle is deloading. 3 sets of 5 reps each at 40%, 50% and 60% of my 1rep max.


After 4 weeks, I start the second cycle. For the second cycle, the 1 RM that I based my calculations on for the first cycle will be increased by 2.5kg for military press, 5kg for squat and 10kg for deadlift.


Currently my 'guess' of my 1 rep maxes are 117kg for back squat, 65kg military press and 175kg deadlift. And for the Powerlifting competition we have at our institute (on April 9), I'm targetting 125kg back squat, 90kg bench press and 195kg deadlift.




Other from the Weightlifting stuff, I got into the habit of switching off my cell phone during classes....

Patriotism

Two days back I was watching a video on facebook. A friend of mine shared it and it was about patrioism. Video shows how people say 'I love my country', 'proud to be an Indian', etc... And then there a lot of poor, illiterate people and a lot of people living in slums without proper food and all, about all the crime and corruption that has become too common in India. Every guy who saw that video was asked to share it and so they shared. Everyone gets a little high on patriotism when they watch such stuff and wants to do something that will change the conditions of life in the country.

To change something, what must you do? Do something about population control? Do some sting operation to expose corruption? Kill terrorists? Punish all those mafia and dons and all? Whatever the answer is, the bigger question is, are you capable of doing that, even if you are, are you willing to do that, make a commitment for some 20 years to something like that. Just to get some form from a government office you have to go around them for weeks and you get too pissed off just by that, a change in the system takes a lot more than just that. And definitely, it never happens like in the movies.

We blame politicians, that they do not do their jobs. That they take up that particular position to serve the people, but they do not do that. If Dhoni drops a catch, we start with "WTF... It was such an easy catch and he..". How many of us can take a catch like that? That doesn't really matter, because when you have a player at international level, he is supposed to take those tough ones, he is supposed to win matches for the country, he is supposed to score runs in every innings, he is supposed to put up a decent performance before the media. Everyone is "supposed to" be doing something.

Now, what about you, me, us... Students. What are we supposed to do? Do you really think you are doing what you're supposed to do? People get into a school because they want to learn, if they just want to put peace, they can just sleep at home. The worse cases, people get into institutes like IITs and then start cribbing saying this is not good, that's not good, I'm not enthued in this, I don't give a shit about this, blah blah blah. If you did not want to mug, if you did not want to put fight for acads, why the duck did you even write JEE?

How many people going to college know what's happening in classes? How many can put it into use. I have a feeling it's only around 5 percent in an average college- 5% of people can appreciate what they're being taught, others just mug it off for exams and forget it after those 3 hours. What would happen if this 5% were turned to 25%? To 50%? I'm not talking just number, I'm talking about the quality of the civil engineer who built that 20 floor building in the city centre. The rate at which the country progresses is definitely in proportion with the quality of the people who work in some field. If the standard engineer in some ship building company is another Isaac Newton, he can build a better ship with lighter weight with higher speed with lower fuel consumption at a lower cost.

Extend this to law schools and medicine schools. Probably the same numbers apply here too, I'm not sure though. If every professional school increases its useful intellectual output by 10 times, or even 3-5times, India would become the best in no time.
In Asian games China got nearly 200 golds and India got 15 golds and we were too proud about that, that was our best performance after some decades. That's because every dude plays some sport only to impress a girl or that bunch of guys who are putting pseud or just to escape from all the shit in his life, but how many are really serious about that particular sport? How many are ready to give his job away because he got a chance to 'raise the bar'? I've known some weightlifters, some really go hard at it, push as far as they can till it's not physically possible anymore, and some just think they're fighting too f-ing hard and give up when they get the slightest pain.

Another thing, if you were to trust your life with someone, or heck, if you've earned some 10 lakh rupees (you fought really hard for that cash) and you have to give it to someone so that that guy can invest it, open a store or do some other business with that money and in the end give you a share in the profit, who would you give that cash to? To this dude who's too damn irresponsible, who pays to go to school, pays for the bus, and then goes there and peacefully sleeps, boozes atleast twice a month, spends a lot of cash in fags, watches a lot of movies as if there were nothing else to do, or may be does drugs too? Or would you rather give it to the guy who's more responsible, boozes or fags, but is yet under control and does his work on time? Which kind are you really? The question is, can you trust your life, your cash, your partner with yourself?

I'm no professional writer, I'm not sure if I've put the point through. What I'm trying to say, if I'm saying something, is, if you really want to do something for the country, or for your parents, or for anyone, you don't need to make donations or go to schools to educate kids and all, atleast do what you're supposed to do without fooling around. If you go to school, try to know what's happening there, if you play some sport, aim for something, don't just hang your nuts in the field. Be responsible.