I would now like to continue my series on our March barbarian photo shoot preparation by going into the second phase of my own program. Below is another unedited shot (my favorite solo one). The final copies should be coming in next week so stay tuned!
As I mentioned in my last post on this topic, by this point I had gained the weight I wanted, but my body fat was higher than I anticipated. With these facts in mind I shifted my routine to a bodybuilding style split schedule, as described here in an older post, and made it very high volume (lots of sets and reps) to get the detail and definition I wanted. Check out the routine here. My strategies were:
- High volume to really ‘kill’ all my muscles and burn some extra bodyfat.
- Lots of exercise variety to hit everything from every angle and get a more complete workout.
- Still some heavy weight moves in there to maintain muscle size and keep my strength up.
- Nutritionally, I kept my calories high, but I cut the bean shakes out and replaced them with regular protein shakes, which instantly dropped my fat intake and aided in my bodyfat loss.
As there was with the first phase, a drawback quickly appeared as I began this one. I was so gung-ho as I wrote up my weekly routine that I ended up biting off more than I could chew. I listed so much work that I usually ended up missing at least one of the workouts per week, and I often had to add a second rest day and push everything back due to fatigue.
In spite of all that, even attempting to stick to such a routine forced me to work hard and push my endurance, and ultimately my physique improved for it.
