• Keep up to date with Ausbb via Twitter and Facebook. Please add us!
  • Join the Ausbb - Australian BodyBuilding forum

    If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact contact us.

    The Ausbb - Australian BodyBuilding forum is dedicated to no nonsense muscle and strength building. If you need advice that works, you have come to the right place. This forum focuses on building strength and muscle using the basics. You will also find that the Ausbb- Australian Bodybuilding Forum stresses encouragement and respect. Trolls and name calling are not allowed here. No matter what your personal goals are, you will be given effective advice that produces results.

    Please consider registering. It takes 30 seconds, and will allow you to get the most out of the forum.

My diet / supps..

Infraction

New member
Hi guys, i'm new here and i'm after a bit of input on my current diet and training efforts.

I'm 30, 187cms and about 88kg. I've been training on home gym equipment on and off for years with enough effect to keep fit and strong but i've never really busted through and taken on a built look which is what i'm aiming to do at the moment.

After reading an absolute shit tonne of material of late I came to the conclusion that the main problems were too much isolation training, no compound lifts and not enough food.

Compound lifts are a problem for me though as I have problems doing squats and deadlifts due to a leg length discrepancy, which although mostly corrected with an orthotic in the left shoe just doesn't give me a symmetrical foundation to lift heavy weight without high risk of injury and back pain afterwards. Couple this with a dodgy right rotator cuff which had me quit bench pressing altogether about 2 years ago and you can imagine it's been tough going trying to shock the body into growth, especially with declining hormone levels.

I've recently started up deadlifts again at a low weight and i'm just doing my best to concentrate on form and try to keep these in my routine without injuring myself. I've also managed to get a couple of sessions of flat bench dumbell presses in each week with a very restricted range of motion and small weight increments to avoid aggravating my shoulder too much. Incline and vertical press are pretty much out at the moment, for any proper amount of weight anyway.

I was also probably training too often, 4 to 5 times a week for 1 to 2 hours sometimes, but this is at home with plenty of rest between sets and alternating muscle groups so I generally felt recovered enough each day, it didn't feel like I was overtraining probably because of the lack of compound lifts. However it has become apparent that I was probably doing a great job of burning up all the extra food I was attempting to eat for gains, and possibly training past the point of stuffing up cortisol/test levels post training.

So to my diet, i've read some of the plans on this site and it seems like i'm on track except perhaps for sheer volume.

I'm consuming 3 pure unflavoured WPI shakes a day, morning, post workout and just before bed, each with full cream milk, a gram or two of creatine mono added and just recently i've started cracking a raw egg into all of these shakes. I'm also considering switching the morning and bed time shakes to WPC because it's cheaper and so it lasts a bit longer.

Other than the shake breakfast is a bit light, a peanut muesli bar and a banana on work days or a fat bowl of nutri grain + banana on non-work days. Coupled with a shake that's about all I can eat without feeling too full and lethargic at that time of the morning.

2 - 3 hours later i'll have 75% of a foot long ham sub, my salad/sauce/bread selection works out at about 400calories for a 6inch according to subway website so say ~600 calorie lunch. Every odd week when I'm sick of subway and I can be bothered cooking up a big batch of chicken risotto or stir fry something or other, then it will be a decent serve of meat and rice instead.

Afternoon I'll either eat the rest of the sub from the fridge or have a can of tuna with a tomato and some cottage cheese / nuts.

Once home i'm currently having a ~50g scoop of sizeon max performance in water followed by a shot of espresso and a workout. 50g WPI + full milk + creatine + egg as a PWS. (I was adding a scoop of carbs aswell but ran out, i'm going to get either maltodextrin or waxy maise starch to add to the PWS.. any suggestion which one to choose?)

Then dinner is something like 200gm tuna + big salad of spinach/tomato/mushroom/leb. cucumber + 100gm cottage cheese. Or replace the tuna and cottage cheese with a steak or chicken breast and the same sort of salad/veg.

By then it's usually after 10pm so other than the occasional bit of chocolate that's usually it until I nail one last shake before bed.

Vitamin wise i'm taking two cenovis 25mg zinc tablets a day, and about 150mg magnesium. Plus 2 or 3 vitamin D3 1000UI's, About 6g fish oil spread over the day and the odd half a b-vitamin mainly if i've been drinking (which i'm doing my best to minimise to keep test levels good).

So I don't really know what the totals of everything are but I figure with the addition of eggs to all my shakes, some carbs to the PWS, and using tuna/nuts as my main snacks I won't be doing too badly??

Could add some boiled eggs as additional snacks probably, got that idea from this site already.. I'm really favouring the 95gm tuna cans though at the moment out of pure convenience but I will eventually get sick of them.

Anyway sorry for super long post, will appreciate anyone taking the time to comment :)

Cheers
 
Thanks.. only just discovered this forum so plenty to read for now!

This sudden desire to break through the plateau is basically all spurred on from being suddenly single and having the time and motivation to train and eat for greater results than before, and wanting the correct knowledge to do so.

I read and don't disagree with any of your one liners. Although regarding point 8, admittedly I have always relied on the amount of doms I feel the next day or so to gauge whether I worked hard enough or not.. I associated muscle soreness with growth, i'm curious as to why you specifically want to desociate the two ?

Other than that I guess I was just interested to see if there were any obvious holes in my approach to eating. Training is a bitch to work around injuries/symmetry issues so any idea's on what the best approach to growth is if you just can't smash heavy squats and bench press. I've pushed dumbell isolation exercises pretty hard but whilst it was effective for a while the progress soon levelled out. I'm going to buy a power tower so I can add chins and dips to my home workouts but other than that i'm a bit in the dark as to what else I can do.
 
Thanks.. only just discovered this forum so plenty to read for now!

This sudden desire to break through the plateau is basically all spurred on from being suddenly single and having the time and motivation to train and eat for greater results than before, and wanting the correct knowledge to do so.

I read and don't disagree with any of your one liners. Although regarding point 8, admittedly I have always relied on the amount of doms I feel the next day or so to gauge whether I worked hard enough or not.. I associated muscle soreness with growth, i'm curious as to why you specifically want to desociate the two ?

The whole shocking the system is another wording the fitness/bodybuilding industry like to throw around to make something seem exciting or whatever.

Look at it like this, if you always do leg entensions first then squats second, you will always feel the same due to the stimulus being taken by a different set of muscles when they are fresh etc. When you swap it around, the muscles that are now worked under fatigue conditions.

Muscle glycogen maybe at different levels, blood flow may not be as good, waste removal may not be as good, muscular activation may not be as good, flexibility may be better under the new stimuli conditions. Lots goes into it 'DOMS'.

So yes while they may in the end adapt to those new conditions (hence the soreness going away over time) if there has been no progression made in terms of load or volume, the level of soreness is/was meaningless for growth.

You could do the exact same workout in the exact same order year in and year out and as long as the stimuli and load can continue to increase, progression is made. Being sore or not didn't play a part in it at all.


Other than that I guess I was just interested to see if there were any obvious holes in my approach to eating. IMO you are focusing on little details that mean nothing in the big picture. Consume your food when you need or that suits. Specific timing offers no other benefit. Consuming sufficient macro and micro's are what counts, of which you maybe deficient in certain areas if you do not use a variety of food types or large enough volumes. Raw eggs have poor digestion and absorption at ~50%. It is fine to supplement your diet once you have tried to complete you diet, not just wing it :)

Training is a bitch to work around injuries/symmetry issues so any idea's on what the best approach to growth is if you just can't smash heavy squats and bench press. I've pushed dumbell isolation exercises pretty hard but whilst it was effective for a while the progress soon levelled out. I'm going to buy a power tower so I can add chins and dips to my home workouts but other than that i'm a bit in the dark as to what else I can do.Just do the best you can with what you have to work with. Progressive load increase is what leads to body composition adaptations and growth.
Answered in bold my friend :)
 
Gunner as I sort of explained those main lifts are the one's I can't do properly due to skeletal asymmetry. Pushing the weight on any of those compound movements results in either injury or uneven growth (or both).

I'm introducing dead lifts carefully with a starting weight of about 5x70, and doing flat bench dumbell press with about 25kg on each dumbell. Even with free dumbells it is still difficult to get my chest to grow evenly, without stacks of concentration on form and follow up isolation work on the right pec, I just get a big left pec and a big right shoulder which looks ridiculous, so my priority has to symmetric growth instead of size unfortunately.

- Thanks max i'll keep what you've said in mind. Interesting what you say about eggs given the number of people i've read banging on about how good they are!
 
Last edited:
All good mate.

FYI eggs are fantastic, they just need to be cooked. The enzyme that inhibits digestion is killed when cooked :)
 
How bad is your leg length discrepancy. It could simply be muscle tightness, I would see a physio for both your legs and shoulders.

As for your diet, it's pretty shit. Start with something like this, its pretty simple, its not the best system in the world, but it is effective and easy to add to.

Meal 1: Oats, milk, fruit

Now down a protein shake

Meal 2: Steak/chicken with rice/pasta

Now down a protein shake

Meal 3: Steak/chicken with rice/pasta

Now down a protein shake
 
Last edited:
Top