Coaching check-in

Two months ago on the day, I told you that I have a coach now, and today I wanted to give a first update on how that’s all going (do note we kicked off the coaching on August 12 so I am ending my 11th week this week).

In short: it’s been really great!

We email at least every week as a check-in and I can email any time I have additional questions or need anything, and schedule video calls as needed as well though I haven‘t needed to do that for a while now. Any need from feedback and I just send him a video of my exercises.

From a nutritional perspective, I’ve achieved all-time low body fat percentage and are approaching all-time low weight (as far back as I have measurements at least, which is 2011). Some way to go until the 10% goal before we switch to very slowly packing on mass instead, but hopefully by January I will be ready.

And workout-wise, things are going way better than I thought in a calorie restrictive state. I feel strong and motivated at the gym, and have set a couple of theoretical personal bests in AMAP (As Many As Possible, reps that is) tests for some of the key exercises (squat and deadlift specifically), so that is incredibly exciting.

It has not been all smooth sailing though. The weekends have been a challenge, see if you can spot a trend in the below graph.

Even without labels on the X and Y axis, I think you can guess this one. It is daily calorie consumption since the start of the coaching period. Can you guess the spikes? Weekends, indeed. I have been good on diet on most weekdays but the weekends have been a struggle. And this is by no means anywhere close to an extreme diet. We are talking about a 500 calorie restriction versus my base metabolic rate, so very reasonable and should amount to a healthy 0.45kg fat loss per week. But, I lack some control in weekends both with snacks and alcohol. Striving to do better in November so as to not have to adjust my deadline when I can start adding again.

With that said, this is my progress so far - the labels are left out on purpose as no need to show my exact numbers, more the trend that is interesting:

Back to the workout regimen - I have some more graphs I want to show you, to bring home the point on how effective just having a coach can be. So below we can see basically how much I have been working out per month over the last year. Think you can find the pretty sharp and so far consistent increase for all these different ways of measuring it.

And here the exercises where I have set new all-time records for hypothetical 1RM based on reps completed on these weights:

So, what's next? I have my first work travel coming up in long time starting tomorrow until next weekend, so a full week. It's long flights, 20 hrs one way, and of course time difference. I expect impact to sleep and nutrition, though I will of course do my best. But there's a social aspect to work travel and there will be dinners and the like - but I at least hope not to return back home with an increase. Time will tell. Workout-wise the gym supposedly has a "well-equipped" gym - and if that is true I intend to workout as normal and complete the coached sessions as they are laid out. If the gym is not well equipped, my coach will provide bodyweight-only workouts instead, or some sort of in-between depending on. I just love that flexibility - instead of getting stuck due to decision fatigue and not doing anything, he will just tell me what to do based on what is available - and I will feel good as long as I get those done.

After that it’s focus on hitting that 10% body fat target as mentioned, and we will see how long I need. Christmas will of course pose a challenge, but I can still be smart and save myself from overeating outside the few occasions where that is actually sort of expected. The home guard base training was rescheduled to February so that no longer pose a challenge, by then I really should be done with the calorie restrictive period so I can just “go for it” during that training.

I think that’s it for now! As I said in the beginning, I couldn’t be happier with how this coaching is working out and I am finding it incredibly worth the money as I feel stronger than in a long time - and that is with only 3 sessions a week versus the 4 I was doing very regularly before becoming a parent. I am just so much more efficient now.

I’ll end with a nice graph showing my last 3 months vs previous 3 months of muscle workout distribution and some other statistics.