Well, I think that I’ll go first. I participated in the nutrition challenge and I now have the results of my dunk and have an inkling about how the performance and strength portion will go. I’ll guide you through my personal evaluation and hopefully you all will choose to do the same. My first step was to look at my original goal and the steps I was planning to take to geth there. I made my goal to increase strength and I was going to do that by lifting more and increasing my food intake (paleo choices). I kept a food log and took weekly pictures to track my progress. I also added strict pullups, pushups and ring dips to my daily routine.

My next step is to evaluate how well I stuck to my plan to meet my goal, and the outcome of the challenge. I would say that with the exception of a couple of weeks where work and travelling kept me busy, I stuck to my goal. I was eating a lot more protein and always ordering extra meat when I went out to eat. The weekly trip to the grocery store included a lot more food than normal. I was also giving up some weekend metcons to lift more, and making sure I did squat and some form of deadlift twice a week each. At the end of the challenge I had gained about 1 pound of lean mass and my bodyfat percentage was essentially the same. I anticipate that both my performance and strength will have improved, just not as much as I hoped it would with my increase in food intake and lifting volume. However, I did notice a huge improvement in my ability to recover from a heavy lift day or from a tough WOD.

The final step is to determine a path forward based on your results vs your original goal. Personally I was hoping to gain more lean mass and improve my strength significantly and therefore end up with a performance improvement as well. Since I feel I fell short of my goal, but saw a performance improvement, my plan moving forward is to continue to not focus only on protien, but try to increase my fat and (paleo friendly) carb intake. I discovered that clearly I wasn’t eating enough to recover, so now that I’m recovering, I need to add more to my diet to see a significant strength and performance improvement. Over the next three months of keeping up with my lifts, and increasing my fat and carb intake, I’ll benchmark the challenge lifts once again and see if I find a more significant improvement.

Now that I’ve opened up to all of you, hopefully some (or all!) of you will be willing to open up with others and discuss your results and adjusted goals/plan. We’d love to hear nutrition challenge reflections from each and every one of our participants. Maybe consider submitting a post-style reflection that could be shared with the gym. There are a lot of different body types out there, but usually there’s someone out there with similar goals and goats, and they would benefit from hearing about your lessons learned. Now that I’ve broken the ice, who’s next?

WOD 05.16.13

Skills Day

TP MCT 2