Tues Feb 15

Deadlift day. It's been a while since I've deadlifted heavy, but I think it went well. I was more so concentrating on form but still put up some good weight for me so I'm very happy. Definitely going to be sore tomorrow; as my upper and lower back both felt fairly fatigued all day. Guess that is why most good trainers recommend only deadlifting heavy once in a while. Jason Ferruggia actually did a post on deadlifting on monday which was great timing for me. It has some great advice in there. It was a rather exhausting workout but I love a workout like that every once in a while. Just means I'll have to focus on recovery over the next few days. I decided to use the straight up pronated grip instead of the alternate grip that many people use; I just did that to try and increase grip strength. I think I'll keep doing that except on instances of doing things like 3-5 rep maxes. Did I mention I love deadlifting; along with squats, pull ups and glute ham raises they are my favorite exercises.

Food went like this:

7:30am Muesli with soy milk
11am Protein shake, apple, banana, vitamins (multi,b,c,fish oil)
12:30pm Leftover chickpea and spinach curry from last night
3pm Turkey, cheddar, spinach, tomato, dijon mustard on whole wheat
5:30pm Turkey, bacon, hummus, tabouleh, lettuce, tomato, cucumber on whole wheat wrap
9:30pm Smoothie - Mixed berries, 2 bananas, soy milk, soy protein, spinach, flax meal; fish oil capsule
11:30pm almonds, cashews, raisins, dried cranberries

Ate a lot today once again. Been getting hungry quite often which hopefully means I'm growing. I've seen small gains in muscle but very large gains in strength so far. It's only been about five weeks so I'm not expecting to see any size changes yet. Overall I'm very happy; it's more important for me to be strong than to be big as my goal is to be able to play rugby. Any size gains are just an added bonus of having some extra weight to throw around.