Halfway Through Hypertrophy I: My Results

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Background:
In Nov '19, I was 210 lbs of detrained human in the 25%+ body fat range. I barely fit into jeans claiming to be 36" waist. It wasn’t good.
Utilizing the Noom brand tools, I got down to 177 in early March, and I could fit into 32" waist jeans (my true waist was much larger). Noom taught me to log my food and weight daily and also got me in the habit of using a food scale for nearly everything. I developed a habit of calorie counting.

I also started SSLP again in February 3 days per week with relative regularity, predictably stalled on the lifts and hired a coach for some more advanced programming in May and set a couple new PR’s. Nothing to brag about, but still, PRs.

In June, I was back up to 192 - after getting very lazy with my food logging and estimations - and I measured my waist with the BBM method at 40.5" At this point, I embraced the BBM general health approach and decided to get my waist and fat under control.

Enter Hypertrophy I for Fat Loss:
I’d done 3x5 deadlift, bench, squat and press for so long (I’ve done 5 SSLP attempts in my life), that Hypertrophy I was a completely new way of thinking. For the first half exercises I chose:

  1. Low Bar with Belt
  2. Box Squat
  3. Standing OHP
  4. Pin Press
  5. Touch & Go bench
  6. Narrow Bench
  7. 303 Tempo Bench
  8. Conventional DL + Belt
  9. RDL
  10. Upright Rows
  11. Hack Squats
  12. Weighted Pushups 6 of these movements were completely new to me, and I had been doing zero GPP before.

Diet:
I set my macro targets at what they should be for 175lbs, my first target goal weight. This was probably wrong-headed, but it’s what I did. My personal goal was to hit my protein macros, but run as much of a deficit as possible. My average calories was 1624 over the 5 weeks.

What I Probably Did Right

  1. I followed all GPP recommendations
  2. With one small exception, I stayed exactly on schedule with workouts. I was able to do GPP during the exception.
  3. Measured and logged 98% of my food intake.
  4. Focused my diet on the macros from TBAB for fat loss.
  5. Spaced my meals 3-5 hours apart and very rarely had any calories between these meals.
  6. Didn’t care much about strength gains
  7. I took regular body measurementsWhat I Did Wrong:
  8. I messed up RPE in the beginning; totally new way of thinking and it took some time to get used to.
  9. I probably should have done ‘The Bridge’ first to get used to RPE. I was anxious to do something new, and the H1 page online sold me on trying it.
  10. A couple of times, I did the wrong movements on the wrong day in the wrong programming. I went from memory and ended up doing things like close grip bench AMRAP, instead of 303 bench. No big deal, but taught me to pay attention to the programming and how it changes. SSLP is just auto-pilot, so I wasn’t used to the daily and weekly adjustments.
  11. I didn’t hit my Protein macros often enough. I was used to counting calories, but it took me awhile to figure out a handle on my macros. None of the above is a big deal, except for the macros.

What I liked:

  1. Changing to a volume based program was a nice change of pace.
  2. Adding GPP that didn’t feel like it was hurting my gainzzz even though I wasn’t really going for gzzzz during this block.

What I didn’t like:

  1. The volume towards the end was brutal. Effective and I’m glad it’s there, but I didn’t LIKE it. It makes Week 6 feel like a walk in the park though.

e1RM Results:

  1. Squats, OHP and Box Squats e1RM started and stopped in basically the same spot.
  2. 303 Tempo Bench dropped every week; weird.
  3. Bench: +20lbs
  4. Deadlift +75lbs
  5. Close Grip Bench: +25lbs
  6. Pin Press: +35lbsBody Results
  7. 188lbs down to 183lbs (rolling 7 day average)
  8. Waist: 40.5" to 37.25 (measured with MyoTape)
  9. No other body measurements seemed to really change enough that I can’t attribute to inconsistency in process of measuring However, I look different than I did when I started. I’m a different shape than 5 weeks ago. Given my goals, I’m happy with the progress.
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Congratulations :slight_smile: That’s a really big decrease in WC and huge increase in DL weight for a handful of weeks.

303 Tempo bench is probably a later exercise on that day and I’m going to guess, based on your comment on volume, that you ended up (as time went on) getting more fatigued and didn’t have as much gas for the movement. Take a look at your other 3rd movement type exercises and see if (while they might not have gone down) if they didn’t quite keep pace with the increases you saw on the primary movements.

I also like the myotape. I was using my wife’s flexible tape measure at first and my WC was varying 1" or more per measurement (back to back) because I just couldn’t keep everything lined up well.

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The 303’s just wear me out in general. I did my first 303 squats today and I was huffing and puffing at the end. I think I probably started lower than I could have on some of the bigger lifts, like DL, since I’ve never really done that much volume work. I blame/credit the wide variations as getting used to RPE. New movements, like 303, I might have started higher and then the volume whipped me. I’m not worried. Overall, strength wasn’t my main target and even staying pretty flat on strength overall would have been a win.

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I did 530 squats a bit ago and I couldn’t do all 8 reps as prescribed–the first few reps were 530 but by the last couple of reps I was definitely more like 531 :slight_smile: