COVID-19 Ain’t Holding Me Back: Lean Bulking Phase Begins
As you can imagine the last few weeks have been pretty all over the place for everyone, myself included. I haven’t been in the right headspace to write anything and have just been worried about everything.
In a quick little catch up for you all I cruised through February and the first week of March with no issues and as of 9th March 2020 officially began my lean bulking phase of my health and fitness program. I would check in monthly with my coach and I would be using MyFitnessPal to monitor my calories and macros. I was on 2000 calories, 140g protein, 50g fat and I wouldn’t have to worry about monitoring my carb intake. Of course this was the plan … all before the shutdown of gyms.
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Truthfully COVID-19 has been affecting me since mid-February as I work in the events industry. I have been dealing with clients cancelling events since then but at that stage it was more precautionary than anything. For me the third week of March was when everything changed, not only did all my events cancel that week but everyone was hearing whispers of non-essential services being shut down … this meant gyms. The shutdown we thought was going to happen later in the week so my PT rescheduled my sessions to Monday and Tuesday so at least I’d have two good sessions in that week. But coming home late Sunday night and not having seen the news, I was confronted with the fact that gyms would close pretty much (12pm the very next day). Of course I was freaking out and irritated; I was only two weeks into the bulking phase (of course I know that the closure was in the interest of the health and safety of the entire country). But the phase I had spent the last year working towards was now in jeopardy.
The week of the shutdown I got one good session in and modified the rest of my program to do from home. The day the gyms shut was the same day I began working from home. Whilst I was still working out at home, of course it wasn’t the same as being in the gym and there’s no way I was achieving the same results. During this week I should have dropped my calories to my maintenance level (1800) but I didn’t and as I result at my first monthly weigh in I put on half an inch around my waist. To stop me stressing over this and make sure that I was keeping on track, Kris asked if I instead wanted to go back to checking in weekly instead of monthly so he could more closely monitor my progress and I could have peace of mind that I was staying on track.
As for training, I am now doing 1 on 1 training sessions as per government restrictions and so far the progress I have seen has been great. My strength has been increasing the last 2 weeks which I’m happy about – it means that I’m gaining the muscle I should be. The makeshift sessions I’ve been doing at home have been going well too but now Kris has finalised my “At Home” Program and I’m excited to begin that phase and see how it affects my muscle growth.
I’m now nearly 2 months into the bulking out of a possible 6 – 8 months. I’m feeling confident in my progress so far and I’m looking forward to the next few weeks of this phase and what changes I will see.
