Quick'n'dirty tasty chicken

So fellas,
here's my first recipe. This is some fucking tasty chicken with some potatoes and spring onions as a side and it's really easy to prepare it, so when you're in a hurry that may be the perfect choice.

You'll need:

• a roasting pan
• 1 chicken breast (250g)
• 3 medium-sized potatoes (=300g)
• 2 spring onions
• 1 (organic) Lemon
• some olive oil
• 1/4 tb Cumin
• 1/2 tb Tumeric
• salt
• pepper
• 1 fresh habanero pepper
• 1/2 thyme

Just preheat the oven to 220 degrees. Slice the potatoes into thumb-sized dices and put them into a pot with some water and salt in it. Put the pot on the stove and just let the water boil for a few minutes. Take the potatoes out of the pot and let them cool down a little bit. Meanwhile, mince the onions and put them into the roasting pan with the whole chicken breast, some salt, pepper, the minced habanero, the other spices and the zest of the lemon. Cut the lemon into half and also mix in the juice of one-half of the lemon. Put in the cooled down potatoes and just mix it all through, so that everything is covered evenly. Then put the roasting pan into the oven and let the whole thing roast for about 30-35 minutes (depending on the thickness of the chicken breast).

Voila, there you go, 5 minutes of work, 30 minutes waiting time (use it wisely...wank, do some chin ups, or something in-between these two options) and you're good to go with your belly filled with some extraordinary tasty and healthy food.

Here are the macros for the geeks:

61 g P
45 g C
13 g F
541 kcal

CHEERS
Jacob

Training Gear - What we use

No matter how much you renounce on training gear (not roids) and equipment, there will always be that one lifter who uses less than you and calls you out on it. He is the rawest of all raw lifters, as raw as you can get, rawer than a vegan's diet. 

But does that always make sense? Do you really need to do without everything that helps you perform in the gym? 

Of course not! Here's an overview of what we use, why we use it and what we think gives you a positive benefit on your training.

Belt

We use a belt on heavy lifts only. There is actually no point in using a belt while squatting 50 kg (110 lbs) or deadlifting 70 kg (154 lbs). How many times do we see other gym goers in our gym wearing belts for biceps curls? It's ridiculous!

So when we use a belt (which we currently don't do because the weight on the bar is not nearly heavy), we do it for better bracing and protection reasons.

There are surely 1000+ posts, videos or comments about "how to use a belt" and "why to use a belt", but for us, the thing that mattered the most was better stability around the core. If you know how to brace, you can put so much more pressure on the abdominals and it feels like you decrease the pressure and stress put on your lower back.

Lifting Shoes

We currently both use the Adidas Powerlift 3 and are very satisfied with them. The shoe is really light and smooth, but still, provides lots of stability. The built-in wedge is about 1cm high (~0,4 inches) and gives us a nice angle to work with. While we use the shoes for the squat and the bench press, we take it off for deadlifting. On the DL you don't want to stand 1cm higher with your heel, you want a flat foot.

Chalk

Chalk is really nice for someone like me, who doesn't have the best grip and starts sweating easily, especially in my palms. We got us some liquid chalk, which was actually made for rock-climbing, therefore really provides nice dry hands. Here's the link to our chalk. It's a little bit more expensive than alternatives from MyProtein for example, but I thought to myself, why take chalk form a protein producer and not from a company that specializes in climbing, where they really need some good chalk

Wrist Wraps / Straps

We have both. As I already mentioned in the chalk paragraph, I have a bad grip, therefore straps were the only possibility for me to do triples or more reps with heavy weight on the deadlift. But then I came to the conclusion, that my grip will never get stronger if I always use straps, so they're now lying around in my gym bag and will probably not come out for a long time. Some grip work really helped and since then, I never really had a serious problem with my grip anymore.

And what comes normally with a weak grip? Weak wrists. Got them too. So I got myself some wrist wraps, which I sometimes still use for heavy bench sets or heavy overhead pressing exercises. They just make me feel safer and it feels like I have the weight more under control. The other times (lighter weight), I just figured I had to be a little bit more aware of my wrist angle and needed to actively correct my wrist posture.

Bands

We actually don't have bands. They are on our wishlist though. In our current state of strength/training, we feel like there is no need to implement bands yet. Although the resistance bands would be nice for shoulder work, we can easily substitute those with some machine work on the cables.



So that's about all we use or want to use. With other training equipment we have actually no experience, this is why we won't talk about it. Unlike other sites or blogs, if we don't know something about a certain topic, we will admit it and don't talk shit about stuff we don't understand.

We hope you enjoyed your read and invite you to comment on what you use or what you think about training gear!

CHEERS
Amin

Traning Week 1 - Recap

So we have just finished our first week. As we are just coming from quite a heavy program from Jamie Lewis (not the darts guy, the powerlifter), which was really high in volume, we started this program with really really light weight, to kind of do a deloading phase. This enables us to monitor our current state of strength better and how we feel in general with all the movements and exercises. It also helps us with getting our technique down, which we haven't trained in ages, so we got that going for us as well, which is nice.

The numbers

Day 1:
Squat 3x5 - 50 kg (110 lbs)
Benchpress 3x5 - 40 kg (88 lbs)
Deadlift 1x5 - 60 kg (132 lbs)
BB Curls 3x5 - 20 kg (45 lbs)
Hanging Leg Raise - 3 x AMRAP

Day 2:
Squat 3x5 - 55 kg (121 lbs)
Press 3x5 - 30 kg (66 lbs)
Power Cleans 5x3 - 50 kg (110 lbs)
Leg Raise  3 x AMRAP
Machine Rear Laterals - 3x15 - 20 kg (45 lbs)

Day 3:
Squat 3x5 - 60 kg (132 lbs)
Benchpress 3x5 - 50 kg (110 lbs)
Deadlift 1x5 - 70 kg (155 lbs)
SZ Curls 3x5 - 22,5 kg (45 lbs)
Ab Roll Outs - 3 x AMRAP ( each about 5 or so, really hard to do)

What's our first impression?

It really felt good to get under a bar once again, after the Jamie Lewis program just let us do stupid machines. Both me (Amin) and Jacob are really overwhelmed with the stress that's been put on our lower backs. Squatting three times a week, plus the deadlift, plus the cleans can really show you some of your weaknesses. And goddamnit the cleans gave me the worst aching in my delts I've ever had, but it felt actually great to feel the so intense for once.

We are really eager to see how next week is going to be with the cleans. Also, our backs are no longer used to these movements (we did a bigger training pause in summer, 1/10, wouldn't recommend). I am quite certain though it won't be a problem at all. We just have to focus on keeping our form tight and a straight back while performing all exercises.

All in all, it was a really fun week and we enjoyed the training.

Scaling next week

I think we will keep the scaling like this week. So we will go in 5 kg steps on the squat, 10 kg steps on the Deadlift. On the bench, we might jump 5kg, we might also do 10 kg more, that depends on how we feel on this particular day.

Of course, bodyweight wise nothing has changed dramatically. And also the look in the mirror says: "Gotta put in some more work there, buddy!", so that's what we're going to do.

Cheers Y'all
Amin

My basic eating template

Hey Fellas!

This is going to be my first post on this blog (I'm Jacob) and I'll just outline my basic bulking diet for the next few weeks. I have to mention, that my metabolism is fast as hell, so I can only speak for the lean guys out there, that unlike Amin that little fatty, don't pack up mass on their frame like a freshly divorced wifey working in an ice factory.

Also, I don't like the GOMAD and just stuff 6000kcal of random shit a day into your face approach like Rippetoe, because of a few reasons. I'll outline in an upcoming post, so as you guys will see it's not as high on total calories as some other more extreme methods. I just think that adding around 0,5 kg a week of quality mass makes more sense than straddling around the gyms corners like a sweating baby whale, after just 3 months of dirty bulking.

But now let's just get to the meat and potatoes of this routine.

08:00 
Shake with whey protein, maltodextrin, and coffee
30g P/40g C/12g F=388kcal

09:30
5 eggs scrambled in butter with tomatoes, an onion and some mushrooms, 4 slices of full wheat toast.
58g P/48g C/ 57g F=937kcal

11:30
Protein shake
30g P/ 16g C/ 12g F=292kcal

12:00
Training

14:00
Shake with whey protein, maltodextrin
30g P/ 50g C/ 12g F=428

16:00
200g pasta, 250g lean ground beef/pork mix, tomato sauce with various vegetables
76g P/ 157g C/ 18g F=1094kcal

19:00
150g rice, 250g lean ground beef/pork, various vegetables
61,5g P/ 115g C/ 20g F=886kcal

22:00
250ml milk, 100g braided yeast bread
13g P/ 77G C/ 13g F=477kcal

On off days I just cut out the after training shake

Totals=4502kcal
298,5 g  P
503 g     C
144 g     F

Now that the math and how much of this and that shit is out of the way, I'll give you a little outtake of my life and how I incorporate this into my daily schedule:

So directly after I wake up I head to the kitchen put on some coffee and get under the shower. After that, I just mix the coffee with some whey and malto, take my dog and head out to the park. While sipping on my morning drink, I goof around with the dog and take a long stroll through the park. After that, I stop by the grocery store and buy my groceries for the day. Normally my grocery bill looks like that:

• 500g ground beef
• 15 eggs
• some onions, tomatoes, garlic carrots (it depends on what's missing in my fridge)
• Toast or black bread
• canned tomatoes
• some random shit I stumble over

I return back home, scramble some eggs, make some toast and take care of my business as usual. Before and after training I chug down two more protein drinks.
Back home I throw all of the meat in a pan, make a badass homemade sauce and cook the pasta. I throw half of the meat and the sauce over the pasta and eat it. After that, I head back to work or work of some other things that are on my to-do list.

In the evening I just take the other half of the meat and scramble it up with rice, some fresh, chopped vegetables and fry it for a few minutes. Just before I go to bed I drink a big glass of milk with some sweet bread.

As you can see there's nothing fancy or extraordinary about this, but I can guarantee you, if you follow something similar to that, you'll see some good results.
Just take care of a big plus in protein and total calories and you're ready to go. Nothing of this is set in stone so, if you want to add or subtract something here or there just go ahead and figure it out for yourself, it's not that complicated.

Following to this post, I'll give you some recipe examples and there's another article about massive dirty bulks and to much milk in your diet coming up.


Till next time, cheers
Jacob

Starting Strength - How does it work?

As we already stated in our first post, we will be doing the "Starting Strenght" program for the next few months. We thought it would be a great idea to try to explain the program a little bit and get a little deeper into what our training will look like from now on.

What's it all about?

In its essence, it is a fairly easy program. Not much of programming and juggling around with percentages is needed to successfully get stronger with this program. The only actual things you need is a barbell, some weights and some basic knowledge about the main lifts.

Rippetoe himself said in an interview with T-Nation: "The Starting Strength program consists of the use of basic barbell exercises. We primarily rely on the squat, bench press, the deadlift, the press, and the power clean. And we combined those exercises into very short, simple workouts."

Now, what do these workouts look like?

The Workout

You basically have two workouts:

Workout A:

• Squat               3x5
• Benchpress     3x5
• Deadlift            1x5

Workout B:

• Squat              3x5
• Press              3x5
• Power Cleans 5x3*

*You can substitute the cleans for pull-ups or back extensions.

Those two workouts will be alternated every two days, three times a week.

So let's say you go to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, your days will look like this:

Week 1:

Monday - Workout A

Wednesday - Workout B

Friday - Workout A

Week 2:

Monday - Workout B

Wednesday - Workout A

Friday - Workout B

Weights

Now that we have a basic understanding of the program, we will take a look at the weights, and it is as simple as the workout itself:

Just put a little weight on, every training day. 

You did squats with 50 kg (110 lbs)? Next time do it with 55kg (121 lbs).

Although this is quite a big jump from 50 kg to 55 kg, a beginner will be able to achieve this with ease. The more you progress, the harder it will get for you to do big jumps of 5kg (11 lbs). This is why we bought ourselves some 0,75 kg plates (~1,5 lbs) so we can actually still progress when we get higher in our numbers.

In Mark Rippetoe's own words: "The way we can add 60 pounds to a kid's frame in a year is the same way we can take his squat from 95 pounds to 365 pounds – systematic, consistent loading, as fast as their recovery will allow. Say on day one I teach a kid to squat. We'll likely get to 95 pounds for three sets of five. Then I send him home. Two days later he comes back in and does three sets of five with 105. Two days after that, we get to 115, and so on, and so on. We continue this progression until it slows down to maybe five pounds per workout, then as he gets even stronger, maybe five pounds per week."

Assistance work

Of course, you are welcome to bring in some additional work. Biceps-curls for example. Everyone wants a bigger biceps, no doubt about that. Simply use the barbell to do some curls. We actually implemented curls into the "basic program" by also doing 3x5 with the same weight progression.

We also do face pulls and leg raises for shoulder and core strength, but this is up to you.

You have to find out where your weakness is and put in some effort to eliminate those flaws. In our example, it is our core and rear shoulder, in some other cases there might be some grip issues or weak quads. If you have determined your problem, address it, never ignore it.


We hope we could give you a basic insight into this program and invite you all to criticise or optimize this post by commenting your experiences and giving us your opinion on "Starting Strength".

If you are missing the dietary aspect of this training program, don't panic, we got you covered in our next post, where we will give you an example of a typical day of our diet.

CHEERS
Amin & Jacob

What is the Strenght Journal?

Why another strength blog?

We were looking for a new training system and stumbled upon "Starting Strength" by Mark Rippetoe (He might not look like it, but he is one beast of a coach. And actually the first one to give back his NSCA certificate in 2009). A friend of us tried it and got huge, so we told ourselves we should give it a try.

Now why a blog about it?

Actually, when looking for serious training logs or blogs, you're not able to find more than some starting stats and periodical posts about progress. And none of the existing posts in some forums provide knowledge around strength training, nutrition and general bullshit out of our lives.

So who are we?

We are Amin and Jacob, two young stallions trying to get stronger:

Amin: 

Age: 22 Years

Weight: 80 kg (177 lbs)

Height: 182 cm (6')

Jacob:

Age: 25 Years

Weight: 78 kg (172 lbs)

Height: 186 cm (6' 1")

We have some years of experience in strength training and fitness, but never really did something as serious as "starting strength". We ran around the gym doing some curls and some squats and eventually started with Jim Wendler's 531 program.

We then did that for about 3 months or so and actually got stronger. But after reading into Starting Strength and general powerlifting blogs and forums, we came to the conclusion, that we kind of fucked up in our planning.

Why would we do a percentage based program when we didn't even build a good enough strength base in the first place? Although 531 was maybe not the dumbest of choices we could make, a program like starting strength makes more sense for the state of strength and power we are currently at.

At what rate will our content be put out?

2+ posts per week.

We will make one weekly post about our training and the progress we made in this week, how we felt while doing it, how we feel about progressing and what we want to do better or change up.

The other post will be about nutrition related topics, like what we ate, what recipes we like, etc.

From time to time, we will also try to get out more content. Our next post (spoiler allert) will be about "Starting Strength" in general. We want to make sure everyone knows what we are going to do and what the whole training philosophy is about.

What is our goal?

We actually have two main goals:

1.) Getting as strong as we possibly can

2.) Provide knowledge, experience and motivation

This is why we created this blog. We want to share our experience we get by doing this program, we want to share the knowledge we acquire on our journey and try to motivate people to also start moving their asses to the gym and help them on their journey to their strongest selves.

We hope to provide some qualtiy content and give you a little insight to our lives and our training.

CHEERS 

Amin and Jacob