I’m back from my business trip to Denver. I’ve decided that I’m not meant to travel much when I’m on a program – whether it’s an on or off season program!  Of course that’s not realistic but boy is it a challenge.  It’s so hard to find the right food to eat. You’d think it’s be easy to find grilled chicken and baked potato (I know better than to try to find yams in restaurants) but what ends up happening is that everything has salt on it and a lot of it has been marinated in some sort of butter or oil based marinade. Yuck!  I just want pure, simple, clean food.  Is that too much to ask?  Apparently it is. 

Then there’s flying.  I need to eat every 2 to 3 hours.  That means waiting in airports and flying on planes can be challenging depending on how long the wait/flight and what time I need to eat.  And if there’s a delay, yikes! I’m in trouble.

At least I was able to get in most of my workouts. The hotel gym wasn’t awful.  It wasn’t great (not nearly as complete as the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego) but it was adequate for biceps, triceps and cardio. I had to adapt my normal leg workout and focus on dumbbell squats and lunges. Got some core and ab work in as well.

The good news is I don’t travel again until later in October and then it’s just a couple of overnight trips.  That shouldn’t be too painful (she said hopefully). :o)

I met with Kim yesterday to mark my progress on my off season program.  He’s very pleased.  He started the conversation by telling me I have curves!  LOL.  This is cause for celebration because I tend to be long and lean.  My lower body is exploding right now – yippee!!  This is super exciting to me because legs are typically the slowest growing of all my muscle groups.  The new training routine is absolutely what I needed and I’m excited to see the end result in another 10 weeks.  In the meantime, we’re upping my protein a bit to support my new muscle growth and keeping all else the same.

More later – time for me to have a protein shake before bed.

I just finished the first week on my program. It went great!  I think it’s just the change up my body needed.  My right shoulder, tricep and lat were all suffering from overtraining. Gosh, to be honest, all of me was suffering from overtraining. But the rest did me good and this week all the little nagging strains were gone. I felt great and super strong.  The only injury that’s still a bit of a problem is my lower right hip/back area. This is an injury that’s several years old and it continues to flare up on legs day and for 1 to 2 days following legs training.  Since I’m training legs twice a week my hip is sore pretty much constantly.  It definitely means I have to lift lighter than I’d like, but at least I can still lift.  Maybe I need to do some lower back strengthening.  I’ll have to consider that.

 My body is slowly getting used to eating the extra lean ground beef in the early morning with my egg whites and oatmeal.  I definitely have more energy now that I’ve added a little red meat to my diet.  I’m also eating turkey, chicken and white fish for protein so my day is full of variety. I’m starting to notice that I’m a bit hungry between my afternoon snacks. That means my metabolism is revving up and within a week or so I’ll need to add more food.

Today was my one day of rest from the gym for the week. I've never done 6 days on/1 day off before. So far, so good. Tomorrow starts another week!   

I met with my trainer/nutritionist, Kim Oddo, today to go over my new training program, supplements and nutrition plan.  We’re changing it up a quite a bit. 

For my new program I’m working one body part per day on a 6 day split – legs get two days since that’s an area I need to focus on. Sunday is rest day. Cardio is a mere 15 minutes per day, 5 days per week at a warm up or cool down tempo, just enough to keep my metabolism running, not so much to ruin my hard earned new muscle. My weight training program is based on Hany Rambod’s FST program. It’s great! I did one variation of it last year and I really grew some muscle from it. This is a new variation – gotta keep the muscles guessing!

Although I will definitely keep my blog here - I love the GrowHuge.com family! - I want to invite you to also visit me at http://barbaramencer.blogspot.com/ I've just started to a personal website - it's still iln the formation stages so don't laugh - and a blog is part of the site. There's a lot left to do the site (add more photos; write more text, etc.) but at least the blog is started.  Hope to see you there.