Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Further Split Thoughts

Let's go into some detail:

As far as I can tell, the main lift basically has to be in the morning. Pre-fatiguing the muscles involved weakens the most important movements; doing them first maximizes the benefit from stimulants without risking them running up against the ones used during conditioning. Conditioning can never happen before the main lift. Mains can technically be done at 1pm on non-conditioning days.

Conditioning shouldn't be done too close to bed; the adrenal effects of serious intervals are really dramatic and make sleeping very, very difficult. Ideally, we want to separate conditioning from any prior training by at least 4 hours (preferably more like 6) to avoid any metabolic conflicts. I finished like two and a half hours ago it's going to take a serious contrast shower to get me to sleep.

Accessory work can basically be done whenever, but since it requires no changes in psychological state and doesn't cause much of an adrenal dump, it can be done at night (possibly quite late at night), though it's still important to eat afterwards.

On the supplement side, the main lifts are probably best done on caffeine, creatine, and ephedrine to maximize CNS activation. Ephedrine synergizes with yohimbine to cause some fairly serious cardiovascular effects; given the longer half-life seen with Bronkaid, taking yohimbine any time after ephedrine is probably a very bad idea. Yohimbine can have a mild effect towards inducing panic attacks, which gets viciously exaggerated during intense exercise. Ephedrine seems to work primarily through appetite suppression, and since that's never going to be an issue for me I'm going to open with yohimbine. If that goes badly for cardio, I'll drop it and gradually add in some ephedrine to see how it goes.

Meal-wise, we want to eat before and immediately after the main lifts, have a gap of at least a few hours before the intervals to avoid blocking the effects of yohimbine, immediately after cardio because why not, and at least before (and preferably after) accessories as well.

Timing-wise, conditioning days are more flexible than the others, because I don't actually have to wake up early the following morning.

From that I'm getting something like:
8am - Breakfast
9:30am - Caffeine, Creatine, Baking Soda
10am - Main Lift
11am - Lunch (meat)
2pm - Lunch (salad)
6pm - Dinner (rolling while the rice cooks)
7pm - Accessories
8pm - Supper (rolling while the rice cooks)
12pm - Bed

8am - Breakfast
9:30am - Caffeine, Creatine, Baking Soda
10am - Main Lift
11am - Lunch
3:30pm - Caffeine, Yohimbine, Baking Soda
4pm - Conditioning
5pm - Dinner (rolling while the rice cooks)
9pm - Accessories
10pm - Supper (rolling while the rice cooks)
2am - Bed

Then walk to the gym for some "technique" erging on off-days, preferably in the evening, before carb intake. I can actually see some benefit to doing two light workouts that day, just to flush muscles with blood and assist with recovery.

The mild caveat here is that I don't know how well I'll be able to train the main lift without some carbs beforehand. Keeping carbs to the evening and emphasizing the post-workout period has some support (lower full-body insulin sensitivity, but some improved partitioning towards muscles, particularly on the conditioning days), and I'd like to stick with that.

Two bonus notes, though:
1) The whole idea behind training this way is to keep the actual activity to 45 minutes per session. That seems to translate roughly into Warmup+Main+Prehab, Conditioning, and Pull-Up+Accessories+Prehab. This potentially opens up some options for extra accessory work (and possibly something more intense). Off of that, I'm going to try:
Upper: Flyes, Lateral Raises, Extensions
Lower: Pistols, Curls, Abs

Ultimately, I may wind up adding or subbing for other stuff; I've had good results with Dumbbell Benching for 6s in the past, and want to start rowing again once my Pec's better (which it might be already). Single-leg RDLs and push-ups both fall into what I'd consider prehab, so I'll integrate those into the circuit.

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