[...]Right now I'm more interested to see how well I do while eating Keto. Not sure if the the Keto diet is optimal for weight training. Been meaning to research that. I want to see if there's some things one can do while following a Keto diet like adding in extra protein after weight training that might help.
I tried keto with weight training. It goes just fine. First few days I noticed a little decline in strength but after few days when body adopts I noticed a small increase in energy but a much bigger increase in endurance.
Today after I finished the training session I wanted to try to lift some heavy weights on a horizontal hammer chest press. Not slow lifting ( HIT ), but normal lifting just to compare my strength now and before I started to do HIT. I managed to lift 120 Kg for 5 repetitions. It is my personal record.
All I want to say is that this HIT training helped me a lot to increase my strength. I will keep doing it in the future.
Since I started with HIT I experimented with diet as well to see what is best for me. I think this is something that needs to be individually determined through trial and error as well.
In the first couple of weeks/months I tried to eat a relatively restricted Paleo diet and then went to a sort of Keto intermittent fasting diet, in which I ate nothing for 24 hours before the training. Pretty much zero carbs with both approaches. I've read and heard in some places , including Guffs book, that it is possible to gain weight/muscles and/or strength with such a diet. I have to admit though, that I was kind of skeptical about that, especially considering that I was already on the skinny side to begin with, with not all that much fat and muscle on my body anyway. My thinking was that muscle/weight gain can't come out of nothing, somewhere your body must get the fuel to gain muscles.
Since I'm training on MedX Machines, it is fairly easy to track improvements fairly closely. MedX Machines seem to make it much easier to improve from session to session as well compared to free weights. Since I started the training, I improved on every exercise (the weight I'm able to lift/strength) and in some exercises quite dramatically, like the leg press.
So while I was on this restricted Paleo and later Keto diet, my strength was still improving, but I was loosing weight fairly dramatically in a short period of time, even though my strength increased! I went from about 68 Kilos to about 64 in just a couple of weeks! That wasn't exactly what I was hoping for! One of my goals, if genetically possible, is to gain weight to about 80 Kilos and then see if more is possible. I also read in a couple of places that it is pretty much impossible to not loose muscle mass if you loose weight, since the muscles also contain fat.
So one day after that diet approach I had a couple of "cheat days" in which I ate one or two packs of cashew nuts on top of this diet a day. To my surprise, I immediately noticed within a couple of days that my weight was increasing quite significantly, while my strength was still improving.
I was happy about that, but felt fairly crappy since I can't really tolerate nuts. So I was thinking about what might have caused the weight gain and how I might be able to keep that up without using nuts. I thought that maybe the carbo hydrates and especially the fat in the nuts might the key (my Paleo, "Keto" experiments had not all that much fat and protein in it). So I changed tactics and changed diet. I took the advice a work college that told me to eat about 400 grams of meat (he said chicken, but I used pork instead) on each meal and about 5 tablespoons of fat in the form of ghee on top of that. There are also quite a number of studies out there that strongly suggest that enough good quality protein is the key to increase muscle mass. Carbohydrates don't seems to help and fat doesn't seem to be tested all that much in studies. With this new approach I was able to increase my body weight significantly in a short period of time, to about 71 Kilos as of now, while still improving strength , and it still seems to increase.
Noticed that I was gaining a bit to much fat with that approach, so I'm currently trying to figure out how much I have to reduce the protein intake and fat intake to find the right balance between the two. Gaining fat moderately is for some people (most I guess) a by product. Currently I'm at about 300 grams of meat and about four tablespoons of fat on three meals a day.
Will see how that goes for a while. So in the end what it seems to come down to, is to experiment for yourself what is best for you and adjust it as you go along. It also seems to be a thing which change on your personal circumstances and improvements.
Another thing that I'm now trying to figure out is the right amount of recovery time between the exercises. As of now I tried every 7 days and for the first time last week I couldn't train in that Intervall, because I was somewhere else and thus am forced to do my next one 14 days after the last one. What I noticed after day 11 now without training, is that I still seem to gain weight and the muscles still seem to improve, which is a surprise to me, even though it shouldn't! My pants and T-shirts are getting tighter as well. If it goes on like that, I need a new size there.
So what I will try to do now is to increase the time to 8 days and more in the next couple of months and see how that goes. I have to admit though, that the idea to increase that recovery time frame, is still something I struggle with, since I like the exercise and would like to do it more then is probably good. The idea of "more exercise, the better" still seems to be deeply ingrained in me. That's something I have to work on it seems.
