SixEightFitness featured in Muscular Development Magazine

If you haven't picked up the brand new June issue of Muscular Development, now is the time to do so and  catch my first appearance in a bodybuilding magazine.

Ok I haven't made it on the cover of Muscular Development...yet!!! and also the word appearance is slightly exaggerated, however a picture of me with IFBB pro Bodybuilder Shawn Rhoden made it in the latest issue on page 36.

MD June Issue 2013

Page 36

At the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, I had the opportunity to meet Shawn and take a picture with him. However since he didn't want to look short next to my 6'8", he decided to grab a stool and stand on it for the picture. While my girlfriend was snapping the picture for me, a photographer from MD happened to be at the scene and take advantage of this humorous situation. 

Zoom

The "uncropped" picture

Today I am less than one week out from my competition and am eagerly looking forward to it. Besides the anticipation to hit the stage again, present my improvements and hopefully place well, I cannot wait to finally "eat" again and get some energy back. 

The last couple of weeks of modified carb drops with several days of low or almost zero carbs have taken its toll. I feel exhausted and slightly lethargic. Last week I also started doing cardio twice a day which further decreased my energy levels and increased my hunger. 

So being tired, exhausted and hungry, it is needless to say, that my life has been quite exciting for the past weeks. I would get up at 5am, do my 30 min of cardio, eat, work out, eat again, go to work, eat, eat, eat, come home, cook, eat, go to bed and repeat the next day. 

I really have to thank my girlfriend for being so patient with me and supporting me through all of this, as this routine is already starting to bore me. 

"It's the final countdown.
Oh, it's the final countdown."

                                                      Europe     

Holy Carb Drop

Talking about shocking your system. 

While my trainer has been gradually reducing my carb intake over the past 10 weeks, he went all out with this week's diet. 

We continue with a modified carb drop (MCD) as we have for the past two weeks, but instead of two high carb days followed by five low carb days, he has me doing one "high" (still nothing compared to the amount of carbs and calories I ate during my off-season) and four low, and by low I mean Mariana Trench low. 

The total caloric intake on my low days is roughly 2,900 calories total, with 1,800 coming from protein, 855 from fat and barely over 200 from carbs. To be precise, for four days, my carbohydrates will come from 1 oz. of almonds, along with some egg whites as my pre-workout, 16 oz. of Gatorade as part of my post-workout meal and two full cups of broccoli, which all together equates to 55 grams of carbs or 220 calories. 

Low Carb Day Meals without 16 oz. Gatorade and protein shakes

Needless to say, my energy levels are equally low and my mood not the best. I feel lightheaded and am easy to irritate. 

In addition to a level of crankiness that could easily take it on with any pregnant woman's mood, I am also battling a slight cold that adds to my overall exhaustion. Long story short, I am not a whole lot of fun to be around these days and should probably wear a shirt like this to work, to the gym or any form or social function that requires human interaction.

I cannot wait for my next high carb day to regain some of my energy. Instant grits, white and brown rice, as well as sweet potatoes never sounded more delicious. As typical for a high carb day, protein intake is dropped, while carb consumption and overall calories are increased. In my specific case, the total caloric intake goes up to roughly 4,000, with more than half of it coming from carbs. Just the thought of it makes my mouth water, figuratively. 

High Carb Day Meals without pre- and post-workout protein shakes

Despite all of this, I am trying to stay positive and keep on pushing myself. I am now a little less than three weeks out and can see a light at the end of the tunnel. It might be a little blurry due to my lightheadedness but it's there. 

My workouts are still relatively strong, even though I had to decrease the weights for some exercises to maintain proper form and technique. My daily cardio remains unchanged at 30 minutes of HIIT on the elliptical, complimented by ten 50 yards sprints twice a week.  

In terms of supplements, Fred upped my BCAA intake to 40gr per day, which should help to temper my hunger, and added Calcium-Magnesium and ZMA, as well as 3,000mg of fish oil pills. 

Being that close to my competition, he also told me to stop using my pre-workout booster, Gaspari SuperPump.  

If you cant handle me "cutting", then you don't deserve me when I'm shredded.

Arnold Sports Festival 2013

As I mentioned before, my wonderful girlfriend and I decided to head to Columbus, OH this year and check out the Arnold Sports Festival.

The Arnold Sports Festival is the largest multi-sport event in the United States and has been held for the past 25 years every year in the capital of Ohio.

Columbus, OH with Arnold Statue

In addition to the various bodybuilding and fitness competitions, several other amateur and professional sport events are held over the course of the weekend along with a huge fitness expo, attracting over 175,000 attendees and athletes from basically all over the world. 

The expo alone featured 700 vendors and packed the main hall of the Greater Columbus Convention Center.  

Fitness Expo

While the expo itself is worth a trip, another good reason for us to make the 8 hour one-way road trip across  5 states was that my coach, IFBB Pro Fred "Biggie" Smalls, was competing in this year's Arnold Classic for the first time.
So early Friday morning we got on the road straight from the gym and started our little adventure.
Since I am in the middle of preparing for my next competition on May 11th and my girlfriend started "to get ready for the summer/beach" we had all meals for the weekend prepared in advance and traveled rather heavy.
Four coolers full of chicken, brown rice, oatmeal, broccoli, water, ice, protein powder and vitamins ensured that we could follow our diets to the tee and wouldn't miss one single bite; not even during a snow storm somewhere in between Western Maryland and West Virginia or on I-70 in Ohio.
Nothing says dedication and commitment more than eating cold chicken and brown rice, smothered in mustard in a parked car next to some rusty gas station is some god forsaken jerkwater town in the middle of nowhere.

Well we survived the drive, the snow storm and the cold chicken and made it safe to our hotel right on time to refresh, eat another meal and head over to the Veterans Memorial Auditorium to watch the Ms. Fitness and Figure finals.
Even more interesting than the actual show was the people watching in the 3,916 seat venue. Pros, fitness celebrities, amateur athletes and fans packed the auditorium and were interesting to observe.
A friend of mine referred to the scene as  "freak show" and it was surely nothing less. Bodybuilders and fitness athletes of all shapes, size and bother genders made for quite a show at the show.

Female Bodybuilding

Bikini

Saturday morning we took advantage of the nice hotel gym for our daily cardio session and enjoyed a nice view over the state house and downtown Ohio while sweating on the treadmill. 

After a warm breakfast, thanks to the hotel microwave, we packed our meals for the day and headed to the convention center to walk the expo. 

Can you say PACKED? Just like our tupperware containers in the cooler we were cramped in between masses and masses of people, trying to walk the expo floor. 

We pushed our way from booth to booth, trying out protein bar samples, collecting supplement samples, taking pictures of and with fitness celebrities, watching various sport events and demonstartions and "playing" with all kinds of workout equipment. 

Working on my Strongman skills

IFBB Pro Shawn Rhoden

IFBB Pro Branch Warren

IFBB Pro Kai Greene

IFBB Pro Dennis James

Former Baltimore Raven Jamal Lewis

IFBB Pro Fred Smalls

After a fun-filled but also exhausting day of walking the expo, we went back to the Veterans Memorial at night for the main event of the weekend, the Arnold Classic men's bodybuilding competition. 

Besides the men's final, the show also included the bikini and Strongman final rounds, as well as award ceremonies for all three events. 

Freddy, my coach, put on quite a show and provided some great entertainment with his creative routine.  

Even though he did not make it under the top 6, he won the best posing award and took home a nice check for $10,000. 

Arnold Classic Winner with the Governator himself

Arnold Classic Lineup

Fred Smalls winning best posing trophy

Sunday morning we started our journey back home and made it back through the snowy Appalachian without any problems. Now it's time again to prepare more meals since my next business trip is coming up this Tuesday. Hopefully Phoenix, AZ will not surprise me with another snow storm and I will have some time to catch some rays and soak up some sun while being out there.

"Some quit due to slow progress, never grasping the fact that slow progress... is still progress"

Unknown

I'm Back

Did you miss me??? 

I apologize for my abstinence, but this Winter was dedicated to building mass and I didn't really have anything "blogworthy" to report.
I basically woke up early every day to lift and then ate. A LOT!!!! Boy, let me tell you. My off-season diet consisted of between 5,200 and 5,400 calories per DAY and consuming that much food was a challenge on its own. 8 meals consisting of either rice and ground beef, rice and chicken, potatoes and salmon, oatmeal and eggs or steak and potatoes. But it all paid off.

I have been working with IFBB pro bodybuilder Fred "Biggie" Smalls since my last show in August and  made some great gains this off-season.

As of this morning, I am at 305 lbs. at approximately 10% body fat and ready to start my next contest preparation.
This year I decided to enter only one contest, the NPC Mid-Atlantic Natural Classic, a drug-tested NPC event, in New Brunswick, NJ on May 11th 2013.

I was thinking about doing two shows this year, but after last year's 26 week dieting marathon, I decided to take it "easy" this year, do one show at the beginning of Summer and then enjoy life for a while. As my grandmother always says, "Life is all about balance. What's the point of getting 100, when your life is miserable. Rather live til 80 and enjoy it."

Let's get serious again and get rid of the winter flab.

Bodybuilding.com Amateur Bodybuilder of the Week

Bodybuilding.com, the number one information portal for bodybuilding, fitness and physique in the world, has selected me this past week for their amateur bodybuilder of the week award and written up a nice article about me.

The article is very well written and talks about how I started weightlifting and about my beginnings in bodybuilding. 

It also includes my current "off-season" diet and sample workout plan.

I fell very honored to be featured on bodybuilding.com and am excited to share my story with bodybuilding and fitness enthusiasts from all over the world. 

The complete article can be found here. 

Everything is Bigger in Texas

Last week I had to travel again for work. Destination this time: Dallas, TX .

After my work assignment in Dallas was over, I spent a couple of days in Fort Worth and explored the area. Since I still had to lift, I simply combined sightseeing and working out and headed  to the famous Metroflex Gym in nearby Arlington, TX. 

Metroflex is THE bodybuilding mecca in the Lonestar State and home to legendary bodybuilders such as 8 times Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman, Branch Warren and Johnnie Jackson. 

The gym labels itself as a hardcore training facility and hardcore it definitely is. An old garage with concrete floors, rusty weights, worn out equipment, yellowed pictures the 1980's and an incredibly intense atmosphere. Just by walking into the place you can feel the intensity and the urge to perform. 

I always considered the Trainingcenter, my second "home", pretty bad ass, but compared to Metroflex, with its dirty floors, shared co-ed bathroom, and rusty equipment, it almost looks like the family YMCA. 

As I walked in I saw a girl running out looking for the next available trash can and throwing up. I just smiled and thought: "Yes, this is exactly where I parked my car. My kind of gym, now let's get started". 

I did my regular leg workout but left out squats since I couldn't fit my heavy powerlifting belt in my tiny carry-on bag and learned my lesson more than twice to not squat without a belt. My leg workout was inspired by Branch Warren's routine, so it was kind of cool doing the exercises on the same pieces of equipment.

After my grueling leg session I had the opportunity to watch another "Metroflex celebrity" benching over 600 lbs raw and left more than impressed this inconspicuous high intensity training facility in one of Arlington's back alleys. 

 

  

                                

Time To Get BIG

As promised in last week's post today I am going to talk a little bit more about my new workout plan. This plan is designed as an "off-season" training to add quality, lean muscle mass.
The weights got heavier and cardio has been reduced from an hour every day to a short and crisp 30 minute session once a week.
As with my pre-contest workout, I dedicate each workout to one specific muscle group or body part and even kept the days I train a certain muscle group/part the same.
Monday is reserved for chest, Tuesday is back day, Wednesday I do abs, calves and cardio, Thursdays I work shoulders and traps, arms are trained on Fridays and on Saturdays I torture my legs.

What has changed are the exercises, the number of sets and the number of reps. I have added more compound exercises to the workout, added a couple more sets and decreased the number of reps from 12-15 to 8-10 reps for most exercises. Reducing the number of reps allows me to work with heavier weight and should help me to gain more strength and muscle mass.

Here is the chest workout I am currently following. I start out with 4 sets of incline barbell bench press as a compound exercise to work on the upper part of my chest, then continue with 4 sets of flat barbell presses as another compound exercise before moving towards more isolation exercises, such as machine incline chest press, machine wide grip chest press, flyes and pullovers. 

Bulking Up

After 26 weeks of contest preparation, low carb diets and tons of cardio it is finally time to eat. 

For the first couple of days after the last competition and the photo shoot, I was basically on a "seafood diet". I was eating all the food I would see. 

Ice cream, cookies, french fries, fruits, peanut butter, yogurt, Chinese food, sandwiches, bread, basically everything I was not allowed to eat for the past half year. 

While it felt great to finally have the freedom again to choose different foods and eat what I wanted, it kind of got old pretty soon and I was longing for the structure my contest diets provided me with. 

So after a couple of days of "binge eating", I sat down and created my "off-season/bulking" meal plan. This plan is based on my daily calorie requirements plus an additional 500 calories to grow.

It ended up being around 5,000 calories, which are split up into seven meals and spread out throughout the day with set eating times. 

Compared to my contest diets, I bumped up my daily caloric intake and  noticeably increased the amount of carbohydrates I eat daily. 

The plan is fairly stringent but not as "radical" as my pre-contest diets, since I allow myself 3-4 "cheat meals" per week and some not so healthy food snacks throughout the day.
To be accurate, this diet actually consists of two plans.
One meal plan for days that I lift weights at the gym and one plan for non-workout and cardio only days. Even though the daily caloric intake remains the same with around 5,000, the macros change significantly between the two plans. On actual workout days 35% of my daily calories come from protein, 53% from carbohydrates and around 12% from fat. I am trying to take advantage of my body's natural insulin cycle and time my carb intake accordingly. The majority of my carb is therefore consumed in the morning and right after my workout. Meal 6 and 7 do not contain any carbs. 

On non-workout days, the focus shifts from muscle hypertrophy to preventing additional body fat storage.  This is achieved by decreasing the carb intake to only 30% of the daily calories and bringing protein up to 42% and adding healthy fats. 

My main source of protein remains chicken but I have also added some more lean red meat to my diet and use whey protein for my pre-intra and post-workout shakes.

Brown rice, oats and yams, as well as white rice for my post-workout meal provide me with the necessary carbohydrates and healthy fats come from extra virgin oil, flaxseed oil and all natural peanut butter.
Two to four cups of green vegetables, such as spinach, broccoli, asparagus or green beans are added to meals in both plans. 

The plan is supposed to be an efficient, lean gain diet program intended to add lean muscle mass without too much body fat. 

Two weeks into the new diet and workout routine, it becomes obvious that this plan is an "off-season" plan and that some fat gain is inevitable. But with Summer gone and the beach/pool season over, I am more concerned about gaining mass and strength than maintaining my abs. Sorry folks!

So far my plan has worked out great. I gained almost 30 pounds since I stepped on stage August 25th and also made huge progress in the weight room. I am getting stronger week by week and, to my surprise, my abs are still visible, well, at least to some degree. Next week I will get a little bit more into detail about my current workout routine but that would be it for today.   

Well, time to eat again!

Kodak Moment

Before entirely switching up my diet and starting to "bulk up", I thought it would be a great idea to preserve some of the shape I was in for posterity, well, at least on film/photo.

The physique was there, time could be made and I was already practicing my "Blue Steel" pose, so all I needed was a photographer. 

By sheer coincidence that problem was also solved pretty quick. 

At the Delaware Championship, I started talking to the show photographer, Jim Wilmer, and during our conversation, it turned out that he was also doing private photo shoots. 

We both expressed our interest in working together and immediately scheduled a shooting for the Tuesday after my last competition.

I figured that after 26 weeks of strict dieting what would an additional three day matter. I was dead wrong. Once the competition was over, these three days turned out to take forever. Even though in theory I was not restricted by my contest diet anymore and "free" to eat whatever I felt like,  I had to get even more stringent for this short period, in order to maintain my stage physique as good as possible.

To stay lean and dry I forewent my "cheat meals" following the competition and ate beyond "clean" Sunday and Monday. My meals basically consisted of chicken, broccoli and lettuce.

Despite numerous showers, I still had a coat of spraytan from Saturday's competition left on my skin, so no extra tanner or lotion were needed for the shooting. The color was now, three days afterwards, much lighter, almost like a natural tan and I looked like I just got back from a Caribbean vacation.

Looking at myself in the mirror Tuesday morning I appeared just a tiny bit fuller than Saturday. The extra sacrifice had actually paid off and I was ready to have "some" pictures taken.

Well, we ended up with over 600!!! that day. 

This number shouldn't actually come as a surprise, since the photo shoot took place both indoors, as well as outdoors, and in a wide variety of different outfits.  

Jim Wilmer has been working with bodybuilders and physique models for decades and his experience can definitely be seen in the quality of work he delivered.  It was a pleasure working with him that day and the pictures came out great. 

Now that the shoot is over I can finally enjoy myself for a bit and eat some of the foods I had to deny myself of for the past 6 months, before I start preparing for next year.

"I'm pretty sure there's a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking. 

And I plan on finding out what that is."

                                                                                    Derek Zoolander

Blue Steel

Le Tigre

A special Thank You to Jim Wilmer for these great pictures, and now I shall EAT!!!