Seriously Bummed Out

[Str8crazy23]

Yes Sir, 37. Will be first ever cycle of anything. I’m 162, 5’8. Already pretty lean as most of my life I was the skinny kid… age is finally catching me though lol.

Honestly Id like to get up to about 180 completely leaned out. Currently max bench is 185. Id love to be hitting 200 consistently. Ultimately Id like to end up at a solid 180 with little to no body fat.

[Honkey_Kong]

Yes Sir, 37. Will be first ever cycle of anything. I’m 162, 5’8. Already pretty lean as most of my life I was the skinny kid… age is finally catching me though lol.

Honestly Id like to get up to about 180 completely leaned out. Currently max bench is 185. Id love to be hitting 200 consistently. Ultimately Id like to end up at a solid 180 with little to no body fat.

How long have you been training? If you want your bench to go up, do some research in your area and find a good coach. Watch some YouTube videos of guys who lift a lot of weight and study their technique. Then bring your phone on the floor when you're lifting and get a cheap phone stand for it and videotape yourself doing your working sets every week and study what you're doing good and where you're failing. Treat it like any other sport. Make small changes to your technique and practice them until they become habit. Then make more changes as needed doing the same method.

And for the diet what I'd recommend right now is for you to not make any changes to your diet for a week, but record everything you eat and drink including portion sizes. Then after a week figure out the calories and macros you're eating on a daily basis. Then increase the protein by 30 grams per day (this could be a simple protein shake) and reduce your overall caloric intake (if you're trying to lose weight) by a small amount. Small changes to your diet make big differences over time. It could as small as not having a daily candybar (I don't know what your diet is, I'm just using this as an example). The key is to make small changes and when you plateau, make more. Otherwise you'll never stick to it.

And as for how lean you want to be. Be realistic. you think professional bodybuilders are carrying single-digit BF% year round? After their season is over most of them put some fat on.

[Str8crazy23]

Honkey thank you for all the advice. Currently 5-6 days a week for the past year. To be honest with you, before that I was a couch potato. A regular drinker for 15 years & a smoker for 20 years. I quit the drinking and smoking after the separation and picked up my first year sober about two weeks ago.

Fitness had always been something I dreamed about & I had not even consider doing any sort of “extras” etc until I met a guy in the gym thats pretty hard core into lifting. He was the one that said a cycle would help me blow up rather quick as long as I continued training the same & ate properly. Thats when I started doing all the reading on it.

I will definitely implement what you said, to consistently put the weight on would you say aiming for 3000 calories a day would be right? Thanks again

[Honkey_Kong]

Honkey thank you for all the advice. Currently 5-6 days a week for the past year. To be honest with you, before that I was a couch potato. A regular drinker for 15 years & a smoker for 20 years. I quit the drinking and smoking after the separation and picked up my first year sober about two weeks ago.

Fitness had always been something I dreamed about & I had not even consider doing any sort of “extras” etc until I met a guy in the gym thats pretty hard core into lifting. He was the one that said a cycle would help me blow up rather quick as long as I continued training the same & ate properly. Thats when I started doing all the reading on it.

I will definitely implement what you said, to consistently put the weight on would you say aiming for 3000 calories a day would be right? Thanks again

Right now, I wouldn't focus on any generic calorie number. I would worry about find out what you're currently eating normally. For there we can tweak that a little here and there to meet your goals. If you decide "today I'm going to go from drinking liters of coke, eating junk food nonstop and cut calories down to say 2000 calories when you're used to eating 4000, it's not going to be long before you start having "cheat" days and from there it won't be long before you abandon it.

But let's say you eat 4000 calories per day and we got you to drop to 3800 calories. that's 200 calories dropped. In about 17 or 18 days that's a pound of fat gone (in theory. In practice there will be more or less fat dropped and probably a little muscle too). But you see what I mean? A small little change that you probably won't even notice will over the course of time make actual real differences.