New plan

I'm getting bored with my nutrition lately. I have a system where I can keep my weight pretty much the same, but I'm not getting any stronger/loosing any fat. I'm going to do a 30-day diet program again. This time my goal is to get my body fat percentage down to 10%. I don't care what my weight is (it will probably be around 160lbs), I just want to loose fat. I'm going to break my effort into two categories: diet, and exercise.

Diet: I'm going to follow my own re-mix of the warrior diet, with some restrictions. Instead of eating a huge meal at once, I'm going to spread my food intake throughout the four hours I'm allowed to eat based on food combining principles of digestion times. I'm going to eat lots of fruit low glycemic fruit throughout the day, without anything else until four o'clock. Then I'll have a whole grain to tide me over until my main meal. Once I get to my main meal (around 6 or 7) I'll eat whatever I want, but not until I'm so stuffed I can't breath. Finally, before I go to bed, I'll drink a 10 to 15 gram protein shake (mixed with water or skim milk).

Exercise: I'm going to train for boxing five times a week. Four times just at the Y hitting the bag's and exercising, and once down at the "friendly house" (our community center) to spar with the guys. I'm also considering getting in shape for a 5k race.

Workout Goals

As you may already know, I've started powerlifting on a ten workout cycle. In other words I progressively add 5 lbs to each workout for ten workouts. Then at the end of the cycle I rest for a few days and when I start my next cycle I increase my first workout in the cycle by 20 lbs from the first workout of the last cycle. I lift and hit the bag 5 days a week, and on Saturday and Sunday I do some push-ups, and sprints (at least I'm going to start, I've been lazy).

At the beginning of this cycle I tested to see what I could bench and deadlift. I figure my bench was about 155 and my deadlift was about 225. This morning I pulled 215 no problem for a set of 5, and I put up 160 for a set of 5. I'm sure my improvements are due to the fact that I'm performing the same lifts every day and as I grow more familiar with them my technique improves. I'm getting close to not being able to do a set of 5 for my bench press, so I know I'm almost at my limit. My deadlift however is another story, my technique has improved just over the last week or so, and I think I could easily deadlift a 1 rep max of 250-275, but I'm not going to test it because I don't want to hurt myself. slow and steady, that's my style.

Powerlifting

I've been reading about power lifting today. Most people who train for that use the Bench Press, Squat, and Dead Lift. I'm not interested in the squat right now for two reasons.

1. its hard. the technical aspect causes the squat to be very easy to mess up. I'm going for quality in my work out, and want to concentrate on perfecting my dead lift, and bench press.

2. the dead lift uses most of your muscles anyways, so doing it with the squat is semi-redundant. I want to keep my time spent in the gym-per-day down to about an hour.

my first goal for dead lift is to be able to lift my body weight. and the same for my bench, which will take a lot longer. I still need to figure out what my 1RM is. I'll update my goals and current progress later. I'm still new to the dead lift, and my bench press isn't that great, so first I want to concentrate on form before dumping on extra plates. I'd say that right now I've been working at 60% to 70% as I'm trying to figure out how to do these things right.